In previous articles I have described the enthusiasm for teaching history through sources that began in the 1890s and lasted into the 1920s. This article continues this theme but leaves North America to examine the contribution of a British educationist, M.W. Keatinge, Reader in Education at Oxford University, who in the early 1900s published a number of source collections and generally promoted the use of sources in the classroom at all ages, from elementary to high school.

Keatinge agreed with his American counterparts that source material would add interest to lessons and give students a basic introduction to the principles of historical method, but his main reason for advocating the use of sources was that it would make the study of history intellectually respectable. Unlike his American colleagues he could not take history's place in the curriculum for granted. By the early 1900s American historians and educationists had won their fight to entrench history in the curriculum. They did not always like the patriotic and citizenship mantle with which policy makers and school officials often cloaked it, and instead argued for it on the grounds of its contribution to a liberal education, and to mental training, but they did not have to worry about whether it should or should not be taught. In the England of the early 1900s, by contrast, Keatinge and others found themselves still having to fight history's battles.

For the most part, history occupied only a minor place in English school curricula. In the elementary schools that most English children attended it was taught primarily through readers rather than as a distinct subject. In the secondary schools, which only a minority of children attended, history's supporters were faced with, on the one hand, the centuries-old tradition of Latin and Greek and all the vested interests and entrenched arguments associated with them, and, on the other, the claims of the newly emerging natural sciences. Philosophically, both the classical languages and the new sciences claimed to be not only educationally valuable in their own right, but also powerful vehicles for mental training. Pedagogically, they presented themselves as subjects that taught "generalizations, abstractions, or rules which can be applied to fresh matter," and where students were active in their own learning, whether in solving problems or in applying lessons previously learned, as in translation exercises or laboratory experiments (Keatinge, 1910: 2).

In the light of such arguments, history was easily dismissed – too easily in Keatinge's view – as a "soft option," a mere memory subject in which teachers did all the work and students simply repeated what they were told or what they read. As Keatinge put it, in history as conventionally taught "It is difficult to devise preparation … other than the learning from a text-book of the facts of a lesson that is to be given or the revising of the facts of a lesson that has been given" (Keatinge, 1910: 3). According to Keatinge, the repertoire of the typical history teacher consisted of lecture, questioning, elaboration of the textbook, and written exercises and essays, none of which he saw as especially inspiring, but which seemed unavoidable so long as the study of history was seen only as the accumulation of factual knowledge. Unlike science or languages, history left nothing original for the student to do: "In this subject more than in any other it seems as if the maximum of work were demanded from the teacher and the minimum from the pupil. The old relations are reversed; the teacher prepares his lessons and the pupil hears them" (Keatinge, 1910: 4).

In these circumstances, Keatinge found himself tempted to agree with history's opponents and to conclude that history was indeed "a bad school subject" (Keatinge, 1910: 4). At the same time, he was convinced that history was too important to be ignored. The health of a "modern self-conscious democracy" depended on its citizens' ability to think rationally about the problems they faced and this in turn demanded an understanding of the past. Keatinge deplored the fact that most people knew more about sport than they did about history. More important than this, however, was the potential of history to expand people's horizons, to illuminate personality and character. It was as "an introduction to the world of human nature that history is chiefly to be prized" (Keatinge, 1910: 3).

To the claims of the scientists that their subject taught valuable principles of scientific method and prepared students for citizenship in an increasingly scientific world, Keatinge replied that most people had little occasion to use their scientific knowledge once they left school, taking technology for granted and leaving science to the experts who alone could understand it. History, by contrast, taught ways of thinking and ways of seeing the world that people used every day of their lives. It was simply too important to be neglected: "If school is to educate for life, it appears that the department of social science is many times of greater value than that of physical science, and if this is so, a sound method of teaching history is of the first importance" (Keatinge, 1910: 35). The key question was this: "How can history be made into a real training school for the mind, worthy of no inconsiderable place in the curriculum of schools where 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). In other words, Keatinge did not expect, or even want, history to displace classics, but he did hope to open a space for it in the classical curriculum.

In his view, the way to do this was to redefine history by emphasizing the value of historical method as well as historical knowledge. To do this he turned to the German historian, Ernst Bernheim, and to the French historians, Charles Seignobos and Charles Langlois, all of whom were widely regarded in the 1890s and beyond as the arbiters of historical method. Keatinge singled out Bernheim's argument that historical science was sui generis, different from the natural sciences but no less scientific for all that. The science of history was to be found in the disciplined attempt of the historian to reconstruct the past from the evidence it had left behind it. In short, the critical analysis of sources was central to historical study. As Keatinge put it, "It is to the criticism and analysis of documents that a great part of historical method devotes itself" (Keatinge, 1910: 30). Moreover, this analysis taught skills and ways of thinking that were important in all areas of life.

Thus, Keatinge found a way of claiming a place in the curriculum for history: "If only we make use of this material, if we fashion this new instrument to suit our needs, the problem of history teaching is by no means solved, but the avenue through which it may attacked is opened up" (Keatinge, 1910: 38). And proceeding along this avenue meant rethinking history both as a discipline and as a school subject. Above all, it must be "reduced to problem form" and the way to do this was to use sources. Source-work was central to historical method. It made the study of history intellectually rigorous. It was a powerful vehicle for mental training. It closed the gap between history as an academic discipline and history as a school subject. It put the onus of work on the student not the teacher. And it was teachable: "The schoolboy … can be given materials to observe and to manipulate, opportunities for drawing inferences, for exercising his power of working with accuracy, and for testing his strength in the attack upon difficult problems" (Keatinge, 1910: 32).

As with all proponents of the use of sources on both sides of the Atlantic, Keatinge disavowed any notion of training students to be historians. The logic of his argument required him to maintain that history was a science that was as intellectually demanding as any other and therefore beyond the grasp of school students, while also arguing that it could nonetheless be taught to them. Nor was he willing to adopt the approach of what he called "the American votaries" of the source method that required the student to "construct his own history and write his own text-book" (Keatinge, 1910: 39). He did not want to replace knowledge with method, or to replace the textbook with a source-book. The textbook was "half the apparatus"; the other half was a collection of sources supplemented by a good classroom library (Keatinge, 1910: 40). Anticipating what later came to be known as the patch or post-hole method of course design, he favoured teaching broad survey courses but with provision inside them for detailed study of selected topics. He wanted students to gain a broad historical knowledge in order to expand their mental horizons while also gaining a basic understanding of historical method.

Unlike Fred Morrow Fling in the United States, Keatinge did not work out a specific teaching strategy for source-work. He contented himself with providing examples supplemented with brief explanatory comments. In the source-books that he produced he used a wide variety of questions ranging from factual comprehension to the use of imagination and judgment, as in this example: "Make a list of the adjectives and adverbs that refer to Lollards in this Statute. How far do you think them justified?" (Keatinge & Frazer, 1912: i). Apart from questions calling for personal judgment (e.g. "What does this extract show as to Elizabeth's character?") he also included questions that called for the evaluation of evidence, for example "What is the value of private letters like the Patson (sic) letters as evidence?" Or again, "Why must Polydore Vergil's statements about Richard be received with caution?" (Keatinge & Frazer, 1912: i-iii). Along the same lines, some of his questions required students to combine or compare two or more different sources, as in this example: "Do you notice any difference in their attitude towards the English of the French and the English accounts of Agincourt?" (Keatinge & Frazer, 1912: i). In addition, Keatinge designed some exercises which, while based on documents, called on students to use their imagination, as in this example: "How far would Bacon's high estimate of the Star Chamber have been shared in the reign of Henry VII by: (1) a turbulent noble; (2) a judge on circuit; (3) a well-fed liveried retainer; (4) a parish priest; (5) a prosperous farmer; (6) a country armourer?" (Keatinge & Frazer, 1912: iii) He also used exercises that required students to write speeches or letters on the basis of evidence contained in the sources provided for them (e.g. "Write a conversation upon Joan of Arc between an English archer and a French archer" - Keatinge & Frazer, 1912: i).

An examination of Keatinge's questions and exercises shows that he focussed on these kinds of questions:

Given what Keatinge saw as the novelty of his source-method and the strength of the barriers against using it, he said surprisingly little about how to deploy it in the classroom. On the one hand, he criticized teachers for making history so dull; on the other, he expected them to be able to use his source-method with little or no support or advice. He ignored the difficulties likely to be created for students by the often archaic and obscure language of his sources. He wrote of his method that it was designed to teach students "to apply the more simple criteria of accuracy and sincerity … to read closely and to extract from a document all the internal evidence that is to be found there, to compare and to rationalise conflicting accounts of characters and of events; and more important than all, though less showy, to summarize and extract salient points from a series of loose, verbose, or involved statements" (Keatinge, 1910: 39). These are all valuable goals but Keatinge said very little about how to achieve them.

He also ignored the very real difficulties imposed by time constraints. In one exercise, for example, based on a lengthy report of a speech by Mary Tudor, followed by three fairly complicated questions, he suggested that it was the kind of thing that could be done in ten minutes at the end of a lesson. In most classes, however, it would probably have taken at least one lesson simply to make sure that students understood what they were required to read. A similar weakness is to be found in Keatinge's discussion of examinations. After a thoroughly negative dismissal of conventional examinations, he proposed an alternative form of examination based on source-work. The problem he ignored, however, was that, even in a three hour examination, students would have had to spend so much time reading the sources that that they would have little time to answer the questions based on them.

In a sense, these are mere nuts and bolts objections, but they help explain why Keatinge's source-method met with so little success. He ignored the reality that, given the existing pattern of schooling, it seriously complicated teachers' lives. What he saw as the relatively straightforward introduction of a new teaching strategy in fact called for a fundamental rethinking of schooling. This is why, apart from one or two short-lived experiments, and despite general dissatisfaction, fact-based examinations did not change and textbooks remained largely the same. At best, a minority of teachers incorporated some sources into their teaching, although largely to serve as illustrative material, not as the basis for teaching the principles of historical method. As one British teacher observed in 1918, he had been through the source-book "fever" and while he was no doubt better for the experience he had concluded that "it was more advantageous to take it in small doses, on the analogy of smallpox and vaccination" (History, 3, 1918, p.21).

All this said, Keatinge deserves to be remembered. Like others of his generation he pioneered trails which we seem once again to be exploring, albeit unaware that they were there before us. What he wrote over ninety years ago, remains as true today as it was then: "It is only if thought-compelling exercises can be devised that history is worth treating as a serious school subject…." (Keatinge, 1910: 110).

References

Keatinge, M.W. (1910) Studies in the teaching of history. London: A. & C. Black.

Keatinge, M.W. & N. L. Frazer. (1912) Documents of British history 1399-1603 with problems and exercises . London: A. & C. Black.

Voices From The Past

References