"We no longer go to history for lessons in morals, nor for good examples of conduct, nor yet for dramatic or picturesque scenes. We understand that for all these purposes legend would be preferable to history, for it presents a chain of causes and effects more in accordance with our ideas of justice, more perfect and heroic characters, finer and more affecting scenes. Nor do we seek to use history for the pur­pose of promoting patriotism and loyalty; we feel that it would be illogical for different persons to draw opposite conclusions from the same science according to their country or party; it would be an invi­tation to every people to mutilate, if not to alter, history in the di­rection of its preferences. We understand that the value of every science consists in its being true, and we ask from history truth and nothing more.

   "The function of history in education is perhaps not yet clearly apparent to all those who teach it. But all those who reflect are agreed to regard it as being principally an instrument of social culture. The study of the societies of the past causes the pupil to understand, by the help of actual instances, what a society is; it familiarizes him with the principal social phenomena and the different species of usages, their variety, and their resemblances. The study of events and evolutions familiarizes him with the idea of the continual trans-formation which human affairs undergo, it secures him against an unreasoning dread of social changes; it rectifies his notion of progress. All these acquisitions render the pupil fitter for public life; history thus appears as an indispensable branch of instruction in a democratic society."

EXERCISES.—Write a historical account of some party, game, or other event which you have recently witnessed, and compare your report with that of several others. Do they agree? If not, who is right? Are all facts reported?

 

Compare several newspaper accounts of any important event—" specials," not syndicate reports. What lessons can be drawn from them?

 
Write the history of some event that occurred in your family or neighborhood before you were born. How do you know when you have the truth of the matter?

As we approach the study of history, one of the most necessary precautions is that we assume toward it the scientific attitude. If the past were a museum into which we could enter and see how things actually were, we should hardly dare to take such liberties with it as we some-times do.

 

Instead of open-mindedly facing the past, resolved to accept whatever shall be revealed regardless of conse­quences, we are too inclined to form a mold of preconcep­tions and force the facts to fit it. To the religionist, history often becomes the story of God's unfolding plan of the ages; to the moralist, it may be a collection of ethical object les­sons; to the statesman, a textbook of patriotism; to the man of letters, a mere branch of literature. We should assume none of these things, not even progress, or a purposive plan of occurrence. History is simply the science of what came to pass, especially as affecting human beings.

 
History as a science.—If we can agree that history is the science of the past, how does it differ from other sciences? Not in its fundamental purpose, for that is the same in all sciences, to understand the world that we may cope with it successfully. It is distinguished by its subject matter, and

Its subject matter is that which no longer exists. The human race is like a traveler whose light can but half penetrate the mist both before and behind him. Both the future and the past belong to that kind of knowledge which must be reasoned out but cannot now be observed,—and the past has slipped away from our observation forever.

It is just here that history fails from a scientific stand-point. For whereas a science like physics can observe its facts directly, record them, and proceed to explain them, history can observe its facts, the happenings of bygone days, indirectly only; must reconstruct them by imagination and thought before it can draw inferences from them. This process may be as truthful or as faulty as the zoological restoration of an extinct animal.

 
The reconstruction of the past.—An event occurs, a bat­tle, a death, a change of custom. This event impresses its witnesses, observers, or participants, in certain ways. They describe it truthfully or untruthfully; if truthfully, they employ such words as seem to them fit to convey their meaning. The historian, prejudiced or unprejudiced, reads these words, perhaps centuries later, gives them what meaning he can in terms of his modern experience, tries to rebuild in his own mind the mental picture that was in the mind of the witness, and from this infers what the event itself must have been like. The historian then rephrases. the story for us, and we build our own mental picture, trusting that the facts, after these two objective recordings and three subjective reproductions, may, if possible, re-main undistorted!<>

We cannot discuss here the additional circumstances that sometimes make the transmission of facts more trustworthy, such as the agreement of independent lines of evidence, nor those that are unfavorable, such as the fact that most witnesses have trusted their memories, instead of recording the events immediately, as scientific practice would require. But the general process of transmitting historical evidence is substantially as described.

 

Historical science and other sciences.—Having gathered, in this indirect and partially trustworthy fashion, what it believes to be the facts, history deals with them in the usual scientific way, classifying, generalizing, explaining in terms of cause and effect. Love of gain, of religious freedom, or what not, caused our early colonists to brave the dangers of the deep. The principle of union versus secession caused our Civil War. History, then, is no mere record of past events; like other sciences it consists of facts systematized according to laws and principles.

However, this discovery of laws has not proceeded far in history. The tests of scientific knowledge are prediction and control: what historian can predict the future, or gain control over the trend of events?

Moreover, all the past must be explained in terms of the present; history cannot give as the cause of a fact anything which the other sciences do not now recognize as a cause. For instance, no sane historian explains peculiar conduct as due to a devil; the scientific term is epilepsy, psychas­thenia, or the like.

From all this it follows that history must always be sub-ordinate to the sciences that deal with present-day experi­ence. "The indirect method of history is always inferior to the direct methods of the sciences of observation. If its results do not harmonize with theirs, it is history which must give way; historical science, with its imperfect means of information, cannot claim to check, contradict, or correct the results of other sciences, but must rather use their re­sults to correct its own. . . . It is kept at a distance from reality by its indirect means of information, and must accept the laws that are established by those sciences which come into immediate contact with reality.

 

Social value of history.—If we wish to understand the value of history to the world at large, let us imagine that all historical knowledge has perished. The world would be like one who suddenly loses all memory of his past, having no adequate conception of the present situation and its meaning. All the great problems on which history has thrown light—war, slavery, democracy—would have to be worked out again from the beginning.

And history is not only the social memory, but also a means of social introspection, self-examination, self-revela­tion. As each of us, by an examination of his heredity and his past, can find much in his ancestry, his words, thoughts, behavior, likes, dislikes, and half-born ideals, to indicate the kind of person he is and the course he should pursue, so can a nation, by studying its history, learn of its deeper nature, what its heart forces and ideals are, and of its best possible future. By comparing ourselves with other nations we learn our peculiar genius, our world mission, and the resources we have for achieving it,—minerals, lands, forests, human stock. We learn also of the necessity for conserving all these things. In a word, history increases our national and social consciousness.

It is frequently stated that history inculcates goodness, and especially patriotism. In itself, as the science of the past, it of course has no bias in any direction. Its generali­zations favor some things commonly called bad, as well as what we commonly call good. They may even support what is commonly regarded as unpatriotic. The villain and traitor of one party or country may be the first hero of another. In studying history, then, we should keep our minds open, just as we do when we study geometry, botany, or physics. We should try to find out what, in the long run, goodness, patriotism, etc., really are; what kind of people we are, and what we should attempt to do in the world.

Educational value of history.—Here again we must guard against supposing that our subject develops any general "mental powers." It is commonly stated that history develops memory, imagination, practical judgment, love of truth. It does tend to educate memory for history, historical imagination, historical judgment, love of histori­cal accuracy. And these very abilities find large use in estimating political arguments, in the franchise, in all im­portant social, political, and civil relations.

That which we wish all children to gain from history is an introduction to citizenship in the large sense. Not that we should strain the facts to support our preformed ideas of citizenship, but let these facts, in the minds of the pupils, pronounce their own judgment on present-day problems. That which we aim to predict and control, so far as may be, is the social situation. We want our young to understand the origin and development of this social situation, and to react upon it intelligently. Just as geography shows us the earth as the home of man, so history should tell the story of man's struggle to make a home on earth. How man ob­tained food and shelter, learned to write, read, speak various languages; his inventions, thoughts, morals, ceremonies; his industries, ways of tilling the soil, of manufacturing, of transporting, bartering, buying, and of securing cooperation in business; family life, education, division into classes; war, peace, government; art and science, especially as they have ministered to the larger human needs—these are the lines of interest which should guide us into intelligent world citizenship.

The psychology of history teaching.—No matter what we find it desirable to teach, we are always limited and com­pelled by the ability of the learner. Unless the matter is fitted to the powers of the child our labor is in vain. We do not teach the history of philosophy in the primary school.


The past includes the most complex events, and the deep­est thoughts of man. To picture it, to reconstruct it for one's self, demands such a wealth of images and such power of imagination and thought as no one can possess without wide experience and maturity of mind. Inability to follow a difficult text often leads to discouragement, verbal memoriz­ing, or even complete misconception. Ex-President Roose­velt, when a boy, imagined the "zeal" in "The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up," as a destructive animal, kept careful watch for it, and inquired about it when he went to church. A little miss who spoke glibly in recitation of "gen­eral dissatisfaction in the North," explained, when ques­tioned, that "General Dissatisfaction was a Southern general ! "

The boy may have to interpret primitive life in terms of camping out; court life he appreciates by means of the parties he has attended; Congress is like his literary society, except that the program is all debates; and war may be the mixture of killing pigs and the death of a playmate. Even pictures can mean nothing unless the observer brings to them sufficient experience to compass their interpretation. Evidently we must be careful to teach that only which the experience of our pupils has made it possible for them to apperceive.

Subject matter.—Because the child's interests and apper­ceptive powers enlarge gradually, the extreme proposal has been made of beginning with local, present-day facts, and proceeding backward, in the reverse of the usual time order, to the beginnings of all things. Each object or event would find its explanation in what preceded. This would be the opposite of the order of all experience and nearly all story-telling. The ratchets on the child's apperceptive machinery work the other way.

But to pull the child out of his modern settings and thrust him precipitately back to the beginnings of history is a worse extreme. We must compromise; if we think of the successive periods of history as so many stages in a journey, then it would seem wise to let the pupil proceed from the be-ginning of the first brief stage, the one nearest the present, down to his own day, retreating thereafter to the most ancient mile posts of successively more distant and longer periods, to repeat the home-coming process. Thus the young historian, as soon as the serious study of events in chronological order begins, might commence with his own history and that of his ancestors, passing from the study of his community to that of his state, his nation, the foreign nation most directly precedent of his own in time—England, for us—and finally the world.

But previous to the serious study of events in chrono-, logical order, mentioned above, which might begin at the age of twelve, in the sixth or seventh grade, much historical work of value can be done. The great questions in history are Who and What? When and Where? Why (or Whence) and Whither? The first two, Who and What, call for a personal story, but it may be detached from space and time, unlocated, perhaps not very well ordered, a sort of sensation knowledge. When and Where require the space map and the time map, a simple ordering of events as one would have perceived them had he been there. Why and Whither de­mand cause and consequence, relations that are thought. We thus have roughly indicated three stages of study, corresponding to the development of the learner.

Of course, our history should nowhere be a mere skeleton of dates or a distemper of wars. Skeletons are necessary, but they are not flesh and blood. Distempers seem unavoid­able, but they are not health.

Nor is history simply the story of politics and govern­ment. If we are right in regarding history as essentially an account of man's attempts to make a place for himself on the earth, and to manage satisfactorily the affairs on which his happiness depends, then it should picture for us such things as country and climate; attempts at agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and commerce; the development of sciences, arts, languages, music; the beginnings of prop­erty holding, marriage, and family life; the growth of moral­ity, religion, philosophy, education; and especially the rela­tions of nations, races, and states to each other. *

Method.—1. In the Who-and-What stage, the primary period, the history story is paramount, especially the bio­graphic story; and among biographic stories, those of chil­dren are sure to be of interest to children. The location of the events is of no great importance, nor need the char­acter presented be pictured as the type, or representative, of any time or people. The best way to find the most in­teresting stories is by actual trial with the group to be taught. Pictures are always valuable, and dramatization is always in order. When the child has learned to read, he has unlimited access to such material.

2. In the When-and-Where stage, which roughly speak­ing is the grammar-school period, it is advisable to use textbooks on the spiral plan, covering the history of our country, for instance, at least twice; first briefly, touching

the larger events only, then in fuller detail, taking care to avoid the death valley of verbal memorizing and repetition. But as no school history can be complete, it is necessary to make use of type studies, one carefully studied colony being used to interpret a similar group, one detailed battle stand­ing as representative of a war, etc.

The time map and the space map become important. The first may be so arranged as to place each event in its proper decade or century, and at the same time, by means of par­allel columns, exhibit contemporaneous events in different countries. The space map should be simple, often drawn by the pupil. He should not see on his map the cities, bound­aries, and roads of modern times, unless he is studying modern history.

New work should often appear in the form of a problem, to solve which the pupil is referred to historical sources if they are available. But the use of sources at this time is like the experiments in elementary science, providing illus­tration rather than proof.

3. The Why-and-Whither period, the high school and college stage, may well be characterized by the increased study of sources and the full development of the critical sense in the use of them.

Civics.—In a democratic country, where every man has a fraction of the ruling power, he should know how the ruling is done. Civics and history must be so clearly correlated as to form practically one branch. Civics in its development is an actual part of history.

Here we can get at the sources with a vengeance, for all can visit town council or school board meetings, and many can take the trip to state or national capital.

Participation in such activities as will help to interpret

FOR FURTHER STUDY

• List the dates which you think a child should memo­rize in studying United States history. How can a single date be made to stand for many events?

• If an author in writing a history cannot give all the known facts, what principles should guide him in selecting the facts to be presented? How do you think the newspaper man solves this problem in reporting?

• "Class politics in school or college enables one to un­derstand the larger political movements outside." Discuss this statement.

• Have you ever pictured some distant place to your-self, and afterwards found your ideas of it to be incorrect? How can we be sure that our mental picture of the past is correct?

• What value can you see in having pupils compare various ages, countries, customs, etc.?

• According to the Binet tests, a child should detect nonsense or inner contradiction in a story at the age of eleven. Does this have any bearing on the method of teaching history at that age?

• I propose to teach the usual facts of general history to a beginning class, age seven or eight, by using words of one syllable. State your psychological objections.

• Show why "battle history," that is, the history of wars chiefly, is to be condemned.

• You have some pupils who do not care for history, but are interested in art, inventions, factories. What should you do? Theoretically, can anyone be totally uninterested in history?Select any historical event, as the discovery of America, and answer concerning it the questions, Who? What? When? Where? Why? Whither?   Does any-thing remain to be told?   Discuss the value of the magazine picture, post card, stereoscope, stereopticon, and moving picture, in the teach­ingof history.

• Do you know of any historical material, spinning wheels, andirons, letters, etc., in your community, that might be collected for a school museum? What would be the value of such a museum?

• Show the use of historical poems in teaching history.

• Discuss the correlation of history with drawing; with composition; with geography.

• Write an essay on "The use of the blackboard in history teaching."