IV

But what are the specific ideals and standards for which our nation

stands and which distinguish, in a very broad but yet explicit manner,

our conduct from the conduct of other peoples? If we were to ask this

question of an older country, we could more easily obtain an answer, for

in the older countries the national ideals have, in many cases, reached

an advanced point of self-consciousness. The educational machinery of

the German empire, for example, turns upon this problem of impressing

the national ideals. It is one aim of the official courses of study, for

instance, that history shall be so taught that the pupils will gain an

overweening reverence for the reigning house of Hohenzollern. Nor is

that newer ideal of national unity which had its seed sown in the

Franco-Prussian War in any danger of neglect by the watchful eye of the

government. Not only must the teacher impress it upon every occasion,

but every attempt is also made to bring it daily fresh to the minds of

the people through great monuments and memorials. Scarcely a hamlet is

so small that it does not possess its Bismarck _Denkmal_, often situated

upon some commanding hill, telling to each generation, in the sublime

poetry of form, the greatness of the man who made German unity a reality

instead of a dream.

But in our country, we do not thus consciously formulate and express our

national ideals. We recognize them rather with averted face as the

adolescent boy recognizes any virtue that he may possess, as if

half-ashamed of his weakness. We have monuments to our heroes, it is

true, but they are often inaccessible, and as often they fail to convey

in any adequate manner, the greatness of the lessons which the lives of

these heroes represent. Where Germany has a hundred or more impressive

memorials to the genius of Bismarck, we have but one adequate memorial

to the genius of Washington, while for Lincoln, who represents the

typical American standards of life and conduct more faithfully than any

other one character in our history, we have no memorial that is at all

adequate,--and we should have a thousand. Some day our people will awake

to the possibilities that inhere in these palpable expressions of the

impalpable things for which our country stands. We shall come to

recognize the vast educative importance of perpetuating, in every

possible way, the deep truths that have been established at the cost of

so much blood and treasure.

To embody our national ideals in the personages of the great figures of

history who did so much to establish them is the most elementary method

of insuring their conservation and transmission. We are beginning to

appreciate the value of this method in our introductory courses of

history in the intermediate and lower grammar grades. The historical

study outlined for these grades in most of our state and city school

programs includes mainly biographical materials. As long as the purpose

of this study is kept steadily in view by the teacher, its value may be

very richly realized. The danger lies in an obscure conception of the

purpose. We are always too prone to teach history didactically, and to

teach biographical history didactically is to miss the mark entirely.

The aim here is not primarily instruction, but inspiration; not merely

learning, but also appreciation. To tell the story of Lincoln's life in

such a way that its true value will be realized requires first upon the

part of the teacher a sincere appreciation of the great lesson of

Lincoln's life. Lincoln typifies the most significant and representative

of American ideals. His career stands for and illustrates the greatest

of our national principles,--the principle of equality,--not the

equality of birth, not the equality of social station, but the equality

of opportunity. That a child of the lowliest birth, reared under

conditions apparently the most unfavorable for rich development, limited

by the sternest poverty, by lack of formal education, by lack of family

pride and traditions, by lack of an environment of culture, by the hard

necessity of earning his own livelihood almost from earliest

childhood,--that such a man should attain to the highest station in the

land and the proudest eminence in its history, and should have acquired

from the apparently unfavorable environment of his early life the very

qualities that made him so efficient in that station and so permanent in

that eminence,--this is a miracle that only America could produce. It is

this conception that the teacher must have, and this he must, in some

measure, impress upon his pupils.

V

In the teaching of history in the elementary school, the biographical

treatment is followed in the later grammar grades by a systematic study

of the main events of American history. Here the method is different,

but the purpose is the same. This purpose is, I take it, to show how our

ideals and standards have developed, through what struggles and

conflicts they have become firmly established; and the aim must be to

have our pupils relive, as vividly as possible, the pain and the

struggles and the striving and the triumph, to the end that they may

appreciate, however feebly, the heritage that is theirs.

Here again it is not the facts as such that are important, but the

emotional appreciation of the facts, and to this end, the coloring must

be rich, the pictures vivid, the contrasts sharply drawn. The successful

teacher of history has the gift of making real the past. His pupils

struggle with Columbus against a frightened, ignorant, mutinous crew;

they toil with the Pilgrim fathers to conquer the wilderness; they

follow the bloody trail of the Deerfield victims through the forest to

Canada; they too resist the encroachments of the Mother Country upon

their rights as English citizens; they suffer through the long winter at

Valley Forge and join with Washington in his midnight vigils; they

rejoice at Yorktown; they dream with Jefferson and plead with Webster;

their hearts are fired with the news of Sumter; they clinch their teeth

at Bull Run; they gather hope at Donelson, but they shudder at Shiloh;

they struggle through the Wilderness with Grant; tired but triumphant,

they march home from Appomattox; and through it all, in virtue of the

limitless capacities of vicarious experience, they have shared the

agonies of Lincoln.

Professor Mace, in his essay on _Method in History_, tells us that there

are two distinct phases to every historical event. These are the event

itself and the human feeling that brought it forth. It has seemed to me

that there are three phases,--the event itself, the feeling that brought

it forth, and the feeling to which it gave birth; for no event is

historically important unless it has transformed in some way the ideals

and standards of the people,--unless it has shifted, in some way, their

point of view, and made them act differently from the way in which they

would have acted had the event never occurred. One leading purpose in

the teaching of history is to show how ideals have been transformed, how

we have come to have standards different from those that were once held.

Many of our national ideals have their roots deep down in English

history. Not long ago I heard a seventh-grade class discussing the Magna

Charta. It was a class in American history, and yet the events that the

pupils had been studying occurred three centuries before the discovery

of America. They had become familiar with the long list of abuses that

led to the granting of the charter. They could tell very glibly what

this great document did for the English people. They traced in detail

the subsequent events that led to the establishment of the House of

Commons. All this was American history just as truly as if the events

described had occurred on American soil. They were gaining an

appreciation of one of the most fundamental of our national ideals,--the

ideal of popular government. And not only that, but they were studying

popular government in its simplest form, uncomplicated by the

innumerable details and the elaborate organizations which characterize

popular government to-day.

And when these pupils come to the time when this ideal of

self-government was transplanted to American soil, they will be ready to

trace with intelligence the changes that it took on. They will

appreciate the marked influence which geographical conditions exert in

shaping national standards of action. How richly American history

reveals and illustrates this influence we are only just now beginning to

appreciate. The French and the English colonists developed different

types of national character partly because they were placed under

different geographical conditions. The St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes

gave the French an easy means of access into the vast interior of the

continent, and provided innumerable temptations to exploitation rather

than a few incentives to development. Where the French influence was

dispersed over a wide territory, the English influence was concentrated.

As a consequence, the English energy went to the development of

resources that were none too abundant, and to the establishment of

permanent institutions that would conserve these resources. The barrier

of the Appalachians hemmed them in,--three hundred miles of alternate

ridge and valley kept them from the West until they were numerically

able to settle rather than to exploit this country. Not a little credit

for the ultimate English domination of the continent must be given to

these geographical conditions.

But geography does not tell the whole story. The French colonists

differed from the English colonists from the outset in standards of

conduct. They had brought with them the principle of paternalism, and,

in time of trouble, they looked to France for support. The English

colonists brought with them the principle of self-reliance and, in time

of trouble, they looked only to themselves. And so the old English

ideals had a new birth and a broader field of application on American

soil. There is nothing finer in our country's history than the attitude

of the New England colonists during the intercolonial wars. Their

northern frontier covering two hundred miles of unprotected territory

was constantly open to the incursions of the French from Canada and

their Indian allies, to appease whom the French organized their raids.

And yet, so deeply implanted was this ideal of self-reliance that New

England scarcely thought of asking aid of the mother country and would

have protested to the last against the permanent establishment of a

military garrison within her limits. For a period extending over fifty

years, New England protected her own borders. She felt the terrors of

savage warfare in its most sanguinary forms. And yet, uncomplaining, she

taxed herself to repel the invaders. The people loved their own

independence too much to part with it, even for the sake of peace,

prosperity, and security. At a later date, unknown to the mother

country, they raised and equipped from their own young men and at their

own expense, the punitive expedition that, in the face of seemingly

certain defeat, captured the French fortress at Louisburg, and gave to

English military annals one of its most brilliant victories. To get the

pupil to live through these struggles, to feel the impetus of idealism

upon conduct, to appreciate what that almost forgotten half-century of

conflict meant to the development of our national character, would be to

realize the greatest value that colonial history can have for its

students. It lays bare the source of that strength which made New

England preëminent in the Revolution, and which has placed the mint mark

of New England idealism upon the coin of American character. Could a

pupil who has lived vicariously through such experiences as these easily

forsake principle for policy?

A newspaper cartoon published a year or so ago, gives some notion of the

danger that we are now facing of losing that idealism upon which our

country was founded. The cartoon represents the signing of the

Declaration of Independence. The worthies are standing about the table

dressed in the knee breeches and flowing coats of the day, with wigs

conventionally powdered and that stately bearing which characterizes the

typical historical painting. John Hancock is seated at the table

prepared to make his name immortal. A figure, however, has just

appeared in the doorway. It is the cartoonist's conventional conception

of the modern Captain of Industry. His silk hat is on the back of his

head as if he had just come from his office as fast as his

forty-horse-power automobile could carry him. His portly form shows

evidences of intense excitement. He is holding his hand aloft to stay

the proceedings, while from his lips comes the stage whisper:

"Gentlemen, stop! You will hurt business!" What would those old New

England fathers think, could they know that such a conception may be

taken as representing a well-recognized tendency of the present day? And

remember, too, that those old heroes had something of a passion for

trade themselves.

But when we seek for the source of our most important national

ideal,--the ideal that we have called equality of opportunity,--we must

look to another part of the country. The typical Americanism that is

represented by Lincoln owes its origin, I believe, very largely to

geographical factors. It could have been developed only under certain

conditions and these conditions the Middle West alone provided. The

settling of the Middle West in the latter part of the eighteenth and the

early part of the nineteenth centuries was part and parcel of a rigid

logic of events. As Miss Semple so clearly points out in her work on the

geographic conditions of American history, the Atlantic seaboard sloped

toward the sea and its people held their faces eastward. They were never

cut off from easy communication with the Old World, and consequently

they were never quite freed from the Old World prejudices and standards.

But the movement across the mountains gave rise to a new condition. The

faces of the people were turned westward, and cut off from easy

communication with the Old World, they developed a new set of ideals and

standards under the stress of new conditions. Chief among these

conditions was the immensity and richness of the territory that they

were settling. The vastness of their outlook and the wealth of their

resources confirmed and extended the ideals of self-reliance that they

had brought with them from the seaboard. But on the seaboard, the Old

World notion of social classes, the prestige of family and station,

still held sway. The development of the Middle West would have been

impossible under so severe a handicap. With resources so great, every

stimulus must be given to individual achievement. Nothing must be

permitted to stand in its way. The man who could do things, the man who

could most effectively turn the forces of nature to serve the needs of

society, was the man who was selected for preferment, no matter what his

birth, no matter what the station of his family.

We might, in a similar fashion, review the various other ideals, which

have grown out of our history, but, as I have said, my purpose is not

historical but educational, and the illustrations that I have given may

suffice to make my contention clear. I have attempted to show that the

chief purpose of the study of history in the elementary school is to

establish and fortify in the pupils' minds the significant ideals and

standards of conduct which those who have gone before us have gleaned

from their experience. I have maintained that, to this end, it is not

only the facts of history that are important, but the appreciation of

these facts. I have maintained that these prejudices and ideals have a

profound influence upon conduct, and that, consequently, history is to

be looked upon as a most practical branch of study.

* * * * *

The best way in this world to be definite is to know our goal and then

strive to attain it. In the lack of definite standards based upon the

lessons of the past, our dominant national ideals shift with every

shifting wind of public sentiment and popular demand. Are we satisfied

with the individualistic and self-centered idealism that has come with

our material prosperity and which to-day shames the memory of the men

who founded our Republic? Are we negligent of the serious menace that

confronts any people when it loses its hold upon those goods of life

that are far more precious than commercial prestige and individual

aggrandizement? Are we losing our hold upon the sterner virtues which

our fathers possessed,--upon the things of the spirit that are permanent

and enduring?

A study of history cannot determine entirely the dominant ideals of

those who pursue it. But the study of history if guided in the proper

spirit and dominated by the proper aim may help. For no one who gets

into the spirit of our national history,--no one who traces the origin

and growth of these ideals and institutions that I have named,--can

escape the conviction that the elemental virtues of courage,

self-reliance, hardihood, unselfishness, self-denial, and service lie at

the basis of every forward step that this country has made, and that the

most precious part of our heritage is not the material comforts with

which we are surrounded, but the sturdy virtues which made these

comforts possible.