But the end is still in question. The pupil goes from the grades, high school and college into life to take his part as a workman some eight hours of the day and as a citizen all twenty-four; as an active, creative worker through the prime of his life, and as a member of society to his grave. The parents and the people out in life ask the question of the practical value, and they answer it from the standpoint of life and social efficiency. Does history stand the test?
From this point of view the specialist fails; the storehouse of facts is static, efficiency is active; the method of facts results only in another static fact. The culturine teacher fares somewhat better; he is active, but unfortunately with empty symbols. He deals with answers and not with problems, with his Bædecker and not with the thing itself. It is the long stretch between the two that is wanting—the process, the use. The history work must be adapted to the life needs of the pupils as members of society: those facts, those generalizations, and especially those processes of reaching from one to the other, that can make him an efficient member of society. Isolated facts will be soon forgotten, generalizations will perhaps stick longer, but methods of generalization can be used throughout life on new facts to reach new generalizations.
What are some of the things in life and society for which history may be used,—the ends to which it may be adapted in study and teaching? Someone has pointed out four ends, but I should like to add another, fully conscious of the excepting and varying relations between them: reading, studying, teaching, writing, and I should like to add living. Writing is justly the work of the professional, i. e., the graduate school; yet if history ever becomes a science it is not at all impossible that living may not usurp this position in graduate work. Teaching, in this state, is also the work of the graduate school and the last years of the college. This leaves, then, reading, studying and living that touch the history work from the grades to the college; these also underlie the other two.
The basis on which all these rest is life itself, and the interest one takes in life. Since one is here in this world he is interested in it, to get as much out of and put as much into it as he can; if he has no interest he at least exerts himself either to be a parasite or to shuffle off its weight. This interest is the starting point of the interest in the past of this life; the basis of the ascending scale from reading onward.
Reading runs through all history work from the stories—told and read—in the grades to the reading after dinner by the evening fireside. Interest in life as it was, is, and is becoming: the problems and policies, the activity and struggle, the peaceful life of the cotter or the demon life of the battlefield, the growth of trade and the sailing of Columbus, or the work of Bach or Paracelsus. From some life interest now one travels back to chosen places and times, and under the lead of some Virgil and Beatrice does more than Dante in taking up temporary habitation then and there. From a purely commercial point of view, also, the historian can here benefit himself—and his publisher—in preparing a public to demand his books.
Studying is a step beyond reading; Virgil and Beatrice are here dismissed. It explores some field of interest and follows some thread; it reads pages and chapters and not volumes or series. The books may be stories, texts or documents—the story must be pieced together from many sources. In reading, the books lead the reader; in studying, the student leads the books. It is the transitory inquisitiveness of the child become somewhat constant in the later grades and high school, and fixed in the university in the professional study of “ut clauses.” Reflection and study go hand in hand,—the latter to answer the questions of the former. For the very great majority of people this is the nearest they ever get to professional history work. It is of the greatest practical value to those who use history for other than the pleasant hour’s reading.
In living, life and history unite. This, of course, touches the live question of what is history. The specialist and his methods are adaptable practically alone to a past not coming within eighty to twenty years of the present. But the parent and the man in life deal on the one hand with human beings, institutions, matter, etc., and on the other with life forces and energies. All these exist in different and modified forms in the specialist’s past. If this breach between the past and present cannot be bridged, then the laboring man is right in asking that history be displaced by things that can bridge it. The man in life is busy with the art of living—can history help him in this? If history is ever to be a science and be scientific, it must consider, as do the sciences, the consequent question of being an art—of reaching desired effects with known causes.
Those who ask the question, has history a practical value, go from the present life into history. From that viewpoint they see its workings, and from life and society they draw their norm by which they judge it, accept it in the curriculum and pay taxes for the history teacher’s salary. For such a purely selfish note as this history should not wait; but should search out in society and life how it may be of service some way and somehow, and through its teaching supply these needs. It can then make itself indispensable and forestall all question of its practical value.
The practical value of history to life depends on a complex of race, age, country, locality and the individual. Some phases of this value might be stated thus: an ease in observing, analyzing and classifying the life activities of to-day. No other subject taught in the schools touches life at so many points and in so many of its activities. Through seeing in history the close interrelation of activities in the past the student can be led to see the close interrelation of the activities of his own day. Again, he learns to see life as a historic whole—his contemporaneous life in connection with the life of the race. He thus learns valuations and norms for judging character. He learns that Jeffries and Johnson are less valuable in life than Pasteur and Eucken; that even in the history of pugilism they perhaps are less noteworthy than either Sullivan or Corbett. Again, history can help him to save experience. He can learn to apply with due modification to present problems not the answers of the past to past problems, but the ways of solving those problems. Material and social environments exist now as they existed in the days of the Greeks; hunger and socialization, love and ambition, the desire to know and to feel, are as effective now as in the days of Socrates. The combination and the emphasis change. The past cannot answer the problem of the present, but can help him to answer it. Again, history can help him to be tolerant, since our day demands tolerance. In studying some struggle of the past he learns to see that question from two or more sides; this practice helps, with the practice in other subjects taught in the schools, to consider a present question from its many sides.
Historical impartiality is frequently misused: impartiality plays its part in the consideration of questions, but should not be allowed to mar decisions when once made. The specialist and his pupils can easily stand off from and out of present, active life like men from Mars. Tolerance, then, is desirable in the consideration of questions, and of the activities acknowledged by society; for tolerance, like liberty, does not mean license. Again, history has a practical value in connecting the present almost as intimately with the past as hope does the present with the future. It gives two or more points together with the present from which direction and tendency may be seen. It can thus help to break down the loneliness of the present.