I'd not made any demands to the latter point, though there are times when keeping a spectacularly bad example around for debate, discussion, or reference can prove handy.

I'd put specific store in rough order "steelman" or best-case defenses or arguments for the indefensible, officially sanctioned references (as with textbooks), or with particularly poular bad examples, even if not particularly cogent.

Knowing your enemy, testing your own beliefs and biases, and walking into battle fully armed, are all benefits.

You don't need to find endless such examples (see also: Gish Gallop), but a carefully selected few can be exceedingly useful.

This applies to other areas as well, tech included.

Sure, to be clear, I grew up with two older brothers and a younger sister, in three different major cities, in three different provinces in Canada, and the history curriculum has largely lacked much particular detail. My history curricula, and that of my brothers, included little or no international history, ancient history, or national history. The main topics of every history textbook (the only source for each curriculum, in my experience) I've seen in Canada (including my brothers', for years I didn't attend in a given school district) have been an obscure subset of clean indigenous stories, and a handful of stories about early Québec.

I'm not saying these history textbooks are especially bad among government school history textbooks, but that they are bad in a general sense, and fail to give much perspective on the origin of the tapestry of nations in Canada, or the story of our legal and governmental traditions.

A better job could be done with an in-depth reading of a mature historical author's work, the kind of thing you would read if you had a personal interest in understanding the history of something.