Society and Civilisation

Abstract

One of the great difficulties about teaching history to children is that most of them have little sense of time. For them events are immediate and memories are short: the happenings of the previous year are already remote, the childhood of their own parents seems incredible, and the existence of a more distant past is almost inconceivable. People in simple societies perpetuate these attitudes into adult life, but because human curiosity is infinite even though information is non-existent, the past beyond a few known and remembered generations is populated by legendary heroes or by myths of creation and renewal. Such societies have no sense of history, but in its place they have folklore, myth, ritual and magic. History only began, as we have already observed, with the systematic attempts by Herodotus and other Greek scholars to recover evidence of the past. This attempt required both rigorous standards in discriminating between good evidence and bad, and an imagination capable of grasping the significance of change over time. Only a well-informed and inspired imagination can make sense of the past, in the literal meaning of arranging it in a pattern that is sensible or meaningful.