Instruction in History and Citizenship. Part I.
by Professor S.S. Laurie, University of Edinburgh.
Volume 11, 1900, pgs. 1-8
Language and literature are not more closely connected with the humanistic in education than history is. And this for obvious reasons. It is the introduction of the young mind to the record of the past of the race to which he himself belongs, and whose traditions it will be his duty to pass on to the next generation. It would be to waste words to endeavour to show how closely the study of this record is associated with moral training in the altruistic virtues, and with that kind of political instruction that best fits the rising generation for the discharge of their duties as citizens in one commonwealth. It strengthens the sympathy of man with men and binds more closely the social bond. By the study of past greatness, moreover, we learn to strive to be worthy of our forefathers, and, by the understanding of the causes which have so often led mankind astray, we learn to understand better the questions which arise in our own time, and to act during the brief period assigned to us on the stage of life with circumspection and under a sense of responsibility to those who are to succeed us. It is for these reasons that I might include history whereby, as Montaigne says, "We converse with those great and heroic souls of former and better ages," under the head of School Ethics.
To discuss here the importance of history in education would accordingly be superfluous. Opinions, however, may vary as to the age at which it ought to be studied, and the method of instruction which ought to be pursued. It has been too much the habit, I think, to speak of history as a school subject from the point of view of the adult and cultivated mind, and to forget that, if the young are to enter into the life of bygone generations, and to take a living interest in the past out of which they have grown, the teaching of history must be adapted to the age of our pupils. [*As an illustration of this tendency I may quote from Professor Dewey, "Everything depends on history being treated from a social standpoint as manifesting the agencies which have influenced social development, and the typical institutions in which social life has expressed itself"; and again, "It is necessary that the child should be forming the habit of interpreting the special incidents that occur, and the particular situations that present themselves in terms of the whole social life." All this is true; but to what age of pupil do these remarks apply?] The childhood of history is best for the child, the boyhood of history for the boy, the youthhood of history for the youth, and the manhood of history for the man. A similar misconception has existed with regard to most other subjects; and, hence, the attempt to convey adult conceptions to young minds in almost every department of instruction; a mode of procedure which, so far from promoting the growth of knowledge, checks growth by destroying interest. And, as educators, we must admit that, if the result of our teaching be not to stimulate activity of the mind, and to plant in the young an interest in the subjects taught that will outlast the school and influence the whole life, we have failed.
History is a very large and various study, and to deal with it as an educational instrument in all its bearings would occupy a volume. My sole interest, here and now, is in history for the young as a vehicle of moral training, a means of extending the sympathy of man with man and of strengthening the social bond, thereby confirming the feeling of the political unity and continuity of the commonwealth.
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When, now, we ask for a method in teaching history, we are first under obligation to explain to ourselves what we mean by history.
If history be the story of man's words and acts, the British Museum could not hold the history of a single day. By common consent, the history of mankind is limited to an account of the words and deeds of men as members of a co-operating society of men, words spoken and deeds done in the interests of the progress of the community as a whole. The record of the past is full of many minor histories, e.g., art, science, education, all of which throw a side light on history in its ordinary accepted sense; but we must not allow our attention to be diverted by these contributions to the history of humanity, however in themselves important, from the specific meaning of history as having for its chief subject-matter man as a political being; as political, law-abiding; and as law-abiding, moral.
(1) History is not antiquarianism [love of old things]. Antiquarianism has something childlike about it, in so far as it revels in the facts and little things of the past simply because of its interest in facts and things in and for themselves, without special regard to their wider relations. There, are, fortunately, minds of this type, and it is a good thing for the historian that they exist, just as it is a good thing for the biologist that there are investigators whose chief delight is in the accurate investigation of particular forms, and who not only fail and rise to the science of their subject in its true sense as a rational and causal presentation of a correlated series of the phenomena of life, but even satisfy their self-love by talking somewhat contemptuously of the "theorists." To such minds in the historical department, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, if it were published to-day, would be a great opportunity; they would fill columns with their "learned" criticisms and exposures of errors. But Gibbon remains; while they pass into foot-notes to be afterwards corrected by subsequent foot-notes. We condone this seeming pettiness in consideration of its uses. After all, an error should be corrected.
(2) History is the story of the long progress of political humanity in time. Consequently, the dating of events in accurate sequence and of the prominent actors round whom these events have chiefly gathered is essential. This however, is to be called chronology, not history.
(3) Since history is the long record of time, it must present events and the acts of the men who specially influenced them in an accurate, sequent series. Now this is to be properly called historical annals. Annals may consist of bald, colourless statements as in China, or they may be vivid and picturesque, and contain an attempt to portray the actors. So far from such picturesque annals being less accurate presentations than a bald record because of their dynamic character, they are, in truth, more accurate because they are a fuller presentation of human life; and human life is always dramatic. All depends on the objectivity of the mind of the writer. It is evident that annals well written are substantially narrations or stories, and furnish the raw material of all history. Mr. Birrell would tell us that this itself is history, "To keep the past alive for us is the pious function of the historian. Our curiosity is endless; his the task of gratifying it. We want to know what happened long ago. Performance of this task is only proximately possible, but, none the less, it must be attempted, for the demand is born afresh with every infant's cry. History is a pageant, not a philosophy." Carlyle looks at history also as a picture. And, certainly, in so far as history rests on annals, it must be a moving picture, and include the domestic and social life and the personal relations of men and women. I say "women," because, in the picturesque annals of the human race, women have played no insignificant part. There have been great female rulers, but it is not this I refer to. It is the silent, and because it is silent and always personal, the potent influence of women on the motives of men. So with literature. Men are the poets, but women have been the living stimulators of poetry.
(4) History, however, in the strict sense (and I do not speak of philosophy or so-called science of history which, again, is a distinct subject) contains both antiquities, chronology and annals,--all the elements to which I have referred; but these so treated as to exhibit the causal relations of the series of events in their relation to the life of the community as a public ethical policy a life of progress or of decay as it may be. To write history in this sense demands a combination of the highest powers, both intellectual, imaginative and ethical. By the very nature of the case, such a treatment of events must be the most instructive and attractive of all studies, for what can transcend in importance the history of man to men?
(5) The history of a nation as distinguished from world-history is the history of a particular race; that is to say of a significant, if not specific, type of man working towards a social policy under certain conditions of physical environment. [It may be said that it is often a history of a political organization embracing many races. But when it is so, there is always a leading race which determines the policy and gives colour to the social life.] The chief factor is, doubtless, the racial type; but, inasmuch as man lives by the earth and its products, it follows that his relations to his environment must be of vast importance in the history of a nation, and will be found to explain much of its political activity and growth. The material and economic conditions can never, indeed, be lost sight of by a historian. In an advanced and complex civilization, these material considerations may seem to have given place to "ideas" as determining the acts and ambitions of a people, but they are always at work silently; and, when they are urgent, ideas, whether moral, political, or religious, may be swept away before them. The prima vitae will ultimately push their claims to the front. Geography, them, in its large sense, is indispensable to the understanding of history.
(6) At the back of the sequence of events and the human drama which we call annals have been thought, i.e., ideas and purposes. These, again, have, for the most part, been closely connected with thinkers and with makers or transformers of politics; although it is true that tendencies often exist and will move a whole people which cannot be traced to any one personality. Thus the series of events as determined by external conditions, but, above all, by thoughts and ideals of social life, constitutes history a philosophy; that is, a reasoned account of the progress of civilization.
If we reflect for a moment, we shall see that the writer of the history even of a single nation in the above large and true sense, much more the historian of the world, ought to be possessed of an intense sympathy with humanity, the imagination of a poet, the thoughtfulness of a philosopher, the knowledge of an encyclopaedist and the gifts of an orator. For the historian has to deal with the largest generalization of generalizations in every field of human activity, and, by dwelling on these, to lay bare the secret springs of events and motives, and all the causal relations, of the growth or decay of nations. Hence, we may say, that a historical grasp of the life of man through the ages is the last and richest result of a man's culture.
I have dwelt on the various elements that enter into history partly to show that even if you have had a boy under tuition up to the end of the secondary school period, it would be little that he could know of history; but the instruction which he receives may always be such as will prepare him for the ultimate comprehension of the subject in its widest significance. It is certain of the elements that go to constitute history a subject of humane culture which a boy must be taught. As in all other subjects, we can do nothing in the school period but lay foundations. What we have to attend to is this:--so to teach as to give a sound foundation for ultimate knowledge in every department that we admit to the school curriculum; but much more have we so to teach as to feel assured that we have already attained an education purpose, at whatever stage the pupil may cease his attendance at school. What is that purpose generally?
Purpose.--We may sometimes be disposed to think that language is somewhat strained when it is said that the object we have in view, even in the formal discipline of intellect, is ethical. We see that it is so, however, as soon as we understand the meaning of the world "ethical" as marking the issue of personal life and conduct of the Rational and Emotional, which so curiously and subtly blend to make a man. To say that the end is ethical is practically to say that the end of man is the Humanity in him--not this or that specific knowledge or faculty. But, however the world may demand explanation or justify restriction, as denoting the end of disciplinary studies, its application to the teaching of school history "leaps to the eyes."
Generally, we would say that we attain our ethical purpose in teaching history by connecting the life of the boy with the life of the past humanity of which he is the most recent outcome. Thus we make it possible for him to become a "being of large discourse looking before and after"; for the afterlook brings with it the forward look. We prolong his experience and his life thereby. Instead of three-score years and ten, he lives thousands of years. All the past of man's life pours into him, and he reaches forward also into the future of the race.
The supreme purpose, then, which we have in view in teaching school history is, I hold, the enriching of the humanity of the pupil with a view to an ethical result in life and character.
But no man, were he to give his whole life to history, can sum up in his own thoughts the past of humanity, save in the form of the most generalized characteristics of nations, and of their influence on each other for progress or decline. And, further, if he does not rest all his experience on a home basis, the true significance of events in world history will not touch him; their interpretation will lie outside his acquired knowledge; his imagination, on which true appreciation of men and movements depends, will fail him. What has been is what now exists around him, and what has been and is, is what will be. Accordingly, his historical appreciation and historical imagination must rest on the comparatively narrow basis of his own national history. If this be so with the professed historian, how much more is it true of the average man. This gives us our second proposition:
The history of the school must be national history, and its primary aim is the knowledge of the past of our own country as a portion of the human family, with a view to the evoking of that personal attachment in our past and present and future which we call Patriotism.
A true patriot as distinguished from a jingo is full of history, though it may be somewhat vague at times. The history of the past and the probable history of the future of his country animate him, although he may be a poor hand at a history examination paper. His whole life as a man is stimulated and broadened by something much greater than himself, and that something is the idea of humanity. This idea, no doubt, is narrowed down to the community of which he forms a part, the part with which he is most intimately connected; but it is none the less operative educationally, operative as a formative force.
In educating the boy to nationality and patriotism, we do not mean for him to stop short at this; but we may be assured that the vague and watered cosmopolitanism which some affect can be genuine only in so far as it rests on a patriotic national feeling. If we do not love those of our own household, the less we talk about loving Humanity with a big h the better. It is in respecting ourselves that we respect others. The youth of the country, then, must grow up in a knowledge of their own national record of arts and arms just as they must grow up in and through their own tongue and their own literature; and this they must do, if they are intelligently and sympathetically to comprehend the life of other nations, past or contemporary. Education fails to attain its moral and civic ends if it does not connect a boy with his own national antecedents and all that has made him and the present possible, and it equally fails to attain the ends of culture in its larger sense.
But while this is our first aim; we must never lose sight of our supreme purpose--the enriching of the humanity of the pupil with a view to an ethical result in him as a member of the human race.
(To be continued.)
Proofread by LNL, Jul. 2011