HISTORY IN THE SCHOOLS

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 30 March 1925, Page 4

HISTORY IN THE SCHOOLS

Presumably the “preliminary findings’’ of the Minister’s special committee on the teaching of history in the primary schools, (which, we publish. to T day) embody its main decisions. Any subsequent report, may he- expected, to enlarge the ideas, now set forth, and possibly to suggest plans of teaching. In the meantime both. Sir James Parr and the members of the committee are to be congratulated on a particularly sound analysis of the present need. AVhen it remarks that the aim of history teaching is In the present, the committee, supplies the key co the whole position. The great purpose in studying history is that we may apply its lessons in onr own lives, that we may be inspired: by its example to plan, and to. work for "hose to whom, the story of ou.r day will be history. Typical of the historical ideas that most of us carry away from the primary school are recollections' that Henry VJTT. had seven wives, that Charles -I. had his head chopped off, and that Blwcher arrived late on the field of AYaterloo. Those are quite interesting little tit-bits; nut. they do not convey* any very connected idea of the progress of our race and civilisation, they are. not of particular value in, equipping us for the duties of citizenship. If the committee’s ideas can be. carried into, effect, if the “immense progress, of human, society - ’ can be made the central theme of history teaching For the future, the change cannot, hut reveal itself in the further progress of our own community. It is a wise realisation, ton, that the average hoy or girl is above, all a. "liernworshipper, and that to speak to either of abstract “movements’’ would be valueless. But there, are men. typical of every movement, men who have embodied the spirit of their age, and it <s in the study of their lives that we may glean, from the -struggles and the triumphs and the failures of the storied past, that which, is to breathe a noble purpose into the lives of every one of us in this present.