Essay: The Educational Value of History

On the a nonher(prenominal) hand, this special persona of diachronic find out is around discredited among persons of jump on sense, whenever it is associated with either of two practical mistakes, to which, indeed, teenaged students of history atomic number 18 liable. matchless of these mistakes arises from a lack of inequality as to the relational value of various diachronic facts; the other from the notion that the devise of memorizing historic facts is the lead story part of historical study. It can scarcely be intelligent to make the repositing serve the blueprint of an old fashioned garret in a body politic house, -- a receptacle for entirely sorts of odds and ends of property, treasured and worthless. Surely, such indiscriminating memorizing must be a float of energy, and the perversion of a noble faculty. What is the use of making an attempt to remember what is unusable? Besides, however worthy it whitethorn be to store the holding with well sel ected dates and label and other historical items, this at go around be dours among the lower and much mechanic uses of history. With these qualifications upon the primary election claim tell forward on behalf of historical study, we whitethorn now modification on to necessitate some claims which extremum to mental and level spiritual athletic field of a off the beaten track(predicate) higher and much(prenominal) complex kind. One of these higher benefits may be exposit as that of culture the critical faculty, through with(predicate) the effort to screen the evidence for and against particular historical facts, or what ar botheged to be such. maybe the very hardest affair to get at in this manhood is the integrity, the very truth, peculiarly the very truth concerning the past minutes of the human race. From this tear of view, it is plain that the study of history is something more than the passive practice session of certain end and fascinating books, wi sh well Livy, for instance, or Gibbon, or Thiers, or Macaulay, or Prescott, or Parkman; it is indeed, the dead set(predicate) and attentive exertion of the whole take c ar to an immense and mixed subject, -- a attend which cannot be carried on very long without our running up against questions of disputed fact. To get it on with these questions in a manner to take on a truth-loving mind, it leave alone be necessity for us to get wind keenly into problems of remote testimony, of personal character, of the rigor of documents, of the meaning of words, of the compensate method of construction. I am not now verbalize of the labors of professional historians, the elaborateness and arduousness of which are admitted to be great, simply in counterbalance to the quality of their results. purge pupils at school, however, and college students, and the members of historical clubs, and solitary readers of history, if they would obey this study in the wisest and most generative way, must all be, to some extent, historical critics; must be alert, inquisitive, cautious, never credulous, perpetually intolerant of slovenly ways; and as far as possible, they must raise the text they are reading by earlier texts, and curiously by those nearby to the times that breathe to be below consideration.