Recent years have seen a move towards making more use of primary sources
and documents in the teaching of history. The emphasis on historical
skills, on teaching a few topics in depth, on organizing history around
issues and problems, the example of Britain's History 13-16 Project
and of the national history standards in the United States - all these
developments have put the study of primary sources at the centre of
history teaching. Indeed, in some jurisdictions the use of primary
sources is stipulated by examinations and curricula, most notably
in Britain, where it is now common for examinations to include an
"unseen" documents-based question that students must answer.
As a result, there are now some useful handbooks on these of documents
available from British publishers (Fines, 1988; Andreeti, 1993).
In one sense, of course, the idea of using documents is not all that
new. We are all familiar with the Jackdaw kits that have been around
for more than thirty years now, not to mention assorted other portfolio
and facsimile packages. Some thirty years ago, Edwin Fenton produced
an American history text, containing nothing but documents. The late
1960s Canadian history textbook, Challenge and Survival, integrated
documentary excerpts into its narrative, a practice which has been
imitated many times since then. There are many collections of documents
available, as well as a wide variety of visual sources of which the
best known is probably Canada's Visual History but it is far
from alone.
Back in 1960 I came out of my British university and teacher training
convinced that primary sources were the very essence of history, and
that no-one could be called a student of history who did not have
at least an awareness of the centrality of sources. I thought of my
approach to teaching history as "teaching against the textbook"
and to do this properly sources were essential. I learned from experience
that it can be very refreshing for students to be confronted with
the realization that the textbook might be wrong, or at least one-sided,
and to ponder the question of just how and why what appeared in the
textbook did in fact get to appear there. Did Dollard set out to save
Montreal at the Long Sault? Was Frontenac a hero? Was Phillip II of
Spain a religious fanatic or a dynastic schemer, or both, and does
this kind of dichotomy between politics and religion even make sense
in a sixteenth century context? Was Peter the Great really great,
and what are the criteria of greatness anyway? Was my old tutor, A.J.P.
Taylor, right to say that the First World War was caused by railway
timetables? How do we know anything about what happened in the past
and why should we believe those people who claim to know something
about it? Questions like these, and history is full of them, were
my bread and butter, and sources, both primary and secondary, were
my tools, though I did not then realize that Fred Morrow Fling of
the University of Nebraska had trod this same ground a century ago
(Fling, 1909).
In high school in England I had been taught well, but my history
teachers said nothing about sources or even about historiography.
They saw their job as giving us a good grounding in the facts (there
were no arguments about what constituted a "fact" in my
positivistic schooling, despite the questioning of Charles Beard,
Carl Becker and other historians a generation or more earlier), preparing
us for national exams, and making history as interesting as possible.
I spent my last two and a half years of high school, for example,
following the English custom of specialization, taking only three
subjects: English literature, French, and history. And in history
I took only modern Europe from 1648 to 1870 and Britain from 1603
to 1714. This meant, in effect, that I took history for almost two
days a week for two and a half years in a small class of about ten
students, which made possible a fairly intensive study. Even so, I
was taught nothing about the vigorous and sometimes downright vicious
historiographical controversies that were then raging. Christopher
Hill's Marxist interpretation of the English Civil War, the rise (or
fall) of the gentry, Hugh Trevor-Roper's savage attack on Lawrence
Stone - these and other such disputes were a closed book to me until
I reached university, even though they were being fought out at the
very time I was studying seventeenth century British history in high
school.
University introduced me to a very different kind of history, one
that posed questions rather than imposed answers, and questions that
usually had no simple answer. One of the very first essays that was
assigned me at Oxford, where the custom was not to attend lectures,
but to write an essay a week and read it aloud to one's tutor so that
it served as the basis of an hour's discussion, was whether it was
possible to write a coherent account of the Anglo-Saxon invasions
of Britain. Here was a very different approach from what I had known
at school: not to write an account of historical events but to ascertain
whether such an account was even possible and, if so, on what basis
and using what evidence. Over the course of the next three years,
I grew accustomed to history-as-questions: Who or what defeated Napoleon?
Was the Model Parliament of 1295 either a model or a parliament? Was
the Glorious Revolution of 1688 either glorious or a revolution? Was
the eighteenth century diplomatic revolution really revolutionary?
And since one of my tutors was A.J.P. Taylor, who thrived on public
controversy, as in the case of his book on the origins of the Second
World War, with its notorious thesis that the war began because Hitler
launched "on 29 August a diplomatic manoeuvre which he ought
to have launched on 28 August," it did not take long to find
out that history meant argument, debate, interpretation, though always
with a healthy respect for evidence.
As part of the Oxford history degree, everyone had to take a special
subject spread over two terms, which involved an intensive study of
a narrowly defined topic based on documents. I chose British colonial
developments 1774-1834. The only limitation of the course was that
the documents we studied were all in printed collections, so that
there was no actual archival experience, no working with original
materials first hand. That came during my teacher training year at
Birmingham University where one of the academic requirements was to
write a sort of minor thesis. I knew that in the 1860s and 1870s Birmingham
had been the headquarters of an organization called the National Education
League, a group of radical-liberals pushing for national, compulsory
and secular education that also had a major impact on the fortunes
of the Liberal party of its day. I discovered that Birmingham Public
Library held many of the records of the League, and though I could
not get at all the papers I needed, I had enough to do a respectable
job of investigating the League as an educational pressure group.
The result was that I spent much of my teacher training year happily
pursuing a piece of historical research using original documents on
a topic that, so far as I knew, had not then been researched by anyone
else. Only recently did I discover that, once again, Fred Morrow Fling
of the University of Nebraska was a hundred years ahead of me, with
his belief that no-one should teach history until they had done some
kind of genuinely original research using primary sources.
Outside university, I had enrolled in a local history group in my
home town, Coventry. Coventry is these days best known for the wartime
bombing and its modern Cathedral and perhaps Lady Godiva but it is
an old town, and in the Middle Ages was one of England's leading urban
centres. The group I joined was studying what happened in Coventry
during the plague of 1349, the so-called Black Death. Our task was
to undertake a house-to-house survey of property ownership to find
out just what happened to whom at that time. What we found was that
as the plague approached the city from the south, a minor panic set
in and people who could afford it sold up and moved out of the city
to escape the plague- which gave one of the local guilds plenty of
opportunity to buy up property on the cheap and, presumably, emerge
from the plague (a guild was a corporate entity, after all, and so
could not die, unlike its individual members) substantially richer
and more powerful. The work involved reading medieval Latin and handwriting
and some small familiarity with legal terms, writing conventions,
and the like, but this was relatively straightforward, and was amply
repaid by the sheer excitement of looking at records that went back
some six centuries and often referred to streets that had the same
names then as now.
As a result of such experiences, when I arrived in Winnipeg in 1961,
I was determined to incorporate documentary sources into my teaching.
During my teacher-training in England I had accidentally stumbled
across a book that had been published in 1910, M.W. Keatinge's Studies
in the Teaching of History. Despite its uninformative title, the
book is in large part an extended argument, replete with practical
examples, for the use of documents in teaching history. Keatinge's
concern was to make history "scientific," to give it the
intellectual rigour and academic respectability that would save it
from the taunts of those who saw it as little more than a branch of
literature, or as a mickey-mouse subject that needed only a capacity
for memory. As Keatinge put it, "The question to be answered
is this: 'How can history be made into a real training school for
the mind, worthy of no inconsiderable place in the curriculum in schools
where the classics are taught, and of a large place in modern schools
and on modern sides where little or no classics are taught?"
(Keatinge, 1910: 38). His answer was that scientific history depended
on the close study of sources and that students were perfectly capable
of doing this, and his book was his attempt to show how it could be
done.
When I first discovered the book in an English used-book store I
saw it as an interesting oddity. With all the arrogance of the young,
who are inclined to believe that they are discovering things that
no-one ever knew before, I thought that using documents in the classroom
was a new idea, the cutting edge of modern pedagogy. That Keatinge
had been there fifty years earlier was interesting but not especially
significant. He was simply a man ahead of his time. When I arrived
in Winnipeg in 1961 I quickly became a frequenter of anywhere that
sold cheap, used books and I was mildly intrigued to find copies of
Keatinge's book appearing on their shelves from time to time but I
did not think anything of it. Only recently did I discover that it
was in fact used as a text in the Manitoba Normal School through the
1920s and into the 1930s, so that by the 1960s, as that generation
of teachers retired or died, their books appeared with increasing
frequency in the second-hand bookstores and thrift shops. In any event,
back in the 1920s Manitoba teachers were getting some training in,
or at least some acquaintance with, the use of sources in the classroom.
In fact, as I have discovered only in the last few years, between
the 1890s and the 1920s historians and educationists agreed that the
use of sources was a crucial element of progressive history teaching.
Keatinge, it turned out, was not ahead of his time in 1910, but very
much of it. As the influential Columbia University historian, James
Harvey Robinson, put it in 1904: "No improvement in the methods
of history instruction in our high schools and colleges bids fair
to produce better results than the plan of bringing the student into
contact with the first hand accounts of events, or, as they are technically
termed, the primary sources" (Robinson, 1904, Vol. 1: 4). Robinson
wrote these words in 1904 but they represented something he had been
saying, and practising, for at least ten years before that.
Robinson was not alone and by the early 1900s source-books, designed
specifically for classroom use, were fairly widely available in many
fields of history. In the words of one such Canadian book, published
in 1913: "Experience has conclusively shown that such apparatus
is a valuable - nay, an indispensable- adjunct to the history lesson"
(Munro, 1913:v). This enthusiasm for using sources explains why other
finds on the used-book shelves in Winnipeg back in the 1960s included
William Stearns Davis's, published in 1912, and Arthur O. Norton's
Readings in the History of Education: Mediaeval Universities,
published in 1909. Both typify the substantial boom in the publication
of source-books that took place in the early 1900s. One can only assume
that publishers were responding to public demand. And, presumably,
someone in Winnipeg was buying them, and even reading them, to judge
by my copy of Norton's book, which is full of underlinings and annotations.
In fact, as I later discovered, it was, like Keatinge, used as a text
in the Normal School.
In addition, by the early 1900s most methods books on the teaching
of history also recommended some use of sources in the classroom.
A book that still shows up from time to time is Henry Johnson's Teaching
of History in Elementary and Secondary Schools which was published
in 1915 and went through many subsequent editions. Johnson taught
at Teachers College, Columbia, and was a frequent and outspoken participant
in the debates over history teaching that took place during these
early years. He was not as fervent a supporter of the use of sources
as some of his contemporaries but he certainly saw a place for them
even in the elementary classroom, and argued strongly that students
should acquire at least a basic understanding of "the historical
method," for which sources, both primary and secondary were essential.
By the early 1900s it had become conventional wisdom that good history
teaching involved some use of primary sources and documents. In 1893
an American committee on history teaching recommended some use of
sources in the research-oriented history course it proposed for the
final year of high school. In 1896 a conference at Columbia University
reaffirmed that it was reasonable to expect some familiarity with
sources from students entering university. The 1898 report of the
American Historical Association's Committee of Seven on teaching history
in secondary schools, though it did not endorse what it called the
"source method" for schools, which it defined as teaching
exclusively from primary sources, nonetheless recommended the use
of sources for illustration and interest and for occasional exercises
in criticism and analysis. In 1902 a committee of the New England
History Teachers' Association, especially appointed to consider the
use of sources in teaching, reported to the same effect: "We
believe that the study of history is greatly deepened and enriched
by a judicious use of original material; that a greater sense of the
reality of the past and a wider use of mind result; that from the
greater robustness and individuality of the study a deeper and more
permanent interest in it is most likely to ensue" (Hazen et al.,
1902: 16). Writing in 1907, Fred Morrow Fling, who criticized the
1898 AHA Report's endorsement of sources as too cautious, observed
that the fifteen year old debate on whether to use sources in teaching
history had been won; the question now, he continued, was not whether
to use sources, but how (Fling, 1907: iii). An American book reviewer
noted in passing in 1910: "It is now generally conceded that
the teaching of history may be deepened through the judicious use
of source material" (James, 1910: 676). A few years later, in
1915, the University of Minnesota's August Krey listed sourcebooks,
together with maps, pictures and other aids, as one of the "essential
factors" in effective history teaching (Krey, 1915: 11).
Across the Atlantic, French historians were making much the same
point. Charles Langlois at the Sorbonne even suggested in 1908 that
the publication of sources might provide a better service to the general
public than the writing of conventional histories: "I am more
and more persuaded that the best method of communicating to the public
the truly assimilable results of our research is not to write history
books, it is to present the documents themselves.... The true role
of the historian is to put the people of today in contact with the
original documents that are the traces left by the people of yesterday,
without mixing anything of himself in them" (Keylor, 1975: 178).
In England, 1910 saw the publication of Keatinge's book on teaching
history with its endorsement of the use of sources in the classroom.
One of the most ardent advocates of the use of sources in the classroom
was Fred Morrow Fling, a history professor at the University of Nebraska.
In Fling's version of what was called the "source method"
students learned history directly from the sources, albeit in a way
that was adapted and suited to their age and immaturity. He criticized
most printed source collections for being no more than supplementary
readings designed to accompany and add interest to a textbook, designed
for teachers' rather than students' use. What was needed instead,
according to Fling, were carefully designed exercises in which students
would have to compare different accounts of the same subject in order
to arrive at the truth, or at least at the greatest degree of probability.
The net result, he argued, would be to open students' eyes "to
the meaning of proof in history, to create an attitude of healthy
scepticism and to put into their hands an instrument for getting at
the truth that they will have occasion to use every hour of the day"
(Fling, 1909: 207).
Most of his contemporaries thought that Fling went too far. They
favoured a limited use of sources, primarily for illustration but
also for some elementary and limited work in critical analysis, and
always as supplementary to a textbook. As the American Historical
Association recommended in 1898: "The use of sources which we
advocate is, therefore, a limited contact with a limited body of materials,
an examination of which may show the child the nature of the historical
process, and at the same time may make the people and events of bygone
times more real to him" (AHA, 1899: 104). Most historians believed
that the goal of history teaching in schools had to be the transmission
of knowledge, not training in method. As Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard
put it in 1896, "Of the three offices of sources in teaching-
furnishing material, furnishing illustration, and giving insight into
the spirit of the times - all are important. It is not to be expected
that any but the most highly trained specialist will found all or
his chief knowledge of history on sources; but parts of the field
may thus be underlaid by actual contact with the material" (Hart,
1896, Vol. 1: 18). The New England History Teachers Association agreed,
declaring in their 1902 Report (of which Hart was a co-author) that,
in schools, the use of sources, while important and necessary, "must
be limited, and be strictly subordinate to that of texts" (Hazen
et al., 1902: 7).
Such critics saw Fling as wanting to eliminate textbooks entirely
and replace them with source-work, as emphasizing "method"
at the expense of "matter." He denied the first charge but
affirmed the second. Yes, he argued, method was more important than
matter, and at least some topics in a course should be taught entirely
through sources. He advised teachers to find examples where textbooks
disagreed with each other, so that they could use them to provoke
students into wondering which was correct and how they might find
out, thus learning valuable lessons about historical method while
also dethroning textbooks from their spurious position as voices of
historical authority. Fling agreed with his critics that source-work
could make history more interesting and reveal to students something
of the otherness of the past. But this, he continued, was not enough.
To learn history must mean learning to understand and use the historical
method.
As for the argument that children and adolescents could not handle
source-work, Fling simply denied it. Properly structured and carefully
taught, he insisted, as in his own sourcebooks, source-work was perfectly
practicable in the school classroom (Fling, 1907, 1913). Throughout
his university career at the University of Nebraska, which lasted
from 1891 to his death in 1934, he insisted that no-one really knew
what students might be capable of, since "most pupils have never
had a chance to show what they could do. There is an abundance of
evidence," he declared, "to prove that the scepticism of
college instructors concerning the inability of pupils in the secondary
schools to study sources critically is not founded on fact" (Fling,
1919: 507). Students could work at this kind of level, however, only
if they studied sources intensively and according to a particular
methodology, as in Fling's own "Nebraska method" (Fling,
1899).
Historians like Fling, Keatinge, Hart, and Robinson, whatever their
differences, emphasized the value of sources for producing in students
a sort of constructive scepticism, while also familiarizing them with
the nature of history as a discipline. As the New England History
Teachers Association observed, "Skepticism, not belief, should
be the attitude of mind that the use of sources should arouse"
(Hazen et al., 1902: 13). To work with sources was to reduce one's
reliance on textbooks, or in Fling's case to demolish their authority.
Textbooks were usually written at several removes from the sources
and failed to make clear the nature of their evidence and how they
used it, and to begin to think and question. They reduced history
to a memory subject. As Robinson put it in 1904: "When we get
at the sources themselves we no longer merely read and memorize; we
begin to consider what may be safely inferred from the statements
before us and so develop the all important faculty of criticism. We
are not simply accumulating facts but are attempting to determine
their true nature and meaning" (Robinson, 1904, Vol.1: 6).
Historians emphasized that this ability to question evidence, to
realize its limitations and assess its reliability, to take stock
of varied and conflicting points of view, was not only an essential
part of the historical outlook, but was also vitally important in
everyday life, especially in a democracy where informed public debate
was supposed to be the foundation of the political process. To quote
Robinson again, this time from 1902: "By cultivating sympathy
and impartiality in dealing with the past we may hope to reach a point
where we can view the past coolly and temperately. In this way really
thoughtful historical study serves to develop the very fundamental
virtues of sympathy, fairness, and caution in forming our judgments"
(Robinson, 1902,Vol. 1: 14). As another sourcebook writer put it a
few years later, the study of sources "helps plant in the student's
mind the conception of fairness and impartiality in judging historical
characters ...." (Ogg, 1907: 11) Indeed, this was what made source-work
so educationally valuable, beyond anything it taught about the nature
of historical inquiry: "So far as practicable the student of
history, from the age of fourteen and onwards, should be encouraged
to develop the critical or judicial temperament along with the purely
acquisitive" (Ogg, 1907: 11).
In addition, Robinson was convinced that the proper use of carefully
selected sources would reduce teachers' reliance on the exotic and
the sensational to pique students' curiosity. As a proponent of what
was then called the "New History," Robinson attacked the
traditional portrayal of history as the actions of great men (and
a few women) and the story of great events. Such an approach, he argued,
misrepresented history by turning it into a series of headlines, a
sort of museum of the bizarre, an old-style cabinet of curiosities.
"There is," he wrote in 1912, "a kind of history which
does not concern itself with the normal conduct and serious achievements
of mankind in the past, but, like melodrama, purposely selects the
picturesque and lurid as its theme." Rather, he insisted, in
some ways anticipating the annalistes in his dismissal of history
as the record of events, history should emphasize the mundane and
the everyday, the daily routines that shaped people's lives, the structures
that conditioned their thoughts and actions, "the ways in which
people have thought and acted in the past, their tastes and their
achievements in many fields besides the political." Such a history,
he insisted, when properly understood, was just as dramatic as, and
far more informative than, any depiction of history as "a chronicle
of heroic persons and romantic occurrences" (Robinson, 1912:
9 & 15).
The whole point of history, as Robinson understood it, was "to
help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and
prospects of mankind." And a necessary way to do this was to
use history first to understand the past and then to transcend it.
"The present," he wrote, "has hitherto been the willing
victim of the past; the time has now come when it should turn on the
past and exploit it in the interests of advance" (Robinson, 1912:
17& 24). For the kind of social history of everyday life that
Robinson favoured, sources were ideal: "Every line gives some
hint of the period in which the author lived and makes an impression
on us which volumes of second-hand accounts can never produce"
(Robinson, 1902, Vol. 1: 13).
Moreover, primary sources were inherently interesting, "often
more vivid and entertaining than even the most striking descriptions
by the pen of gifted writers like Gibbon or Macaulay" (Robinson,
1904, Vol. 1: 5). Fling agreed, arguing that sources were more interesting
and certainly more worthwhile than any historical novel, and holding
out ambitious hopes for the impact of source-work in ancient history:
"If this work is properly done, it may not be difficult to induce
the pupil to read a play of Sophocles, the whole of the Iliad,
a book or two of Herodotus, the whole of Thucydides, several speeches
of Demosthenes, some of the Lives of Plutarch, and even the
Apology of Plato, in place of less valuable reading. An enthusiastic
teacher, one who loves these things himself and is able to communicate
his enthusiasm to his pupils, will accomplish something that is really
worth while, even with young pupils." (Fling, 1907: iv). For
all his emphasis on "method," Fling was obviously no enemy
of "matter."
For Fling, Robinson, and their colleagues, the greatest crime a history
teacher could commit was to make history dull. They were convinced
that the use of sources in the classroom would not only make history
more scholarly, it would make it more interesting. Not the least of
the attractions of sources was their ability to convey "atmosphere,"
to use a favourite word of the time. Far more than any textbook, sources
had the power to bring the past to life while at the same time showing
how different it was from the present. As Keatinge put it, documents
were valuable for "giving atmosphere and stimulating the imagination"
(Keatinge, 1910: 26). For Robinson the sheer dramatic power of the
eye-witness account and the contemporary record could never be overestimated:
"It makes no great impression upon us to be told that the scholars
of Dante's time had begun to be interested once more in the books
of the Greeks and Romans; but no one can forget Dante's own poetic
account of his kindly reception in the lower regions by souls of the
ancient writers whom he revered-Virgil, Homer, Ovid, Horace-people
'with eyes slow and grave, of great authority in their looks,' who
'spake seldom and with soft voices'" (Robinson, 1902, Vol. 1:
13). Fling similarly believed in the evocative power of sources, arguing
in the case of ancient history that, properly taught, they lead the
pupil "to feel the old Greek masters speaking to him out of poem
or speech, statue or temple" (Fling,1907: iv). So strongly did
Fling feel on this point, that, for all his insistence on the critical
analysis of sources, he also recommended that some sources, such as
Pericles' Funeral Oration for instance, should be read aloud, memorized,
and recited.
A few years ago John Fines, perhaps the leading proponent of the
use of sources in England in recent years, added a new element to
this argument. He described how as a young teacher facing some recalcitrant
students, he decided to "punish" them, three at a time,
by making them stay after school to help him with the historical research
he was doing for his doctoral thesis on fifteenth century heresy trials.
As Fines describes it, "That would teach them a thing or two
- after an hour sorting out my card indexes and taking down Latin
at dictation as I read from microfilm, they would trot home and reflect
mightily on their sins." Such, at least, was the theory. In practice,
things worked out very differently. Fines reports that after two or
three days of this "punishment" he had twenty students asking
to "join the club." He ended up, he says, with a paradox:
"I taught History from 9 to 4 that satisfied no-one (least of
all myself) and from 4 to 6 there were shoals of boys helping me deal
with materials that should by any definition have been way above their
heads." His explanation speaks volumes about the power of working
with sources and about how we might teach history:
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Slowly I began to realize that the boys were interested in the process
of the subject - they wanted to see someone who was doing history,
not just telling them about it (perhaps only in woodwork and art did
they get a chance at a similar experience of seeing their teacher
doing his subject), but more importantly what was happening in the
daytime was superficial, lacked the guts of real life, whilst the
depth study of the after-school session, baffling as it might be,
satisfied the lust for real knowing. Slowly, as time went by, I began
to realize also that when we were working on those documents in the
evening we were working at the right sort of pace, slowly, deeply
and really. In the daytime we were just skimming the surface, turning
a page and letting forty years pass as if it didn't matter. In the
document work everything mattered, for accuracy was obviously necessary
when everything might be a clue (Fines, 1988: 318).
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A hundred years ago Robinson tried to demonstrate how documents generated
their own interest. Some of his collections of source-materials differed
from those of his contemporaries. Most of them were content to produce
compilations of documents, selected by various criteria of accessibility,
readability, interest, and informative power. They were designed above
all else as pedagogical tools, to be used in the classroom and the
study but rarely to be read for pleasure. More often than not, they
were designed as supplementary reading for use with textbooks. Robinson
produced books like this, and indeed was able to retire on the proceeds
of his textbooks and supplementary source-collections, but he also
produced some very different source-books, designed not as compilations
of sources but as flowing narratives in their own right, in which
the sources formed the core of the story, but were surrounded by introductory
remarks, transitional explanations and linkages, and contextual commentary.
They were designed to be read rather than used, to be enjoyed rather
than analyzed, as in the case of his life of Petrarch which appeared
in 1898. Others, notably Fling and those who followed his example,
produced collections of sources that, while they were designed to
be interesting, were primarily intended to provide materials upon
which students could sharpen their powers of critical analysis and
learn to employ "historical method" (Fling, 1899, 1907;
Ogg, 1907). Such, for example, was the series entitled Parallel
Source Problems, which appeared between 1912 and 1918, where each
volume took a limited number of "problems" (what actually
happened at Charlemagne's coronation or at the battle of Lexington,
for example), supplied a selection of sources and commentary all accompanied
by exercises and questions requiring students to analyze the selected
documents and produce their own historical narratives based on them
(Duncalf & Krey, 1912; Fling, 1913; White& Notestein, 1915;
McLaughlin et al., 1918).
It seems that Canadian historians and educationists never totally
shared the enthusiasm of their American and European colleagues, perhaps
because the academic study and professional organization of history
in Canada in the early 1900s lagged behind the progress achieved elsewhere.
With so few historians in its universities, Canada lacked the critical
mass needed to spark any kind of pedagogical campaign. Insofar as
they had any time to spare for schools, Canadian historians' priorities
were more concerned with the state of curricula and textbooks, with
the basic historical preparation of teachers, with the conduct of
examinations, not with innovative teaching methods. It was not that
they opposed the use of sources, but that they had more pressing things
to think about. In 1899 Charles Colby, a McGill historian published
a collection of sources in British history, while George Wrong of
the University of Toronto supervised the production of scholarly editions
of source materials, as did other Canadian historians. Little was
done, however, to link this work with the schools, presumably because
of lack of time and resources.
Normal Schools did something to fill the gap. They introduced their
history students to the value of sources in the study and teaching
of history. The Manitoba Normal School, for example, used Keatinge's
book as a text as well as using source-books in courses in the history
of education. During the 1920s Normal School students in Manitoba
also had to use a classic work of historical method, Langlois and
Seignobos' Study of History, which first appeared in English
translation in 1898,and which had a good deal to say about the nature
of historical evidence and the analysis of documents. Thus, student-teachers,
at least those of them who were graduate history specialists, must
have been aware of the potential of using documents in the classroom.
The difficulty is to know what, if anything, they actually did once
they were teaching. It seems likely that, at best, Canadian teachers
used sources for anecdote and illustration but never used them in
any systematic way. In the early 1970s, for example, I was moved to
a new classroom in the Winnipeg high school where I was then teaching
and found a variety of treasures in its cupboards. One of them was
a multi-volume set of documents in British history published in the
1910s which had been authorized for use in Manitoba schools in the
1920s. Almost fifty years later the books were still in pristine condition,
showing no sign of ever having been used.
In Canada, as elsewhere, despite the rolling wave of enthusiasm for
the use of sources in teaching between 1890 and 1920, most teachers
remained unpersuaded. Though Fling (1919: 507) denied it, it is difficult
to escape the impression that in some ways sources became something
of a fad in these years, one of those passing bandwagons to which
education is prone to succumb. One historian, himself co-author of
a sourcebook, surveyed the teaching of history in 1915 and remarked
that teachers were too easily led astray by the glamour of "devices,"
at the expense of "matter." He argued that too heavy a reliance
on devices, which he saw as including source-work, led to students
with "a smattering of information" but "only a superficial
knowledge of the history for the study of which they have enrolled"
(Krey, 1915:10). He concluded that "few causes have operated
more drastically to impair the efficiency of history teaching in the
past five years than this confusion of device and matter" (Krey,
1915: 10). In 1918, a British teacher referred to the use of sources
as a "fever," observing that "The victims of the source
book fever have passed through the more acute stages and (he spoke
feelingly as a convalescent) most realised that they were personally
better for the attack, but that it was more advantageous to take it
in small doses, on the analogy of smallpox and vaccination" (History,
1918: 21). Asked to survey the use of sources in schools in 1919,
Fling concluded that though sources were here to stay, only a minority
of teachers actually used them (Fling, 1919). Many teachers were not
familiar enough with history as a discipline to feel comfortable working
with sources. As a 1923 report put it: "In history therefore
few teachers except those employed as specialists in the larger High
Schools and Collegiate Institutes are likely to have any idea of what
the writing of history implies" (National Council of Education,
1923: 14). Reports on the state of history in American schools in
the 1920s made no mention of the use of sources, describing recitation
and lecture as the most commonly used teaching methods, with a minority
of classrooms also using various "project" methods (Brown,1929;
Kimmel, 1929). Overwhelmingly, the emphasis was on the coverage of
facts and the teaching of "citizenship," not training in
methods. As one observer concluded in 1926: "Whatever mind to
desert the teaching of facts there may be among experimenters, none
appears in the official guides given to teachers" (Morehouse,
1926: 118).
In the small rural schools that constituted the norm of schooling
in these years, teachers faced working conditions that made the use
of sources next to impossible, even had they been inclined to use
them. In the words of a 1923 Canadian report, they faced "a hopeless
task" (National Council of Education,1923: 14). Shifting attendance,
lack of preparation time, minimal training, unsympathetic school boards,
language difficulties, lack of resources, crowded curricula, pressure
to stick to the textbook and cover the course - these and other problems
made any use of sources seem like a Utopian dream. As a Manitoba teacher
complained in 1923: "Very little effort is made to deal with
the practical difficulties with which every teacher has to cope. Overcrowded
classes, mixed grades, lack of equipment- all these are ignored, and
young teachers, their minds crammed with vague generalities and idealistic
twaddle, find themselves helpless and discouraged when they try to
practice, under the grim reality of actual conditions, what has been
preached to them from the clouds" (Bulletin of the Manitoba Teachers
Federation, 22, April 15, 1923: 353-6).
In any case, Canadian teachers, unlike their British And American
counterparts, had few sources at their disposal. So far as I can ascertain,
there was in these years only one sourcebook in Canadian history,
compiled by a history professor at the University of Edinburgh and
produced by a British publisher as part of a series of English history
source books. It was James Munro's Canada (1535-Present Day)
and it was published in 1913, but it seems to have had little impact
on the classroom. There were a few specialized collections of sources
in economic and constitutional history; the publications of the Champlain
Society; and other such works, but they were intended for academics
rather than for schools. The 1930s saw the publication of a few sourcebooks
in general history (see Phillips, 1938, for example) and George Brown
of the University of Toronto published a Canadian history sourcebook
for high school use in 1940 but the publication of collections of
documents intended for more general use had to wait until the1960s,
spearheaded in Quebec by Trudel and Frégault's Histoire
du Canada par les textes in 1952 and in English-speaking Canada
by McNaught and Reid's Source Book of Canadian History which
appeared in 1959.
Even in city schools with subject-specialist teachers the demands
of external examinations and the subsequent need to cover the course
and therefore stick to the textbook meant that teachers had neither
the time nor the incentive to use sources. In 1923 a University of
Toronto historian criticized what he called "the cast-iron examination
system, by which pupils are more often than not encouraged to memorize
verbally large sections of a text which they do not understand and
in which they are quite uninterested." He called for provincial
departments of education to "see to it that the tests prescribed
are such as to display the ability of pupils for organized thought
and expression. Otherwise they bring the whole examination system
into disrepute, and expose themselves to the attacks of the educational
anarchists" (National Council of Education, 1923: 14). Here,
one might think, was an opportunity to develop source-based examinations
and in the 1930s Britain experimented with them but they never got
beyond the trial stage (Happold, 1932). American teachers, due to
the localized nature of the American school system, had the freedom
to experiment if they so chose. In Canada, however, the high school
curriculum before the 1960s was subject to strong university pressures
through the universities' presence on examination boards and the universities
valued factual knowledge and the three R's over such fanciful notions
as historical method and historical thinking. Most university historians
saw such abilities as beyond the capacity of school students at anything
beyond the most minimal level, though they hoped that teachers might
do something to introduce students to the nature of history. As a
Toronto historian reported to the National Council of Education in
1923: "Now while it is admitted that the notion of research by
students junior to the higher years of university work is absurd and
that in all grades of primary and secondary instruction history must
in the main be taught as a body of accepted truths, nevertheless the
teacher, if he is to be of real help to his classes, must be able
to illustrate the problems which lie beneath history as written"
(National Council of Education, 1923: 16). Certainly, history examinations
in Canada in these years never set any questions that required students
to be familiar with sources, historical method, or historiographical
debate.
In these circumstances, even in the larger urban school divisions
which could afford to hire specialists, the use of sources required
more than average dedication and energy. Nonetheless, some teachers
apparently were equal to the challenge, for in the early 1930sthe
National Archives reported what it described as "an increasing
number of requests for photostatic prints from teachers who have found
that the use of such material is of the greatest value in the teaching
of Canadian history" (PAC, 1931: 21). In the 1930s the National
Archives also did what it could to popularize the use of sources through
the use of summer workshops for teachers and the hosting of school
visits. It might well be that this kind of work had some effect since
in 1940 a publisher found it worthwhile to publish the first source-book
of Canadian history for school use since 1913, George Brown's Readings
in Canadian History.
In 1961, however, when I arrived in Winnipeg, there was no evidence
that sources were being used in history classrooms. In his 1968 survey
of Canadian history teaching, Hodgetts reported that the use of primary
and secondary sources occurred in the well taught classes that his
team observed, but these amounted to only seven per cent of the classrooms
visited (Hodgetts, 1968: 53-6). By the end of the 1960s and into the
1970s, there was increasing discussion of the use of sources. Sourcebooks
were increasingly available and the elimination of province-wide external
examinations reduced pressure on teachers to cover the course and
follow the textbook, leaving them free to adapt their courses as they
saw fit.
None of us knew in the 1960s that the use of sources had once been
so ardently discussed and promoted. In this respect, as in so many
others, we have totally forgotten what our predecessors did, so that
every generation of history teachers has to start from scratch, ignorant
of what has gone before. One of the most useful things we could do
to enhance our teaching is to develop a sense of the history of our
craft. If we could locate ourselves in an emerging tradition of history
teaching as it has taken shape over the last hundred years, we would
be better placed to create a rooted sense of what we stand for so
that we might react sensibly to the many demands that are placed on
us.
Perhaps as we turn once again to the sources, we might spare a thought
for all those who were there before us.
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