§ 4
The Hope of a Better Teaching of History
I will revert for a moment to my suggestion of an Outline of History for Catholics from the Catholic point of view. It is, I submit, a very desirable thing at the present time. I suppose the Church, at its head and as a whole, has a policy, a definable relationship towards the States and nations of the world. As an organisation one feels that it should make for peace and human co-operation—wherever it operates. If any sort of men can be expected to have the same political ideas wherever they are found, and to have had something like an identical historical training, it is surely the priesthood of the Catholic Church. But the Church does not seem to give its priests any systematic instruction in the history of mankind, after the period covered by the Bible story. Much less does it attend to the minds of its laity in this matter. Everywhere the Catholic priest, instead of restraining the local and patriotic prejudices of his flock, seems rather to be swayed by them. In very many centuries the Catholic Church plays a very important political rôle; it is almost inevitable that the facilities offered by its organisation and solidarity should be used politically. But it does not seem to be used coherently throughout the world in the cause of human unity. Its weight is rather on the side of the intenser Nationalisms. I believe that a Catholic History of Man written for world-wide use would do much to turn the influence of the Church throughout the world back towards its former rôle of a peace-compelling and world-unifying power.
Of course, I cannot pretend to understand how a Catholic Outline of History would be designed and written. I do not see how any writer can see history except from his own standpoint, and my conception of how that Catholic history would be planned, were I to give it here, would certainly strike any Catholic as at least a grotesque caricature of his vision.
That opens up the still larger question of the possibility of other Outlines of History written from different angles of vision from my own. My vision of history is essentially one of mental synthesis and material co-operation, from the completely isolated individual life and death of the primordial animal to the continuing mental life and the social organisation now growing to planetary dimensions, of the human species. Means of communication and educational and political organisation necessarily dominate the story. The triumphs of art and of poetic literature are secondary in such a scheme. Mr. Gomme complains that an examinee would get low marks if he had to write an account of Homer from my Outline. If the question concerned Shakespeare or Giotto, I doubt if he would get any marks at all. For the plain truth is that such outbreaks of beauty scarcely affect the Outline—as such. They may be very important to the human soul and so forth, and a list of them—an Outline of History can do no more than that—may be very necessary to struggling examinees; but these were considerations beyond the intention of the Outline.
Other minds may see the question differently. It has been suggested that the Outline could have been told as a history of art. Or, as the Marxists are disposed to insist, as a history of economic relationship and its consequences. (Because the Marxists believe that first a man produces and then he exists.) Either method may be possible, but to my mind neither is possible. For me, I can only imagine a history of art or of economic development being written after the Outline as I conceive it has been apprehended. And the same remark applies to a project which is, I gather, afoot in the United States for a History of Woman. I do not see how such a history can be written until you have the fundamental Outline of the development of human societies in space and time as the framework in which it can be hung.
I would like to lay stress upon this idea of universal history as an educational framework. Combined with the study of physiography, as Professor Huxley defined it, it gives something that may be made the basis of a common understanding and sympathy for all mankind. Each one of us could pursue his particular interests and develop his particular gifts the better within such a common mental framework.
Now if it is true that my Outline of History is a sketch of the real Outline of History, this framework of which we stand in need; and if it is true that either by effective revision or replacement we may presently get a generally satisfactory Outline of History that will be available as an educational framework, the next question we have to ask is how we can best get that Outline into operation in schools. In America, where there is much more freedom and variety in educational method than in Europe, much may be achieved by a steady insistence on the part of groups of parents and journalists upon the introduction of the new teaching of history into schools and colleges. But in Europe, where the schools of both boys and girls are much more dominated by the requirements of the various leaving-schools, qualifying and competitive examinations by which they pass on into business or professional or student life, the method of attack may need to be a different one. It becomes a matter of importance under such conditions to do one’s utmost to introduce into such examinations what will be at first an alternative paper in the Outlines of History, a paper which may be taken as an alternative to the paper upon the national history of a special period which is at present the usual requirement in history of such examinations. The two sorts of history teaching would then go on, for a time at least, side by side. Some schools and some candidates would follow the extensive, and some the intensive, method. And a thing now very urgently needed is for teachers of history, or for the Historical Society, or some special committee, to draw up a sample syllabus, or two or three such documents, to define a course of instruction in the outlines of world history. My own contribution to that is, of course, the list of contents of the Outline I have written. It would be an extraordinarily useful thing to produce and to criticise and revise such a syllabus now, and then when it was in fairly good shape to agitate for its adoption as an alternative scheme of instruction to the existing history courses.
So soon as the Outline of History becomes a “subject” and a “paper” in these various examinations that mean so much to the youth of Europe, enterprising teachers would begin to qualify themselves for the new work, and enterprising publishers would set themselves to abstract, improve, paraphrase, plagiarise and adapt the Outline for class use. In a very little while, with incalculably great benefit to mankind, we could have the broad facts of human history taught, as chemistry is taught to-day, in practically the same terms throughout all Europe. And later, as the students went on to a closer study of their own nation and its literature, they would do so with a sound sense of historical perspective, and with their disposition towards national egotism and conceit at least corrected. On minds prepared in this fashion it would be possible to build the new conceptions of an organised world peace that struggle so hopelessly at present against the dark prejudices of to-day.
H. G. Wells.
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