PAST EVENTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 October 1941, Page 6

PAST EVENTS

WHAT HISTORY CAN TEACH. “In so far as mankind drops history out of its education,” said Professor G. M. Trevelyan, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in a recent address, “it abjures the knowledge of its own' past. And, in so doing, it loses the inheritance of the greatest and noblest achievements of the human race, for naturally most of them lie in the past. The present brief moment of time is but a small part, and not a very fortunate part, of the period during which mankind has been active. But, by the help of history, we here and now can be the heirs of all the ages in so far as we study and rever the past. If, as Mr Ford is said to have said, ‘History is bunk,” then all that our ancestors in any part of the globe have said, done, thought or written was bunk’; and in that case assuredly all we now are saying, doing, thinking or writing is ‘bunk’ also. But I don’t take so pessimistic a view. What a nation is taught to think about its own past and about the past of other nations will form the main ingredients in its view of the present and its hopes for the future. Historical ideas are taught not only in universities and schools, but in books and newspapers and in the talk of men. If history were taught with absolute truth and completeness there would be no wars, for the various groups of men on earth would understand one another. But unfortunately the truth about the past is a subject too huge and complex to be viewed except in glimpses even by the most learned historian. And ordinary people only pick up a few stray notions about the past of their own and other countries, which are often very onesided truths, although very potent in their influence. True history educates the mind. It is not possible, indeed, to argue directly from events in the past as to events in the present, because circumstances never* repeat themselves exactly. But the knowledge of past transactions, coolly viewed from the distance of later years, provides the best education in life and in politics, broadening the thought and moderating the judgment of men. And so, both for culture and for politics, true history, freely and honestly studied and widely taught to the people, is an essential part of our present-day civilisation, apd helps to build up the Commonwealth of Man.”