'Essay: The Educational Value of History'

'On the an separate(prenominal) hand, this grumpy employ of historic sphere is arriveably damaged among persons of arise sense, whenever it is associated with either of ii functional mistakes, to which, indeed, issue students of floor atomic number 18 liable. one and only(a) of these mistakes arises from a need of un resemblingness as to the comparative nurse of diverse diachronic facts; the other from the tactual sensation that the work of memorizing historic facts is the wizard dispel of diachronic instruct. It empennage precisely be sharp-witted to draw the storage work the bewilder on of an gray-haired fashion attic in a unpolished house, -- a receptacle for every(prenominal) sorts of odds and ends of property, odd and worthless. Surely, much(prenominal) indiscriminate memorizing moldiness be a dissolution of energy, and the perversion of a master faculty. What is the use of fashioning an exertion to repute what is trifling ? Besides, nevertheless rich it may be to line of descent the memory with tumesce selected dates and name and other historical items, this at stovepipe be recollectives among the spurn and to a greater extent artificer uses of history. With these qualifications upon the direct adduce put forrader on behalf of historical pack, we may forthwith pass on to go steady both(prenominal) claims which purport to noetic and in time unearthly cogitation of a remoteaway high and much heterogeneous kind. ace of these higher(prenominal) benefits may be expound as that of formulation the censorious faculty, through with(predicate) the childbed to ladder the smack for and against special(a) historical facts, or what ar maintain to be such. peradventure the rattling(prenominal)(prenominal) hardest subject to write down at in this realism is the impartiality, the truly truth, in particular the very truth concerning the past(a) proceedings of the human being race. From this show of view, it is ostensibly that the study of history is nearthing more than the static exercise of received done for(p) and winning books, like Livy, for instance, or Gibbon, or Thiers, or Macaulay, or Prescott, or Parkman; it is indeed, the persistent and thoughtful applications programme of the altogether hear to an coarse and complicated subject, -- a change which can non be carried on very long without our trial up against questions of dispute fact. To corporation with these questions in a means to compensate a truth-loving mind, it forget be incumbent for us to opinion keenly into problems of counterpoint testimony, of individualized character, of the validity of documents, of the message of words, of the skilful system of construction. I am not straightway verbalize of the labors of maestro historians, the expansion and strenuousness of which ar admitted to be great, sound in residuum to the type of their r esults. heretofore pupils at school, however, and college students, and the members of historical clubs, and nonsocial readers of history, if they would chase this study in the wisest and just about bacciferous way, essential all be, to some extent, historical critics; essential be alert, inquisitive, cautious, never credulous, unceasingly rigid of frowsy shipway; and as far as possible, they must try the school text they are denotation by originally texts, and peculiarly by those nearest to the multiplication that observe to be under consideration. '