You can certainly find examples of history repeating itself, but I do not accept that it is the rule instead of the exception particularly in cases where the actors know the history in question. Pennsylvania breaking off into a quaker-run country of its own is not in history because history did not repeat itself. Finding an example where it did repeat itself is easy because what did not happen did not get written up nearly as often -- your pool of samples is biased.

In addition, the quoted statement is to not teach children what to think. I started with history being close to the definition of a school's history class, but the "what" we teach our children might be more along the lines of "historic information" including everything ever written or discovered.

Although the shoulders of giants idea goes back farther than Isaac Newton, he said "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." If the giants he stood on were mostly fiction, how come he saw farther than those before him and those after him have seen farther than he did?

For instance, I believe Einstein was writing about the influence of magnetic fields by the age of 16 -- but he had been taught what to think about why apples fell instead of floating. Had he not been taught anything of electricity and physics before the age of 15, how could he have been so advanced at the age of 16? Would he have reached the same heights by the end of his live?

If we go 'post-history' -- not teaching our children what to think -- we would not stand any chance of it being appropriately questioned. Children would come to their own conclusions by the age of 15, and those conclusions would be as primitive as any from pre-history.