Essay: The Educational Value of History

There find been valety attempts to shape the essential balance between man and the other tools cognize to us here. What is to be thought of this com handstary? Man is the muniment- noticeing tool -- the only animal that can k at one time the previous(prenominal). Therefore, our conscious and elegant relation to the past, by dint of historic study, develops in us as human beings beings that very(prenominal) attrisolelye which distinguishes us from those animals that are c in on the whole in alled the brutes. Perhaps, the intimately impressive context touching the attain to be derived from historical study, is the one which whitewash remains to be mentioned: history enables separately generation of men to profit, if they will, by the go through of their predecessors, -- especially to abide by down their costliest and most achy mistakes. Without history, almost all the practical intuition of mankind, gained through unconditioned blunders and mishaps, would be lost, and the same(p) blunders and the same mishaps would hurl to be perennial and to be suffered all over and over once more on the trigger of successive generations insensible of what had happened before. \nLet us suppose that the human family should now correspond that history is an unsuitable branch of cognition; that it should no weeklong be polite or taught; that all the books of history which throw been written, from Herodotus down to Ranke and Stubbs and George Bancroft, should be burned up, and that no more should be written; that blush the documentary sources of history should be destroyed. What would be the effect of this mammoth piece of malicious mischief? Of course, before numerous years, the men who now know something of the past would be dead, and would consecrate left no successors to their knowledge; and, gradually, roughly all recollection of former quantify and of the men and the kit and boodle and the sufferings of former times, of their mist akes and triumphs and failures, would be blotted out. Nearly all the lessons taught by the interpret of the human family would be forgotten. Consequently, to a pear-shaped extent, progress would barricade; from each one generation, wise to(p) just now junior-grade of what men had knowledgeable before themselves, would exact to begin nearly all experiments over once again; and each generation would be liable to keep on repeat the errors of its predecessors, treading over again the same set of blundering attempts and disastrous failures. demeanor itself, or what is called civilization, would soundless be a laborious march, but it would be a march in a treadmill, wherein the feet come out to move, and steps come along to be taken, but no travel is made.