Repeating History

“From the Academy” column, National Review, September 16, 1977

At every level of schooling in America, the study of history has been declining. Not seldom the historical discipline is abandoned in favor of courses in “special social problems.” And of course the television has made its inroads: who wants Thucydides when we have Barbara Walters? The professors of history are alarmed. They, at least, recall the observation of Santayana that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Mr. Richard S. Kirkendall, executive secretary of the Organization of American Historians, made an interesting report late in 1975 on this sorry decay of historical studies. Since then a considerable variety of newspapers and organizations have tested or questioned students and teachers. All these surveys have been disheartening.

Professor Kirkendall’s report, “The Status of History in the Schools” (Journal of American History, September 1975), proved, “if proof is necessary, that history is in crisis and that history’s crisis is not merely a part of the large difficulties of academic life at the present time.” One of the chief causes of declining interest in history, Mr. Kirkendall and his colleagues found, was the notion that history “is not a practical subject.” One thinks of Albert Jay Nock’s essay “The Value of Useless Knowledge,” in which Nock argued that though historical knowledge has no immediately practical application, nevertheless it is the most valuable of all intellectual disciplines.

“Signs of improvement are scarce,” Mr. Kirkendall reported; and though the Organization of American Historians has dredged up a few little cheering symptoms of historical revival since 1975, in general we are no better off in this discipline than we were two years ago. “Confidence and interest in history are not nearly as widespread and strong among students, educational administrators, and politicians as they were only a few years ago. Doubts about its usefulness for the individual and for society now exert a large influence on attitudes and decisions,” Professor Kirkendall concluded. “It seems unlikely that historians can destroy the influence of presentism, but they can reduce the anti-historical consequences of it by demonstrating the value of historical perspective and historical comparisons and the importance of a sense of time and place.”

Mr. Kirkendall is a temperate historian. My own academic discipline, at three universities, was modern history; and I am tempted to be intemperate about the grim phenomenon of what amounts to deliberate neglect, or positive exclusion, of history.

***

Consider the results in St. Louis, late last year, of testing a representative 122 high school students on their knowledge of basic American history, government, and world affairs. The test, a sound if simple one, was prepared by the Gallup organization and the National Municipal League. The passing score was supposed to be seventy out of one hundred questions. In fact, the average grade was 49.15. Only 22 students passed the St. Louis test; one hundred failed. Most of these students were graduating seniors.

Or consider the New York Times’ History Knowledge and Attitude Survey, conducted among 1,856 freshmen at 194 college campuses last year. Forty-four questions were asked. The average student in the sample answered correctly only 21 of these questions; the highest score by any student was 41. History department chairmen and social science coordinators in six cities were asked to evaluate this test. They estimated that a typical college-bound high school senior ought to be able to get a score of 70 percent. Actually, only one college freshman in 12 scored that high.

One of the liveliest historical writers of our time, Professor John Lukacs, has argued that we are entering upon an era when historical literature will supplant the novel and other forms of literary expression. Let us devoutly hope so; but as yet the signs of this are few.

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history, Hegel wrote. Perhaps that hard truth will revive our historical consciousness, after experience of adversity. I mean that when the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return, chastened men and women perceive afresh that they should have paid some attention to the record of human endeavor—which we call history.

T. S. Eliot remarked in a memorable lecture that we have been condemning the rising generation to a new form of provincialism: the provincialism of time, imprisoning people in their own little present moment. Eliot knew that aside from revelation our only source of humane knowledge is history, in the larger sense of that word. Only the past is knowable. The present is an evanescent film upon the deep well of the past; the future, diverting though it be to speculate about, is quite unknowable.

So if we cut off the rising generation from historical consciousness, we cut them off from knowledge generally. What can be done about this decay? Better historical writing and better historical teaching could help. I think of the advice of Disraeli, in Contarini Fleming: “Read no history, nothing but biography…” Disraeli meant that the historical concreteness of biography captures the imagination more readily than does historical abstraction. I tried something of the sort in some textbook work I did a few years ago for the Educational Research Council of America; but I have had few emulators.

However that may be, the modern unhistorical, or anti-historical, attitude is unique in the history of civilized man as a widespread social phenomenon. It seems to parallel the wide lack of interest in the question of the immortality of the soul. I suspect that people uninterested in the soul will forfeit their own souls; and that a people uninterested in history presently will cease to have a history, or to be a people.

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