THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN ACADEMIES AND COLLEGES.

BY PROFESSOR LUCY M. SALMON, VASSAR COLLEGE.

Copyright, 1890, by George A. Bacon.

The old Greek legend representing the muse of history as of divine lineage, and the eldest of her sisters, rested on a philosophic as well as a poetic basis. With dim perceptions of the nature of a future life, men early sought it in the record of their earthly deeds, hoping thus to win immortality in spite of death.

History thus ministered to the individual, and in the dim twilight of the race sang the wrath of Peleus’s son and the fortunes of the exiled men of Troy. As the importance of the individual became merged in that of the nation, it was the jealousies of rival States and foreign conquests that employed her pen. Nations, like individuals, were of special interest to themselves, and their achievements in war and politics were recorded by admiring and servile chroniclers. Men saw in history only an attempt to rescue from oblivion national and individual deeds worthy of emulation or demanding universal condemnation. Until our own period, therefore, the muse of history has, with few exceptions, been an annalist looking from a lower window. Men and events have passed before her, but she has not cared whence they came or whither they went. But as modern chemistry is the outgrowth of mediæval alchemy, and astronomy of the astrology of a still more ancient day, so modern history has been developed from these chronicles of a remote past. Clio no longer seeks alone to win enduring fame for her favored heroes, but she depicts the past, that men may live more wisely in the present. As the muse of comparative history, she goes to the mountain-top and makes the whole world hers by right of eminent domain.

Several influences have contributed to bring about this change, but the most important have come through the French Revolution. Those great intellectual movements that culminated in the overthrow of absolutism in France and the creation of new political ideals throughout Western Europe gave to history a different conception of the relative position of potentates and peoples. The subject gained new dignity as it abandoned the homage previously paid to civil, military, and ecclesiastical rulers, and concerned itself more with the characteristics of nations. Voltaire anticipated Macaulay and Green by one hundred years when he wrote, “I wish to write a history, not of wars, but of society.... I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.” History has thus during the present century gained a new theme in the portrayal of those democratic tendencies of which its new purpose has been the result.

But not only did the French Revolution create a truer historical perspective within the different nations—it also widened the horizon of each. The armies of Napoleon and the allies, that swept over Europe from the Spanish peninsula to the heart of Russia, broke down the artificial barriers that had separated nation from nation. Provincialism was diminished, national interest was less self-centred, States for the first time became aware of the existence of institutions after which their own might profitably be modelled. The political, social, industrial, and educational condition of nations became of more vital interest than the hours of dining and retiring of capricious sovereigns. The study of comparative history was born of the same destructive forces that overthrew the oldest and apparently most stable institutions of Europe.

While history has thus been indebted to political revolutions for new themes, it has also been indebted to changing intellectual standards for new methods of work. The early age had been one of credulity and adulation. But men came in time to see that “fables begin to be current in one generation, are established in the second, become respectable in the third, while in the fourth temples are raised in their honor.” Scepticism and speculative thought followed in turn, and these have been superseded by a demand for the study of facts, not for their own sake, but to determine the laws that govern them. Science and scientific methods have become controlling intellectual forces, and history, like every other subject, has come under this influence. As a result of this awakening, Voltaire in France, Niebuhr in Germany, and Arnold in England, gave the impulse to that form of historical writing which has made history pre-eminent in the world of letters in our own century. It has not been forgotten that there were immortal names in Greece and Rome, and that the eighteenth century produced a Gibbon; but these are exceptions that show that the true historical spirit characterized the individual, not the age.

If history has thus been affected by the credulity of one period and the indiscriminating love of facts of another, now by speculative tendencies and again by scientific movements, is it not a chameleon unworthy of consideration among more stable subjects? The important place it has won for itself in the curricula of all our colleges and secondary schools must at this time be a sufficient answer to the question; but it is fitting to ask what are the dangers that at present beset the path of students and teachers of history.

The first danger is the failure to recognize the individuality of history. This is often due to a desire to acknowledge the indebtedness of history to science. Schools announce the employment in history of “laboratory methods,” publishers advertise text-books in history constructed on the laboratory plan, and a recent catalogue of a large and important university proclaims that no text-book in history is used, but that one is being prepared by the professor and advanced students in the historical laboratory of the university. Historical laboratory, indeed! Is the old word library to become obsolete and referred in the next edition of Webster to the heading laboratory? Must our study-table give place to a more scientific article of furniture yet to be produced in some other historico-scientific workshop? The true student and teacher of history is ever foremost to confess his obligation to scientific methods, but he will never recognize in history a subdivision of physics or biology, or look forward to an historical Newton who will reduce the events of the past to mathematical formulæ or physical laws.

A second phase of the same danger assumes the form of a desire to make history the vehicle for our philosophical conceptions of the past, present, and future. This desire to know and to teach the philosophy of history is a reaction against that spirit which saw in the events of the past only an enumeration of facts, a skeleton without flesh and blood. This reaction has been inevitable, and in a sense is not to be regretted; but it has brought its own attending dangers. A class of teachers, by no means small in numbers or restricted in influence, whose knowledge of history and of philosophy is based on Hegel’s Philosophy of History, supplemented by a course of lectures at the Concord School, is to-day instructing history classes in our high-schools that the ultimate aim of the world is the mind’s consciousness of its rational freedom. For the type of mind that has first grasped the idea that it is not all of history to teach Barnes’s text-books memoriter from cover to cover, the transition is easy to the Hegelian conception that in Greece the mind was introspective; among the Romans the mind was resolved into generality, which makes mind itself universal; while in Christianity the mind first withdraws into pure introspection in communion with the universal; then follows the reconciliation, which is the introspective mind transforming the world. (Diesterweg’s summary.) A disciple of this school, whose sublime indifference to the fact that the Norman Conquest came in the eleventh rather than in the first or the nineteenth century, had been the despair of his instructor, when asked what material he would select for a class in history in the grammar grades, replied promptly, “I would teach them the philosophy of history.” It is this spirit that teaches in our academies and high-schools the philosophical, psychological and physiological aspects of the French Revolution, that discusses history, as has been said of Mr. Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, “in the past potential subjunctive,” and all this without any sound, accurate knowledge of the facts on which the conclusions of others have been based.

A third danger comes in the adaptation of the fatalistic “whatever is, is right,” into the fashionable “whatever is European, is right.” This, again, is but the expression of a reaction against a too fervid patriotism which would have nothing of the effete monarchies of the Old World; but special evils follow in its train. The college that employs laboratory methods and teaches the philosophy of history to freshmen glories in “original investigation” and the German seminary. He is of all men most deceived who dreams that the German Seminarium can be built upon anything but a German university basis. Doubtless the word seminary is often used with us to characterize a form of instruction affording special freedom of intercourse between professor and student, and in this sense its use is not objectionable, but the typical German seminary in an American college is an anomaly.

A fourth danger comes from another adaptation of the old saying into “whatever is new, is right.” This, again, is a reaction against certain misconceptions of the subject-matter of history. Since Mr. Green wrote his Short History of the English People, in protest against the previous exclusive consideration of military and political affairs, it has become the fashion to decry every history that does not treat of “the people.” The protest has been well made; but there is danger that the teacher who welcomes emancipation from the drudgery that compelled the memorization of all the campaigns of the Revolutionary War will forget that

There is a temptation to overlook the fact that we are conscious of our political constitution, as of our physical body, only when it is out of order, and that the study of preventive politics, like preventive medicine, has a proper place. The fault of all early writers and teachers of history was not in the consideration, but in the exclusive consideration of military and political affairs. He errs in like degree who teaches that these phases of a nation’s life can be ignored. He is wise who sees them in their proper relation to other phenomena of society.

These four dangers, the loss of the individuality of history in, first, the scientific tendencies, and, second, the philosophical aspirations of the times, the attempted transplanting of foreign methods to American soil, and the recent ignoring of certain vital portions of history, all grow out of the proneness in the human mind to seize half of a truth and remain content with it. We have learned in medicine, but, alas! not yet in pedagogy, the fallacy of the argument that if a little of a thing is good, more must be better. Each of these methods of teaching history is half right, but wholly wrong. A scientific method in its study we must have; but to treat history as an exact science is to degrade it from its own exalted position, since all imitation is demeaning. The relation of cause and effect every beginner in history must be able to see; but to introduce Hegel, Schlegel, or Lotze into the class-room of the average academy or college is to caricature both history and philosophy. The German seminary is good—in Germany; and the adaptation of many of its methods may be good for us, in so far as it teaches us to subordinate rhetoric to fact and to consult original documents. The history of peoples we must have, but of peoples concerned in war and politics as well as in literature and industries.

If we are to avoid these and similar dangers, we must clearly understand, first, the general principles that should control all teaching of history, and, second, the line of demarcation between history as taught in the secondary school, in the normal school, and in the college and university.

History, wherever taught, should ever keep in mind, as regards the choice of subject-matter, the practical end. Perhaps we come late in life to realize that history, like virtue, is its own reward, as we learn to appreciate Mr. Lowell’s definition of a university as a place where nothing useful can be learned. But the practical end must come first and lead up to it. This end must be the creation of an intelligent understanding of American history, American institutions, American ideals. This does not imply that we are to teach American history exclusively—far from it; but our national history is to be at once the beginning and the climax of all historical study. The necessity for this is the greater since we have but recently come to recognize the importance of historical study. Not until the Civil War had made possible a true national life did we dare to bid defiance to sectional and local jealousies and study our own past. On the other hand, the study of European institutions was neglected, for the Monroe Doctrine took root educationally as well as politically. When the centennial anniversary of our independence lessened our prejudices and removed somewhat our insular character, a new interest came in the study of European history and politics. We have thus come to realize that both American and European history must be taught, in view of the large number of foreigners annually coming to our shores, the early age at which many American boys and girls leave school, and the grave political problems yet unsettled and demanding the serious attention of every mature mind. Bishop Potter, in his recent Phi Beta Kappa address on “The Scholar and the State,” has shown the necessity of keeping ever present, even in the higher paths of learning, the plain truths that history teaches, if we are not to be wrecked on the shoals where other nations have gone down. From strange localities the encouragement comes to begin and to continue this work. On Rivington Street, in the slums of New York, in a district from which comes one-tenth of the criminals of New York City, a college settlement has been established, and in connection with it a free library. The librarian reports that the first demand of every boy is for a life of George Washington, and that when the biographies have been exhausted, the second choice is for a history that has “something about George Washington.” If a recent magazine article on “Why an Irish boy should make a good American citizen” could teach, not only our friends from the Emerald Isle, but immigrants from other nations as well, their duties as citizens of the Republic, and if Bishop Potter’s address could be placed in the hands of every native American, the teaching of history would receive greater encouragement than has yet been vouchsafed to it.

If the practical end should be our objective point, three general principles should lead us to it.

The first step in beginning any historical work is to give a bird’s-eye view of the whole subject. What Bunker Hill Monument is to Boston, the Brooklyn Bridge to New York, and the Eiffel Tower to Paris, that the general outline is in all historical study. One school of writers has often of late urged the theory that historical study should begin with local history, that the town and county should come first, the nation last. But this is much like attempting to draw a map of the United States by locating New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Key West, and then drawing the coast-lines. It is the historical Cuvier, not the novice, who can take an isolated portion of local history and reconstruct from it an historical whole.

A second general principle is that in history, as well as in pure and applied science, the student must become familiar with the terminology employed. The words state, constitution, law, pure democracy, representative government must be as clearly understood as straight line and angle, base and salt. In this way much local history and many political principles can be, indeed must be, taught by way of illustration. “Taxation without representation” is a glittering generality; but it has meaning when the principles of taxation are understood, and when it is evident why we never pay a direct tax without complaining, and why some persons can look with equanimity upon the payment—by others—of an indirect tax of 20 per cent. on foreign books.

A third general aim should be to train the student to do independent work. This can be done by putting into the hands of the students, even of high-school boys and girls, a certain amount of original material. The amount as well as the kind must vary with the nature of the school and the time given to the subject; but to pupils of even the lowest grade the Constitution of the United States must be something more than “what is in the back part of the book;” the Declaration of Independence must teach him why the colonies revolted, and his Iliad must show him the condition of society in the Homeric age. The best working outfit for every grade is a text-book containing a brief outline of facts, supplemented by original documents, selected with reference to the needs of special classes. Publishers are ever ready to meet such demands, and have already given us the Old South Leaflets, The National Library, English History from Contemporaneous Writers, and Documents Illustrating American History, while the instructor can find compensation for one of his trials in the large number of old English chronicles made available in the Bohn edition. Some persons indeed have cried out in alarm against the free use of original documents, even in our colleges, as an introduction of “university methods.” Such criticism, however, is due to a failure to understand what is meant by university methods, and to a lack of discrimination between independent work, which should be done everywhere, and original work, which properly belongs to the university.

These general principles we believe should govern all historical teaching; but there are certain specific principles that must be applied to the teaching of history in special grades. We may lay down the general proposition that in the secondary schools the distinctive aim should be the accumulation of historical knowledge, in the normal school the classification of such knowledge, in the college independent investigation, and in the university original investigation. This expresses, however, only the leading characteristic in each form of instruction, since in every grade must be found to a certain extent the distinguishing features of every other grade.

It has been said that in the secondary schools the distinctive aim should be the accumulation of historical knowledge. A German university professor was once asked the first step in historical study. His brief reply was “Lesen.” “And the second?” “Viel lesen.” “And the third?” “Sehr viel lesen.” The principle applies to work in the secondary schools. But here the instructor must be like the skilful engineer who constructs a tunnel by beginning at opposite sides of the mountain, knowing that the two ends of the tunnel will ultimately meet without the variation of a hair’s breadth. At one end of the historical tunnel must be the reading, the much reading, the very much reading; at the other end, careful, systematic, dry—if you please—tedious drill. There must be the much reading, or the student early forms the pernicious habit of generalizing from one particular. There must be careful guidance to furnish a receptacle for this knowledge, or it is like water poured upon the ground. There must be general information, or the student becomes narrow; but general information alone is a jelly-fish, brilliant in coloring, but formless and without use. In the secondary schools everything is grist that comes to the historical mill, but it is here also that the student must learn that “there is no northwest passage to the intellectual world.”

The special province of the normal school is to emphasize the classification of historical knowledge. To the average normal-school student a fact is a fact. His knowledge is a Chinese painting, an historical crazy-quilt. He never sees that in history, as well as in mathematics, 2+2=4. He has often much general information, especially concerning his own country, but it is an information and a zeal for information that leads him to ask “How many Presidents have died in office?” “Who was President for a single day?” “Who fired the first gun in the Civil War?” “Who was the youngest soldier in the Revolution?” and to affirm, in the same breath, “the reconciliation of the contradiction between its inner aim and life with its actual being is the process of the history of a nation. The collision between the ideal of a nation and the actual produces the process of history.” The normal-school student must first of all be taught historical perspective, and, second, that there is no historical multiplication-table or system of mechanical memorizing either of details or of general principles that can be applied to the solution of historical problems.

If the secondary school is to encourage the accumulation of historical knowledge, and the normal school the classification of historical facts, it is the college and the university that is to be the investigator of historical subjects. It is said that every lawyer owes a debt of gratitude to his profession. So the obligation rests upon every special teacher and student of history to contribute something to the sum of historical knowledge. This contribution cannot be made during a college course, but the college student must be an investigator for himself, the tools must be put into his hands, and he must learn their use. Like the high-school boy, he must be an omnivorous reader, but he must also be a critical reader. Hume and Freeman are to be to him not merely names of historians, but of historians representing different schools of thought. Macaulay’s every school-boy knows that taxation without representation was the cause of the Revolution, but the college student must know, if the school-boy does not, why but one of the twenty-seven complaints in the Declaration of Independence refers to the subject of taxation. The college student must know that Magna Charta is the corner-stone of English liberty, not because Bishop Stubbs and all the historians say so, but because he has himself studied that great instrument and the subsequent development of constitutional liberty. The college student must learn the condition of the Church before the Reformation, not from Fisher, Hausser, and Alzog, but from Chaucer, Dante, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus. He must know that history is not a simple substance, but a compound. He must be able to see that into it enter, as component parts, politics, economics, statistics, finance, sociology, jurisprudence, archæology, philanthropy, comparative philology—every subject that concerns itself with the life of the individual or the nation. He must be familiar not only with the process of analysis, but also with that of composition.

What results are we justified in thinking should follow our best efforts in secondary school and college?

In the first place, history can do more than any other subject except science to break down the barrier that too often rises between the instructor’s desk and the class-room seats. No subject except science lends itself so readily to co-operative methods of work. Professor and student, teacher and pupil are alike seekers after truth, and the library door swings outward for all. If, as has been said, aristocratic politics broke down with the French Revolution, and aristocratic economics are fast disappearing in the light of the economic discussions of the day, so aristocratic pedagogics must yield to that spirit which makes students of both instructor and instructed.

Again, history is pre-eminently adapted to teach the fact that knowledge is singular in fact as well as in form. To the ordinary mind Greek is Greek, geology is geology, and history is history. Cæsar’s “first impressions” of Britain, and Cicero’s arraignment of Verres, which must have exhausted all the editions of the Roman Herald and Evening Post, are to the average school-boy not history, politics, and literature, but Latin. The average college student turns for his history, not to his Cæsar, but to Mommsen’s chapter on the “Subjugation of the West,” which in its narrative portion is but a paraphrase of the Commentaries. Nothing is more difficult to overcome than this belief that each branch of knowledge is isolated. History, more than any other subject except literature, must show how every study in the school or college curriculum dovetails into every other study, making from seemingly isolated parts a compact whole. History must show that, while it itself works by scientific methods, science works by the historical method; that mathematics and music are first cousins; that art and philosophy are related; and that the study of Sanscrit roots has made “the whole world akin.”

These are but suggestions of what history can and should do. History does not wish to supersede any or all other subjects in the academic or the college curriculum. It asks only a fair place and reasonable treatment.

1890.