if every child should be schooled till at least his twentieth year, and should
find free access to the universities, libraries, and museums that harbor and
offer the intellectual and artistic treasures of the race? Consider education
not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely
the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world,
but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic
heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of
man’s understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.
The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever
before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek
flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo’s [Leonardo da Vinci
(1452-1519)], for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than
Voltaire’s, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical
dissemination. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we
are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but
because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that
pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground
and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as
he receives it.
History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage;
progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use.
To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of
man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of
generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it
becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a
thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians,
lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The
historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence
except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may
put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends
death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he
