Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

time before it touched the general body of the public schools. In the second third of the century, Thomas Carlyle and Macaulay began to exercise their prodigious influence over the English middle classes, an influence which has perhaps done more than any other single cause to familiarise the national mind with historical images and historical ideas. Neither can be called a professed teacher of history. Macaulay declined the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge when the Prince Consort offered it to him, and Carlyle lectured, not at a University, but by way of private venture, in the Portman Rooms in London. He gave four series of historical lectures -in 1837, 38, 39, and 40. In this last year his subject was Heroes and Hero-worship, and this was the only series of the four that he ever wrote out and printed. It is with Thomas Arnold that the systematic teaching of History in our public schools begins. His headmastership at Rugby lasted from 1829 to 1842. His peculiar glory in the records of our education is that whereas, when he came to Rugby, he found on one side a society of Boys with a strange corporate life of their own with games, institutions, and laws of a spontaneous and irregular growth, and on the other side a system of instruction and religious training entirely without relation to or influence upon that corporate life, he contrived to fuse every part of the school energies into a unity with a central purpose. The self-governing commonwealth of the Boys themselves he retained and confirmed, with certain modifications, but this commonwealth was to be so truly ordered as to train its members to take afterwards an active part in the life of the larger commonwealth of Church and State; the instruction whether religious or secular was to interpenetrate and to illumine the life of this commonwealth by introducing the boys to the history of other such communities and to the great literatures ancient and modern by which the ideas of those communities, at their best, have been interpreted and expressed. In Arnold's conception, the English gentleman must not only learn to rule and to be ruled,

and to play football and to speak the truth, but he must also understand the history of his country and the history of Christendom, and the literature of Greece and Rome, which along with the sacred books of the Hebrews lies at the foundation of Christendom. The unity of education, the unity of history are his moving ideas; and we shall fall short indeed of the true estimation of Arnold's work for the study of history if we confine it to such matters as his co-ordination of geography with history, his constant use of the Blackboard in historical instruction, his comparative method of treating ancient and modern history, or even to the admirably devised cycle of historical lessons which he embodied in his school curriculum. Infinitely more important than all these important things was the clearness with which he himself apprehended and taught others to apprehend, the bearing of literature and of history upon life, and of life, in its turn, upon literature and history. He thus put upon an entirely new basis the claim of the old classical curriculum to furnish the best training for the modern Englishman. Our innermost intellectual and spiritual life, our laws, politics, religion are charged with forces which we cannot understand nor wisely deal with unless we study them in the light of the single continuous historical process by which they have come to be what they are. Arnold therefore, like Herbart, concentrates and unifies his curriculum; but he does far more, he concentrates and unifies the whole of human life; the core of his circle of studies is active Christian citizenship, and their proportionate value depends upon the degree in which they help to make that citizenship intelligent and earnest.

Arnold's influence as a teacher of History was, of course, not confined to his work at Rugby. In the last two years of his life, 1841 and 42, he held the office of Professor of Modern History at Oxford and, short as his tenure of the chair was, he roused the greatest interest and enthusiasm by his lectures, and placed the study of History in a position of importance which it had never held before. He also profoundly affected

the views of his successors and likewise of those who held the corresponding Professorship at Cambridge. Edward Freeman at Oxford and Charles Kingsley at Cambridge in very different ways continued to expound the views of Arnold. The famous saying that "History is past Politics, and Politics are present History" was one of the sides of his teaching upon which they laid most stress, and which in the last quarter of this century Seeley made the central idea of his work as Professor at Cambridge, in this slightly altered form, "Without History, Politics has no root; without Politics, History has no fruit." This was a view which, to some minds, appeared to have its dangers, and there arose in opposition to it a School which demanded that History should be regarded as a purely abstract antiquarian subject, and that the bearing of the past upon the present should-as a possible cause of prejudice and partisanship-be strictly kept out of its judicial investigations. Of this School Bishop Stubbs, who was appointed Professor at Oxford in 1867, has been the most distinguished representative in England. Under the influence of men of this way of thinking the efforts of historical students were bent specially to discover the exact and minute truth before any inferences should be made from it. Time forbids us to do more than mention the immense services performed by this school of historians and by the Public Offices which under their inspiration have, both in England and abroad, issued copies of ancient documents, charters, and records such as have revolutionised our ideas more particularly of the Middle Ages.

This split of the historians into the political school and the antiquarian school was followed by further subdivisions. Social life and customs, details of dress, household furniture and the like and all that we vaguely include under Archaeology or Anthropology, had a greater attraction for some scholars than the history of political or municipal institutions, and we have seen arise in this last third of the century a School of Archaeologists which by its excavations and researches have recon

structed before our eyes the minutest details of ancient domestic life. One might pursue this process of specialisation and subdivision into many other branches, but it is enough to say that the study of History has become a general name for several groups of highly differentiated scholars who work exclusively at special sides of the whole historical field.

The consequence of this has been one, which is, in a way, a direct contradiction of the view of Arnold. It has been thought necessary to divide History from Literature, and to make it a parallel and as it were alternative subject. A special Tripos in History was established by a Grace at Cambridge in 1873 and the first examination was held in 1875. A similar step had been taken some years before at Oxford, where, however, for some time the school of history was combined with the school of law. Henceforth, at both Universities, it became possible to graduate in History, as an alternative to Mathematics or Classics.

The general upshot of this was a curious one. We have seen that, up to the time of Arnold, History was practically not taught as a subject at our Public Schools and Universities. His influence, however, was so great, and was backed by such an overwhelming weight of social opinion that History gradually came to be studied more or less thoroughly at both one and the other. This process was, however, an exceedingly gradual one. When the Public School Commissioners published their report in 1864, it was still the case at Winchester that neither "ancient nor modern history is taught in set lessons, and ancient history does not enter as a separate subject into any of the School Examinations." "I wish," says Dr Moberly, the Head Master, to the Commissioners, " we could teach more history; but as to teaching it in set lessons, I should not know how to do it." It is worth while to compare with this remark of the good Doctor's a passage in Mr A. F. Leach's History of Winchester College, where, describing the extreme aridity and dulness of the purely classical studies, even in the Sixth Form, he says

that the one or two exceptions to this dulness live in his memory: as for instance when one day in the year 1866, Dr Moberly came into the room and told them that war had been declared between Prussia and Austria. He delighted the boys by giving them a vivid account of the relations of those two powers in the past, and of the circumstances which had brought on the war, and he wound up by hazarding the prophecy that the war would perhaps last the lifetime of some of them. As a matter of fact the war was over in six weeks. This was just two years after Dr Moberly had said that he should not know how to teach set lessons in history.

This entire absence of the set teaching of History at Winchester in 1864 may be compared with the account of the elaborate system of teaching of the subject, as now conducted there, given on pp. 220, 221 of the Report of the American Committee of Seven on the Study of History in Schools.

Similar particulars might be given with regard to other Public Schools, but the main point is that whereas in the first third of the century, history was scarcely taught at all, and that in the second third it was introduced into Rugby by Arnold, and elsewhere by his pupils and followers, as for instance by Vaughan at Harrow, in the third section of the century it practically became universal in Schools, in one form or other, and was made a Special subject at the Universities as one of the alternative avenues to a Degree in Arts.

The specialist character given by this change at the Universities to the study of History seriously threatens its position as a part of a liberal education. Arnold's view was, as we have seen, that History was essential to a comprehension alike of literature and of life, and must indispensably be taught in appropriate shapes to every class of the School.

On the other hand, the recent view tends to the specialist conception, namely that History is one of a number of options which a boy may choose between, as soon, at any rate, as he reaches the age of 15 or 20. While the classical specialist is

« ForrigeFortsæt »