Equipment for Source Work.
It is well to concede at the outset that historical method cannot be taught successfully by a teacher who does not know what it means or who has never applied the method, i. e., done some research work. But perhaps nothing would contribute more to the development of a poorly-trained history teacher than to oblige him to teach the method; he would be forced to learn something about it! It is because we have not emphasized the method, because we have not required our candidates for positions as teachers of history to know how to investigate—what would we think of a teacher of chemistry who could not direct the work in the laboratory!—that we have so much absolutely impossible history teaching. The question is, then, can a teacher who knows what historical proof means successfully conduct exercises in historical method in a high school? I think there can be no doubt of it. It is being done.
To conduct the work successfully a source book, differing in some respects from the majority of source books, is needed. There are two kinds of historical facts: one class can be established by a single source, the other—and this is the more difficult, but at the same time the more valuable as training—can be proved to be true only by the agreement of independent sources or witnesses. For this last kind of work more than two sources treating of the same event are necessary. As the most of the source books are only intended to supply collateral reading, they contain little material that could be used for critical exercises. My source book on Greek history contains some such exercises, and it would be a matter of no great difficulty to supplement the sources in any of the books by two or three extracts dealing with the same topic.