History leads us to be decisive about our future

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): It has been frequently said that there is a clear relationship between our past, our present, and our future, and that history teaches us how to perceive this relationship.

Is this a valid proposition? It is not too easy to answer this question, because there are conflicting views about the value of history. On the one hand, there are statements by significant personalities that support this proposition, but on the other hand there are also statements that do not quite support it.

Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965), an American presidential candidate in the 1956 election, said in 1952, "We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the past which has led us to the present." But what Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870) wrote about history in 1867 does not persuade us to believe that knowledge about history is of great use to us. He wrote, "There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries."

It depends thus, I think, on the kind of history lessons one got in the past, whether or not one will agree with this proposition. If you have had good instruction in history, and you think you can see the relationship between the past, the present, and the future, you will certainly agree with this proposition. If, on the other hand, what you have got in the past was merely instruction in memorizing "dead facts" of past events, you will certainly not be able to see this relationship between past, present, and future, and you will therefore reject this proposition

In my own case, I never had sensible instruction in history in my formal education up to college level. It was only later in my life, after I had contact with persons who really understood what history is, that I begin to understand what this proposition actually means. Allan Bloom expressed the meaning of this proposition quite succinctly when he wrote, "We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible." (The Closing of the American Mind, 1987).

What is history? And what is historical understanding?

Philip H. Phenix defined history as "that imaginative recreation of past human events that best accords with the evidence of the present." The study of history is thus "the story of what human beings have made of themselves within the context of their physical and social environments. It is the account of the moral adventure of mankind, of decisions for good and for evil, and of the judgments revealed in the consequences."

Put briefly, "History is the study of what human beings have deliberately done in the past." But since the past is gone, "leaving only traces of itself," wrote Prof. Phenix, historical events can be understood only by "restoring the past as faithfully as may be, ... , and by conceiving those events as outcomes of personal existential decisions at particular times."

To make the past live again in the present is possible only if we can, in our thought, actively engage ourselves with people who made the past and regard them as moral subjects involved in the struggle to fulfill their destiny.

Is history ever taught this way in our schools?

I am inclined to answer in the negative. The greatest mistake made in most of our schools has been that history is confused with "chronicle", that is "a register of events in the order in which they occurred." We have given scant attention to the principle that the subject matter of history is human events of the past that must be looked upon as outcomes of human deliberations. It must be noted in this regard that the elements of chronicle are not human events, but mere outward behavior. Chronicle is thus only "the skeleton of history", or a history without any "animating principle", a history without any personal significance.

By merely touching upon the skeleton, we have not trained the young generation to catch the "spirit of the time." By merely teaching chronicles we have not guided the young generation into insights concerning the significant mental processes that at any given period in the past went on in the mind of our nation. It is this series of ignorance concerning the psychological and ethical drama that went on in the mind of our nation that has made most of us incapable of grasping why we have become what we are now. And if we do not know what has brought our nation to our present condition, how in the world can we make deliberations regarding our future?

Unless and until we improve our present way of teaching history we will continue producing younger generations incapable of understanding the character of their own nation and therefore incapable also of understanding themselves as a generation. As long as such cultural condition continues to exist, we cannot hope for the timely arrival of younger generations with increasingly better insights concerning the precarious condition of our nation. We cannot hope for the timely arrival of younger generations capable of mobilizing the national will and equipped with the ability to correct the mistakes perpetrated by the older generations.

Since the process of "historical recovery" is always intergenerational, the program of correcting the method of teaching history must be treated as an urgent matter within our educational reform. An indefinite delay in bringing about this particular improvement will merely prolong our present condition of "national inertia."

Can such a program be designed and executed?

I am sure it can. Even though I have no experience whatsoever in teaching history -- any kind of history, including history of education -- I am nevertheless convinced that we have enough experienced history teachers in our system to guide our schools into a more enlightened method of teaching history. At the end of the day the teaching of history must generate within the young generation a sense of what the ideal is of this nation for the future. Grasping this ideal is important, because as Abba Eban wrote in 1986, "A nation writes its history in the image of its ideal."

We will stop being indecisive about our future only after we know what our ideal is for the future of our nation.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.