TEACHING OF HISTORY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 48, 27 February 1939, Page 8

TEACHING OF HISTORY

j MR. H. G. WELLS’ ATTACK ! _ “POISON AND BUNK” COMPLETE REVOLUTION NEEDED Condemning history as it Is taught to-day as "poison and bunk,” Mr. H. |G. Wells, noted historian and author, in a provocative address to the Science Congress at Canberra, flung out a challenge for a complete revolution in the form of historical teaching. Declaring that the title of his address was “The Poison Called History,” Mr. Wells said: "You are not going to do anything to turn the world from its evil courses by assembling all the poison histories of al! the nations together, sewing them together with that bit of weak, rotten string—the League of Nations—and imagining that they will act as antidotes to each other. "History as It is taught to-day is by its very nature useless as a basis of a world peace ideology," he said. "It is a struggle to sustain the old worn-out story of personified Britannias, Germanias, Holy Russias, and so forth I meritorious races and chosen peoples, j And this League of Nations, this little ! bit of a paper hat on the top, not of a I colossus, but a squirming heap of discordant patriotisms, is only a last des- ! perate attempt to carry on the old patchwork of nationalist ideas into a new world that has no wholesome use for them. “There are two sorts of history, an old traditional history which is out of date and decaying, and becoming more and more poisonous, and a new sort of history, which is essentially human biology,” said Mr, Wells. Making Patriots “Common history as it is taught today is bunk—pretentious stuff and largely useless. From the beginning it has been written with a purpose. Sometimes, but not very often, that purpose has been purely artistic. But ' usually it has been written to school minds to some particular conception of the community in which they live. It has sought to make people citizens, to make them patriots, to combine them for glory for some aggressive enterprise. "Common history remains still national or regional propaganda lightened by gossip, and, at most, paying lip service to humanitarian ideas. It is. only in recent years that any attempt has been made to present a world history, and then the disposition of the historians has been to assemble all the partial histories in a sort of crazy patchwork, rather than to discover any general pattern. National and Imperial boundaries are still there a.s the main divisi ons of the subject. “If we want this world to become a consistent whole, we must think of it as a whole. We must, cease to deal with States, nations, and Empires as primary things which have to be reconciled and welded together; we must deal with them as secondary things which have appeared and disappeared incidentally in the course of a larger and longer biological adverv ture. “I propose that the present division of historical teaching into the chiefly political history of localities, countries of selected peoples, or periods, should be absolutely scrapped. I propose that the leaching of Greek history, Latin history, Jewish or Bible history, English history, French history, medieval history. German history, our island story, the Empire, and so on. and so on, as separate subjects, shall be entirely abandoned. Biological Approach “Instead. I suggest that in teaching the history of mankind we approach the subject from the biological side. We begin with the conception of small sub-human family groups scattered about lhe world almost completely unaware of each other. We trace the development of speech, of gesture and drawing, and we show how these beginnings of communication and of understanding lead inevitably to larger communities. We teach of wanderings, of caves and shelters, of primitive inhabitations, of the invention of implements. Never once do we talk of our tribe. “The history of communication, rhe history of implements, and the intelligent study of the consequences of this progress and extension of human mentality is infinitely simpler and truer than any of the old history. It is healthy food, whereas the race and nation sluff is poisonous food. “The old history breaks up the picture of the real operating forces in human affairs and does everything possible to conceal them. The history of nations and people is not the essential history of mankind; its chapters are not even natural fragments of that history. ! “When the new education does have to take cognisance of the kingdoms and empires that have come and gone like flashes of colour in an oil pool it will have to deal with these childish claims with humour and sometimes with indignant humour. But not with respect and incitements to respect. “My conviction of the extraordinary uselessness of the old history in our treatment of modern problems has been quickened in the last few years by my excitement over two particular questions. One is the continuing and steady ill-will of large sections of the American community towards Britain and of influential sections of the British community towards America: the other is the tragic situation of the Jew in the modern world. Both these questions concern the establishment and growth of a legend. American Master Idea “This is the paradox of the American situation. A century and a-half ago the original 13 States of the Union cast loose from the economic exploitation of the British monarchy. They did so with the support and sympathy of the City of London and large sections of the British people. But to hold the new detached colonies together, to prevent their drifting back towards British tutelage, it was necessary to simplify the issue and tell a story of the unmitigated disingenuousness of all British people. “That became the master idea of the American story. Only a very small element in the mighty human aggregate of America to-day had even a single ancestor on either side in the

War of Independence. But they have all taken that story on, lock, stock and barrel. You will meet American ‘citizieais still speaking with strong German accents who glory in their victory at Bunker Hill and are unable to express indignation of the unforgettable barbarity of bringing Hessian 1 troopers into a white man’s war. "But the greatest, most astounding! story, masked a«nd hidden beneath the: mis representations of the old history, 1 is the Judaean-Christian mythology j tat has set the Jewish people apart 1 from the rest of mankind. It was a poisonous history that arrested the ( amalgamation of the Aryan and ( Semitic cultures. It set up a division i in the spirit of mankind, so that aj great multiutude of brilliant, able and 1 skilled people, constituting a majority | of the trading, travelling and money-i handling strata were set apart by the | from any chance of coalescence with circumstances of their upbringing < the people about them. i °I cite the Jewish question as a particularly bad instance of the dis-1 tortion of human life by the poison j called history. But all over the world where history is taught the history that separates prevails.”