16.
CHAPTER XVI
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY:
1. Extension of Meaning of Primary Activities.
—Nothing is more striking than the difference between an activity
as merely physical and the wealth of meanings which the same activity
may assume. From the outside, an astronomer gazing through a telescope
is like a small boy looking through the same tube. In each case, there
is an arrangement of glass and metal, an eye, and a little speck of
light in the distance. Yet at a critical moment, the activity of an
astronomer might be concerned with the birth of a world, and have
whatever is known about the starry heavens as its significant content.
Physically speaking, what man has effected on this globe in his progress
from savagery is a mere scratch on its surface, not perceptible at a
distance which is slight in comparison with the reaches even of the
solar system. Yet in meaning what has been accomplished measures just
the difference of civilization from savagery. Although the activities,
physically viewed, have changed somewhat, this change is slight in
comparison with the development of the meanings attaching to the
activities. There is no limit to the meaning which an action may come
to possess. It all depends upon the context of perceived connections in
which it is placed; the reach of imagination in realizing connections is
inexhaustible.
The advantage which the activity of man has in appropriating and finding
meanings makes his education something else than the manufacture of a
tool or the training of an animal. The latter increase efficiency; they
do not develop significance. The final educational importance of such
occupations in play and work as were considered in the last chapter is
that they afford the most direct instrumentalities for such extension of
meaning. Set going under adequate conditions they are magnets for
gathering and retaining an indefinitely wide scope of intellectual
considerations. They provide vital centers for the reception and
assimilation of information. When information is purveyed in chunks
simply as information to be retained for its own sake, it tends to
stratify over vital experience. Entering as a factor into an activity
pursued for its own sake—whether as a means or as a widening of
the content of the aim—it is informing. The insight directly
gained fuses with what is told. Individual experience is then capable
of taking up and holding in solution the net results of the experience
of the group to which he belongs—including the results of
sufferings and trials over long stretches of time. And such media have
no fixed saturation point where further absorption is impossible. The
more that is taken in, the greater capacity there is for further
assimilation. New receptiveness follows upon new curiosity, and new
curiosity upon information gained.
The meanings with which activities become charged, concern nature and
man. This is an obvious truism, which however gains meaning when
translated into educational equivalents. So translated, it signifies
that geography and history supply subject matter which gives background
and outlook, intellectual perspective, to what might otherwise be narrow
personal actions or mere forms of technical skill. With every increase
of ability to place our own doings in their time and space connections,
our doings gain in significant content. We realize that we are citizens
of no mean city in discovering the scene in space of which we are
denizens, and the continuous manifestation of endeavor in time of which
we are heirs and continuers. Thus our ordinary daily experiences cease
to be things of the moment and gain enduring substance.
Of course if geography and history are taught as ready-made studies
which a person studies simply because he is sent to school, it easily
happens that a large number of statements about things remote and alien
to everyday experience are learned. Activity is divided, and two
separate worlds are built up, occupying activity at divided periods. No
transmutation takes place; ordinary experience is not enlarged in
meaning by getting its connections; what is studied is not animated and
made real by entering into immediate activity. Ordinary experience is
not even left as it was, narrow but vital. Rather, it loses something
of its mobility and sensitiveness to suggestions. It is weighed down
and pushed into a corner by a load of unassimilated information. It
parts with its flexible responsiveness and alert eagerness for
additional meaning. Mere amassing of information apart from the direct
interests of life makes mind wooden; elasticity disappears.
Normally every activity engaged in for its own sake reaches out beyond
its immediate self. It does not passively wait for information to be
bestowed which will increase its meaning; it seeks it out. Curiosity is
not an accidental isolated possession; it is a necessary consequence of
the fact that an experience is a moving, changing thing, involving all
kinds of connections with other things. Curiosity is but the tendency
to make these conditions perceptible. It is the business of educators
to supply an environment so that this reaching out of an experience may
be fruitfully rewarded and kept continuously active. Within a certain
kind of environment, an activity may be checked so that the only meaning
which accrues is of its direct and tangible isolated outcome. One may
cook, or hammer, or walk, and the resulting consequences may not take
the mind any farther than the consequences of cooking, hammering, and
walking in the literal—or physical—sense. But nevertheless
the consequences of the act remain far-reaching. To walk involves a
displacement and reaction of the resisting earth, whose thrill is felt
wherever there is matter. It involves the structure of the limbs and
the nervous system; the principles of mechanics. To cook is to utilize
heat and moisture to change the chemical relations of food materials; it
has a bearing upon the assimilation of food and the growth of the body.
The utmost that the most learned men of science know in physics,
chemistry, physiology is not enough to make all these consequences and
connections perceptible. The task of education, once more, is to see to
it that such activities are performed in such ways and under such
conditions as render these conditions as perceptible as possible. To
"learn geography" is to gain in power to perceive the spatial, the
natural, connections of an ordinary act; to "learn history" is
essentially to gain in power to recognize its human connections. For
what is called geography as a formulated study is simply the body of
facts and principles which have been discovered in other men's
experience about the natural medium in which we live, and in connection
with which the particular acts of our life have an explanation. So
history as a formulated study is but the body of known facts about the
activities and sufferings of the social groups with which our own lives
are continuous, and through reference to which our own customs and
institutions are illuminated.
2. The Complementary Nature of History and Geography.
—History and geography—including in the latter, for reasons
about to be mentioned, nature study—are the information studies
par excellence of the schools. Examination of the materials and
the method of their use will make clear that the difference between
penetration of this information into living experience and its mere
piling up in isolated heaps depends upon whether these studies are
faithful to the interdependence of man and nature which affords these
studies their justification. Nowhere, however, is there greater danger
that subject matter will be accepted as appropriate educational material
simply because it has become customary to teach and learn it. The idea
of a philosophic reason for it, because of the function of the material
in a worthy transformation of experience, is looked upon as a vain
fancy, or as supplying a high-sounding phraseology in support of what is
already done. The words "history" and "geography" suggest simply the
matter which has been traditionally sanctioned in the schools. The mass
and variety of this matter discourage an attempt to see what it really
stands for, and how it can be so taught as to fulfill its mission in the
experience of pupils. But unless the idea that there is a unifying and
social direction in education is a farcical pretense, subjects that bulk
as large in the curriculum as history and geography, must represent a
general function in the development of a truly socialized and
intellectualized experience. The discovery of this function must be
employed as a criterion for trying and sifting the facts taught and the
methods used.
The function of historical and geographical subject matter has been
stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal
contacts of life by furnishing their context, their background and
outlook. While geography emphasizes the physical side and history the
social, these are only emphases in a common topic, namely, the
associated life of men. For this associated life, with its experiments,
its ways and means, its achievements and failures, does not go on in the
sky nor yet in a vacuum. It takes place on the earth. This setting of
nature does not bear to social activities the relation that the scenery
of a theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it
enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form history.
Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It furnishes original
stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources. Civilization is the
progressive mastery of its varied energies. When this interdependence
of the study of history, representing the human emphasis, with the study
of geography, representing the natural, is ignored, history sinks to a
listing of dates with an appended inventory of events, labeled
"important"; or else it becomes a literary phantasy—for in purely
literary history the natural environment is but stage scenery.
Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a counterpart
connection of natural facts with social events and their consequences.
The classic definition of geography as an account of the earth as the
home of man expresses the educational reality. But it is easier to give
this definition than it is to present specific geographical subject
matter in its vital human bearings. The residence, pursuits, successes,
and failures of men are the things that give the geographic data their
reason for inclusion in the material of instruction. But to hold the
two together requires an informed and cultivated imagination. When the
ties are broken, geography presents itself as that hodge-podge of
unrelated fragments too often found. It appears as a veritable rag-bag
of intellectual odds and ends: the height of a mountain here, the course
of a river there, the quantity of shingles produced in this town, the
tonnage of the shipping in that, the boundary of a county, the capital
of a state.
The earth as the home of man is humanizing and unified; the earth viewed
as a miscellany of facts is scattering and imaginatively inert.
Geography is a topic that originally appeals to imagination—even
to the romantic imagination. It shares in the wonder and glory that
attach to adventure, travel, and exploration. The variety of peoples
and environments, their contrast with familiar scenes, furnishes
infinite stimulation. The mind is moved from the monotony of the
customary. And while local or home geography is the natural starting
point in the reconstructive development of the natural environment, it
is an intellectual starting point for moving out into the unknown, not
an end in itself. When not treated as a basis for getting at the large
world beyond, the study of the home geography becomes as deadly as do
object lessons which simply summarize the properties of familiar
objects. The reason is the same. The imagination is not fed, but is
held down to recapitulating, cataloguing, and refining what is already
known. But when the familiar fences that mark the limits of the village
proprietors are signs that introduce an understanding of the boundaries
of great nations, even fences are lighted with meaning. Sunlight, air,
running water, inequality of earth's surface, varied industries, civil
officers and their duties—all these things are found in the local
environment. Treated as if their meaning began and ended in those
confines, they are curious facts to be laboriously learned. As
instruments for extending the limits of experience, bringing within its
scope peoples and things otherwise strange and unknown, they are
transfigured by the use to which they are put. Sunlight, wind, stream,
commerce, political relations come from afar and lead the thoughts afar.
To follow their course is to enlarge the mind not by stuffing it with
additional information, but by remaking the meaning of what was
previously a matter of course.
The same principle coordinates branches, or phases, of geographical
study which tend to become specialized and separate. Mathematical or
astronomical, physiographic, topographic, political, commercial,
geography, all make their claims. How are they to be adjusted? By an
external compromise that crowds in so much of each? No other method is
to be found unless it be constantly borne in mind that the educational
center of gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the subject.
From this center, any material becomes relevant in so far as it is
needed to help appreciate the significance of human activities and
relations. The differences of civilization in cold and tropical
regions, the special inventions, industrial and political, of peoples in
the temperate regions, cannot be understood without appeal to the earth
as a member of the solar system. Economic activities deeply influence
social intercourse and political organization on one side, and reflect
physical conditions on the other. The specializations of these topics
are for the specialists; their interaction concerns man as a being whose
experience is social.
To include nature study within geography doubtless seems forced;
verbally, it is. But in educational idea there is but one reality, and
it is pity that in practice we have two names: for the diversity of
names tends to conceal the identity of meaning. Nature and the earth
should be equivalent terms, and so should earth study and nature study.
Everybody knows that nature study has suffered in schools from
scrappiness of subject matter, due to dealing with a large number of
isolated points. The parts of a flower have been studied, for example,
apart from the flower as an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the
plant apart from the soil, air, and light in which and through which it
lives. The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which
attention is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed
imagination. The lack of interest is so great that it was seriously
proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural facts and events with
myths in order that they might attract and hold the mind. In numberless
cases, more or less silly personifications were resorted to. The method
was silly, but it expressed a real need for a human atmosphere. The
facts had been torn to pieces by being taken out of their context. They
no longer belonged to the earth; they had no abiding place anywhere. To
compensate, recourse was had to artificial and sentimental associations.
The real remedy is to make nature study a study of nature, not of
fragments made meaningless through complete removal from the situations
in which they are produced and in which they operate. When nature is
treated as a whole, like the earth in its relations, its phenomena fall
into their natural relations of sympathy and association with human
life, and artificial substitutes are not needed.
3. History and Present Social Life.
—The segregation which kills the vitality of history is divorce
from present modes and concerns of social life. The past just as past
is no longer our affair. If it were wholly gone and done with, there
would be only one reasonable attitude toward it. Let the dead bury
their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the
present. History deals with the past, but this past is the history of
the present. An intelligent study of the discovery, explorations,
colonization of America, of the pioneer movement westward, of
immigration, etc., should be a study of the United States as it is
to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it in process of
formation makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open to
comprehension. Genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific
achievement of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its principle
is that the way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the
process of its making,—to follow it through the successive stages
of its growth. To apply this method to history as if it meant only the
truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its past,
is one-sided. It means equally that past events cannot be separated
from the living present and retain meaning. The true starting point of
history is always some present situation with its problems.
This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration of its
bearing upon a number of points. The biographical method is generally
recommended as the natural mode of approach to historical study. The
lives of great men, of heroes and leaders, make concrete and vital
historic episodes otherwise abstract and incomprehensible. They
condense into vivid pictures complicated and tangled series of events
spread over so much space and time that only a highly trained mind can
follow and unravel them. There can be no doubt of the psychological
soundness of this principle. But it is misused when employed to throw
into exaggerated relief the doings of a few individuals without
reference to the social situations which they represent. When a
biography is related just as an account of the doings of a man isolated
from the conditions that aroused him and to which his activities were a
response, we do not have a study of history, for we have no study of
social life, which is an affair of individuals in association. We get
only a sugar coating which makes it easier to swallow certain fragments
of information.
Much attention has been given of late to primitive life as an
introduction to learning history. Here also there is a right and a
wrong way of conceiving its value. The seemingly ready-made character
and the complexity of present conditions, their apparently hard and fast
character, is an almost insuperable obstacle to gaining insight into
their nature. Recourse to the primitive may furnish the fundamental
elements of the present situation in immensely simplified form. It is
like unraveling a cloth so complex and so close to the eyes that its
scheme cannot be seen, until the larger coarser features of the pattern
appear. We cannot simplify the present situations by deliberate
experiment, but resort to primitive life presents us with the sort of
results we should desire from an experiment. Social relationships and
modes of organized action are reduced to their lowest terms. When this
social aim is overlooked, however, the study of primitive life becomes
simply a rehearsing of sensational and exciting features of savagery.
Primitive history suggests industrial history. For one of the chief
reasons for going to more primitive conditions to resolve the present
into more easily perceived factors is that we may realize how the
fundamental problems of procuring subsistence, shelter, and protection
have been met; and by seeing how these were solved in the earlier days
of the human race, form some conception of the long road which has had
to be traveled, and of the successive inventions by which the race has
been brought forward in culture. We do not need to go into disputes
regarding the economic interpretation of history to realize that the
industrial history of mankind gives insight into two important phases of
social life in a way which no other phase of history can possibly do.
It presents us with knowledge of the successive inventions by which
theoretical science has been applied to the control of nature in the
interests of security and prosperity of social life. It thus reveals
the successive causes of social progress. Its other service is to put
before us the things that fundamentally concern all men in
common—the occupations and values connected with getting a living.
Economic history deals with the activities, the career, and fortunes of
the common man as does no other branch of history. The one thing every
individual must do is to live; the one thing that society
must do is to secure from each individual his fair contribution
to the general well being and see to it that a just return is made to him.
Economic history is more human, more democratic, and hence more
liberalizing than political history. It deals not with the rise and
fall of principalities and powers, but with the growth of the effective
liberties, through command of nature, of the common man for whom powers
and principalities exist.
Industrial history also offers a more direct avenue of approach to the
realization of the intimate connection of man's struggles, successes,
and failures with nature than does political history—to say
nothing of the military history into which political history so easily
runs when reduced to the level of youthful comprehension. For
industrial history is essentially an account of the way in which man has
learned to utilize natural energy from the time when men mostly
exploited the muscular energies of other men to the time when, in
promise if not in actuality, the resources of nature are so under
command as to enable men to extend a common dominion over her. When the
history of work, when the conditions of using the soil, forest, mine, of
domesticating and cultivating grains and animals, of manufacture and
distribution, are left out of account, history tends to become merely
literary—a systematized romance of a mythical humanity living upon
itself instead of upon the earth.
Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education is
intellectual history. We are only just beginning to realize that the
great heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its politicians,
generals, and diplomatists, but the scientific discoverers and inventors
who have put into man's hands the instrumentalities of an expanding and
controlled experience, and the artists and poets who have celebrated his
struggles, triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic,
or written, that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to
others. One of the advantages of industrial history as a history of
man's progressive adaptation of natural forces to social uses is the
opportunity which it affords for consideration of advance in the methods
and results of knowledge. At present men are accustomed to eulogize
intelligence and reason in general terms; their fundamental importance
is urged. But pupils often come away from the conventional study of
history, and think either that the human intellect is a static quantity
which has not progressed by the invention of better methods, or else
that intelligence, save as a display of personal shrewdness, is a
negligible historic factor. Surely no better way could be devised of
instilling a genuine sense of the part which mind has to play in life
than a study of history which makes plain how the entire advance of
humanity from savagery to civilization has been dependent upon
intellectual discoveries and inventions, and the extent to which the
things which ordinarily figure most largely in historical writings have
been side issues, or even obstructions for intelligence to overcome.
Pursued in this fashion, history would most naturally become of ethical
value in teaching. Intelligent insight into present forms of associated
life is necessary for a character whose morality is more than colorless
innocence. Historical knowledge helps provide such insight. It is an
organ for analysis of the warp and woof of the present social fabric, of
making known the forces which have woven the pattern. The use of
history for cultivating a socialized intelligence constitutes its moral
significance. It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of
anecdotes to be drawn on to inculcate special moral lessons on this
virtue or that vice. But such teaching is not so much an ethical use of
history as it is an effort to create moral impressions by means of more
or less authentic material. At best, it produces a temporary emotional
glow; at worst, callous indifference to moralizing. The assistance
which may be given by history to a more intelligent sympathetic
understanding of the social situations of the present in which
individuals share is a permanent and constructive moral asset.
Summary.
—It is the nature of an experience to have implications which go
far beyond what is at first consciously noted in it. Bringing these
connections or implications to consciousness enhances the meaning of the
experience. Any experience, however trivial in its first appearance, is
capable of assuming an indefinite richness of significance by extending
its range of perceived connections. Normal communication with others is
the readiest way of effecting this development, for it links up the net
results of the experience of the group and even the race with the
immediate experience of an individual. By normal communication is meant
that in which there is a joint interest, a common interest, so that one
is eager to give and the other to take. It contrasts with telling or
stating things simply for the sake of impressing them upon another,
merely in order to test him to see how much he has retained and can
literally reproduce.
Geography and history are the two great school resources for bringing
about the enlargement of the significance of a direct personal
experience. The active occupations described in the previous chapter
reach out in space and time with respect to both nature and man. Unless
they are taught for external reasons or as mere modes of skill their
chief educational value is that they provide the most direct and
interesting roads out into the larger world of meanings stated in
history and geography. While history makes human implications explicit
and geography natural connections, these subjects are two phases of the
same living whole, since the life of men in association goes on in
nature, not as an accidental setting, but as the material and medium of
development.
