This question of the practical value of history rises not out of a theory but out of existing social and educational conditions. In a practical age where “doing things” receives such generous applause, and “ends” are held in high estimation; when “results,” and very frequently material “results,” are the norms of success, and “efficiency” widens its meaning beyond the physical world,—then history, as well as other subjects is called into question to render an account of itself before the judgment bar of the present. Life looms up great beyond all the parts of the school system. The eighth grade has its graduation into life as well as the high school and college. The grades feel their responsibility to the great majority of their pupils who go directly into life. In the East the high schools are breaking from the “preparatory status” to the college, and are looking to the good they can do for their pupils who get no more schooling. Trade schools are growing up within and beside the high schools, as the professional schools grew up within and beside the colleges. The college itself is in question by labor union committees and inaugural addresses. The university is becoming professional; even Arts and Letters in preparing teachers and general practitioners of arts and letters. The industrial movement has now the economic interpretation of history. The “Market Reports”[5] of the university have brought the “ticker” within the college walls. Students and parents are asking more and more insistently, “What is the use?” and “What is the practical value?”
The question is not new; the questioners are not new; the things questioned are new. In olden days when schools existed primarily for the Latin professions, the question was answered: these things prepare for law, medicine, and the ministry. Schools now prepare for other professions and also for the trades; but the question is not yet answered without condition, amendment or dissent. In those old days the members of the Latin professions were the bearers of the highest culture; but now with our ideas of democracy and opportunity, and the general diffusion of knowledge, these members are but a small fraction of the bearers of the highest culture. The school system has grown from the school of the professions into the school of the people; but do the schools prepare for the people as the older schools prepared for the professions? A healthy, growing institution—like Webster’s mariner—must constantly take its bearings relative to life to know how far the elements of fads, specialization, and scholarly isolation are driving it from its true course.
Practical relates to action, use, practice; it refers to ends or means to ends; it is opposed to theoretical, speculation or ideal. But there is nothing in the word to debar its use in mental as well as physical fields. It may be used as the German uses übung in his university courses. Value is the quality that makes something suitable for ends or purposes. It permits the wildest limit of “art for art’s sake”; and equally permits one part of the “art” to be suitable to the ends and purposes of another part or of another “art.” Practical value, then, is the quality that renders a thing useful or desirable in meeting ends. It does not by any means alone imply “for revenue only.”
Has history a practical value? It depends on the ends. The narrowest specialist as well as the broadest humanitarian will both agree upon the usefulness and desirability of history to meet their respective ends, but they disagree upon what the ends are. The specialist is interested in history for its own sake; to him the element of history is the fact; the tradition of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries has forced him to select his facts in the fields of politics, war and diplomacy; the method he uses is rather a one-sided use of the natural-scientific method. He is interested in the facts for their own sake: he is often too little interested in their value, importance and inter-relations. He has performed a great service in the nineteenth century in correcting old facts and in finding new ones. But now he has such mountains of facts that he is overawed by their mass, and long practice in his method prevents him from using them. So a great Harvard professor is reported as saying, “Keep on piling up facts, their weight will squeeze out some kind of order.” In his attempt to be scientific the specialist has used only one side of the scientist’s method; he has forgotten that the scientist works not only with matter, but with the activities and relations of matter. He loves to brush the mold off the dry bones of the past. Perhaps he even has a dream of articulating a few of the bones into a cross section of the skeleton of the political past. This is a rightful part of the work in the university and graduate school, unfortunately often the all-dominating part. I have spoken at length of this work for the reason that in this state there is required of all high school teachers a year of graduate work in some university of the American Association. The specialist’s method received there is all too often taken, without adaptation into the high school and occasionally even into the grades. So “art for art’s sake” is perpetuated. The boy is prepared for carrying on research when he expects to carry on business, and the girl is drilled in turning out monographs when she expects to turn out biscuits. Here is where the parents, and others, raise the question, what is the use? The answer and the reform must come from the top downwards.
On the other hand the humanitarian is often so broad that his work contains but little of history; it is so thin and transparent that it may justly be called culturine. His pupils learn answers, but not the steps to the answers; or they learn the fashion phrase of the “example,” but not the steps of solution. At every point in their journey through the past they are dependent on their Bædecker. Here again is where the question is raised, what is the use?
It is not necessary to make a choice of either of these for the history work in the schools. Where the fact-hunter ends his work the historian may begin his. More important than either fact or generalization is the method of getting at each so that the pupil may become self-active. If he learns these methods he can use the facts in finding other facts, in explaining and interpreting other facts, or in understanding other departments of life. He can use facts inductively and through a process of analysis and classification reach generalization; or like Kepler, Newton and Faraday he can work on the facts deductively. He can follow lines of interest, threads of activity; he can view them from one view point or from different view points. On the other hand he can learn and use the method of working a fact after the Seignobosian “rules of the game.” So even within the narrower and professional field there is the practical value.
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.
The life of each succeeding present must dictate its own norms of efficiency: whether citizenship or patriotism, character or individuality, socialization or socialism, etc. The practical value of history is like the practical value of all other subjects—it must adapt itself to life needs, and by its leadership make itself indispensable to life and society. Also it must be of practical value to the individual for his pleasure, his use, and his business; by its adaptability to these ends it makes itself indispensable to him. It has this practical value for the pupils in the grades, high school, and college, in contributing something for themselves and for their parts in life.
An Idaho cow-puncher last summer defined life as “just one d—— thing after another.” It has also been pointed out that this is the best definition of history, as all too often taught and written. The “cow-puncher” forms a small class, and is rapidly disappearing; history will soon be forced to adapt itself to another class and to a life otherwise defined. In doing so it is hoped that it will not be by this chance and unconscious adaptation, but that it will consciously and deliberately adapt itself to the new class and its life.
I believe history has a practical value in life, and a place in the school system; and also that it can prove this value so efficiently that its critics will not wish to relegate history to the position of Greek and Latin.