February - World Understanding Month

 

History properly taught can help men to become critical and humane, just as wrongly taught it can turn them into bigots and fanatics. For the child can begin to develop, even from an elementary historical training, qualities and attitudes of mind which all aid international understanding. He can acquire an abiding interest in the lives and achievements of peoples outside his own homeland and realize what they have contributed to the common cultural inheritance of man; he can learn to be accurate and critical and grasp the idea of change as a factor in human affairs; he will be able to see that the civilization of the present is only one of many civilizations that have existed on this planet, and that for all our marvels we may lack certain qualities which some former age had in abundance.  The cause of international understanding benefits yet further when children reach adulthood knowing something of the causes and results of past human conflicts, and something of the history of man's efforts international cooperation, and when the history they have learned teaches them both about the growing interdependence of nations and about the strenuous efforts of millions of individual men to establish human freedoms.

 

Few would deny that teaching international understanding is a desirable result of history teaching,and that the teacher who strives to promote it is pursuing a laudable end.