The Psychology of Nations / A Contribution to the Philosophy of History

by G. E. Partridge

INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL

If we take a serious and an optimistic view of education as a social institution, and think of it at all as standing in functional relationships with the social life as a whole, we must conclude that internationalism as a new movement and idea, and the school as an institution in which changes in the social order are reflected (but in which also changes in the social order are created) are closely related. Adjustment is a relatively easy matter; it is the conception of the school as a creative factor that challenges our best efforts. Let us think of the school as a workshop in which there must be created the forces by which we must make a desired and an otherwise unrealizable future come to pass and we have a new and inspiring view of education. The school perhaps must do even more than educate the forces; it must help even to create the vision itself by which the future is to be directed. The school becomes, so to speak, the working hypothesis of civilisation. In it the ideas and the desires by which nations live must be made to take shape.

The idea of internationalism implies certain changes in the external relations of nations which, whatever the form internationalism will take on its political side, are not difficult to perceive. These in turn imply internal changes. We might readily outline or psychologically analyze what could be called the mood of internationalism, in order to see its relations to education. It contains a number of factors, more or less related to one another. First, there is a recognition of a world of growing, living historical entities which we call nations; and this recognition implies new understanding and an enrichment of knowledge. Second, there is a change in the consciousness of nations, slow but visible, by which they become more willing to investigate freely and fairly their own place in history, understand their own desires, functions, virtues, faults, the value of their culture and civilization. Without such an attitude all talk of internationalism in any real sense is idle. Third, there is a new and different practical interest. We begin to conceive our world as a world of complex practical relations, and this idea of a practical world is likely to become one of the leading thoughts of the future. Fourth, by extending, so to speak, this idea of a world of practical relations, we idealize a world in which there is a common interest in great international achievements,—a world devoted more than it is now to coördinated efforts to accelerate progress, more conscious of the needs of a distant future, perhaps, or even of an ideal of universal efficiency as a means of realizing some one world purpose or many good purposes. This is not now, as it once might have been called, merely an Utopian dream. In some slight degree it is already being accomplished. Fifth, social and moral feelings are widened in scope, and must be still further extended; it is in the form of the democratic spirit, that these feelings must find expression. And this democratic spirit is on one side practical, but it is also something more than the emergence of the common mind; it is the aristocratic idea carried out universally that we look forward to, an enthusiasm for all true values, a mood and activity in which all people participate. Sixth, there is a necessary attitude toward world organization or world government, according to which we think of world government or world organization as a means of accomplishing results which fulfill fundamental desires and purposes of the peoples of the earth; as a growing structure, something to be added to and improved. Seventh, if so general a tendency and demand may be made clear, there is a philosophical mood, which must be made a part of the ideal and the attitude of the future, if that future is to realize even the practical hopes of the world. This philosophical attitude is first of all a way of living comprehensively and more universally, in the world both of facts and of ideas. It means a less provincial and a more widely enriched life for all. It means also an ability to choose the good not according to preconceptions and narrow principles, but according to the wisdom contained in the experience and the selective powers of mankind as a whole. This means a life in which men live, so to speak, more collectively.

These factors of the idea of internationalism, whatever we may think of the possibility of their realization, make in their totality an educational problem: they are specifications, so to speak, laid before us for the making of a new educational product. If we say that it is useless to think of such things, we are saying merely that it is useless to hope to be a factor in conscious evolution, or that the world as a whole has no purpose and no goal. If we believe education has any function in the larger work of the world, educational philosophy must take these things into account, see how they may be created or sustained, and how they can be made to work together to help bring to pass the kind of future men are talking so much about.

I. The Essential World Idea

Our present situation has plainly made it necessary for us to understand the world in which we live far better than we have in the past, and to be willing to make more dispassionate judgments about it. For better or for worse we have entered upon a new stage of history, in which heavy responsibilities fall upon all peoples, and upon none more than upon ourselves. Enlightenment beyond all our present understanding is a necessity. We have been peculiarly isolated and separated from the world's affairs; now we are peculiarly involved. We have, however, one great and unusual advantage. In our case it is ignorance rather than prejudice that we must overcome in ourselves. The world feels this and recognizes the unusual place this gives us. We have no thousand years of continuous strife to distort our historical perspective. We out to be able to be just interpreters of the history of the world. Our universities ought to be the greatest centers of historical learning, and as a people we should feel ourselves called upon above all other people to know the world.

As a nation we pass out of a local into a broader political field. We become citizens of a world, but this world is no mere habitation of individuals who are to be affiliated with one another. It is a world of national wills. Internationalism is first of all a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations. But such a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations cannot be effected merely by spreading abroad good will. A widespread education in the meaning of history must first be made the foundation of international justice in the minds of the people. Current history and future events seen in the light of all history, of history as the science and story of all human experience, become our chief intellectual interest to-day. The war has taught us how little the people in the world know bout the world as a whole. All history thus far has been local history. Everywhere there tends to be the prejudice in some degree that comes from the private need of using history for political ends. Unless we can now put history, real history, at the head of our sciences, the war will have failed of a great result, whatever in particular, in a political way, it may have accomplished.

With such an understanding of what is to be meant by history we say, if that seems an adequate way of expressing it, that the teaching of history becomes one of the fundamental problems of the educational work of the day. It might be better to say that living in the historical spirit is demanded as a way of salvation of the world. However, adding geography and economics to history we have a content that must somehow be taught in the schools. History, as the most concrete science of the actual world in which we live, now seems to have become a new center for the curriculum. Hitherto we have tended to regard history too lightly, as the story of the world; now there must be a deeper view of it. We must have an understanding of the motives and the desires of peoples; history must not only be broader and more comprehensive but more penetrating and psychological. It is the purposes of nations, working themselves out in their history, that we must understand. There must no longer be great unknown places on the earth. Germany, Russia, Japan must not continue to be mysteries. National psychology must be made a part of historical interpretation. This new history must be the means of showing us our world in a more total view than we have thus far had of it, so that we may better discern the continuity, if there be one, behind the detached movements and multiplicity of facts presented by the world's story; for perhaps, in this way, we should better understand what the future is to produce, and what, more important still, it ought to be made to produce.

The need first of all is for a continuation of the interest inspired by the war—an interest showing itself in the form of an universal interest in all history, and an intensive investigation of history. We need now, indeed, the most comprehensive study of the world that has ever been conceived or dreamed of by man. This is the duty of the historians. This new history must show us what nations are at heart, what they desire, what they can do. Such an understanding of nations is, we say, the real beginning of internationalism. It is a necessary foundation for it, if internationalism is to be anything more than a merely practical, prudential or political arrangement among nations. In the school-room eventually, and indeed beginning now, there is demanded a readjustment of interest by which history takes a new and more central place. We must endeavor to give the new generation a world-idea. And upon the nature and clearness of this world-idea much, in the future, will depend.

Such a demand upon the school opens once more, of course, all the old problems of the teaching of history. All the dreary questions of the precise order in which history should be taught—whether backwards or forwards, local first or the reverse, may be brought up if one chooses to do so. But after all, these questions are not very fruitful. What we need most is the historical spirit. We want a dramatic presentation of the world's whole story, by which the true meaning of history is conveyed. The methods of art must be added to the methods of fact. A persuasive use of the materials of history must be made. This means a change finally, perhaps, not only in the methods of teaching history, but in the whole mood and spirit of the school. Methods are likely to adapt themselves to necessity. Certainly the slow methods of presenting facts, sometimes if not generally employed, the tedious lingering upon details, seems wholly out of place. We need a broader outlook in history. Even the young child must have a more comprehensive world-idea, some sense of the whole of the great world in which he lives. This is one of the instances, it may be, in which we must set about breaking up any recapitulatory order, natural to the child, which suggests an advance from the local to the more general and wider knowledge. The universal interests of the day so strongly affect the child, the social consciousness so dominates the individual consciousness that even the natural law of development must to some extent yield if necessary. This social consciousness, the interests and purposes expressed in the child's social environment, present the experience of the adult world dramatically and intensively, exerting as we might say, a creative power upon the mind. That indeed is precisely what the higher teaching, whether in the form of art, or in the form of vivid experience, conveyed though the practical life does everywhere in education.