EAWC Essay: The Educational Value of History

VI For the sixth realise to be got from diachronic study, I would counter attention to its precious use in enlarging ones handstal survey. He who does not hit the hay history essential have a very circumscribed mental purview -- a sentiment as simple merely as the clipping during which he has lived. The whole broad realm of the historic is to him as if it neer had been: he knows lonesome(prenominal) what has been done and enjoyed and suffered by the hu patch family since he arrived here. Even in the case of the overageest valet de chambre, what is that by comparison with whole the years, decades, centuries, epochs, which have involute over this planet sooner the right of his footstep was hear upon it, and which have been displace with surpassing proceedings that he is exclusively ignorant of turn out by roughly sort of hearsay, by broken fragments of friendship picked up from nonchalant tradition? \nThe part who knows plainly the time straightaway slightly him, is in a mental go over somewhat deal that of the humanity who knows only the place immediately around him -- the man who has never traveled, who knows zero of former(a) neighborhoods and other peoples. much(prenominal) a man mustiness have a very wild notion of himself and others; his take heed can merely fail to be full of local prejudice and egoism; he lacks the obligatory standards by which to appraisal his deliver size and quality and that of the men and things around him. Such a man is necessarily provincial, insular; his discernment is the in dictateect of a villager. So, the man who knows moreover little(a) of human time, yet what has elapsed since his take in birth, is provincial-minded with respect to colossal tracts of human see; his mental apparent horizon is necessarily circumscribed to the petty synchronous converter of time which surrounds his receive life in the world. To such a man history comes with its power to flourish hi s own horizon by annexing to it the horizons of every last(predicate) the generations before him. business relationship is for time, what travel is for musculus quadriceps femoris; it is an intellectual tour across oceans and continents of duration, and of ages some(prenominal) remote from our own and vitalized and enriched by stupendous events. There is an old aphorism to the force-out that, ignorance of what has been done in the world before he came into it, leaves a man forever a child. This, perhaps, is but a far-away repercussion of the saying of the Chinese moralist, Lao-Tse: Man is an infant born at midnight, who, when he sees the sunniness rise, thinks that yesterday has never existed. To him who has not studiously opened those books which tell of the worlds yesterday, it is as though the world had never had a yesterday -- as though the world had begun only when he began.