A Window on Westmount Ville Marie

These have been interesting times for the history trade. As Canada threatens to disintegrate, a host of history and heritage organizations have emerged or revived. Provincial education departments face rising pressure to shove more history back into the curriculum. This fall, heritage-minded couch potatoes will be able to see Canada's own History Channel. The History Channel's fare this autumn will depend heavily on the CRB Foundation's award-winning Heritage Minutes and too many American war movies, but Canadian producers will finally have a serious incentive to tell us about our own past.

Last July, the newly-fledged Dominion Institute announced that Canadians youngsters were ignorant of basic facts of Canadian history. An Angus Reid survey of 1104 Canadians aged 18 to 24 reported to the Institute that a majority of them did not even know that Confederation was launched in 1867. Indeed, more than a third couldn't even find the right century. Most Quebeckers could name Wilfrid Laurier as our first francophone prime minister: most non-Quebeckers couldn't. On the other hand, only 28 per cent of Quebeckers (and 63 per cent in the rest of Canada could name Sir John A. Macdonald as our first First Minister. Almost two in five guessed that Canada enemies in the First World War were Britain, France and Russia. If most British Columbians knew of the internment of Japanese-Canadians in 1942, less than one in five Quebeckers had ever heard of it.

Young Canadians may not be worse than their neighbours. Ten years ago, surveys found that young Americans were as ignorant of the dates of their Civil War (1861-1865) as Canadians are about Confederation. One result was the privately-funded Bradley Commission, a blue ribbon panel that called for a lot more American (and world) history in the schools.

The Dominion Institute is promoting what it calls a National Historical Framework, an array of fifty or a hundred events that all Canadians should know about. In the United States, the Bradley Commission inspired a similar project that exploded. Devised at UCLA, the resulting framework trashed tradition, endorsed a Black, Hispanic, feminist and radical version of U.S. history, and provoked a 99-1 denunciation by the U.S. Senate. Even if the Dominion Institute wants facts, not interpretation, will everyone agree on what is important? Was the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 really more important for labour than its real charter of rights, P.C. 1003 in 1944? Would the formation of the CCF in 1932 count? Or its Regina Manifesto in 1933? Or the PQ in 1967?

In Canada, how much history children study, and what kind, is determined by ten provinces. Many favour a regional or political perspective that demonizes Ottawa or some other part of the country. Quebec is not unique. Indeed last year's report on the history curriculum by a strong committee under historian Jacques Lacoursière was admirably open-minded. Not only did it urge that history be studied in every year of school, it urged greater prominence for world history, more objectivity and diversity, and greater recognition of everyone, from Native people to recent immigrants, in creating Quebec society. Its recommendations have been backed by the Inchauspé report to Education .

Canadians, young and old, have a right to know more about our shared experiences. Sharing factual reference points, the Lacoursière Report argued, is part of being culturally and socially literate. Imagine following the current Quebec-Canada debate if words like "conscription", "Confederation", "Louis Riel" or even "Pierre-Elliott Trudeau" had no real significance. History is also an education in civics. "It is through history", Lacoursiere argued, "that we understand the mechanisms of change and continuity, and the many ways in which problems are posed and resolved in society". And what could be more relevant to people of this fragmenting and confused country?

Expanding history's place in school curricula will raise storms. Across Canada, History has been losing a twenty-year struggle against Social Studies, Civics, Economics, Moral Education and kindred subjects. What can be cut to make room for the past -- sciences, mathematics, English, French? Her dismissive comments about home economics in an Actualités interview may haunt Pauline Marois when next she meets Quebec's teachers' unions.

[In connection with this, it is interesting to note the increasing discussion of the Civil Society, - a topic which has been suggested for a future Wednesday Night and on which information may be found at http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~ccsi/csusa/csintro.htm#csalex. ]

Nor will History deserve more time if its teachers are untrained. The new Governor Generals' awards for history teachers have found superb candidates, but they are outnumbered by untrained colleagues to whom history was a childhood misery. Education faculties favour pedagogy and psychology over subject specialization. Veteran teachers are leaving Canadian classrooms in droves. Their replacements are even less likely to have a history background. Few of us are good at teaching what we don't know.

Whatever the cause -- nationalism, conservatism, or a healthy desire to learn from the past, we will be hearing more about history. Last month, a quiet little academic gathering at the University of Montreal on the teaching of Quebec and Canadian history exploded from the expected 40 people to a overflow 160 teachers, students and professors, most at the expense of their holidays. They cared, they came, and they were not alone.

______

Georgeville, 13 September 1997 GZHISTORY.S13 w821

by Dr. Desmond Morton
Was Director The McGill Institute for the study of Canada