The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Teaching of History, by Ernest C. Hartwell

Title: The Teaching of History

Author: Ernest C. Hartwell

Release Date: January 3, 2005 [eBook #14577]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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Riverside Educational Monographs

EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO

PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

THE TEACHING OF HISTORY

BY

ERNEST C. HARTWELL, M.A.

SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, PETOSKEY, MICH.

Houghton Mifflin Company
Boston, New York and Chicago
The Riverside Press Cambridge

1913

CONTENTS

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

This volume is offered as a guide to history teachers of the high school and the upper grammar grades. It is directly concerned with the teaching methods to be employed in the history period. The author assumes the limiting conditions that surround classroom instruction of the present day; he also takes for granted the teacher's sympathy with modern aims in history instruction. All discussions of purpose and content are therefore subordinated to a clear presentation of the details of effective teaching technique.

The reader into whose hands this volume falls will be deeply interested in the ideals of teaching implied in the concrete suggestions given in the following pages, for after all the value of any system of special methods rests, not merely on its apparent and immediate psychological effectiveness, but also on the social purposes which it is devised to serve. It must be recognized at the outset that history has a social purpose. However much university teaching may be interested in truth for its own sake, an interest necessarily basic to the service of all other ends, the teaching of the lower public schools must take into account the relevancy of historical fact to current and future problems which concern men and women engaged in the common social life. So the elementary and secondary school teachers of the more progressive sort recognize that the way in which historical truths are selected and related to one another determines two things: (1) Whether our group experiences as interpreted in history will have any intelligent effect upon men's appreciations of current social difficulties, and (2) whether history will make a more vital appeal to youth at school.

Certainly children, whose interests arise not alone from their innate impulses, but also from the world in which they have lived from the beginning, will be eager to know the past that is of dominant concern to the present. It is clear gain in the psychology of instruction if history is a socially live thing. The children will be more eager to acquire knowledge; they will hold it longer, because it is significant; and they will keep it fresh after school days are over because life will recall and review pertinent knowledge again and again. There can be no separation between the dominant social interests of community life and effective pedagogical procedure; the former in large part determines the latter.

Such educational reforms in history teaching as have already won acceptance confirm the existence of this vital relation between current social interests and the learning process. The barren learning of names and dates has long since been supplanted by a study of sequences among events. The technical details of wars and political administrations have given way to a study of wide economic and social movements in which battles and laws are merely overt results reinforcing the current of change. History, once a self-inclosed school discipline, has undergone an intellectual expansion which takes into account all the aspects of life which influence it, making geographical, economic, and biographical materials its aids. All these and many other minor changes attest the fact that a vital mode of instruction always tends to accompany that view of history which regards the study of the past as a revelation of real social life.

The author's suggestions will, therefore, be of distinct value to at least two groups of history teachers. Those who believe in the larger uses of history teaching, so much argued of late, will find here the procedures that will express the ideals and obtain the results they seek. Those who are not yet ready to accept modern doctrine, but who feel a keen discontent with the older procedure, will find in these pages many suggestions that will appeal to them as worthy of experimental use. It may be that the successful use of many methods here suggested may be the easy way for them to come into an acceptance of the larger principles of current educational reform.

THE TEACHING OF HISTORY

I

SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS

Assumptions as to the teacher of history

This monograph will make no attempt to analyze the personality of the ideal teacher. It is assumed that the teacher of history has an adequate preparation to teach his subject, that he is in good health, and that his usefulness is unimpaired by discontent with his work or cynicism about the world. It is presupposed that he understands the wisdom of correlating in his instruction the geography, social progress, and economic development of the people which his class are studying. He is aware that the pupil should experience something more than a kaleidoscopic view of isolated facts. He