Rootless

Is the study of the past getting to be a thing of the past? One man who thinks so is Historian George Barr Carson Jr. of the University of Chicago. If the present trend in U.S. education persists, says he, in the current American Association of University Professors' Bulletin, the study of history may very well disappear completely under the new academic preoccupation with "contemporary living . . .

"Ancient history is a luxury only reluctantly afforded . . . Medieval history is only better off by degree. Both, to be sure, have had the ground cut from under them by the failure of the lower schools to provide sufficient students with the necessary classical background. The university itself may be blamed in part; faced with the fact that the lower schools had fallen under the administration of a faction that regarded such disciplined studies as languages to be a waste of time and unnecessary for contemporary living, the university had either to drop its requirements or not to admit students."

Even a bigger threat to history, says Carson, is the growing preoccupation with the present, fostered largely by the social sciences. "The teaching of history before the first world war has been indicted for . . . not keeping the subject matter up to date. The history student of 1910 ended his study of history with the Franco-Prussian War, or thereabouts ... As a consequence, we are told, the generation in 1914 was badly prepared for the social cataclysm of the war.

"After 1918 the trend was reversed. More and more the emphasis . . . was placed on the contemporary scene . . . Since the second world war, it has become the fashion in survey courses to begin at about 1500 A.D. if the institution is conservative, and 1918 if it is not, with a quick flashback to 1917 in order to include the Bolshevik revolution ... If this trend is carried to its logical conclusion we shall indeed not have history in the curriculum, but only social studies which, with luck, will be contemporary civilization, and at worst, predictions of things to come based on statistics of things happening.

"The teaching of history which degenerates to this point will bear quite as heavy a burden of guilt in failing to prepare new generations for the future as did that before 1914. We shall have still more generations whose efforts to rebuild society may be compared to an attempt at scientific study of the English language without a knowledge of Latin ... rootless."

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