BRIDGING MODERN HISTORY

Hawera Star, Volume LII, 19 November 1932, Page 11

BRIDGING MODERN HISTORY

Difficulties Confronting Students

J BEAD the other clay a lively essay by a bright young man, who took as his theme Lord Grey’s saying that “the nations must learn or perish,” and said, speaking for himself, that ho had far rather perish than learn (writes Mr J. A. 'Spender, the eminent English editor and publicist). It was, he said, just: the fun of life that everybody began again from the beginning and had a jolly time striking out new paths through the jungle. Fancy the boredom of treading the beaten track with doddering old men to keep your feet from straying!

It is an ill business to quench the spirit of youth, but I cannot think that we older ones are doing enough to pass on our experience to the generation which has most to learn from it. Not long ago I happened to be speaking to a gathering of fifty or sixty young men between the ages of 18 and 25, and I took as my theme certain landmarks in European history between the years 1871 and 1914. It was a very simple discourse about things familiar to older people, but when I had done, one after another of my audience told me that it was absolutely new to them. A few days later I happened to mention this to a friend, and he capped it by saying that he had just met a young lady, aged about 20, and quite well educated, who had told him that, though she was trying to learn history, she had “not yet reached the war,” but understood that it had something to do with Belgium.” The explanation is quite simple. This recent and most important history falls

within the blind spot of the rising generation. The history taught in schools anil universities stops somewhere about the end of the last century, and for all that happened since then until they were old enough to take an interest in current events most young people have had to rely on scraps and odds and ends picked up in talk with their elders. This, on looking backwards, I realise to have been my own plight when I was young.

History books in my schooldays ended with the Reform Bill in 1832, and of what happened between that time and the late ’seventies, when I began to taken an interest in politics, I knew practically nothing until I became aware of the gap and sat down to fill it. This mattered less when we were sailing on the smooth seas of ninteenth century politics, and one might be ignorant of what Lord Russell or Lord Palmerston did in the ’fifties and ’sixties and yet understand pretty clearly what Mr Gladstone was doing in the ’eighties.

But no one can understand what is going on now in the world without having some knowledge of what happened, say, between 1901 and 1914; and if there is such, a thing as learning from experience, the story of these years is vital. The questions now looming up raise all the old-issues, and there can be no serious judgment about them without knowledge of the recent past. Lectures and lessons on the events of these years ought to be part of the curriculum of schools and universities, and of all institutes for adult education.