While reading a book by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, I came upon a very intriguing concept, called "historical provincialism" or "chronological snobbery".
It is hard to find many studies on the topic, however, Christopher Dawson in his book "The Crisis of Western Education," writes the following: "Until a man acquires some knowledge of another culture, he cannot be said to be educated, since his outlook is so conditioned by his own social environment that he does not recognize its limitations... he almost inevitably tends to accept the standards and values of his own society as absolute." Further on he indicated the importance of "widening the intellectual horizon by initiation into a different world of cultre," and/or, respectively, a different historical time.
This is indeed a very insightful study of the need to educate young people about history in a way which will help them build a solid understanding of evolution and historical change, which has led to their present historical and social reality. The opposition of the core, or the focus on present and reality, isolated from the periphery, or the past, which has "created' the present reality, is what characterizes historical provincialism. In other words, the unawareness of the historical change or evolution which has influenced our present state of existence.
In this sense, studying history as a mere succession of facts and dates, does not contribute to taking a person out of his provincial state of mind. What matters is creating the ability to reason on the correlations between these facts and their power to influence the present. Studying history is shifted away from the factology, more into a study of the history of ideas, knowledge and evolution.
Defining this new type of provincialism, automatically alters the understanding of what cosmopolitanism is; this is no longer a "space" category, but already a "time" category as well. Studying a different culture, is linked to studing a different period of time, and broadening our horizons on a multidementional grid. Caring for foreing ideas, becomes linked with caring for past ones.
Historical localism and illiberality is probably not as dangerous as traditional provincialism, because it is much more difficult to link it to issues such as racism, intolerance and nationalism. Historical provincialism seems like a more intellectual limitation. In an interview, titled "Curing Provincialism, Why We Educate the Way We Do", Jaques Barzun says, "the student who reads history will unconsciously develop what is the highest value of history: judgement in world affairs. This is a permanent good, not because history repeats... but because the 'tendency of things' shows an amazing uniformity within any given civilization. The great historian, Jacob Burckhardt, said of historical knowledge, it is not 'to make us more clever the next time, but wiser for all time'."
Curing our historical provincialism, will give us not only knowledge, but wisdom as well. What could be a better conclusion on the topic :)