The Introduction of the Teaching of History as an Academic Subject and Its Implications I

ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO WE are so used to taking history as an obvious part of school teaching--and especially of university teaching--that we seldom stop to consider how comparatively recent the introduction of history into the school curriculum is at any level. Even less do we reflect on the consequences of this particular change in the pattern of education. The Greeks who invented history, as we understand it, in the fifth century BC never regarded history as a specific subject for instruction in school at any level. There were public readings of historical books for adult audiences. Herodotus is notoriously supposed to have read his books publicly and to have inspired a young man in his audience called Thucydides to follow his example, with the results which everybody knows. The story may be untrue, but is typical. In Greece you did not learn history at school. You read it privately or somebody read it to you in polite company. The same happened in Rome. There was of course plenty of incidental history to be learned at school from poets, orators and philosophers, and conversely historical episodes could be turned into themes for poetry, oratory and philosophy. Moreover, historians like Thucydides could be read for their style and, more specifically, for the speeches they included in their books. Everybody recognised that history offered examples and models for both good and bad behaviour: single episodes from the past were supposed to be known to everyone. But the past as the past was not the subject of study at school, and the rules of historical method were not something you would have to learn at school, as you learned the rules of grammar, rhetoric or mathematics. You did not
1 I am trying in this paper to develop an argument I first presented in my Lurcy lecture at the University of Chicago, "History in an Age of Ideologies", published in the American Scholar, LI (1982), pp. 495-507. On the history of the teaching of history see now Bergmann, K. and Schneider, G. (eds), Gesellschaft--Staat--Geschichtsunterricht, Beitriige zur einer Geschichte der Geschichtsdidaktik 1500-1800 (Diisseldorf: Pfidagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1982). For the position of history in the Renaissance, Cochrane, E., "The Profession of the Historian in the Italian Renaissance", Journal o f Social History, XV (1981), pp. 51-72. My data on German universities are mainly based on Scherer, E. C., Geschichte und Kirchengeschichte an den deutschen Universitiiten (Freiburg: 1927), quoted in the text; but I have tried to check them against the histories of individual universities and the original evidence. Recent work on the history of education in general is listed by G. P. Brizzi in Universit~t, Principe, Gesuiti, La politica farnesiana dell'istruzione a Parma e Piacenza (1545-1622), introd. C. Vasoli (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), pp. 194-196. The work being done in France, by D. Julia and others, has proved to be especially valuable. G. P. Brizzi has himself contributed much to the subject in La formazione della classe dirigente nel Sei-Settecento (Bologna: 1976) and La Ratio studiorum (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981) (with contributions by several authors). The periodicals Histoire de r~ducation, from 1978, and History o f Universities, from 1981, provide information on new research; Borst, A., Geschichte an mittelalterlichen Universitiiten (Konstanz: 1969), has proved to be of little use.