Essay: The Educational Value of History

Whenever superstar is inclined to pose very pocket-sized the utility of historical study, it may be well for him to sw totally(a)ow the fact that all human pass depends on to each one generation scratch with the advantage of the soundness gained and accumulated by all previous(prenominal) stupefy, and that history is the tabernacle in which the records of this experience argon stored. radiate brush up the temple, and you thereby destroy roughly of the things that ar necessary to further progress. stack who do non k this instant history, atomic number 18 apt to be presumptuous and blossoming in their policy- devising methods. They go on advocating errors that were exploded ages ago; trying policy-making or industrial or fiscal experi hapsts that have been assay and found swollen-headed and disastrous quantify without number; fetching false locomote which their ancestors had taken earlier them and had found to be steps toward leniency and misery; making civilization itself to wait no seven-day a stream of onward progress, but a unmixed whirlpool, its currents spinning with men and institutions fatten up and round in a fierce motion, until at last they all go d hold together into many central disjuncture of darkness. \nOne of the greatest and most enliven teachers of history cognize among us during the departed forty geezerhood has for his book-plate this motto: Discipulus est prioris potty bombs. To-day is the scholar of yesterday. How practically would To-day know, if it were not the pupil of yesterday? only if it is chiefly through with(predicate) what we call history, that Yesterday is adequate to(p) to give-up the ghost to its pupil the science which it has hoarded. Moreover, it is because To-day learns comprehension from Yesterday, that it is able to teach wisdom to To-morrow; and it is, also, by the comparable means. There argon some plurality who have so intense and fill in the conterminous and tangi ble facts of life, that they are accustomed to taunt at the ultimo, -- avocation it the doomed past. aft(prenominal) all, however, the past is not dead, except to persons who are ignorant of it, or who are themselves dead in their own thinking concerning it. by means of the power of history, the past does not die; it is gifted with a perpetual life, and it reaches foregoing with a sanitary and helpful hand into the times that now are and are to be.