History News Network posted this excerpt from story in the Times of London.
Check out the reporter's opening line.  My comment / query follows the HNN
excerpt. Jon Kukla History isn't bunk ... The teaching of history, as it
unfolds, should be a higher priority in schools (UK)

Source: *Times (UK)*<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article5891156.ece>(3-12-09)
Edward Gibbon once said: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided,
and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future
but by the past.” It is a lesson that the British nation needs to learn
again.

In a recent report on the teaching of history in schools, Ofsted pointed out
that, too often, British children had no clear sense of chronology and no
vantage point on historical change. For too long, the idea of a story
unfolding in real time has given way to a series of fragments, themes ripped
out of time. As a result, many pupils are unable to answer history's big
questions and do not know enough of the story that brought their nation, and
the world of which it is a part, to where it stands today.

That is why it was good to hear Michael Gove, the opposition education
spokesman, say that a future Conservative government would insist on the
teaching of narrative history. This means teaching history in a
chronological order, with a clear exposition of what happened when. This
does not mean that history needs to be taught as though it moves inexorably
towards the light. It is even more of a simplification, if not a travesty,
to tell the story of British liberty as a single, sinuous golden thread, as
Macaulay tries to.
-  Posted on HNN, Thursday, March 12, 2009

Comment / query:

Edward Gibbon may in fact have said or written the "Lamp of experience"
quotation that opens this Times of London article. But I would like to see a
well-documented source. A quick Google search brings up any number of
'Gibbon once said' references of the sort common to urban legends. A quick
and very limited check of a few readily searchable online Gibbon texts
resulted in zilch, zip, nada.
     Both sentences, as presented in the Times article, appear prominently
in the text of Patrick Henry's 1775 Liberty or Death speech as reconstructed
by William Wirt in his 1817 biography. . .
     Against the possibility that Wirt might have borrowed from Gibbon, it
would be useful to have something better than urban-legend/Google-level
documentation of precisely where and when Gibbon may have said or written:
“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of
experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com <http://www.jonkukla.com/>

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