The New Teaching of History
With a Reply to some Recent Criticisms of The Outline of History
§ 1
Historians and the Teaching of History
For the better part of three years the writer of these notes has been occupied almost entirely in an intensely interesting enterprise. He has been getting his own ideas about the general process of history into order and he has been setting them down, having them checked by various people, and publishing them as a book, The Outline of History, which both in America and Europe has had a considerable vogue. In volumes or in complete sets of parts it has already found over two hundred thousand purchasers; it is still being bought in considerable quantities, and it is being translated and published in several foreign languages; it is quite possible that it has sufficiently interested almost as many people to read it through as it has found purchasers to take the easier step of buying it.
This Outline of History did not by any means contain all the history the writer himself would like to know or ought to know, and much less did it profess to condense all history for its readers. But it did attempt to sketch a framework, which people might have in common, and into which everyone might fit his own particular reading and historical interests. It did try to give all history as one story. And the largeness of the measure of its success is certainly much more due to the widespread desire for such an Outline than to any particular merit of the particular Outline the writer produced. So far as reception goes, almost any enterprising person might have succeeded as the writer has succeeded. He was, as people say, “meeting a long-felt want.” But his years of work in meeting it have necessarily made him something of a specialist in historical generalities, and the adventure of making and spreading the Outline abroad has been full of interesting and suggestive experiences. Some of the criticism to which the Outline has been subjected affords an opportunity for profitable comment. To “answer” all its critics would be a preposterously self-important thing to do, but, from the point of view of our general education, some of them do repay examination. And accordingly he is setting down these present notes to the Outline; partly comments upon the educational significance of its general reception and partly a consideration of the mental attitudes, the moral and intellectual pose, into which it has thrown certain of its critics.
A most fruitful question the writer found was this: “Why was it left for me in 1918 to undertake this task?” There has been a need of some such general account of man’s story in the universe for many years. Such an account is surely a necessary part of any properly conceived education. One might almost say it was the most necessary part. For why do we teach history to our children? To take them out of themselves, to place them in a conscious relationship to the whole community in which they live, to make them realise themselves as actors and authors in a great drama which began long before they were born and which opens out to issues far transcending any personal ends in their interest and importance. And it is a commonplace to say that in the last century or so the sphere of human interest has widened out with marvellous rapidity until it comprehends the whole world. Economically, intellectually, and in many other ways the world becomes one community. But, while there has been this enormous enlargement of human interests, there has been, if anything, a narrowing down of the scope of historical teaching. If the reader will look into the sort of history that is taught in schools to-day and compare it with the yellow old books of our great-grandfathers, he will find rather a shrinkage towards the intensive study of particular periods and phases of history than an extension to meet the more extensive needs of a new age.
This is a curious result, but it is not a very difficult one to understand. Something of the same sort of narrowing down from broad views to closer and more detailed study went on for a time also in the teaching of science. In both cases the narrowing down can be ascribed to the same cause, to the growing accumulation, refinement and elaboration of detailed knowledge, and to the increasing numbers and the consequent increased division in labour and specialisation, of the original workers in the two fields. In the field of physical science particularly, and also in the field of biological science to a lesser degree, an extensive revision of fundamental conceptions has largely corrected this tendency towards narrow and specialised attention, but there has not been the same recasting of fundamentals in historical study. And the teaching of history in schools has followed the movement of the student of history towards concentration and not the needs of the common citizen towards ampler views, because there has never yet been a proper recognition of the difference in aim between study for knowledge, the historical study of the elect, on the one hand, and teaching, the general education of the citizen for the good not only of the citizen but of the community, on the other. But these are divergent aims. The former is a deep and penetrating pursuit of truth; the latter a common instruction and discipline in broad ideas and the general purpose. The material may be the same, the science of physics, biology or history as the case may be, but the method of treatment may be widely different in the two cases.
Education is really one of the newest of the arts and sciences. The idea of particular, exceptional people pursuing learning has been familiar to the world for scores of centuries, but the idea of preparing the minds of whole classes or whole communities for co-operations and common actions by a training in common ideas is comparatively a new one. The idea of education as learning still dominates us, and so it is that while we have numbers of teachers of history who are or who attempt to be, or who pose as historians who teach, we have comparatively few teachers of history who are teachers whose instrument is history. In relation to the science of history, and indeed to all the sciences, the importance of teacher as teacher is still insufficiently recognised.
Now the virtues required of the historian as of the specialist in any other science are extreme accuracy, fulness, delicacy and discrimination within the department of his work. He is usually not concerned with a philosophical review of the whole field of his science and very chary of invading any unfamiliar provinces of his subject, because of the great risks he will run there of making, if not positive blunders, at least incomplete statements. The specialists will catch him out, and though the point may be an utterly trivial one, he will have been caught out, and that discredits the historian excessively. But the teacher’s concern is primarily with the taught and with giving them a view of their universe as a whole. It is only after undergoing such comprehensive teaching that a student should be handed over to learn, by example and participation in some definite specialisation of study, the finer precisions.