Function and Method in the Teaching of History EDWARD JAMEs Woodhouse This is a preachment based on observation of the methods. and results of the teaching of history in several colleges and universities and on experience as a graduate student and as a teacher of undergraduates. It is submitted with deference and gratitude for those teachers who, as masters and as colleagues, have laid the writer under great obligations, and whose achievements and methods form much more of the foundation for this paper than anything accomplished by the writer himself. He is concerned largely with gathering together here the strong points in the methods of these fellow workers and friends. In advocating a change, he is attacking, not individual teachers, but a mistaken system of teaching. The much discussed question as to how to teach history is really made up of three parts: (1) What is history? (2) What benefits are to be derived from the study of history? (3) How can the teacher lend the most effective aid to the student in securing these benefits? It is not the purpose of the article to debate the first question, but the statements of some of the most prominent history teachers of the country give sufficient basis for the proposed discussion of the other two questions. Professor William A. Dunning, in an article on “Truth in History," said: "For my present purpose, I am going to assume that the province of history is to ascertain and present in their causal sequence such phenomena of the past as exerted an unmistakable influence on the development of men in social and political life."1 Professor James Harvey Robinson, in a recent volume of essays, wrote, "I think that one may find solace and intellectual repose in surrendering all attempts to define history, and in conceding that it is the business of the historian to find out anything about mankind in the past which he believes to be 1 American Historical Review, XIX, 218. interesting or important and about which there are sources of information."2 Professor George Burton Adams, in his inaugural address as President of the American Historical Association on "History and the Philosophy of History," dealt with the new "social sciences" in their relation to history and indicated his conviction as to the province of history. His idea of the relation of history to political science, geography, economic interpretation of history, sociology and social psychology is summarized thus: "For more than fifty years the historian has had possession of the field and has deemed it his sufficient mission to determine what the fact was, including the immediate conditions which gave it shape. Now he finds himself confronted with numerous groups of aggressive and confident workers in the same field who ask, not what was the fact-many of them seem to be comparatively little interested in that-but their constant question is, what is the ultimate explanation of history, or, more modestly, what are the forces which determine human events and according to what laws do they act. This is nothing else than a new flaming up of interest in the philosophy, or the science of history. No matter what disguise may be worn in a given case, no matter what the name may be by which a given group elects to call itself, no matter how small, in the immensity of influences which make the whole, may be the force in which it would find the final explanation of history, the emphatic assertion which they all make is that history is the orderly progression of mankind to a definite end and that we may know and state the laws which control the actions of men in organized society. This is the one common characteristic of all the groups I have described and it is of each of them the one most prominent characteristic."3 Professor Adams favors testing carefully the results claimed by these allied studies and accepting their conclusions as far as they stand the acid test of historical criticism. Professor Robinson seems to misunderstand Professor Adams' position and to think that Professor Adams would reject all aid from these "new allies of history," as Professor Robinson The New History, 72-3. 3 American Historical Review, XIV, 229-30. calls them. That such is not the wish and belief of Professor Adams is shown by the following sentences from the same address: "The new interpretation of history brings us too much that is convincing, despite all the mere speculation that goes with it; the contribution to a better understanding of our problems is already too valuable; we are ourselves too clearly conscious in these later days of the tangled network of influences we are striving to unravel; of the hidden forces upon the borders of whose action we arrive in our own explorations, to justify us in ignoring or in denying the worth of those results which are reached by other ways than ours. We may perhaps find warrant for an exercise of discrimination, which does not always seem possible to them, but further than that it is not likely that we can go." In this connection attention should be called to Professor Adams' language above to the effect that the historian "has deemed it his sufficient mission to determine what the fact was, including the immediate conditions which give it shape." These words and his statement quoted below show that Professor Adams believes that history should concern itself with finding out, not only wie est eigentlich gewesen, but even wie es eigentlich geworden, not by hasty conclusions, as he fears workers in the social sciences may do, but by slow and guarded steps. This is plain from his own words, "To the true historian, the being of a fact has always included all that portion of its becoming which belongs to the definite understanding of it. What is more than that we can safely leave to others." It is not attempted here to decide, then, on a definition of history further than to assume the general position that it is the study of man in relation to his environment in the past, of his thoughts and deeds, of his development of himself and his surroundings and of the reaction of these conditions upon him. Strangely enough few people seem to have written about the benefits to be derived from the study of history and these few have contented themselves with very modest claims. The "Guide to American History," by Professors Channing, Hart and Turner, comments very briefly on the educational value The New History, 82. Am. Hist. Rev., XIV, 230. of history in general." "History is an intellectual discipline which has many peculiar advantages. Like literature, it deals with humanity, with character, with intellectual progress. Like the sciences, it is based on a body of facts, some of which must be kept in mind through the training of the memory. Like economics, it abounds in generalizations drawn from a multitude of data, and it develops the judgment. Like philosophy, history attempts to study the workings of the human mind, and, from the experiences of the past to derive some light for the future. Few subjects studied in school or college bring so clearly to the mind the process of arriving at the truth out of a mass of apparently chaotic material." Professor Robinson has said, "But the one thing that it (history) ought to do, and has not yet effectively done, is to help us to understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind." He does not mean by this sentence "that conditions remain sufficiently uniform to give precedents a perpetual value" or that it is safe "to apply past experience (directly) to the solution of current problems" but rather that history is really the memory of the race and supplies to the personal memory the experience of man in the past, to supplement the personal experience. In his own words: "We are almost entirely dependent upon our memory of past thoughts and experiences for an understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves at any given moment." He takes as one example the slow realization of one's whereabouts as memory resumes its activity when one has just been awakened from a sound sleep, "The momentary suspension of memory's functions as one recovers from a fainting fit or emerges from the effects of an anaesthetic is sometimes so distressing as to amount to a sort of intellectual agony. In its normal state, the mind selects automatically, from the almost infinite mass of memories, just those things in our past which make us feel at home in the present. It works so easily and efficiently that we are unconscious of what it is doing for us and of how dependent we are upon it. It supplies so promptly and so precisely what we need from the past in order to make the present intelligible that we are beguiled into the mistaken Guide to the Study and Reading of American History, 5. notion that the present is self-explanatory and quite able to take care of itself, and that the past is largely dead and irrelevant, except when we have to make a conscious effort to recall some elusive fact." Along with necessary parts of our own past experience memory supplies us with the necessary parts of what we have been told or of what we have read of the past of the race, that is, of history. "So it comes about that our personal recollections insensibly merge into history in the ordinary sense of the word. History, from this point of view, may be regarded as an artificial extension and broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations. Could we suddenly be endowed with a Godlike and exhaustive knowledge of the whole history of mankind, far more complete than the combined knowledge of all the histories ever written, we should gain forthwith a Godlike appreciation of the World in which we live, and a Godlike insight into the evils which mankind now suffers, as well as into the most promising methods for alleviating them, not because the past would furnish precedents of conduct, but because our conduct would be based upon a perfect comprehension of existing conditions founded upon a perfect knowledge of the past. As yet we are not in a position to interrogate the past with a view to gaining light on great social, political, economic, religious and educational questions in the manner in which we settle the personal problems which face us-for example, whether we should make such and such a visit or investment, or read such and such a book,-by unconsciously judging the situation in the light of our recollections. Historians have not as yet set themselves to furnish us with what lies behind our great contemporaneous task of human betterment."7 Many students of history would agree with Professor Robinson that historians have not as yet worked at all satisfactorily the background of present society and progress but would claim that history has undertaken the task. Perhaps "the supreme value of history" is to supply the "technique of progress" for advancing social betterment, or to serve as The New History, 17-34, here and there. |