Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 7 (October 1, 1938)

[section]

History can be almost too interesting for a school subject if approached from the right angle. There are two angles of approach—the dryangle, and the spryangle. The first is what the teacher teaches; the second is what the pupil makes of it. With a few disconnected facts to work on a schoolboy of imagination can produce a private history of England calculated to make professional historians kick themselves black and blue to think of their neglected opportunities. There is creative genius in youth which history is capable of bringing out in purple patches. For this reason it is a criminal act to retard a boy's mental development by feeding him with historical date pudding after the first standard. It is in this standard that all his most valuable impressions are formed. It is at this stage of his development that he learns that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, and that Cardinal Wolsey was the man who invented underwear. It is here that he gathers valuable data concerning 1066 so that, whatever his future occupation may be, he can put it to any use from adding his overdraft to advertising socks. 1066 is capable of anything. To advertise socks with it all one has to do is to write 1066 in large letters at the top and continue: “If the Britons had worn So-easy socks at Hastings they wouldn't have got cold feet. Socked but un-sacked!”

It has always been my fear that some historian, crazed by the repeating dismals of history, will do something to prove that the Battle of Hastings wasn't fought in 1066—in fact, wasn't fought at all on account of a strike among the woad-pickers and pikers. This would be a national disaster, depriving a deplorable number of people of the whole of their historical knowledge. It is poor consolation to contemplate that, if we lost 1066, The Battle of Hastings, posterity would still have 1938, The Battle of Hustings.