Various

“ All that the sensible teacher, who knows what he is about, expects to accomplish by the critical study of the sources is to open the eyes of his students to the meaning of proof in history, to create an attitude of healthy scepticism and to put into their hands an instrument for getting at the truth that they will have occasion to use every hour in the day. ”

“ For ponder the magnitude of the task before us, as we return from our vacation in this very modern world of ours to our very modern pupils. How shall we be true interpreters of the life of an early day, so remote, so utterly removed, so unreal, unless we can by some magic touch invest it all with reality? It is a solemn thing, fellow workmen in this noble field of English history, to think how many thousands of us shall endeavor, during the next few weeks, to impart some knowledge, some realizing sense of prehistoric man’s dwelling in the so different Albion which was the mother of England ”

“ At first glance it is evident that the subject matter of history lends itself most admirably to the type lesson method of development. The average grade teacher is frankly dissatisfied with his results in history. In spite of his best efforts to string historical facts along the chain of cause and effect, in spite of his most carefully prepared topical outlines, the teacher of history in the grades is too often obliged at the end of his year’s work to acknowledge that his efforts to make the facts of history a real part of the child’s mental content have been largely futile. ”

“ This great development of civilization among the peoples we are to study, of course implies long preparatory ages of slow and bitter struggle upward from savagery. These stages may be hinted at enough to make the pupils reflect that there has been such a weary fight in unrecorded days. And now our story begins in the middle and not at the beginning of things. In our year’s work we are to take up the study of some eight or ten of the great peoples who have helped make our modern world what it is. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Alive to the Student’s Need
For stirring, gripping work in American history look to Professor Mace. He comes to the task with every sense alert for the student’s help, and with every means in hand to give the truest and most intelligent conception of history. The impression he makes is unforgettable.
In
Mace’s Primary History Stories of Heroism
the author takes our great men in every line of life by periods—men who fought for the good against the bad; he shows them living, throbbing with power, doing. He cuts them into the child’s memory. ”

“ Can we make the most and get the best from the newer methods of teaching? Can we teach students to handle books and to think as well as remember? Can we give them the historical idea and the historical point of view? Can we stimulate them to read and arouse their imagination? ”

“ What are the signs by which we recognize it as truth? There is the knowledge that ought to be the principal result of their studies. The young people ought to leave the high school having learned well what the principal methods are by which human knowledge is formed and to what objects, for what results, each method is applied. They ought, on leaving school, to be trained to do nothing without method, without a method chosen with discernment, according to the object to be known or the end to be attained. ”

“ They have no desire to follow out a course of study whose purpose is a technical preparation, nor is such a course well adapted for them. The demand which their presence in the college makes is for what we may call a general preparation for life, some knowledge of facts, some training of judgment and taste, sympathy with a variety of intellectual interests, such broadening and liberalizing of mind as is possible. To the instructor who teaches in the eager atmosphere of an active university such a demand may seem illegitimate, because it seems vague and weak. ”

“ It is not easy to specify a line of professional work to which the study of history stands in a technical relation, except that of the history teacher, whose numbers are at present so small, in proportion to the college as a whole, as to be almost negligible, and who perhaps needs above all others that point of view in regard to history which a general rather than a special training will give. Law and theology come the nearest perhaps to having a technical need of historical study, and yet it is also true of them that what they need of history is not technical but general preparation. ”

“ One lesson at least the teacher should devote to the shore line, the water courses, the gaps and mountain passes, the portages and the wood roads, else the story of the exploration of the continent must ever remain to the students a blind story of purposeless wanderings in a trackless wilderness. ”

“ If it is worth while to acquaint the student with the methods of the natural sciences—and I believe that it is—it is certainly imperatively important to give him some training in the use of proof touching the truth of things that he is constantly concerned with, namely, the facts of social life. This position seems so self-evident to me that I can hardly conceive it possible that a teacher, who accepts the new theory of education and realizes the meaning of historical method, would take any exceptions to it. ”

“ History concerns itself with the unique evolution of man in his activities as a social being. It deals with human potentialities in their teleological connections. Out of past social facts it selects the unique facts that have a value for the period that is being studied and groups these facts in complex, evolving wholes. History does not seek for what is common to the social facts of the past; it does not attempt to generalize, to establish laws. It could not if it would, for it deals with facts that have occurred but once, that will not occur again, and a generalization assumes repetition. ”

“ In order to fulfil its proper function in education a book should reach both teachers and students and be the basis for discussion in the class room. A well-trained and efficient teacher is always anxious that the members of the class shall have every opportunity for reading and study outside of the text-book. We would, therefore, urge on all teachers of English history the great desirability of introducing into general class use this new and exceedingly valuable collection of source readings. ”

“ I sometimes think when I grow weary of the interminable discussion of the history curriculum that there is no need of our trying to establish anything like uniformity, and that the safest and easiest way is to tell every program-maker to go his own way and every teacher to do what he likes ”

“ The question is, then, can a teacher who knows what historical proof means successfully conduct exercises in historical method in a high school? I think there can be no doubt of it. It is being done.
To conduct the work successfully a source book, differing in some respects from the majority of source books, is needed. There are two kinds of historical facts: one class can be established by a single source, the other—and this is the more difficult, but at the same time the more valuable as training—can be proved to be true only by the agreement of independent sources or witnesses. ”

“ There is a wide-spread complaint that, with all the time given to history, much more time than was commonly given ten years ago, pupils leave the high schools with indefinite knowledge—I had almost said with indefinite ignorance—of the subject. College teachers are perplexed and discouraged by the frailty and inaccuracy of the students’ attainments when the students first appear in their classes; perhaps there is like cause for discouragement when they disappear from their classes. The cold fact is that our boys and girls too often do not have distinct, decided, accurate information ”

“ There is then much that is attractive in the period if we follow it with this second thought in mind. Although these men were living embodiments of ideas which may be “alien to our comprehension,” their very ardor and enthusiasm become contagious, once the teacher catches a little of the spirit which animated them. Around some of these great personalities, too, can be woven much of the life of the times. A Charlemagne not only becomes the embodiment of the imperial idea, but behind him looms the shadowy outlines of the imperial system ”

“ 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. ”

“ A magazine devoted to the interests and the problems of the history teacher ought to be of service. We all have so much to learn, our tasks are so perplexing and trying, that we can profit much by the experience of others and gain something by discussion and exchange of opinions. This is true even if we admit that all can not follow the same route and use the same methods, and that, in history teaching, success depends in a peculiar degree on character, aptitude, and native skill. ”

“ The natural science method consists of a direct study of the facts, and, as it is not concerned with the unique as unique, it may create situations and conditions, thus securing abundant data for generalization. For the historian this is impossible. He studies not the fact, as the natural scientist studies plants, animals and chemicals in the laboratory; he has only the record of the fact, the fact itself having gone never to return. His knowledge of the fact will depend upon the abundance and value of the records the fact has left behind it. Such records we call sources. ”

“ You will permanently undermine confidence if you make a false start here. So it appears to me that all the period before the Romans came should be clothed in a haze of mystery, a few looming facts in the gloom, but nothing too clear cut or definite. So, too, throughout the course, let us be frank in acknowledging the many uncertainties which beset us, so setting an invaluable example of sincerity, and unconsciously inducing a spirit of honesty in the attitude of our pupils toward history. ”

“ To the east and southeast are the Slavs and the remains of the eastern half of the Roman empire, which having played its part in history, remains merely as the storehouse of the intellectual, literary and artistic treasures of the remote past ”

“ In studying the history of the English and Dutch settlements the way will again be a way through a trackless wilderness unless the teacher is bold enough to make a judicious selection among the many details which must appear in every text-book, neglecting all the others and insisting that his students obtain a clear comprehension of the two or three leading motives which are ever present in the colonizing efforts of both these nations. ”

“ In every study and exercise, the aim of the master ought to be to develop in the minds of his pupils the sense and the taste for truth, to cause them to note how in each subject the truth is found or missed, to put them, finally, in possession of a certain method or discipline appropriate to a certain object. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now the interesting thing is that in this country, where the mass of the teachers would probably reject the theory and where supreme emphasis is being laid on the acquisition of information as the goal of educational effort, the teachers of natural science are doing the very thing the theory demands, namely, teaching methods or processes by which one can get at the truth or test what is supposed to be the truth in natural science, and giving along with the knowledge of these processes but a modicum of information. ”

“ The teacher will waste time if he attempts to teach the mere facts of American history without attempting to relate them one to another. American history in the secondary school should be a study of the relations of American history to the history of the rest of the world, and of the steady development of American political, social, and economic institutions. ”

“ The clergyman or lawyer may need a more permanent hold upon the facts of history than does the business man. They are to him more an end in themselves rather than chiefly a means for producing a result, as in the case of the other. But preacher and business man alike need to study the same facts in the same way each for his own purpose. ”

“ Sources, then, are the remains of man’s social activities. They fall naturally into two groups: remains and tradition. Remains consist of objects that were parts of the past event, and have survived the destructive action of time; tradition embraces the impressions of the event recorded by witnesses, and may be oral, written or pictorial in form. The historical reconstruction, found in the narrative text, is based, in a large majority of cases, upon written tradition.
What is the method employed by the historian in restoring the past from a study of the sources? ”