In biography, whenever the options made it possible to write on several persons rather than on one, the greater majority of the candidates found it easier to present a few meagre facts about several individuals than an extended account of one individual. Evidently biography in school is confined to the foot notes or the descriptive introductory paragraph on the page that mentions a new leader for the first time. In fact one student apologized for his limited knowledge of Pitt and Nelson on the ground that Montgomery gives no extended biographies. Like Dr. Sullivan, he blamed the text-book. It should not be implied that the reader finds no evidence of collateral reading. Indications of it do appear, but they are rarer than oases in Sahara. Far from hinting at collateral reading, many answers showed inadequate attention to the slender material offered in the text-book. It seems not unreasonable to expect that every student going up for examination in English history should be able to place Milton and Nelson correctly, yet their names have brought out such statements as, there is nothing recorded in history showing any personal service that Milton did for the Roundheads and that personally he was a Tory, that Milton wrote books of travel and wild improbable adventures of sea and land; that Nelson explored for England and went furthest north, that he sunk the Spanish Armada, that he defeated the combined French and Spanish navies at Waterloo, and that he signaled, “Don’t give up the ship.” The only satisfactory item to be credited to these statements is the fixed association of these names respectively with literature and the sea. Any hint as to the personality of the subject is seldom found, yet William the Conqueror, Henry VIII, and Cromwell, seem to have had some hold on the imagination.
To summarize experiences as a reader is not a happy task for the secondary school teacher. As regards what may be termed the New Learning in history--geographic control, economics, and the exercise of observation, analysis, and judgment, the teacher need not blush at his failure to render his pupil able to observe, analyze, and judge in clear and correct English in fifteen-minute sections of a two-hour examination, or to deal successfully even in an elementary way with subjects that have either only recently become part of a college course or are not generally studied by freshmen. But what history teachers do need to concern themselves with is the failure to supply their pupils with a reliable store of facts. If the statistics of the Board seem to imply that history teaching is inferior to teaching in most other subjects, it would be consoling to accept the suggestion that the poor returns are not the result of poor teaching, but of no teaching, since many candidates have tried the examination without instruction, an experiment they would make in no other subject.