Some people believe that we cannot learn anything from the past for our life today, while others believe that history is a valuable source of information to understand human's life.

It is difficult to determine whether history can be useful to comprehend the human mind or not. It would be reasonable for some people to think that it is hard to apply the knowledge of history in modern times: the world is in constant development and so are people's mindsets. The problems humans had to go though in the past are completely different from nowadays problems; it is highly unlikely that some of the same events would occur again. For example, it is difficult to believe that a witch hunt or a crusade would happen again. On the other hand, the world would not be as it is now if it was not for its own history. I am a strong supporter of the idea that "people learn from their mistakes" and without studying history this approach would not be possible. In my opinion there is a substantial sensitivity regarding racial issues as a consequence of all the fights and disorders caused in the past. Reading some transcripts written by ancient Greeks can be really illuminating: their way of thinking was really modern, and they already had some up-to-date ideas such as democracy and equality. Studying the ancient roman culture shows how human beings at that time had the same exact flaws of people in any other time: everyone was, and still is, prone to procrastinate, subject to irrational decisions driven by the passion of love, amusement or rage. Nonetheless it can be observed that too much desire for success frequently leads to decay. In conclusion I am prone to think that the human population has a lot to learn from history. There might be different problems in every time age, but the ideas and the nature of men has been the same for centuries.