Suggestions for a Lesson on Egypt.
What follows is simply an illustration of one method sometimes used. The whole class is directed to read the account of Egypt. The work is then subdivided for more minute study. Depending on the size of the class, it is divided into topics, one of which is assigned for special preparation to a student or a group of students. At the recitation period ten minutes are given in which each student or group is to write out what has been learned on the particular topic. It will probably not be possible in a large class for each pupil to read the work thus written. But one or two treatments of each topic may be read, and a different set of pupils called on at some other time. Thus the work will be participated in by all. As each topic is read criticisms and suggestions from the class are called for; and first of all from those who have not had that special topic; then in closing, from some student who has written but not read on that particular field. If note-books are used, the teacher may guide as to what shall be written down as the summary of each topic after it is read. A variation of the foregoing scheme is to send as many pupils as possible to the board to write out their topics. Appoint to each writer one or two critics. Let one criticize the English, the spelling, the punctuation (every lesson in history may be a lesson in English); and another the facts. A sample list of such topics for a lesson on Egypt is offered.
1. The Nile Valley.
2. The people; the one Hamitic race of prominence.
3. Periods of political history; the two capitals.
4. The government.
5. Classes of society.
6. Occupations and products.
7. Arts and sciences; specially architecture and sculpture.
8. Religion; ideas of immortality.
9. Decay of moral ideals.
10. Foreign conflicts.
11. Subjugation by Persia.
With the coming into view of Media and Persia, we get our first glimpse of a conquering Indo-European people. Their struggle to get into Europe is foreshadowed and we are brought to the threshold of the Greek story.
[The College Teaching of History]
PROFESSOR GEORGE BURTON ADAMS, OF YALE UNIVERSITY.
There are many things which the college teacher of history may set before him to do: He may say, “the things most fundamental are the facts of history,” and devote his work to thorough drill in names and dates. He may have a keen sense of the valuable discipline of mind and faculties to be obtained in historical study and give himself to this. He may perhaps be under the influence of the reaction which has begun and seems certain to continue and believe in reviving the ancient maxim, “history is philosophy teaching by example,” seeking primarily in his teaching to enforce lessons of statecraft and political wisdom. More likely he may be imbued with the spirit of the generation just closing and be disposed to insist that the only proper method of instruction is that by which the scholar and specialist are trained. Or he may believe that the opportunity offered him in history to impart a broad and liberal culture is the one which he should least of all neglect. Any of these purposes, or more than one of them at once, are possible to the college instructor in history. His field of choice is bewilderingly wide. Is there any one of them which is more than another the proper object of college instruction?
Any satisfactory answer to this question must be sought by determining in the first place what is the proper object of the college course itself. Such a preliminary question would be absurd had we not by our educational reforms of the past fifty years gone far to put the college into a place in advanced education which does not belong to it, and in consequence to confuse all our ideas as to its natural functions. I am not finding any fault with these reforms. They were so necessary and have proved so valuable that they can never be called in question. But in bringing them about, some things were done, unnecessary and ill-advised. In consequence for one thing the duty lies upon the next generation, as one of its most important tasks, of restoring the college to its historical and to its logical position in the university. For the present purpose it suffices to say that the function of the college is general training and general preparation. It is the one department of the university which has, and which should have, no special object. Or it is more accurate to say that it can be adapted at the same time to a number of different objects to meet the needs of students whose ultimate purposes are different, and the possibility of doing this wisely and efficiently is one of the happiest results we have gained from the changes of the last generation. The work of the college is fundamental to that of all the other departments of the university, and in the normal university they should all require and build upon it. But it should also not be forgotten that the work of the college is not of necessity fundamental to any special line of advanced study. The number of students in our colleges who are not looking forward to professional or specialist work, but who are expecting to go into various lines of commercial activity, is already large and constantly increasing. They have no desire to follow out a course of study whose purpose is a technical preparation, nor is such a course well adapted for them. The demand which their presence in the college makes is for what we may call a general preparation for life, some knowledge of facts, some training of judgment and taste, sympathy with a variety of intellectual interests, such broadening and liberalizing of mind as is possible. To the instructor who teaches in the eager atmosphere of an active university such a demand may seem illegitimate, because it seems vague and weak. But this opinion is proper only to the narrow specialist who cannot see beyond the limits of his own field. The demand is perfectly legitimate; it is certain to be increasingly heard; and it is the duty of the college to meet it. It is to be remembered also that the best preparation for technical work does not omit all studies which are cultural merely, just as the best general preparation for life should embrace some training in technical lines.
With these considerations in mind let us ask to which of the two ways by which the college discharges its preparatory function, technical preparation or general preparation, the study of history is most naturally adapted, and which of the purposes already stated as those the instructor may have in mind is most likely to secure the desired end. It is not easy to specify a line of professional work to which the study of history stands in a technical relation, except that of the history teacher, whose numbers are at present so small, in proportion to the college as a whole, as to be almost negligible, and who perhaps needs above all others that point of view in regard to history which a general rather than a special training will give. Law and theology come the nearest perhaps to having a technical need of historical study, and yet it is also true of them that what they need of history is not technical but general preparation. The clergyman or lawyer may need a more permanent hold upon the facts of history than does the business man. They are to him more an end in themselves rather than chiefly a means for producing a result, as in the case of the other. But preacher and business man alike need to study the same facts in the same way each for his own purpose. It is in truth the later studies of the professional man which serve to keep alive the facts which he and his classmate in business once learned in the same class room.
The proper purpose then of the study of history in the college course is general preparation—preparation for life in general rather than for some special line of later study which builds upon it. To accomplish this purpose, and indeed every other, a certain amount of drill in names and dates is indispensable. Without it every result is insecure and all the instructor’s lessons hang in the air with no foundation to rest upon. But the teacher who makes drill in the facts his main object overlooks the almost universal experience that no matter how well a body of details may once have been learned they inevitably fade out of mind in later years unless the necessities of one’s daily occupation keep them fresh. What remains a constant possession is the general effect, the general impression once made by means of the details. The teacher who makes the general his main object, drawn from and enforced by a knowledge of the special which is for the moment clear and sound, deals with the most abiding of educational results.
The effectiveness of history as a means of mental discipline is so great that the teacher is constantly tempted to make this his main object. With one who does I have no great quarrel. I have only to say that at best it is the choice of an inferior good and that it is devoting oneself to what is already abundantly provided for in the curriculum of studies. There is so much in any college course with which discipline of the mental faculties is necessarily connected, mathematics, elementary language studies, many of the sciences, that it seems a flagrant waste of opportunities to use history for the same purpose.
Of the maxim, “history is philosophy teaching by example,” two different things are to be said. For the scholar and investigator it is a maxim full of danger, adding gratuitous perils to those which must beset his way, and it should be summarily discarded. For the teacher of history the danger is not so great, but he would be a very unusual man who could interpret the facts of history into political lessons for others without a very decided personal bias, or even succeed in disguising the influence of his private convictions upon his doctrines. It is doubtless more effective in most cases to let the facts speak for themselves, after a presentation of them which honestly endeavors to make them clear and to state them exactly as they are.
The belief that graduate and undergraduate students should be taught alike, that the best method for all is the method by which the scholar should be formed, that there should be no distinction in the study of history between general and special preparation, is in my opinion one of the most pestilent heresies accompanying the changes of recent years. It is a belief no more likely to be true because the particular change which produced it is that by which the true university has been created. There are certain studies in which I am ready to admit its truth. They are, however, those studies only in which training in the method of advance peculiar to the given subject is so necessary to an understanding of its nature that no real knowledge is possible without it, and their number is, I believe, decidedly less than is commonly asserted. Assuredly history is not one of them. To acquire a knowledge of the human past, especially if that knowledge is enriched, as it should be, with an imaginative conception of the process of the ages, is a large and worthy intellectual task for teacher and taught, indeed for the lifetime of a man. To confuse it for the great mass of college students with the effort to impart to them the method of the scholar, which is the proper technical training of the graduate school, is, I firmly hold, morally little short of a breach of trust.
This is only affirming in other terms my belief in the transcendent importance of that one of the special purposes which the teacher may set before himself which remains, the effort to make the study of history one that is directed to the broadening and liberalizing of the mind. The claim which I make for history is that of all college studies it most naturally and simply produces these results. Did instructors in physics and chemistry realize more clearly than they seem to me to do what they might accomplish of this sort, I should be disposed to admit their right to dispute this claim, but for the average of college students, as they come to us in masses, I am not now ready to allow any other exception. If history be taught with that degree of imagination without which no man should enter the teaching profession, it is not difficult to open the mind of the student to two impressions. One is of what may be called in simplest phrase the continuity of history, meaning thereby no mechanical continuity, but an organic and living unity—the continuous and cumulative progress of civilization which makes us to-day not in a poetic sense, but as a bald and literal fact, the heirs of all the ages. This needs especially to be imaginatively presented to induce an imaginative conception of it. The other is of the fact that somewhere in the past humanity has worked through crises which are essentially the same as those which now confront it. It is the especial privilege of the teacher of history to bring the mind of the student successively into contact with almost every species of political effort, of intellectual interest, and of moral struggle of which the race is capable. To the great majority of minds the optimistic inference is more natural than the pessimistic, and the conclusion almost draws itself that endeavor is not in vain, that the good result is in the end secure. If the student can be given in some degree these two things, a conception not merely intellectual, but imaginative, it may be more or less emotional, of the sweep of humanity onward, and a calm assurance of the ultimate good, I certainly believe he will confess that no step of his mental advancement has opened to him so wide a horizon or brought him to so steadying a confidence in the worth of individual effort and the final outcome of things.
I am perfectly well aware that in this I am stating the ideal. I am not foolish enough to believe that these results can be imparted to whole classes, or immediately in full perhaps to anyone, nor would I claim for every instructor the power to produce them. But though the ideal is unattainable, I do wish to say clearly three things. One is that to some students very much of these results, more probably than would at first be thought possible, can be given, and to nearly all something. Another is that history of all college studies leads to them most directly and naturally. The third is that the teacher who labors for them wisely and with proper balance of interest is laboring not merely for what is likely to be most permanent, but for the highest and best possible to him.
[American History in the Secondary School]
ARTHUR M. WOLFSON, PH.D., Editor.