As things now stand, the course of instruction in American history inour public schools embraces three distinct treatments of the subject.Three separate books are used. First, there is the primary book, whichis usually a very condensed narrative with emphasis on biographies andanecdotes. Second, there is the advanced text for the seventh or eighthgrade, generally speaking, an expansion of the elementary book by theaddition of forty or fifty thousand words. Finally, there is the highschool manual. This, too, ordinarily follows the beaten path, givingfuller accounts of the same events and characters. To put it bluntly, wedo not assume that our children obtain permanent possessions from theirstudy of history in the lower grades. If mathematicians followed thesame method, high school texts on algebra and geometry would include themultiplication table and fractions.
There is, of course, a ready answer to the criticism advanced above. Itis that teachers have learned from bitter experience how little historytheir pupils retain as they pass along the regular route. No teacher ofhistory will deny this. Still it is a standing challenge to existingmethods of historical instruction. If the study of history cannot bemade truly progressive like the study of mathematics, science, andlanguages, then the historians assume a grave responsibility in addingtheir subject to the already overloaded curriculum. If the successivehistorical texts are only enlarged editions of the first text—morefacts, more dates, more words—then history deserves most of the sharpcriticism which it is receiving from teachers of science, civics, andeconomics.
In this condition of affairs we find our justification for offering anew high school text in American history. Our first contribution is oneof omission. The time-honored stories of exploration and thebiographies of heroes are left out. We frankly hold that, if pupils knowlittle or nothing about Columbus, Cortes, Magellan, or Captain JohnSmith by the time they reach the high school, it is useless to tell thesame stories for perhaps the fourth time. It is worse than useless. Itis an offense against the teachers of those subjects that aredemonstrated to be progressive in character.
In the next place we have omitted all descriptions of battles. Ourreasons for this are simple. The strategy of a campaign or of a singlebattle is a highly technical, and usually a highly controversial, matterabout which experts differ widely. In the field of military and navaloperations most writers and teachers of history are mere novices. Todispose of Gettysburg or the Wilderness in ten lines or ten pages isequally absurd to the serious student of military affairs. Any one whocompares the ordinary textbook account of a single Civil War campaignwith the account given by Ropes, for instance, will ask for no furthercomment. No youth called upon to serve our country in arms would thinkof turning to a high school manual for information about the art ofwarfare. The dramatic scene or episode, so useful in arousing theinterest of the immature pupil, seems out of place in a book thatdelibe