Review Reviewed Work(s): What Is History? by Edward Hallett Carr Review by: Seymour Itzkoff Source: History of Education Quarterly , Jun., 1962, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jun., 1962), pp. 132134 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/367109 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History of Education Quarterly This content downloaded from 111.68.106.54 on Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:46:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Dewey Society conclusively proves its life. While it is true, as Dr. Cremin points out, that school chairs are now movable, has education really been made life-like when chemistry teachers continue having their students make soap? Can we say, as Dr. Cremin does, that because educators use such progressive jargon as "individual differences" that schools have been transformed when the practices persist of using a single text and uniform tests and grading scales? Can we honestly say that the social sciences are now being fully applied to education, another of Dr. Cremin's possible definitions of progressive education, when secondary school teachers are not generally required to have a specific course in adolescent psychology or when all in the way of social foundations of education that is usually required of public school teachers is one course in either history of education or philosophy of education or sociology of education? The progressive approach to educating still competes with a non-psychologically and non-sociologically oriented rationalism, a mind-centered idealism, and a conditioning type of realist factualism. As long as students in good colleges indicate that they are being asked for the first time to act upon thinking and to bring knowledge to bear upon actual personal and societal problems, progeessivism has not become the modus vivendi of our schools. Not only do we still have many problems created by industrialization such as slums and suburbs, standardization, unequal political representation on the state level, and farm surpluses, but these are now further complicated by the new international ones. If progressivism is the best means of liberating individuals from the shackles of random trial and error learning or from either tradition or a new social order, democracy needs it more today than ever before in history. University of Michigan ROBERT M. WEISS WHAT IS HISTORY? Edward Hallett Carr (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962. $3.50.) Edward Hallett Carr, in his book What Is History? maintains that the his- torian's most important role is the synthetic one of giving meaning to the facts and events of the past. This is the theme of his book: "The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless." History then, is a continuing and unending dialogue between the present and the past with the historian serving as guide and interpreter. A variety of issues is covered in this short volume. In the process, Carr effectively punctures some of the pet historical myths of certain schools. The sharp antithesis between the individual and society, the heavy emphasis on the importance of the "great man" in history are nicely clarified in terms of the social forces which act upon "great men." The great men in turn become representatives of the forces which they have shaped and which in turn give direction to the new turn of historical events. Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin are criticized 132 This content downloaded from 111.68.106.54 on Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:46:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms for their polemics against so-called historicism and determinism in historical thinking, especially as supposedly found in Hegel and Marx. Carr is devastating, yet reasonable, in his analysis of this issue of historical explanation. He claims that to do historical writing we must assume that it is possible to explain this process rationally. To do so does not rule out the incorporation into the ex- planation of the possibility of accidental or unique events which refocus the flow of human events. "Professor Popper and Professor Berlin . . . assume that the historian's attempt to find significance in the historical process and to draw conclusions from it is tantamount to an attempt to reduce 'the whole of experience' to a symmetrical order and that the presence of an accident in history dooms any such attempt to failure. But no sane historian pretends to do anything so fantastic as to embrace 'the whole of experience'. . . . The historian distils from the experience of the past, or from so much of the experience of the past as is accessible to him, that part which he recognizes as amenable to rational explanation and interpretation, and from it draws conclusions which may serve as a guide to action." Mr. Carr's thesis is important for the historical treatment of the problem of education. Education is an idea, an idea that has had many dimensions, explicit and institutional as well as implicit in the fabric of culture. Carr would here seem to be warning the educator to eschew the chronicling of accepted educational facts and to become aware that selection itself is conditioned by interpretation-interpretation of what education is. The historian cannot hope to retain objectivity or neutrality. By becoming aware of his biases and setting them within a theoretical, indeed philosophical, frame of reference, he will be better equipped to grapple with the historical issues of education in a responsible manner. Carr demonstrates the speciousness of so-called neutral or objective histories. They too serve ideological ends. Most important is his emphasis on the value of teleological if not utopian thinking (what he calls "The Widening Horizon"). Good historians, he states, have the future in their bones. There are some interesting implications here for education. One can see the value for the proper interment of the past, e.g., the progressive era in education. At the same time, one can see an even more urgent need for an evaluation of this period from the standpoint of a philosophical appraisal of where we now stand in education, also where we seem likely to be tomorrow. In 1957 Morton White wrote an epilogue to his book, Social Thought in America, in which he tempered his previous criticism of Dewey with a more compassionate evaluation based on the irrational intellectual currents which had appeared since the book was first published (1947). In the present, when possible educational prescriptions are apparently exhausted by teaching machines, team teaching, and programmed learning texts, we could do worse than plead for a bit more of the utopian attitude in our own historical writings. It is this general lack of the historical vision which perturbs Carr. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were suffused with a sense of change and dynamic, a deep commitment to the progress of mankind through reason. Our own era lacks this anticipation of and receptivity to the new, the ideal, the possible. Much of what he says concerning the lethargy and conservatism of 133 This content downloaded from 111.68.106.54 on Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:46:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms historians can be applied to educators. The historical vision of contemporary educators as compared to that of a generation ago is marked by this timidity and unconcern. "For myself I remain an optimist; and when Sir Lewis Namier warns me to eschew programmes and ideals, and Professor Oakeshott tells me that we are going nowhere in particular and that all that matters is to see that nobody rocks the boat, and Professor Popper wants to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal engineering, and Professor Trevor-Roper knocks screaming radicals on the nose, and Professor Morison pleads for history written in a sane conservative spirit, I shall look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall answer in the well-worn words of a great scientist: 'And yet-it moves' ". Hunter College SEYMOUR 134 This content downloaded from 111.68.106.54 on Fri, 05 Nov 2021 06:46:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ITZKOFF
