The effectiveness of history as a means of mental discipline is so great that the teacher is constantly tempted to make this his main object. With one who does I have no great quarrel. I have only to say that at best it is the choice of an inferior good and that it is devoting oneself to what is already abundantly provided for in the curriculum of studies. There is so much in any college course with which discipline of the mental faculties is necessarily connected, mathematics, elementary language studies, many of the sciences, that it seems a flagrant waste of opportunities to use history for the same purpose.
Of the maxim, “history is philosophy teaching by example,” two different things are to be said. For the scholar and investigator it is a maxim full of danger, adding gratuitous perils to those which must beset his way, and it should be summarily discarded. For the teacher of history the danger is not so great, but he would be a very unusual man who could interpret the facts of history into political lessons for others without a very decided personal bias, or even succeed in disguising the influence of his private convictions upon his doctrines. It is doubtless more effective in most cases to let the facts speak for themselves, after a presentation of them which honestly endeavors to make them clear and to state them exactly as they are.
The belief that graduate and undergraduate students should be taught alike, that the best method for all is the method by which the scholar should be formed, that there should be no distinction in the study of history between general and special preparation, is in my opinion one of the most pestilent heresies accompanying the changes of recent years. It is a belief no more likely to be true because the particular change which produced it is that by which the true university has been created. There are certain studies in which I am ready to admit its truth. They are, however, those studies only in which training in the method of advance peculiar to the given subject is so necessary to an understanding of its nature that no real knowledge is possible without it, and their number is, I believe, decidedly less than is commonly asserted. Assuredly history is not one of them. To acquire a knowledge of the human past, especially if that knowledge is enriched, as it should be, with an imaginative conception of the process of the ages, is a large and worthy intellectual task for teacher and taught, indeed for the lifetime of a man. To confuse it for the great mass of college students with the effort to impart to them the method of the scholar, which is the proper technical training of the graduate school, is, I firmly hold, morally little short of a breach of trust.
This is only affirming in other terms my belief in the transcendent importance of that one of the special purposes which the teacher may set before himself which remains, the effort to make the study of history one that is directed to the broadening and liberalizing of the mind. The claim which I make for history is that of all college studies it most naturally and simply produces these results. Did instructors in physics and chemistry realize more clearly than they seem to me to do what they might accomplish of this sort, I should be disposed to admit their right to dispute this claim, but for the average of college students, as they come to us in masses, I am not now ready to allow any other exception. If history be taught with that degree of imagination without which no man should enter the teaching profession, it is not difficult to open the mind of the student to two impressions. One is of what may be called in simplest phrase the continuity of history, meaning thereby no mechanical continuity, but an organic and living unity—the continuous and cumulative progress of civilization which makes us to-day not in a poetic sense, but as a bald and literal fact, the heirs of all the ages. This needs especially to be imaginatively presented to induce an imaginative conception of it. The other is of the fact that somewhere in the past humanity has worked through crises which are essentially the same as those which now confront it. It is the especial privilege of the teacher of history to bring the mind of the student successively into contact with almost every species of political effort, of intellectual interest, and of moral struggle of which the race is capable. To the great majority of minds the optimistic inference is more natural than the pessimistic, and the conclusion almost draws itself that endeavor is not in vain, that the good result is in the end secure. If the student can be given in some degree these two things, a conception not merely intellectual, but imaginative, it may be more or less emotional, of the sweep of humanity onward, and a calm assurance of the ultimate good, I certainly believe he will confess that no step of his mental advancement has opened to him so wide a horizon or brought him to so steadying a confidence in the worth of individual effort and the final outcome of things.
I am perfectly well aware that in this I am stating the ideal. I am not foolish enough to believe that these results can be imparted to whole classes, or immediately in full perhaps to anyone, nor would I claim for every instructor the power to produce them. But though the ideal is unattainable, I do wish to say clearly three things. One is that to some students very much of these results, more probably than would at first be thought possible, can be given, and to nearly all something. Another is that history of all college studies leads to them most directly and naturally. The third is that the teacher who labors for them wisely and with proper balance of interest is laboring not merely for what is likely to be most permanent, but for the highest and best possible to him.
[American History in the Secondary School]
ARTHUR M. WOLFSON, PH.D., Editor.