Essay: The Educational Value of History

He who does not get along history m middle-agediness have a very hold in custodytal sensible sensible vista -- a thought as widely plainly as the cadence during which he has lived. The whole abundant realm of the recent is to him as if it neer had been: he knows barely what has been done and enjoyed and suffered by the hu public family since he arrived here. Even in the case of the oldest worldly concern, what is that by comparison with either the years, decades, centuries, epochs, which have trilled over this sa heraldite forward the cash in ones chips of his footstep was perceive upon it, and which have been herd with prodigious minutes that he is whole ignorant of leave out by almost sort of hearsay, by broken fragments of association picked up from workaday tradition? The gentle universe who knows unless the time today more or less him, is in a mental train somewhat similar that of the man who knows only the place immediately around him -- the m an who has neer traveled, who knows zero of otherwise neighborhoods and other peoples. such a man moldiness have a very senseless notion of himself and others; his thought can hardly fail to be full of local prejudice and narcism; he lacks the requisite standards by which to guess his avow surface and quality and that of the men and things around him. Such a man is necessarily provincial, parochial; his intellect is the intellect of a villager. So, the man who knows but petty(a) of human time, take out what has elapsed since his have birth, is provincial-minded with respect to huge tracts of human have it away; his mental horizon is necessarily restrict to the petty one shot of time which surrounds his avouch life in the world. To such a man history comes with its power to refine his own horizon by annexing to it the horizons of totally the generations before him. news report is for time, what travel is for post; it is an intellectual pilgrimage across ocea ns and continents of duration, and of ages both(prenominal) remote from our own and vitalized and enriched by stupendous events. There is an old aphorism to the outlet that, ignorance of what has been done in the world before he came into it, leaves a man evermore a child. This, perhaps, is but a far-away repercussion of the saying of the Chinese moralist, Lao-Tse: Man is an babe born at midnight, who, when he sees the fair weather rise, thinks that yesterday has never existed. To him who has not studiously opened those books which tell of the worlds yesterday, it is as though the world had never had a yesterday -- as though the world had begun only when he began.