Knowledge of Most Worth to Citizens

Abstract

More than a century ago Herbert Spencer posed the question, ‘What knowledge is of most worth to citizens?’ His response was not to emphasize those subject areas which are most commonly associated with citizenship — history, geography, political theory, economics and civics, for example — but an affirmation of the primary place of science, ‘without which the citizen cannot rightly regulate his conduct’ (Spencer, 1861). History he dismissed as a ‘mere tissue of names and dates and dead unmeaning events, (having) not the remotest bearing on any of our actions’. Science, however, as well as providing accounts of biological and physical phenomena of value to citizens, also embraces sociology, the science of society. Spencer eventually reinstated history as worthwhile knowledge for citizens, provided the emphasis was shifted from dynastic, imperial and military events towards those more intimately concerned with the everyday lives of ordinary people in their vocational, economic, political and cultural dimensions. For Spencer, history had practical value only as a ‘descriptive sociology’, recalling also John Dewey’s similar characterization of history as ‘an indirect sociology’.