Historical Causes
Historical causes of war are in part the sequences of events that the political causes of war produce (political as the causes inherent in the wills of nations), and we must suppose they are mainly this. History, from this point of view, is the working out of the motives or the desires contained in these national wills. The causes of our late war, for example, are to be sought mainly in the wills of the great powers that are concerned in it. Economic forces, the laws of the growth of nations (both psychological and physical laws), the conditions of the geographical distributions of peoples over the earth—all these are involved in the cause of wars. There are also great personages whose actions must to some extent be considered apart from these general laws; these personages contribute factors to the causation of any given war that are not entirely inherent in the laws of growth or the psychology of nations. Shall we say also that there are fortuitous factors, historical causes that are not contained in any logic of human desires? Can we say, perhaps, that these fortuitous causes are indeed the main causes—in a word that wars are not desired, mainly, but are the product, indeed, either of the mere logic of chance, or of a design that transcends human will altogether? Are wars willed, or are they the results of the complex, the illogical and uncontrollable factors of the world's existence and movement? These may not be practical problems, but they are serious problems, since in the end they implicate the whole of philosophy.
What place shall we give, in the laws of history, to the sudden and chance turn of affairs; to the quick shift of the wheels of fortune; to the incidents, the accidents, the mis-judgments of rulers and the slips of the diplomats? Are wars after all a product of the logic of life, or are they mere fortuitous syntheses of events which in their particular combination make a total that is not involved, either asdesire or as tendency, in the sum of the particulars that enter into the whole? How completely, in a word, do the interests and purposes of nations determine wars? May we speak of motives that always tend to produce wars, but never seem to will them?
History seems to show us that wars are less directly willed than we have sometimes supposed, and perhaps that there is a large element of chance in them as regards a given war at any time and in any place. War in general is inherent in, or is a natural effect of, the laws of development of nations. Wars as historical events are not completely describable in terms of these laws. It is the old contrast between the historical and the scientific explanation of things that appears here. Nations have deep and vague desires, we say. They want satisfaction of their honor; they crave a dramatic life, even military prestige and glory, but we do not often find war itself definitely willed. The desires of nations, we repeat, tend to be too fundamental to be specific. Their specific desires are indeed and for that reason likely to be contradictory. They desire both war and peace at the same time, and have interests that may be served by both. They live in indecision like individuals. Motives conflict. They hesitate, and doubt, and fear. They shrink from taking the plunge. It requires the sharp and clear event, the chance event, most often, to precipitate them into wars. It is always to-morrow that they are to wage wars. So wars do not usually occur by the rational plans and devices of any man or any historical sequences of men, we may believe, and it is a question whether wars are very often intended in a real sense by any one. Wars occur as crises in events. The strains that produce them are certainly inherent in the relations of nations at all times, and even in the motives of personal politics, but in general these relations as consciously governed relations are in the direction of seeking the greatest advantage with the least show of force. The conditions must all be present, both the match and the powder, beforewar can take place. There must be a condition of strain, having certain psychological features none of which can be missing, the condition being something complex and not readily analyzable, at any given time. In addition to these strains events must take place which, in all their appearances, are fortuitous.
One might argue from this that the cure of war consists in eternal watchfulness to see that the match does not touch the powder, that we must watch these events that precipitate wars and safeguard peoples from being affected by them. This, of course, is more or less the method of diplomacy; to some minds the league of nations is a device for doing this on a larger and more systematic scale. But when we study history and see what these war-causing incidents are, how numerous and how variable, we can see that diplomacy and statesmanship undertake an impossible task when they try to steer the world along its narrow historical course, with only historical landmarks for guides.
The war that is so vividly in mind now furnishes us with an illustration of the complexity of the causes of war, and allows us to see clearly contrasting views of the causal factors in great wars in general. We see here a closely fitting series of events, each in itself having but little reference to the great crisis, all fitting together, and for want of any one of which, if one takes the purely historical view, we might suppose the war would never have happened, or might have been postponed indefinitely. If Venezelos, to go back no further than that, had remained in Crete and had been content to be an island politician, would not the course of events in the Balkans have been very different? Out of his course came events which no one could have foreseen, but which, without similar actions on the part of individuals producing other links in the chain, would not have taken place. If some diplomat or some foreign office had made a decision slightly different from what was actually decided; if the three emperors had had a little more reliableinformation about one another; if the statisticians of the German service had computed a little better England's resources, and had put the moral factor into the sum—would the war have happened at all?
In this direction, of course, lies the chaos of history and its madness—and also its philosophy. We may be driven on the one hand to think of all history as a matter of the chance relations of individuals and of detached particular events, having significance as a series but never planned or controlled as a whole, or we may resort to the opposite way of thinking, and say that all of history, in every particular and detail, is divinely planned and prearranged, and each event fits into a rational whole. This, of course, is our final problem of history, we say, as it is the final problem of every question that considers life as concrete events having value precisely as the particular sequence that it is—when we view life historically, in a word, rather than by the methods of the quantitative sciences, or by the genetic methods such as are used mainly in the psychological sciences, and which we may say stand between history and the sciences of matter.
It appears to be no very difficult matter to discover causes of war, and indeed a considerable number of causes. In fact the problem seems to yield an embarrassment of riches, especially if our chief interest happens to be a practical one, and we wish to find the causes of war in order to see how they may be controlled. We might even have discovered all the causes of war and still be as far as before from any real understanding of the cause of war. Unless one can know the relative importance of the causes, and the manner in which the causes combine to produce wars; unless the results give in some way a synthetic view of the causes of war, showdominatingcauses, or reveal a total cause which is not merely a summation of stimuli, but is both a necessary and a sufficient situation for the production of war; unless we have shown some fundamental cause and movement in the social order, we are still left in search of the cause of war.
We have, indeed, found a number of causes of war, but at the same time the causes have not appeared to exist as separate causes. We are always catching sight of a movement in the development of nations and of the world—of certain fundamental motives, the most basic of all, the most general, being the motive of power. These causes of war do not appear, however, to be of the nature of achain, giving us the impression that in order to break the habit of war, all we need do is to discover the weakest link in the chain of causes, break the chain there, and so interrupt the whole mechanism of war-making in the world. Above all,although fortuitous events as causes of war must not be overlooked, war is not continually being made anew by the appearance again and again of accidental situations, which are thus to be regarded as the cause of war.
War is, first of all, a natural expression of the social life, resting primarily upon the fact of the existence, universally, of groups of individuals acting as units. But here cause and effect are lost in one another. Conflict cements the group, and the existence of the group, again, is the cause of conflict. War is an aspect of the social solidarity of the group acting under certain conditions, and these conditions are the presence of deep desires that can, in general, be satisfied only by the exertion of force on the part of communities acting as wholes.
These primitive motives and moods of war that we find in the nature of the social group itself, emerge finally in three aspects of the life of nations, and it is these aspects of the life of nations that appear to us as the causes of war. They are not separate and independent features of the social life, and it is in part only for the sake of convenience that they are sharply separated at all. They are all at bottom manifestations of the motive of power that runs through all history, and all the social and individual life. On one side this motive appears in moods and impulses that we called the "intoxication" moods and impulses. National honor was found to be another effect of it. The political motives of war are its concrete expression. These motives all together—all being but phases of a deep, powerful energy and purpose, are the source of the main movement in history out of which war comes. In this movement all the motives of the social life are always present and active at the same time. The good and the bad of national life are phases of a single purpose and are not two contrasted principles or moments. The past is always contained in the present.
War, then, is the result of certain motives which arefundamental to the group life. It is a natural form in which, given a certain degree of intelligence and of complexity of the social life, these motives express themselves. All the motives and forms of expression are present in germ at least from the beginning of the development of the social life. Considering the whole history of war we see that it is a part of a very complex movement in human society, and yet that no war appears to be the final term of a process of inexorable logic. Taking history as a whole, we see that the natural laws involved and the nature of the social consciousness make a state of war from time to time highly probable, but war is not a necessary consequence of any natural law. Nations are self-conscious personalities. Perhaps in the future they may change their ways, abandon voluntarily their desires, subject themselves to discipline, or deliberately invent a plan of international relations that will have the effect of eliminating war from their lives altogether.
It is always dangerous, but at the same time it is always tempting to try to explain national life, or all life and history, in terms of the individual and his experience. Once more, however, we may yield to that temptation and say that the world to-day is in a stage of development which has many traits that show its relation in some very significant ways to certain undeveloped conditions found in individuals, which in fact always appear as phases of the life of all individuals in some degree and form. Nations have acquired a high degree of subjectivism, partly on account of the geographical conditions under which they have lived, and the many barriers between nations due to difference of origin and of language, and the fundamental emotions of fear and jealousy which, as we have seen, play so large a part in the life and conduct of groups. Nations, however close to one another, have remained isolated in spirit; they have lacked both the initiative and the means for becoming definitely related to one another in purposiveand sustained activities. Therefore all their relations have remained highly emotional, subjective, influenced by mysticism, filled with hatred and fear, hero worship and illusion. Nations have lacked both the power, and we might say, the organs, for externalizing their spirit. They have dreamed dreams and played plays, and followed their illusions of empire. Even their wars have not, until perhaps now, become wholly real and serious in a measure commensurate with their powers and resources. The present war more than any other, and more than any other event in history, represents an escape on the part of nations from their subjectivism, and a beginning, it may be, of the realization of a more mature, or shall we say morenormalconception of the world. Nations have played at being great and have really produced but little true greatness. Now, let us say, their dream is over. We see that these nations can no longer play. Their wooden weapons have at last been turned to steel. They can fight no longer indeed without destroying one another. They must nowlivein practical and moral relations, give up their bright dreams of empire after the old heroic order, and be content to be imperial (if they are born to be imperial) by performing distinguished service in the world, by their own genius of leadership. There is work in the world for nations to do; there are empires of the spirit, it may be, greater than have yet been dreamed of in the nations' childish philosophies of life. The consciousness of nations contains, it may be, unsuspected powers, suppressed in the past by narrow nationalism, by fear, habit and convention. These powers may now, if ever, blossom forth; they have been wasted too long in patriotic feeling and in idle dreamery. They must now show what they can do in a practical world that will have no more of mere assertions.
The world stands to-day balanced between two ideals. Human spirit, the spirit of nations, is a free and plastic force; it is also a sum of motives and desires; but mostfundamentally of all it is a growing, living, creative and personal spirit. It still clings to its luxuries of feeling, to its provincial life, it is still fascinated by its beautiful romance of empire. On the other hand we see the stirring of a new idea. A new world arises, less dramatic in its appeal than the old world, but a world appealing by its practical problems both to the will and to the intellect. Shall we yield to the fascination of the old romance and go back to our hero worship; or shall we be inspired now by this vision of a new and greater social order, create out of our own powers of imagination the forms this world must assume if it is to appeal to the deepest feelings of all peoples, and make this new world real by our own intelligence and determination?
We stand to-day at a dramatic moment in history; a more dramatic moment than when the victory itself hung in the balance. Perhaps our sense of responsibility for the future is an illusion; perhaps we are driven by an inexorable logic of history, and we do not after all choose what our world shall be. But certainly the sense of human power in the world has never been greater than now nor seemed better justified; nor, if we are deceived, has the reality ever been more out of harmony with the ambitions of man.
Education, like all other institutions, has been charged, we know, with having contributed its share to the causes of the war. The Prussian school system, we have been told, was mainly a school of war; all the emotions and ideas necessary to produce morbid nationalism, distorted views of history, and a belief in and a love of war were there fostered and deliberately cultivated. There is, of course, some truth in this; it is a truth that is deceiving, however, if we regard it as at all indicating the true relation between education and practical affairs. If the school was a factor in the late war, such a creative effect of education appears to be rare in history. In general it is the negative effect of the school that is most conspicuous. It is what the school has not done to prevent war, what it has failed to do in not bringing nations out of their perverted nationalism into a life of more practical relationship with one another that really best characterizes the school.
It is difficult or impossible for us now, of course, to perceive what the war has done—in what way, all in all, the future will be different from the past. It is very easy and natural to look at everything dramatically now, see revolution everywhere and believe that all institutions are now to be radically changed. Or, going to the other extreme, we may become cynical, and say that, human nature being unchangeable, we shall soon settle down into the old routine and we shall see presently that nothing revolutionizing has transpired. Some will say, and indeed are saying that education must now be entirely remodeled;some will think that education had best go on as before—that nothing has happened certainly to require any new philosophy of the school, or any profound change in its form. We see these two tendencies in many phases of our present situation: in politics, in education, and in the business world.
It is impossible, we may repeat, to make wholly safe judgments now about the future, but still something must in the meantime be done. We must either stand still or go forward—or backward; we must act either with a theory or without one. The school is involved in this necessity. There is a new content of history that we cannot ignore, but must in some wayteach. We must say something about the war; current events can hardly be kept out of the school, and to understand current events there must be a wider content of history than we have had in the past. There are new, or at least disturbed, conditions in the industrial and in all the social life, and these conditions cannot fail to have some effect upon the school. The school must adjust itself to them, and it must surely take into account new needs that have arisen. Patriotism may need to be taught now, or taught in a different manner. There is a problem of war and peace, the question of what ideals of national life we are to convey. Internationalism demands some recognition on the part of the school. It seems probable, therefore, and even necessary that a new interest in the function of education will be felt and must be aroused. Must we not indeed now examine once more all the foundations upon which our ideas about education rest? Certainly there will never be a more favorable time, or more reasons for such a task.
It is the impending internationalism, or the idea of internationalism now so vividly put before us all, that most incites new thought about education, and about all the means of controlling the ideas and feelings of the people. We hear much aboutreconstruction andreadjustment, andthese terms obviously imply the old ways and the old institutions. But internationalism is something new, having many possibilities; it means new relations among peoples; it opens up new practical fields and new phases of sociology and economics. It is because of this new phase of the social life and social consciousness of man, we might suppose, that education is most likely to be affected in its foundations, so that no mere readjustment will be enough. A new politics and a new science of nations appear, and we cannot fail to see that there is at the present time something decidedly lacking in education; that there is a larger life perhaps for which our present ways of educating children would not sufficiently prepare, and that to prepare for this larger life something more would be needed than an added subject in the curriculum. This is because internationalism is not simply more of something we have already; it is a turn in the road, and a turn which, it can hardly be denied, will finally affect all institutions. If internationalism has come to stay, it will need, and it must have, powerful support from all educational forces. It will need something more than support; education must produce creative habits of mind, which shall make and nourish new relations in the world, and it must make people intelligent, so that they can understand what the new and larger relations mean and what must be accomplished by them.
A casual observation of the educational situation might indicate that education is limited in two ways, so far as being a means of meeting our present needs is concerned.It is lacking in power; it treats children and youths still in a fragmentary way, and the process of learning is somewhat detached from the totality of living. There is a lack of richness of content, and a lack of responsiveness in the school to the stirring life outside the school. If we may say that history now turns a new page, and that society stands at a change of tide, education is also in a peculiarand interesting position. The school may, from now on, if our view of it be at all just, be expected to do one of two things: it may settle down to a relatively successful work, in a limited sphere of usefulness, training children well, especially fitting them to enter into our present social order; or, on the other hand, the school may now become a much greater power, and may seize hold upon fundamental things in life and society under the stimulus of new conditions—find a way to a deeper philosophy, a more consistent theory, attain a more exalted mood and higher purpose, and become a far more potent factor in civilization.
That education will remain unaffected in profound ways by the war, is difficult to believe. One may very readily, as we say, see these impending changes in too dramatic a way, and begin to talk about profound upheavals and ideals that certainly will never be realized (and we ought to guard against this easy idealizing, which leaves human nature out of the reckoning); still we cannot but feel that in some way a new dimension has been added to the social life as a result of the war, and that education, in dealing with this greater society, must itself be raised to a higher power. If we think, educationally speaking, in terms of a world at all, rather than in terms of individuals, or communities, families and nations, we are quickly impressed by the sense of living in a new order of educational problems, and possessing, it may be, a new variety of self-consciousness. Nations in this new view are thought of as parts of a world, as having many external relations, whereas formerly almost all education has had reference at the most to the internal life of nations. Patriotism has been the expression of its most distant horizon.
If we believe that anything new is about to be realized in education, it might seem natural to begin to think about changes from the standpoint and in the terms of the old chapters and topics. We might ask what this or that subject of the curriculum means or must produce that it didnot mean and did not produce before; or we might consider the old and the new requirements in the education of the feelings, the will, the intellect; or we might take any other of the educational categories as a basis for a discussion of the philosophy of the school. These programs, however, do not seem to be very inspiring. Would it not be better now to try to distinguish the main fields of life and the main interests in regard to which new questions and new needs have arisen, and see what changes in our educational thought are really demanded by them? On such a plan, internationalism itself would first demand attention, and indeed most of all. In a sense all questions about education must now be considered with reference to internationalism in some way. Then there are the problems already raised during the war and widely discussed, about the teaching of patriotism. Patriotism becomes a new educational problem, a chapter in our theory of education, in which we become conscious of ourselves in a new way, and are aware of our larger field and changed conditions. There are questions, too, about the teaching of the lessons of the war, what we shall think about war in general as a good or an evil, how we shall conceive peace and its values. Changes are taking place in government, and in our ideas of government, and governments are being put to new tests. Political education can hardly fail to be now one of our most serious concerns. Democracy appears to be our great word; the control and education of the democratic forces and the democratic spirit becomes an urgent need. Industry acquires new meanings; we must take up again all the theory of industrial education, for we have seen of late that industry contains possibilities of evil we did not before understand. Social problems arise in changed forms. The new world-idea or world-consciousness becomes an educational problem of the social life. Class difference can never again be ignored as it has been in the past in the schools. Moral, religious and æsthetic education seems to have adifferent place in the school, just to the extent that all life has become more serious on account of the war. These demands made upon the deepest elements of the psychic life suggest the need once more of a new philosophy of education, or, at the least, a greatly increased recognition and application of the philosophy we already have.
Before the war there was a sense of security and the feeling that our education was adequate to meet all demands. We were proud of our educational system. Our democratic ideals, people said, were safe in the hands of the public school. Industrial education was meeting fairly well the needs of the industrial life. There were no very pressing class problems. The troubles of capital and labor, although always threatening, seemed to demand no educational interference. The religious problem was temporarily not acute. Aesthetic forms had been attended to in the curriculum sufficiently to meet the demands of the day. Hygiene and physical education and individual attention seemed to be making rapid advances. All of these had been influenced by the scientific methods of treating educational questions. On the whole we seemed to have a good school. But now the question must be asked whether this school of yesterday will be adequate to meet the needs of to-morrow; whether new conditions do not call for new thought, new philosophy, new schools. These things of course cannot be had for the asking. We cannot give orders to genius to produce them for us. But a generation that does not hope for them, we might suspect of not having realized what the war has cost. For so great a price paid have we not a right to expect much in return, especially if we are willing to regard the war as a lesson rather than as a debt to us, and bend all our energies to make it count for a better civilization?
We may already see in a general way what the effect of the war is to be upon the mind of the educator. The journals begin to be filled with plans for the participationof the school in the work of reconstruction. There are many suggestions for the improvement of the school. Industrial education, the classics, history, military education, social education are all being discussed. Evidently many minds are at work. Some of them, indeed many of them, are apparently most concerned about what changes we shall make at once in the day's work of the school. Many wish to know what we are going to do now with Latin, or history, and how we can improve the method of teaching in this or that particular. But there are some deeper notes. Thinkers are asking elementary questions about the whole of human nature. They wish to know what the original nature of man is, and what the limits of our control over human nature are. Such books as Hocking's "Human Nature and its Re-making" and Russell's "Principles of Social Reconstruction," which grapple with the basic problems of human life, are signs of the times. No one can yet predict what the final result of the increased intellectual ardor that has come out of the war will be, but it seems certain that that striving of the mind which has made the literature of the war so remarkable a page in the history of the human spirit will continue, and in the field of education as elsewhere in the practical life there will be new vitality and earnestness.
If we take a serious and an optimistic view of education as a social institution, and think of it at all as standing in functional relationships with the social life as a whole, we must conclude that internationalism as a new movement and idea, and the school as an institution in which changes in the social order are reflected (but in which also changes in the social order are created) are closely related. Adjustment is a relatively easy matter; it is the conception of the school as a creative factor that challenges our best efforts. Let us think of the school as a workshop in which there must be created the forces by which we must make a desired and an otherwise unrealizable future come to pass and we have a new and inspiring view of education. The school perhaps must do even more than educate the forces; it must help even to create the vision itself by which the future is to be directed.The school becomes, so to speak, the working hypothesis of civilisation.In it the ideas and the desires by which nations live must be made to take shape.
The idea of internationalism implies certain changes in the external relations of nations which, whatever the form internationalism will take on its political side, are not difficult to perceive. These in turn imply internal changes. We might readily outline or psychologically analyze what could be called the mood of internationalism, in order to see its relations to education. It contains a number of factors, more or less related to one another.First, there is a recognition of a world of growing, living historicalentities which we call nations; and this recognition implies new understanding and an enrichment of knowledge.Second, there is a change in the consciousness of nations, slow but visible, by which they become more willing to investigate freely and fairly their own place in history, understand their own desires, functions, virtues, faults, the value of their culture and civilization. Without such an attitude all talk of internationalism in any real sense is idle.Third, there is a new and different practical interest. We begin to conceive our world as a world of complex practical relations, and this idea of a practical world is likely to become one of the leading thoughts of the future.Fourth, by extending, so to speak, this idea of a world of practical relations, we idealize a world in which there is a common interest in great international achievements,—a world devoted more than it is now to coördinated efforts to accelerate progress, more conscious of the needs of a distant future, perhaps, or even of an ideal of universal efficiency as a means of realizing some one world purpose or many good purposes. This is not now, as it once might have been called, merely an Utopian dream. In some slight degree it is already being accomplished.Fifth, social and moral feelings are widened in scope, and must be still further extended; it is in the form of thedemocratic spirit, that these feelings must find expression. And this democratic spirit is on one side practical, but it is also something more than the emergence of the common mind; it is thearistocratic idea carried out universallythat we look forward to, an enthusiasm for all true values, a mood and activity in which all people participate.Sixth, there is a necessary attitude toward world organization or world government, according to which we think of world government or world organization as a means of accomplishing results which fulfill fundamental desires and purposes of the peoples of the earth; as a growing structure, something to be added to and improved.Seventh, if so general a tendency and demand maybe made clear, there is a philosophical mood, which must be made a part of the ideal and the attitude of the future,if that future is to realize even the practical hopes of the world. This philosophical attitude is first of all a way of living comprehensively and more universally, in the world both of facts and of ideas. It means a less provincial and a more widely enriched life for all. It means also an ability to choose the good not according to preconceptions and narrow principles, but according to the wisdom contained in the experience and the selective powers of mankind as a whole. This means a life in which men live, so to speak, more collectively.
These factors of the idea of internationalism, whatever we may think of the possibility of their realization, make in their totality an educational problem: they are specifications, so to speak, laid before us for the making of a new educational product. If we say that it is useless to think of such things, we are saying merely that it is useless to hope to be a factor in conscious evolution, or that the world as a whole has no purpose and no goal. If we believe education has any function in the larger work of the world, educational philosophy must take these things into account, see how they may be created or sustained, and how they can be made to work together to help bring to pass the kind of future men are talking so much about.
I. The Essential World Idea
Our present situation has plainly made it necessary for us to understand the world in which we live far better than we have in the past, and to be willing to make more dispassionate judgments about it. For better or for worse we have entered upon a new stage of history, in which heavy responsibilities fall upon all peoples, and upon none more than upon ourselves. Enlightenment beyond all our present understanding is a necessity. We have beenpeculiarly isolated and separated from the world's affairs; now we are peculiarly involved. We have, however, one great and unusual advantage. In our case it is ignorance rather than prejudice that we must overcome in ourselves. The world feels this and recognizes the unusual place this gives us. We have no thousand years of continuous strife to distort our historical perspective. We out to be able to be just interpreters of the history of the world. Our universities ought to be the greatest centers of historical learning, and as a people we should feel ourselves called upon above all other people to know the world.
As a nation we pass out of a local into a broader political field. We become citizens of a world, but this world is no mere habitation of individuals who are to be affiliated with one another. It is a world ofnational wills. Internationalism is first of all a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations. But such a recognition of the legitimate desires of nations cannot be effected merely by spreading abroad good will. A widespread education in the meaning of history must first be made the foundation of international justice in the minds of the people. Current history and future events seen in the light of all history, of history as the science and story of all human experience, become our chief intellectual interest to-day. The war has taught us how little the people in the world know bout the world as a whole. All history thus far has beenlocalhistory. Everywhere there tends to be the prejudice in some degree that comes from the private need of using history for political ends. Unless we can now put history, real history, at the head of our sciences, the war will have failed of a great result, whatever in particular, in a political way, it may have accomplished.
With such an understanding of what is to be meant by history we say, if that seems an adequate way of expressing it, that the teaching of history becomes one of the fundamental problems of the educational work of theday. It might be better to say that living in the historical spirit is demanded as a way of salvation of the world. However, adding geography and economics to history we have a content that must somehow be taught in the schools. History, as the most concrete science of the actual world in which we live, now seems to have become a new center for the curriculum. Hitherto we have tended to regard history too lightly, as thestoryof the world; now there must be a deeper view of it. We must have an understanding of the motives and the desires of peoples; history must not only be broader and more comprehensive but more penetrating and psychological. It is the purposes of nations, working themselves out in their history, that we must understand. There must no longer be great unknown places on the earth. Germany, Russia, Japan must not continue to be mysteries. National psychology must be made a part of historical interpretation. This new history must be the means of showing us our world in a more total view than we have thus far had of it, so that we may better discern the continuity, if there be one, behind the detached movements and multiplicity of facts presented by the world's story; for perhaps, in this way, we should better understand what the future is to produce, and what, more important still, it ought to be made to produce.
The need first of all is for a continuation of the interest inspired by the war—an interest showing itself in the form of an universal interest in all history, and an intensive investigation of history. We need now, indeed, the most comprehensive study of the world that has ever been conceived or dreamed of by man. This is the duty of the historians. This new history must show us what nations are at heart, what they desire, what they can do. Such an understanding of nations is, we say, the real beginning of internationalism. It is a necessary foundation for it, if internationalism is to be anything more than a merelypractical, prudential or political arrangement among nations. In the school-room eventually, and indeed beginning now, there is demanded a readjustment of interest by which history takes a new and more central place. We must endeavor to give the new generation aworld-idea. And upon the nature and clearness of this world-idea much, in the future, will depend.
Such a demand upon the school opens once more, of course, all the old problems of the teaching of history. All the dreary questions of the precise order in which history should be taught—whether backwards or forwards, local first or the reverse, may be brought up if one chooses to do so. But after all, these questions are not very fruitful. What we need most is the historicalspirit. We want a dramatic presentation of the world's whole story, by which the true meaning of history is conveyed. The methods of art must be added to the methods of fact. A persuasive use of the materials of history must be made. This means a change finally, perhaps, not only in the methods of teaching history, but in the whole mood and spirit of the school. Methods are likely to adapt themselves to necessity. Certainly the slow methods of presenting facts, sometimes if not generally employed, the tedious lingering upon details, seems wholly out of place. We need a broader outlook in history. Even the young child must have a more comprehensive world-idea, some sense of the whole of the great world in which he lives. This is one of the instances, it may be, in which we must set about breaking up any recapitulatory order, natural to the child, which suggests an advance from the local to the more general and wider knowledge. The universal interests of the day so strongly affect the child, the social consciousness so dominates the individual consciousness that even the natural law of development must to some extent yield if necessary. This social consciousness, the interests and purposes expressed in the child's social environment, present the experience ofthe adult world dramatically and intensively, exerting as we might say, a creative power upon the mind. That indeed is precisely what the higher teaching, whether in the form of art, or in the form of vivid experience, conveyed though the practical life does everywhere in education.
We do not yet know what history, taught thus dramatically and intimately, under the stimulus of the greatest events of all time might do for the mind of the child or for all the future of the world. We have never had the most favorable conditions for the teaching of universal history. We have been obliged to create interest. History has been taught externally, from the standpoint of a far-away observer. Now history may and must be taught more as it is lived. The world has become more real to every one; this sense of reality of a world of historical entities must be made to persist. We must not go back to our unreal and intellectualized history. The spirit of the nations must be made to live again, so to speak, in the minds of the coming generation. What each nation stands for, its ethos, its personality, must be made clear. Powers says that all governments and all nations aresincere. It is the soul of nations, then, their own realization of themselves that must be made the real object of history. We must go back of the individual and the event at least, to the desires that have made history what it is; we must see why events have taken place, and while sacrificing nothing of our own principles and standards, understand and feel what the principles and the nature of these widely differing nations really are. For the actual teaching of history, it is likely that the story, carried to its highest point of art, will still be the chief method. But pictorial art must be heavily drawn upon, and all the resources of symbolic art, as we pass from the lower to the higher stages in education, or, we had perhaps better say, as we try more and more to convey moods and the spirit of nations and epochs and to appeal to the deep motives in the subconscious life ofthe individual. Plainly there is much work to do in the investigation and the teaching of history for every grade and department of the educational system, from the government and the higher universities to the teacher of the young child. It is an age of history, a day in which all sciences have as one of their tasks to aid in the understanding of history. In the broader world and the universal life which the idea and the reality of internationalism has opened up to us, all must live in some way, if only in imagination. History is a part of the necessary equipment for that life.