As I delve more and more into the philosophy and practice of a Charlotte Mason education with my children, I can’t neglect the articles in the Parents’ Review. This monthly magazine edited by Charlotte Mason was sent to parents and teachers of her schools from about 1890 to 1920. So on weeks when I don’t have any other blogging inspiration I hope to share some thought-provoking quotations on the teaching of history from Parents’ Review articles.
Today’s passages are excerpted from “Instruction in History and Citizenship” by Professor S.S. Laurie, University of Edinburgh (Volume 11, 1900, pgs. 1-8, 69-77).
“Generally, we would say that we attain our ethical purpose in teaching history by connecting the life of the boy with the life of the past humanity of which he is the most recent outcome. Thus we make it possible for him to become a “being of large discourse looking before and after”; for the afterlook brings with it the forward look. We prolong his experience and his life thereby. Instead of three-score years and ten, he lives thousands of years. All the past of man’s life pours into him, and he reaches forward also into the future of the race.”
“The supreme purpose, then, which we have in view in teaching school history is, I hold, the enriching of the humanity of the pupil with a view to an ethical result in life and character.“
“In educating the boy to nationality and patriotism, we do not mean for him to stop short at this; but we may be assured that the vague and watered cosmopolitanism which some affect can be genuine only in so far as it rests on a patriotic national feeling. If we do not love those of our own household, the less we talk about loving Humanity with a big h the better. It is in respecting ourselves that we respect others. The youth of the country, then, must grow up in a knowledge of their own national record of arts and arms just as they must grow up in and through their own tongue and their own literature; and this they must do, if they are intelligently and sympathetically to comprehend the life of other nations, past or contemporary. Education fails to attain its moral and civic ends if it does not connect a boy with his own national antecedents and all that has made him and the present possible, and it equally fails to attain the ends of culture in its larger sense.”
“But while this is our first aim; we must never lose sight of our supreme purpose–the enriching of the humanity of the pupil with a view to an ethical result in him as a member of the human race.”
