“When experience is not retained… infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana, quoted in Leonard Read Let Freedom Reign [I know you all know the 2nd part, but the 1st is also important]
“Mr Wirt: What do you think is going to happen in the next few years of history, Mr Lewis?”
“Lewis: I have no way of knowing. My primary field is the past. I travel with my back to the engine, and that makes it difficult when you try to steer.”
C.S. Lewis “Cross-Examination” in The Grand Miracle
“Innocent Louis [XVI] bears the sins of many generations: he too experiences that man’s tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
In a piece in C2C Journal that I forgot to post at the time, I argue that social licence sounds good, or did until we discovered you couldn’t get one. But in fact it’s just another way of saying “tyranny of the majority” which is bad in principle and worse in practice because it means mob rule by a fanatical minority
On Wednesday I was on with John Gormley on CKOM 650 in Saskatoon to discuss my National Post column on setting rational priorities in fighting terrorism.
“Researchers have identified ‘structural’ historical concepts that provide the basis of historical thinking. The Benchmarks project is using this approach, with six distinct but closely interrelated historical thinking concepts. Students should be able to:
* establish historical significance…
* use primary source evidence…
* identify continuity and change…
* analyze cause and consequence…
* take historical perspectives…
* understand the moral dimension of historical interpretations…
Taken together, these tie ‘historical thinking’ to competencies in ‘historical literacy.’”
Excerpted from “Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: Framework for Assessment in Canada, by Peter Seixas, Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness” in The Beaver April-May 2009