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

by G. E. Partridge

We do not yet know what history, taught thus dramatically and intimately, under the stimulus of the greatest events of all time might do for the mind of the child or for all the future of the world. We have never had the most favorable conditions for the teaching of universal history. We have been obliged to create interest. History has been taught externally, from the standpoint of a far-away observer. Now history may and must be taught more as it is lived. The world has become more real to every one; this sense of reality of a world of historical entities must be made to persist. We must not go back to our unreal and intellectualized history. The spirit of the nations must be made to live again, so to speak, in the minds of the coming generation. What each nation stands for, its ethos, its personality, must be made clear. Powers says that all governments and all nations are sincere. It is the soul of nations, then, their own realization of themselves that must be made the real object of history. We must go back of the individual and the event at least, to the desires that have made history what it is; we must see why events have taken place, and while sacrificing nothing of our own principles and standards, understand and feel what the principles and the nature of these widely differing nations really are. For the actual teaching of history, it is likely that the story, carried to its highest point of art, will still be the chief method. But pictorial art must be heavily drawn upon, and all the resources of symbolic art, as we pass from the lower to the higher stages in education, or, we had perhaps better say, as we try more and more to convey moods and the spirit of nations and epochs and to appeal to the deep motives in the subconscious life of the individual. Plainly there is much work to do in the investigation and the teaching of history for every grade and department of the educational system, from the government and the higher universities to the teacher of the young child. It is an age of history, a day in which all sciences have as one of their tasks to aid in the understanding of history. In the broader world and the universal life which the idea and the reality of internationalism has opened up to us, all must live in some way, if only in imagination. History is a part of the necessary equipment for that life.

II. The Reëducation of National Desires

The second factor in internationalism is also, on its educational side, related to a knowledge of history. This is the attitude which peoples must take toward their own purposes and ambitions. We must begin to speak of the education of national consciousness. This process of the education of nations must be such as will teach peoples to surrender certain visions most of them have in regard to a future which cannot now be realized. The content of the desires of nations must now be changed. The future of many peoples will depend upon the extent to which they can remain progressive and enthusiastic without the stimulus of imperialistic ambitions.

Considering our own situation in America, it seems plain that we have confronting us a serious educational problem, that of imparting to the rising generation and of acquiring for ourselves, a better understanding of the meaning and place of our country in the world, and a more earnest interest in its functions and its welfare. This requires something more than a teaching of American history. It is time for us to take stock of all our material and all our spiritual possessions. We need perhaps to discover what our ideals really are and what the ideas and the forces are that have made our history what it has been; and what in the future we are likely to do and to be, and ought to do and be. We must question deeply at this time our own soul; we must look to our institutions, our literature and our art for an understanding of ourselves.

This more profound knowledge of ourselves must be made the basis of our especial educational philosophy. Here is the most urgent of all our educational problems. Education is, or should be, a process by which national character is constantly being molded. In the school the nation must learn much that cannot be read in books. It must learn to believe things that cannot be proved, or perhaps even definitely formulated as truth. The soul of the nation must be subjected, in a word, to some kind of spiritual leadership. Constructive statesmanship must be felt as an influence in the school. The problem is really nothing less than that of educating and forming national character. Now that we stand less alone as a nation our character cannot safely be left so much to chance and to the effects of our favorable environment and our original stock of virtues. We cannot continue to be so naïve and so unconscious of our country as we have been. What we are and what we must do as a people, we say, ought to be better understood. We should bring these ideals of ours out of the mists of partisan thinking and give them more definite shape, and at the same time translate them into the language of sincere living. National honor ought to be made a clearer idea. We ought at least to be sure it contains the idea of honesty. Such prejudices as our history has encouraged in us must be recognized, and computed in our personal equation. These prejudices we certainly harbor—in regard to our own particular type of government, our culture and education, our freedom and our democracy and our security. Every nation appears to have its own idols, its concealments and its self-deceptions, its belief in its own supremacy and divine mission, and its innocent faith in its own mores. To overcome such narrowness and perversion without introducing worse faults is a difficult problem of education. In either direction there appear to be real dangers. A nation steeped in provincial ways, plunged as we are now into the midst of world politics, has difficulties lying before it compared to which contributing a decisive military power is small. There are dangers in standing aloof from other peoples. But if we surrender too readily our prejudices and homespun ways, and too rapidly absorb influences from without, we shall be no safer, for carried too far, that would mean to lose our mission and our vision. There appears to be, moreover, no safe and easy middle course which we can follow. Our only course seems to be clearly to understand ourselves, rise above our limitations and difficulties, turn our faults into virtues, and make ourselves secure by our own inner worth and power.

Plainly there are difficult problems ahead of the teachers of American history. They must not inculcate suspicion and fear, but they must not present our security in a false light. They must not inspire the war-like spirit and imperialistic ambitions, but they must do nothing to lessen our seriousness of purpose and enthusiasm for the future. They must not teach national vanity, but they must not on the other hand encourage a spirit which is in any way over-critical and cynical or supercilious. There must be political wisdom on the part of the people but not a sophisticated state of mind. These teachers must inspire a wholesome pride, without creating an inflamed sense of honor such as has caused so many wars. They must make clear the virtue and the individuality of our own national life, but in doing this they must not disparage the foreign and give rise to prejudice and antagonism. How to establish us still more firmly in our own essential traits and philosophy of life without making us conceited and closed to good influences from without; how to give us a strong sense of solidarity without the attendant sense of opposition to everything outside the group is a part of our educational work which, in a broad sense, falls to the teacher of history.

The central problem of the education of national consciousness, in our view, is to make desires more conscious and to subject them to discipline and the influence of the best ideals of American life. MacCurdy says that by making instincts conscious we take a great step in advance. That we should say is true, if we make them conscious in the right way, and do not try to substitute rational principles for them. But we need to go further; we must not only understand and control the impulses of aggression, jealousy, fear and the like that have played such a sinister part in history, but we must know more about those complex and subtile things we call moods, which are really the main forces in modern life. These moods are accumulations and repositories of interests and desires, and they must be appreciated by all who as educators, undertake to direct the forces in our national life. These desires must be made more definitely conscious everywhere, and be subjected to influence and education. It is not simply institutions, organizations and factions that must be watched and controlled, just because these are the more obvious and most easily affected expressions of tendencies and desires, but all the subtile feelings or moods which are the raw materials, so to speak, of future conduct, ideals, and institutions.

Here comes to view, of course, our whole problem of assimilation of heterogeneous elements. Favored by our geographical position, and by the fortunate success and the great suggestive power of the ideal of liberty with which our history began, America has had, as we all realize, thus far an unusual career. We have been able to assimilate foreign elements with great rapidity. We may not be so fortunate in the future. Distances which have severed our new peoples from their old ties have become strangely shortened by the war. Our problems of adjustment have become more subtile and complex. The necessity of succeeding in unifying our population is more urgent. Therefore our future development, as a nation, becomes to a greater extent a process of conscious direction; what we have done naïvely and by sheer force of our powers of growth, we must do now, it is likely, more deliberately and efficiently.

We have before us in America the highly important and by no means easy task of harmonizing, under new conditions, all sorts of forces and desires by directing them in ways and toward ends which cannot now be wholly determined. There is both a psychological and a pedagogical aspect of the situation. Psychology must perform for American life something very much like a psycho-analysis; we should expect to see as a result of the war a greatly increased interest, on the part of the American people, in themselves; self-understanding and self-interpretation, we should suppose, would be advanced; all the sciences of human nature we should think would be called upon to help us to make a new American history and to formulate the purposes of our national life.

On the pedagogical side we might expect reasonably to see a deepened sincerity on the part of all who in any way stand in the position of teachers. We are dependent upon leaders in a democratic country, and all leaders in whatever place in society would now, one might hope, feel a heightened sense of duty, both to understand and to influence American life, to represent in their own persons and teachings the highest ideals, and indeed to become truly creative forces in society. Boutroux says that Germany is a product of an external phenomenon—education. America, we should say, must become more and more a product of an internal phenomenon—education. That is, the forces that will continue to shape our country must be in the form of leadership growing out of the best impulses and the true meaning of our civilization. No forces will make of us something we are not by nature; our strength must continue to come from within, but it is the aristocratic spirit, the aristocracy of genius in the fields of intellect, morality and art that must of course have the fullest opportunity to influence all our institutions, even the school room.