The History Teacher's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 5, January 1910Various
History
The History Teacher's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 5, January 1910
Various
History -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals
In living, life and history unite. This, of course, touches the live
question of what is history. The specialist and his methods are
adaptable practically alone to a past not coming within eighty to
twenty years of the present. But the parent and the man in life deal
on the one hand with human beings, institutions, matter, etc., and on
the other with life forces and energies. All these exist in different
and modified forms in the specialist’s past. If this breach between the
past and present cannot be bridged, then the laboring man is right in
asking that history be displaced by things that can bridge it. The man
in life is busy with the art of living--can history help him in this?
If history is ever to be a science and be scientific, it must consider,
as do the sciences, the consequent question of being an art--of
reaching desired effects with known causes.
Those who ask the question, has history a practical value, go from the
present life into history. From that viewpoint they see its workings,
and from life and society they draw their norm by which they judge it,
accept it in the curriculum and pay taxes for the history teacher’s
salary. For such a purely selfish note as this history should not wait;
but should search out in society and life how it may be of service
some way and somehow, and through its teaching supply these needs. It
can then make itself indispensable and forestall all question of its
practical value.
The practical value of history to life depends on a complex of race,
age, country, locality and the individual. Some phases of this value
might be stated thus: an ease in observing, analyzing and classifying
the life activities of to-day. No other subject taught in the schools
touches life at so many points and in so many of its activities.
Through seeing in history the close interrelation of activities in
the past the student can be led to see the close interrelation of the
activities of his own day. Again, he learns to see life as a historic
whole--his contemporaneous life in connection with the life of the
race. He thus learns valuations and norms for judging character. He
learns that Jeffries and Johnson are less valuable in life than Pasteur
and Eucken; that even in the history of pugilism they perhaps are less
noteworthy than either Sullivan or Corbett. Again, history can help
him to save experience. He can learn to apply with due modification to
present problems not the answers of the past to past problems, but
the ways of solving those problems. Material and social environments
exist now as they existed in the days of the Greeks; hunger and
socialization, love and ambition, the desire to know and to feel, are
as effective now as in the days of Socrates. The combination and the
emphasis change. The past cannot answer the problem of the present, but
can help him to answer it. Again, history can help him to be tolerant,
since our day demands tolerance. In studying some struggle of the past
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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