To teach history successfully means to give the child vivid pictures of the past, to enable him to see as a whole the march of a race or of a nation across the canvas of time, to watch the legions of warriors go to victory or defeat, to hear the voices of statesmen whose wisdom has builded empires, to walk side by side with the men and women whose lives make up the annals of the world. To be of value to the child, history must be felt, just as a work of literature must be felt. He must live it, must approve the worthy and disapprove the unworthy, must rejoice in and sympathize with the fortunes and misfortunes of its characters, else it cannot be anything more to him than the chronology in the almanac, disliked during his school days and forgotten as soon as they are over.
Story-telling can make history alive and vital because of its power to convey the child to distant scenes and ages, and through it he may become, not only a spectator, but a participant in every human activity. If our libraries were to be swept away and publishing houses should shut their doors, we could still teach history to children, and teach it successfully, through the art of the narrator. By the medium of the story we can make the child see what has been done by his ancestors and other people in the past; by it we can interpret to him how his forefathers lived and acted, how other people have attempted to do what he is trying to do or sees done, and give him a vivid idea of human ways of living and conduct. This is history in the larger sense, and it was taught successfully by the story-teller in the past.
Before the days of printing, when books were manuscripts that no one but monks could read and kings could afford to own, story-telling was the only way in which this subject was taught. Tales of bygone days were told in castle halls and to groups of eager listeners on the village green, and boys and girls of King Alfred’s time knew as much of their country’s story from the lips of wandering bards as those of our generation know from cramming the contents of textbooks. They knew it because through the tales they heard they were able to relive it, and what has been done before can be done again. Because of the story’s power to vivify, modern children can relive the world’s story just as those in medieval times relived it, and history can be made a subject fraught with delight to the child.
Child attention centers first upon familiar things, and radiates from them to the unknown. Through his interest in creatures that are a part of his environment, the kindergarten tot becomes interested in those of other regions, in the men, women, children, and animals that are part of the life of some other child. Through knowledge of his immediate surroundings he comes to acquire knowledge of life in other surroundings, and according to the appeal it makes to his imagination, he understands and sympathizes with it, and his social sense is broadened. Therefore, in the study of history, the attention should be focused upon local environment, and from it should radiate to other sections of the world. In other words, by what the child sees happening around him, he must be led to see what has happened in the past and what is happening now in distant regions. This requires imagination, and a boy or a girl cannot see or feel these events if they are presented as a dry chronology, because under those conditions they do not arouse the imagination. He must behold them flashed on a canvas like a colorful picture, and because the story can do this, because it can make real to the imagination situations that cannot be experienced, through it he can be led to see and feel all that we desire him to see and feel.
The biographical story, the tale of the leader who towers above his fellows like the Matterhorn above the Valais foothills, is a boon to every teacher of history. Because it is unified in plot and dramatic in appeal to the imagination, it is the most easily handled of all the history material, and should be used freely. But if children are not to have a distorted idea of the story of the human race, we must not stop with the biographical tale. We must give them also a conception of the part the masses have had in the making of the great human story, of the yeomen of England, upon whose sturdy shoulders the foundation of British liberty stands, of the vassals of Italy, France, and Germany, of the army of unknown toilers who built the Pyramids and the Chinese Wall. Sometimes, in satisfying the child’s hero-love, we make him one-sided by laying too much stress upon individual achievement and not enough upon the work of the multitude. We do not lead him to value the importance of the humble who toil in the rank and file. This is not as it should be. We should make it clear to him that the stokers who feed the furnace of the man-of-war are as splendidly patriotic as the admiral who commands the fleet, and are as necessary to their land, because, were there no coal heavers, there could be no navy.
Sometimes, too, because martial events are more spectacular than those of peace, we give the impression that they are the only important and heroic ones, and fail to convince the children of the fact that the peasants of Lorraine, who tilled their fields until they blossomed like gardens, served their land as loyally as the soldiers who marched to victory under the oriflamme of Henry of Navarre. We are too prone to center the child interest around military affairs, and neglect to emphasize the importance of conflicts of another kind. The history of every modern industry, of every achievement that has meant anything to the world, is a story of struggle, of victory over opposing forces. It has its succession of events, its periods of triumph and defeat, its moments of suspense, and its thrilling climax, and if presented in all its possibilities, is as fascinating to childhood as Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Let us not fail to give these narratives of struggle that are unstained by human blood, and in doing it lead children to understand that there are other ways of serving one’s land besides riding a war horse or carrying a musket.
We teach that Robert Fulton invented the first steamboat, but it is only the exceptional child-leader who makes the most of that event, who throws upon the canvas, for youth to behold, the story of the struggle and disappointment, the triumph and despair, of the young American engineer. To give them the fact that the Clermont made a successful trip from New York to Albany in 1807, is like telling the end of a story without the beginning or intervening chapters, and a snatch of a tale never has the effect of the whole. But if the children have all the light and shade of that splendid narrative of invention, of the labor beside the Seine, of the hope and discouragement there, it becomes a fascinating, unforgotten tale. They remember the Clermont episode because they have enjoyed a story, and years afterward, when they see a ferryboat or an ocean greyhound, they will think of the New Englander through whose dreams and labor it came to be.
To the teacher who looks upon history as a great, fascinating tale, who regards it as a narrative instead of a mere bunch of dates and periods, who knows the story of man’s inner development as well as that of his outer, and who uses the myths, legends, and epics of a land as side lights to illuminate its true story, great results are possible. There is no phase or period of history that he cannot make intensely interesting to the child, no page of the world’s story that will not teem with life and color to the boy or girl who receives it from such an instructor. It may be an account of events in his own land, of happenings in the stern, white north country or in the opalescent south, it may be of knights in glittering armor or of serene-faced, brown-cowled friars, of men from the masses or from the ranks of the exalted, but it will breathe and pulsate for him, it will give him the information that he should receive, and it will give him an understanding that no memorizing of dates and outlines can give, because he has lived with those who made history, because he has suffered, rejoiced, and achieved with them.
Every great historian is more than a recounter of events of the past. He is an artist who fits himself into the moods of men and women who lived and accomplished before his time, puts them into his pages as creatures of flesh and blood, and gives to their activities as much freshness and interest as have the events that happen before our eyes. Motley, Guizot, Hume, Hallam, Froissart, and our own Parkman, Lodge, Prescott, and Bancroft created as splendidly as ever Hugo, Corneille, or Balzac created, because they endowed characters of fact with as much life as these other men gave to characters of fiction; and consequently, with sources rich in inspiration from which to draw, the teacher who aspires to vivify history by story-telling is confronted by no hopeless task. He need only go to the works of the standard historians for his background, and then, by giving the imagination sufficient play to supply setting and detail of situation, he can carry a joyful lesson to the children. This is well illustrated in the following story of Western discovery. Children love it and ask to have it told again and again, while if the bare facts are given them in outline form, it means little to them. Not every teacher is gifted to the degree of Miss Hood and can hope to weave a fact of history into a tale that deserves to rank as a children’s classic; but every teacher can put history into story form with enough skill to make it hold delight for his pupils and cause them to go from his instruction with a fondness for history, an understanding of what history really means, which is worth infinitely more than a thousand dates or outlines crammed into the mind for an examination or recitation, or stored there permanently to rust and grow useless, because they have no meaning, and therefore no broadening or illuminating effect upon his life.