Ohio History Journal

History in the study and iin the schools* by HENRY R. WINKLER     Like so many college students in our time, we historians have been going through an identity crisis of our own. Who are we? Where are we going? Why do we do what we do? What is its purpose? Is it worth the trouble? Why? And so on. And so on. Most of us, to be sure, manage to avoid thinking about the rationale of our subject most of the time. Our work is interesting. We are absorbed in it. When we teach, we receive some stimulation from our students -- and gain some satisfaction from the occasional student we seem to be able to stimulate as well. When we write, we feel gratification when a job is care- fully and interestingly done and a sense of accomplishment when our fellow historians consider that our work is useful. Clearly enough, it is good and proper that this should be so. But sometimes, I suspect, all of us -- and not merely the philosophers of history -- all of us feel compelled to look more closely, to ask why it is that scholars in other disciplines or educators responsible for supervising broad programs of instruction are not as sure as we are of the overriding importance of historical study. There are answers -- and I think there are good answers -- but too many historians for too long a time have simply squirmed uneasily when confronted by the various challenges to their discipline. This is of course nothing new. For about fifty years now, professional historians in this country have felt compelled to justify themselves, a com- pulsion that could hardly have occurred, one would suppose, to the     * A speech presented at the banquet on April 7, 1967 for the joint annual meetings of the Ohio Historical Society, the Ohio Academy of History, the Ohio Association of Historical Societies, and the Ohio Covered Bridge Committee.

• 1
 

HISTORY IN STUDY AND SCHOOLS                                    167

 

patrician historians of an earlier era. From about the 1920's, when the "new

historians" began to suspect that their craft did not have the rigor of the

new social sciences, until the present, when analytical philosophers look

askance at all historical statements that cannot be reduced to the language

of science, historians have more often than not been on the defensive, have

groped for explanations of what they do in terms set by the needs of

other approaches to knowledge -- or have gone about their business with

the uneasy feeling that perhaps too many questions should not be asked,

a bit afraid of the answers they might find.

There has been, let me be quick to add, there has been since about the

1940's a genuine revival of confidence in history as history among the

professional scholars -- as I shall want to emphasize later. And it is well

that this should be so. For today the challenge is not only a theoretical or

philosophical or even methodological one. It is even more a very practical

one -- an inquiry over the place of history in the school curriculum, over

its role in the education of millions of young people, over whether it should

not give way to more contemporary studies in the fifth grade or the tenth

grade or indeed in the colleges themselves.

How did this all come about? Please do not be alarmed. I have no

intention of parading once again the oft-told tale of history writing and

history teaching in America. But we are historians and need, I would think,

to see even history in some historical perspective. There have of course

been changes in the fashion in history. From the patrician historian in the

nineteenth century to the new breed of professionals who founded the

American Historical Association in 1884 and the American Historical Review

in 1895 the change was a logical one. The new "scientific historians" them-

selves, more often than not, came from the same milieu and shared most

of the same values as the Bancrofts and Motleys whom they tended to

disparage as being essentially men of letters. The difference was that the

new college curriculum and above all the emergence of the concept of the

university, with its graduate programs heavily modelled on continental

types, began to place more and more emphasis upon professionalism -- and

perhaps, although this was to be more striking later, less and less emphasis

upon a common core of knowledge and of values to be transmitted after

the first few years of education. In a burgeoning and complex new industrial

society, I suppose, the trend was what we historians call inevitable after

it has happened.

More to the point of my present concern are the developments that began

to become clear about the time of the first World War. Already in 1912

James Harvey Robinson had published his influential volume on The New

History. Several generations of students have been taught -- rightly, to

be sure -- that the meaning of the new history was a rejection of its subject

matter as merely past politics, an embracing of the view that its practitioners

must be concerned with the broad range of human society, with "social

forces," with those areas in which it came most closely into contact with

• 2
 

168                                                   OHIO HISTORY

 

the expanding social sciences. Above all, the new historians insisted that

their discipline, if it was to have continued meaning, must be closely related

to the issues and the realities of contemporary life.

Like many innovations, this new approach was not as innovative as its

advocates honestly believed. Much of it was not only exciting, but healthy

as well. Yet increasingly it became evident -- and it is evident today --

that for more and more historians -- and for their colleagues in other fields

-- history was acceptable only insofar as its disciples approximated in their

practice the ways in which the economists, and the political scientists, and

the sociologists went about their work. "Objectively verifiable data" in the

social sciences became an open sesame to knowledge -- and some historians

at least plunged into studies whose faithful mirroring of social scientific

method was overshadowed by the triviality of the subjects which they

purported to deal with.

What had happened, as so many observers have pointed out, was that

historians had lost their own self-confidence. They saw their discipline as

valuable only when it approximated the sister social sciences. In striving

to make the past serve the purposes of the present, in reacting against

the supposed anarchy of historicism, they tended to lose sight of history

as an independent and valuable area of study, uniquely interested in the

past. Instead they saw it as part of the team searching for rules and

regularities -- and for predictive norms -- by which to mold and fashion

the future of society. If this is an exaggeration, it is only slightly so.

Ironically, it helps to explain why history was so much on the defensive

in the interwar years. If it is of use only when it emulates, for example,

the behavioral sciences, then its utility is very limited indeed -- for it does

not, of course, approximate them in a complex variety of ways. And if this

is so, in turn, why should any of us invest a lifetime of training and com-

mitment into a discipline that -- by other people's standards -- is merely

fun and games?

Fortunately, the nadir of this outlook was reached by the beginning of

the 1940's. Unlike the first World War that gave rise to an outbrust of

unrealistic optimism -- not the least about what could be done by the

flowering social sciences -- the second World War brought disillusionment

to many who were committed to the intellectual life. By that very fact,

perhaps, it also added a strong breath of realism to the historian's vision

of his tasks. More and more, professional historians insisted that their

work and their findings must be evaluated on their own terms, not on

those that reflected the needs and strategies of other disciplines.

Not that the attack on history was soft-pedalled. By the 1940's, it was

the analytical philosophers whose turn came to take up the cudgels. Carl

Hempel's The Function of General Laws in History inaugurated a dissection

of our craft which, in oversimplified terms, tried to recognize it as valid -- as

capable of discovering truth and uncovering knowledge -- only when it

could be broken down into what has been called "sequences of explanatory

narrative sentences in the wholly denotative vocabulary of the sciences."

• 3
 

HISTORY IN STUDY AND SCHOOLS                                       169

 

Like other social scientists, analytical philosophers were puzzled by the

complicated variety of history. They found it difficult to accept -- let alone

to cope with -- so long as it could not be forced into the Procrustean bed

of the rhetoric of scientific language.

But by now the manifesto that heralded the re-emancipation of history

in the United States appeared. "Postwar Reorientation of Historical Think-

ing" in the October 1948 issue of the American Historical Review was the

work of Roy F. Nichols, last year's president of the American Historical

Association. In some ways, it was as much a landmark in the history of

American history as Robinson's pronouncement of 1912. Nichols called

upon historians for a declaration of independence. "History is not art, science,

or literature," he declared, "it is sui generis. It is a division of knowledge

with its own character and methods and should be thought of in terms of

itself rather than of analogies. It is time for historians to be more positive

about their functions, their objectives, and their methods. It is time to

stop living by other people's wits, by frantically seeking to adopt other

people's jargon, by humbly seeking to be recognized as faithful and rea-

sonably satisfactory handmaids worthy of Thursday afternoons and alternate

Sundays on which to do what they really wish. Historians must become

independent and self-confident again, and thereby assume a new importance

in the intellectual world as scholars with unique functions of their own."

And almost twenty years later, J. H. Hexter without apologies was

making almost the same firm defence. In his perceptive review of two

interesting books -- Morton White's The Foundation of Historical Knowledge

and Arthur Dento's Analytical Philosophy of History -- Hexter uses the

late Garrett Mattingly's The Armada to show how awkward may be the

claim that historians -- because their findings cannot be communicated in

the language or languages scientists use, because their findings are not

susceptible to scientific "proof" -- to show how awkward may be the claim

that they therefore can add no really true knowledge of the phenomena

they deal with. History, after all, is story and all social groups at all times

have tried to find their place in time by telling and retelling, refining and

reflecting on the stories that look in one fashion or another to their past.

"Suppose" asks Hexter, "one were to reduce all the sentences involving

narrative explanation in . . . The Armada to the denotative language of

science and to present them so as to exhibit their causal connections. Then

one would have a story of the Armada that would contain as many true

statements and causal ascriptions as The Armada contains. Would anyone

seriously claim that the dreary result was the best true historical story about

the Armada? Would he even dare claim that from such an account he

knew and understood as much about that story as he could learn from

Mattingly's book, that he had been confronted with as much of the truth

about it? And if he did so claim, would not any sensible man suggest that

he had better rethink his notions of knowing, understanding and truth?"

For, he sums up, "The truth about the past which a historian is committed

to tell when he sets out to tell a historical story cannot be adequately

• 4
 

170                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

communicated within the confines of narrative explanatory sentences and

the language of science." Unlike either analytical philosophers or various

kinds of social scientists historians in their own unique way do succeed

"in communicating increments of knowledge, understanding, and truth

with their sometimes imprecise, connotative, evocative, non-scientific rhet-

oric." And it is healthy that they are no longer half-ashamed to say so.

That being the case, what has been going on during the past several

decades? Certainly the declaration of intellectual independence that Roy

Nichols called for appears to have precipitated a much more fruitful collabo-

ration with the social sciences. For some time, as John Higham argued in

the October issue of the American Historical Review ("The Schism in

American Scholarship"), history was consigned to the limbo of the "human-

ities" by the social sciences and reciprocated by accepting the label with

pride. Professor Higham quite rightly deplores the division of the studies

dealing with man into humanities and social sciences, a division much

sharper than in most advanced countries of the world. He goes a great

deal farther than many of us, in fact, in rather deploring the emergence

of the National Endowment for the Humanities. To some degree, he sees

the separation of official bodies into organizations for the support of the

sciences -- whether natural or behavioral -- and the humanities -- whether

literary or social -- as divisive for scholarship and for education. But the

very fact that an outstanding historian can deplore such a separation with

such vigor stems from the revival of self-confidence among American his-

torians in general. Once the historian feels able to believe in his own unique

discipline as the psychologist or the economist or the physicist feels able

to believe in his, then the way is open for a genuine and meaningful coopera-

tion among the disciplines.

Thus, to look briefly at some of the interesting developments in recent

years, the great explosion of area studies -- Africa, South and East Asia,

Latin America, even American studies (though here the emphasis has

seemed to me at least to be too heavily literary and too insufficiently economic

or sociological or political or even historical) -- the development of area

studies is one rather striking example of a collaboration in which, usually at

least, the historian has made his contribution with purpose and with real

results. I am not a Japan specialist, but I was a Japanese language officer

during my own war years and I have to some degree retained an interest

in Japan and its history. In addition, as an editor, I see a good deal of

what is going on in Japan studies. It strikes me that much of the best

that is being done to illuminate Japanese history and culture is being done

on a cross-disciplinary basis -- in such a study, for example, as the University

of Michigan's analysis in depth of Okayama Prefecture -- where political

scientists, sociologists, economists, historians, others, all have contributed

in ways that reflected their particular skills and interests. And the point is

that the historians' contributions have been effective ones because they

have acted like historians and not played another role.

• 5
 

HISTORY IN STUDY AND SCHOOLS                                    171

 

Equally important, it seems to me, has been the growth of such a subject

for investigation as the history of science. In the last two decades especially,

this relatively new field has emerged from the shadows in which were told

interesting anecdotes about scientific pioneers to the bright lights where its

practitioners have been concerned -- and most instructive -- about the

whole range of scientific development as part of -- and in terms of -- its

impact upon Western thought. Books like John Greene's The Death of Adam:

Evolution in Its Impact on Western Thought or Charles Gillispie's Genesis

and Geology or H. Stuart Hughes' Consciousness and Society are only ex-

amples -- I could give many more -- are examples of the kind of exciting

contributions to knowledge that can be made by historians who are deeply

rooted in their own craft and reach out sensitively to use the insights, and

sometimes even the techniques of their sister disciplines -- in ways very

much like those in which the sister disciplines can use historical insights,

and sometimes even techniques, to gain richer understanding of their own

problems. Increasingly, I think, the collaboration of history and the social

sciences seems on the level of scholarship to be becoming a two-way street.

That collaboration has taken a number of forms. As an example, let

me use for one moment the case of psychological explanations of historical

figures or historical developments. Recently I heard Professor William

Willcox give a fascinating description of how he spent several years of

steady discussion with a clinical psychiatrist in order to try to understand

the huge gap between promise and performance in the career of General

Sir Henry Clinton, the man who, perhaps more than any other single

individual, may have lost the American war for the British. Willcox himself,

sophisticated and knowledgeable though he was in the vocabulary of

psychology, felt the need for professional help in dissecting out the traits

of character and personality that might explain Clinton's seemingly inex-

plicable behavior. And because he found a colleague who was willing to

share a fruitful exchange of hypotheses, hunches, and more formal analytical

information, in my judgment we have one of the most interesting -- and

one of the most important -- examples of historical reconstruction written

in recent years.

Increasingly, in their attempt to explain men's actions in psychological

terms or to understand what is irrational in those actions, historians have

taken up the challenge thrown out by William L. Langer in his presidential

address to the American Historical Association in December 1957. I am not

an American historian and I speak with some diffidence about American

history, but I seem to recall that when such a pioneer work as W. J. Cash's

The Mind of the South was published in 1941, it was not immediately seized

upon as a revolutionary new approach nor used as a model to follow in

understanding the character of the South. But in recent years, historians

like Woodward and Sellers and Donald and Elkins -- to cite only a few

of them -- have followed up on the brilliant beginnings of the earlier study.

In each case what we have is the work of a first-rate historian, deeply com-

• 6
 

172                                                OHIO HISTORY

 

mitted to his own craft, but willing to learn from and to use the particular

kinds of perceptions that can come only from the professional contributions

of contemporary psychology. And, as I have said, the advantages work both

ways. There has recently been, to my mind, no more stimulating and ques-

tioning piece of historical writing than Erik Erickson's Young Man Luther,

the investigation of a psychologist who respects and makes use of the his-

torian's particular knowledge and know-how. In this area, as in so many

others, the contemporary emancipation of history, at least for the present,

is increasingly becoming a fact.

But now that professional historians have asserted their independence

in their writing, history itself is being increasingly called into question as

a subject to be taught. For about ten or twelve years -- indeed until a

couple of years ago when I took over the editorship of the Review and dis-

covered that there was a limited number of hours in the day -- for about

ten or twelve years, I was intimately involved in what was going on in the

schools. I helped develop the Advanced Placement Program in European

History, worked closely with many able high school teachers in the John

Hay Fellows Program, even -- and perhaps most instructively for me --

served for some years on a local Board of Education. During all that time,

I was struck by two related facts. One was that in many of the schools in

this country -- in many of the best schools in this country -- all of our own

assumptions about the value of the study of history are not at all shared.

And secondly, I was -- and continue to be -- appalled at how little my pro-

fessional colleagues know about what goes on in the schools, how much

they indulge in sloppy and unexamined assertions about the schools that

they find shocking when applied to the practice of their craft. Still, I am

a prejudiced witness, so let me turn to Professor Charles Sellers, certainly

one of our distinguished professional historians. Professor Sellers recently

served on an Organization of American Historians' committee to make recom-

mendations about what the organized historical profession could usefully

do to assist in improving the teaching of history in the schools. His descrip-

tion of the attitudes with which he approached his task is instructive and

worth quoting: "One misconception, widely shared by historians, had to do

with a group of people who presumably inhabited this terrain and whom I

was in the habit of referring to as educationists. They were, I had been

assuming, not very bright; they knew nothing about any subject matter

areas; they had an abnormal hunger for power and influence; and they

thought they knew all about how teachers ought to teach without knowing

anything about what was to be taught. I had also been assuming that these

educationists were organized in some mysterious but potent way for the

purpose of preventing any intellectual content from getting into the school

curriculum, and for the purpose of denigrating, out of envy and fear probably,

intellectuals like me and other historians in the colleges and universities."

Needless to say, Sellers found the terrain very different from what he

thought it to be. Like historians, professional educators were divided into

the able and the mediocre, into the imaginative and the time-servers, into

• 7
 

HISTORY IN STUDY AND SCHOOLS                                    173

 

those who respected knowledge and those who really did not. He was encour-

aged by what he called "the modest but growing interaction between edu-

cators and historians," by the recognition that "scholarly expertise and

experience must converge with classroom expertise and experience." Un-

fortunately he found -- and my own much longer experience confirms --

that it is more often the educators who understand this, that we historians

have not yet caught up with what is happening, let alone realize the oppor-

tunities that should be grasped.

Clearly, the challenge to history in the schools is a long-standing one. I

am not here concerned with the teachers of history -- like coaches -- whose

primary responsibility is to do something else. Nor am I for the moment

concerned with the teachers whose training in history as a discrete subject

is a couple of survey courses in some fashion mixed up with a few other

survey courses in other subjects, all of them set into a framework of emphasis

upon techniques of pedagogy rather than the meaning of the subjects. More

and more that caricature is disappearing. Teachers are, I think, becoming

better trained -- on paper at least -- in their so-called "content courses"

and the process is likely to continue. What I am concerned with, however,

is underlying philosophy or, if that is too grand a word, with the underlying

assumptions about the teaching of history in the schools.

For years, of course, history has lived with the likelihood that it will

give place in the schools to a synthetic subject called social studies. The

social studies movement started as a healthy reflection of the conviction that

all of the experience of man in society might better be seen as a whole rather

than be compartmentalized into traditional packages. It was also an indica-

tion that the so-called "newer" social sciences needed to be taken into account

in the education of young people. At the primary and elementary levels, this

movement toward the integration of materials from the various subject

areas was unquestionably a liberating and an effective one. Even here,

however, I notice that many curriculum planners -- Educational Services,

Incorporated, for example -- and teachers are once again thinking in terms

of what the peculiar qualities of separate specialties can contribute to a

child's education. My wife, to use a very personal illustration, teaches

second grade in a small independent school. She has, in theory at least,

some opportunity to experiment. She has discovered that a systematic use

of certain anthropological materials with her seven-year olds challenges

them in a way that other units of study did not. And she is convinced that

any primary teacher who is worth her salt will, in the future, have to learn

a great deal more about anthropology -- even if it is at the expense of

those courses that are supposed to promote classroom expertise. But in

general there can be little argument with the view that formal social science

subjects make much less sense at, say, the primary level than a well-developed

and fully-integrated program of social studies.

It is at the high school level, however, that the real challenge to history

has taken place. When I was in high school more than thirty years ago

I did ancient and medieval history, modern European and American history.

• 8
 

174                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

Probably much of it was conventional and routine, and we didn't even

dream that it might be important to have some exposure to any of the

modern non-Western cultures and societies. Yet it was a coherent program

in the sense that it was based on a belief that any civilized person had to

have some way of placing himself in time, had to have a few benchmarks to

enable him to place his own experience in perspective. The attack upon the

curricular stranglehold of history may, nevertheless, have been a fruitful

and a proper one. If the innovations of the past three decades had been

mainly aimed at bringing the approaches of economics and sociology, political

science and psychology more fully into the schools, along with the historian's

view of man's past, there would have been little ground upon which historians

could reasonably object, except insofar as their vested interests were

threatened. Instead, the reform movement, like its scholarly parallel in the

nineteen twenties, insisted on throwing out the baby with the bath. Since

man lived in the present, it often assumed, only the study of the present

could have much usefulness. Accordingly, history might be used to furnish

interesting examples of social behavior, or economic policies, or political

organization, but its role, quite obviously, must be subordinated to the

active and alive contemporary disciplines. Not history and the social sciences,

each contributing in ways best suited to its particular characteristics to

the unfolding of a young person's knowledge. But rather some amalgam

called social studies, in which any sense of a meaningful past was discouraged

because it was more "progressive" to look ahead -- not back. Of course

this is a caricature, but not by much. Just a month ago I received an article

-- not for publication but for myself to read -- from Edgar Wesley, one

of the grand old men of the social studies movement for whom I have great

respect despite our obvious differences. And Wesley, who wrote the American

Historical Association's study of history in the schools and colleges in 1944,

quite unabashedly insisted that history was really not a primary discipline

for teaching at all, that it had no single focus as did certain other subjects

of study. It was, in his words, a "resource discipline," to be drawn upon to

illustrate the more systematic insights available in the contemporary

behavioral and societal studies.

Now very few educational scholars at the frontiers of their fields any

longer accept the view that there is such a discipline as "social studies."

This is largely left to educational hacks who find it hard to move beyond

the conventional wisdom of a past generation. Instead, some very interesting

thinking is going on about the character of these subjects and how they may

be taught. The United States Office of Education, to say nothing of various

foundations, is financing a whole series of experimental projects to devise

new strategies for teaching the social studies. We are being bombarded --

although the professional historian still doesn't seem to realize this -- with

a whole host of new, or revived, ideas about the intellectual aims and the

value patterns to be sought in teaching the social studies. Professor Jerome

Bruner of Harvard, working closely with Educational Services, Incorporated,

has taught us to place emphasis on education as training in ways of thinking

rather than as mastery of particular segments of knowledge. But in so

• 9
 

HISTORY IN STUDY AND SCHOOLS                                         175

 

doing, Professor Bruner -- like the analytical philosophers or the "new

historians" -- has shown a distressing tendency to misunderstand the nature

of history. To my mind, the result is that he neglects its role in the proper

education of any living creature who is not simply an animal living wholly

in the present. When Bruner talks of the problems of discovering the struc-

ture of history, when he finds it a bit difficult to apprehend the basic organiz-

ing principle by which this discipline is framed by scholars -- and which

can be opened up for the instruction of students -- he reveals that his

knowledge of psychology and the "hard" sciences is a good deal more impres-

sive than his knowledge of history. His models in the sciences -- like the

models of analytical philosophy for Mattingly's The Armada -- don't really

work very well for history, where there is not a nicely definable single

"structure" of the discipline, but many structures. The intellectual historian

works very differently, with different tools, and asks different questions than

the diplomatic historian. And because the very variety of history -- a

variety that may reflect the complexity of man's experience in society and

not the historian's shortage of rigorous conceptual tools -- because the very

variety of history makes historians less self-confident in making sweeping

generalizations about the condition of man, many educators are agreeing

with Bruner when he writes that young people must study "the possible

rather than the achieved .... It is the behavioral sciences and their generality

with respect to variations in the human condition that must be central to

our presentation of man, not the particularities of his own history.

And Elting Morison who is chairman of the Planning Committee, Social

Science Curriculum Program of Educational Services, Incorporated, plunges

into a recent article (in Ventures, the magazine of the Yale Graduate School)

with a revealing comment from a very intelligent mother of teen-age children.

In his words, she "protested that much of what was taught her children in

the name of history was not only irrelevant but positively harmful in that

it actually reduced the capacity of students to interpret and accommodate

to modem conditions." Let me say at once that Morison disagrees with the

extremism of the statement. But because the pace of change has become

so rapid in our time, the argument -- not necessarily made so positively by

Morison himself -- the argument seems to be that a great deal of the past

no longer has any relevance at all to man's present. It may be fun for the

scholar, but it has no justification for being taught. Professor Morison quite

generously is willing to find three things in the teaching of history. It is

the best field in which to analyze the influence of the non-logical elements

that help shape human life. It is the most likely place to look for all elements

and conditions that enter human situations -- machines, ideas, money, ter-

rain, accident, and so on, and so on. And if it cannot yield exact precedents

for either action or full understanding in the present revolutionary con-

tingency, it can still create a sense of the past.

I am not here concerned with Morison's own suggestions for the selection

of material from appropriate areas of history -- the history of revolutions,

of man in institutions, of science, of decision making. His view of the uses

of history is a very sophisticated one. It goes -- obviously in part because

• 10
 

176                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

he is a first-rate historian -- considerably beyond that of Jerome Bruner, to

be sure. And it is true that the Educational Services Incorporated curriculum.

with which both men are associated, does have considerable room for his-

tory -- witness their prized unit on colonial America -- at various stages.

But unfortunately, the lesson of Bruner and Morison has been learned

differently by many, many educational experimenters who accept their

caveats but reject the qualifications placed upon them. In much that is

appearing for use in the schools, history is being relegated to what Sellers

has called "a grab bag of instances to be used for illustrative purposes."

And if we increasingly produce high school graduates whose outlook on

history is that it is boring, rote learning (as it so often is, but that is the

subject for another talk), but that it has no relevance to their lives at all,

then in the course of time we will find that in our colleges and in our

historical societies dry rot will have set in as well. Unless our own commit-

ment to the importance of the study of the past is constantly reinforced

by a similar commitment among new recruits in a society that considers our

work significant (even if it doesn't read it), unless that process continues,

it may be that another era of defence and decline will be on its way. And

clearly it is not enough to parrot the conventional arguments for history,

whether philosophical and complex in the fashion of Marc Bloch or popular

and elegant ?? la Allan Nevins. For, when the chips are down, what we do

is much more important than what we say about what we do.

I have no easy formulas for coping with the problem. Like the historians

who figuratively declared their scholarly independence in the 1940's, so I

think the historians at present -- the people in this room, for example --

must declare their independence at the level of teaching. Only this time

the declaration of independence must reflect enough confidence in our own

craft to impel us to sit down with teachers and professional educators and

social scientists to develop materials, argue out emphases, put the case for

history in the schools on the basis of our own knowledge and our own

commitment. At present, history is on the defensive in the schools -- and

its appropriate defenders, for the most part, not only do not know what is

happening, they hardly even suspect that anything is happening. Clearly

the case must be put in forthright and honest terms that are concerned

with genuine education, not from the view that somehow history should

be manipulated to reinforce the accepted values of the manipulators. And

equally clearly that case is not being so put at the present time.

Beyond this let me make one other comment. If the study of history is

merely an antiquarian interest or idiosyncratic enthusiasm -- whether for

counting arrowheads or sorting out ancestors (and both have their place

in man's need to know his past) -- then surely we could be better occupied

in numerous ways. Activities that are no more than pleasant hobbies to

while away idle hours are hardly activities that we can seriously commend

to the schools for the training of young minds. If this is all that history

means to us -- and I know historians for whom that definition is substantially

their view of their work -- then there is little reason to deplore its possible

• 11
 

HISTORY IN STUDY AND SCHOOLS                                       177

 

disappearance from the schools. Indeed, in such a case, probably, the less

history the better -- after all, there are many important areas of knowledge

and modes of thought competing for a student's time.

But if we can, as I think many professional historians in our time have

done, if we can demonstrate the uniqueness and the excitement of the

historical enterprise; if we can show by what we do -- whether as scholars

or editors or teachers or museum directors -- if we can show by what we

do how much history really has to offer toward the understanding of the

human condition; if we can, in other words, carry over into the classrooms

of the nation the self-confidence we have once more regained in our studies;

then the future of the past with which we are all concerned is likely to be

a rich and enduring one.

 

THE AUTHOR: Henry R. Winkler is

Managing Editor of the American Histor-

ical Review and Professor of History at

Rutgers, The State University.

• 12