How to Study History, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson January 2, 1875

How to Study History
by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
New England Journal of Education: Vol. 1, Number 1, Boston, Massachusetts, January 2, 1875

It has always seemed to me very creditable to the brains of children that they habitually rebel against the study of History, as presented to them. Why should any boy or girl sincerely wish to know in which Olympiad the victory of Corcebus took place, or whether Ottoman was or was not the son of Ortogrul. When the witty Madame du Chatelet owned to Voltaire her profound indifference as to this last point, he did not reprove her, but rather praised her. He told her that she was quite right in her indifference, but that if History could only be taught as it should be –with the really unimportant names and dates left out, and those only retained which really throw light on manners or great events, History would then become for her the most interesting of all studies. Then, when Voltaire himself wrote History, he carried out his own theories, and laid the foundation of the modern school.

There still remain among us many institutions where historic teaching means only a list of names, or a complex chart, or “River of Time.” A graduate of a Boston grammar school once told me that she was required in her school days to put on paper every date that occurred in the portion of ‘Worcester’s History’ studied by the class. On a large sheet she made five columns of these dates; she then learned them by heart so thoroughly that she could repeat them backwards, and at the age to twenty-two she had forgotten every one.

Warned by experience, when she herself became a teacher, she adopted a wholly different plan. Taking the successive periods, she gave her pupils in each case a few outlines and a few dates from the manual. Then she gave a few questions, of which they were to learn the answers for themselves in such books as they could find in the school library or elsewhere. They were to bring to her all the light they could obtain; she was to add whatever she had. From time to time, wider examinations summed up the whole. This method often led to prolonged study of particular points. Thus, the Reformation occupied one paragraph in the manual they used; but to that one paragraph her class devoted six lessons. The pupils eagerly discussed every point of the reformation –talking it over, Protestants and Catholics together, with perfect freedom- and at the end of the time they passed a written examination that amazed her.

Nor did the benefit end here. Her pupils found their love of books rapidly develop, when the charm of a special investigation was offered to them; and one young girl told her, several years later, that her whole intellectual activity dated from this course of lessons; and that whereas she had before been content with an exclusive diet of Mrs. Southworth, she had ever since demanded better food.

I am aware that I am suggesting nothing new to the teachers of experience. I am aware also of the obstacles to any course that demands original research on the part of pupils. But, after all, it is only this flavor of original research, on however small a scale, that makes History take any real root in the mind; and a single period or event, explored in this way, fixes the very facts more vividly in the mind than if they had been learned by the heart from a neat little compendium table, all conveniently arranged beforehand by somebody else.

Of course History can no more be learned without names and dates than a body can exist without a skeleton. But the driest anatomist does not seriously maintain that the skeleton is the body, and that flesh and blood have no business to exist. Yet the anatomical teacher of History does believe this, and grows indignant when you ask that his department should consist of anything but bones. For myself, I believe in the bones –in their place. No pupils should be permitted to take merely the picturesque and romantic part of any period, without a perfectly connected framework of dates for its vertebral skeleton. But a very few dates will answer for this, and the fewer they are the more likely they will be to remain in the mind. It is better to learn only twenty of these, and to carry them through life, then to be able to repeat five columns backwards, when you are sixteen, and to have forgotten them all when you are twenty-two.

If the principle applies to young people at school, it applies still more to those who, having left school, are reading by themselves or with a teacher. There is no young person, I believe, who could advantageously read through Gibbon’s Rome, consequently, or even Bancroft’s United States. But let the student take some very simple outline of the facts and proceed to throw light on it for himself and it will soon prove interesting. How dry is Worcester’s brief narrative of the settlement of Massachusetts for instance! But read it with the journals of the colonists ans given in Young’s ‘Chronicles of the Pilgrims,’ and ‘Chronicles of Massachusetts’ –and throw upon these the sidelights obtained through poetry and fiction, through Whittier’s ‘Margaret Smith’s Journal,’ Mrs. Child’s ‘Hobomok,’ Longfellow’s ‘Miles Standish,’ Hawthrone’s ‘Scarlet Letter,’ and Motley’s ‘Merry Mount.’ When you have ended, the whole period has become a picture in your mind; and the most thoughtful and serious discussion of it, by Bancroft or Palfrey, finds you with a prepared and intelligent mind, if you have the time to give it. And if period after period could be followed up in the same spirit, history would become for you a study of absorbing interest, and in exhaustible in its themes.

It may be said that some of these books are “light reading.” They are light reading in the very best sense if they throw light on what else would be dark. I don’t believe in the theory that only what is disagreeable is healthy; but hold that labor itself is most useful when it is applied with a will, and not against one’s will. There is no danger of any one’s acquiring any great range of historic knowledge without corresponding toil; but it is possible so to lay the foundations of knowledge that later toil shall be a delight, and the habit of study its own exceeding great reward.