Why Is History Teaching So Important?

Simon Schama, the historian, has placed particular stress on the importance of teaching history in reaching children with their attendant modern distractions:

Who is it that needs history the most?

Our children, of course: the generations who will either pass on the memory of our disputatious liberty or be not much bovvered about the doings of obscure ancestors and go back to Facebook for an hour or four. Unless they can be won to history, their imagination will be held hostage in the cage of eternal Now: the flickering instant that‘s gone as soon as it has arrived. They will thus remain, as Cicero warned, permanent children, forever innocent of whence they have come and correspondingly unconcerned or, worse, fatalistic about where they might end up.