A history of physical education in the public schools of British Columbia from 1918 to 1967

Abstract

History has served many masters. It has been used, for example to teach; whereby the reader learns from the distilled wisdom of the ages. It can also instruct in the form of dogma or as propaganda in order to teach men how to behave philosophically or politically. History can be used as by Machiavelli, to flatter. Hitler used it to vilify and Churchill to glorify while others attempted merely to record. The assumption underlying the following study was that history can show the direction in which groups of men and their particular institutions move. If one "stepped outside" of the present to view that period in relation to the past, trends and patterns could begin to appear; and if these recorded experiences were extrapolated into the future it would perhaps be possible to perceive more clearly the direction of that process. Bailyn has expressed this view by describing modern history as that process "...when one seeks as the points of greatest relevance those critical passages of history where elements of our familiar present, still part of an unfamiliar past, begin to disentangle themselves, begin to emerge amid confusion and uncertainty."