I have a bit of a concern with the education system, but I don’t want to come across the wrong way. I only hope to articulate my thinking in such as a way as to not come across the wrong way.
History can be a complicated thing, mostly because it’s often a story told by the ‘winners” of the conflicts big and small that are woven through the tapestry of the human story. For millennia, human history was often conveyed as oral storytelling, and as such, would often take on the feel of grand stories often involving the participation of deities, gods, merchants of evil as much as the actual doings of the actual humans who often serve as principals of these stories.
Recorded history tightened that up a bit, but only a bit, and it wasn’t really until Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press that recorded history was available to people in written form, that is, of course, if they knew how to read, which most didn’t. And even with this, recorded histories were still subject to human bias in storytelling, so that even today there are often competing versions of events that some people interpret one way while others interpret differently. Bias is still a big part of it, but it also comes down to the reality that if three people experience or witness the same event at the same time, you can count on three different versions that may be agreeable generally but differ on the specifics.
I was a history teacher for the longest of times. It got so bad that I started to realize that I didn’t watch the History Channel anymore, I was the freaking History Channel, since a lot of the stuff I was watching on television had happened in my lifetime. None of this makes me an expert of history, or smarter than anyone else, it was simply a continuation of a childhood passion arising from having parents who were military veterans of a great war, and they having brothers who all served and all saw combat action. The stories they told, at least by some of them, — my dad never talked about the war, ever — would lead me to pore over maps and devour any publication I could get my hands on that further enlightened me on World War 2, but then extended to military and diplomatic history generally.
I grew up during the Cold War and Vietnam. War, or the prospect of it, was all over the television screens of my youth. So becoming a history teacher was always going to be a goal of mine, although I did take stabs at other things, obviously to negligible effect.
Of all the subjects, or sub-set of subjects under the History umbrella, it was Canadian history that always seemed to fall off the table, especially if the topic had anything to do with something other than the two world wars or the colonial wars between the English and the French. As a nation, we all seem pretty well-versed, or generally aware of Cartier and Champlain, Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach, not so much Second Ypres. But aside from that, Canadian history was generally regarded as being boring when compared to more exciting histories, like south of the border where somebody was always shooting at somebody else, and the struggle for land ownership was often the purview of murderous rascals and borderline criminals.
There is no perfect way to teach history, such a task would would be impossible. But, still, we can endeavour to do the best we can, free of bias, incorporating the good and the bad, as we should if we’re hewing to a mission of telling the truth as best we can. What we cannot do is whitewash, or blackwash the story. There is good and bad in people, and there is good and bad in nations, which are collections of people. This is ultimately reflected in the stories of these people and these nations.
When I was growing up, our Canadian history was a study of aboriginal societies before European contact, inter-aboriginal warfare with or without European involvement, the business of the fur trade, the epic encounter between Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. Isaac Brock getting gunned down on a hill at Queenston was made more real by being able to see his bloody tunic at the War Museum. But then we got down to a study of development and government, of politics and political rascals, all of it exclusively from the point of view of the European conquerors. Responsible government, rep by pop, William Lyon Mackenzie, George Brown, John A McDonald, Georges-Etienne Cartier, Confederation. Canadian history detours into a study of constitutional law, and if presented poorly, will cause a generation of Canadian young people to check out of the story of the formation of their own country, their own story, the story of their ancestors. It was white history, and it was boring as hell, more so if the person teaching it clearly had little interest themselves.
Within the past twenty years or so, Canadian history did get more exciting, in that we started talking about the thousands of people who died as a result of the poor behaviour and racial decision-making that was endemic to the time. Pushing the indigenous populations off their lands, saddling them with the Indian Act, allowing them to starve to death while at the same time prohibiting them from farming with anything other than hand-held implements.
Residential schools packed a punch as a topic, and every ground-radar discovery of undocumented bodies hammers that story home to the current day. The complicity of organized religion in this, whether Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Anglican drove home the point that these institutions of implied respect had their own human failings that caused serious harm, impacting that implied respect. Japanese internment camps during the Second World War were a blight on our story, as was the treatment accorded to Chinese and people originating from India, and Asia at large. The Head Tax was patently racist, and any student can readily identify it as such.
Turning away the Komagata Maru full of Indian nationals was racist. Turning away 907 Jewish refugees on the St. Louis was negligently murderous as much a s it was racist, as most of those passengers died in the Holocaust when the ship was forced to return to Germany because nobody would let it land. No, we were not solely responsible for this historical injustice, but we played our part, and had we done something differently, nearly a thousand Jews would have survived the coming years.
Our recent political leadership has apologized for these things, which I suppose is something.
But here’s my point, or at least sort of.
Our young people today, perhaps the cohort age thirty and younger, see Canadian history as a never-ending exercise in apologies for deeds done wrong in the past. They see paint thrown on statues of historical figures, names of public buildings and infrastructure changed, and a wave of being politically correct as being the new normal.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being politically astute, or historically astute. Those injustices need to be recognized, absolutely. But they can’t be allowed to replace the other aspects of nation-building and the national story. One theme cannot be taught to the exclusion of the other. The story, good or bad, for better or for worse, is the story, and it reflects the human condition. Sure, we can all be better, people and nations too. But we often aren’t, so there it is.
The story of human kind is one fraught with challenge, with struggle, with conflict, and with violence. It’s the way of things, and as much as I’d like to say it was otherwise, it wasn’t and it isn’t.
Teaching is a tough gig, in that you’re often asked to be an expert on thirty things at once, which is just unreasonable. Outside of the secondary panel, you’re going to have people who are tasked with teaching a number of things that they’re not properly experienced with or trained for. In the elementary panel, teachers are more often than not generalists when it comes to subject matter. Most rise to the occasion. Like anywhere else, some do not.
The people above them on the educational food chain hew to the notion that everything the Ministry of Education spits out is gospel, that is until it’s debunked by the next thing coming down the pipe, to the point where the circle closes and we’re right back to where we started. We set out the creation of critical thinking as one of the preferred outcomes in our students, then we promptly ignore the concept when it comes to the stuff coming down from on high.
There is nothing most resembling God on Earth than a senior administrator in the education system selling the latest from the deep thinkers down south. It reminds me of the George Orwell book 1984, where this its good, it’s always been good, and will always remain to be good, until it’s bad. A dog chasing its tail comes to mind as a visual.
Curricular approach seems to be often dependant upon the final chapter of the last book read by the Director of Education, who was introduced to that book by some other director of another board, and then it’s game on, that is at least until a new director rises from the plebes below and reads a different book.
This du jour approach impacts all subject matter, as it does with history.
What I’d like to see is the identification of a stable direction of content and delivery that somehow manages to blend responsibly all the aspects of Canadian history where students can identify the good and the bad, the high and the low, of our national story. Something that translates into young people not feeling good about their history, or bad about their history, but aware and appreciative of their history.
To me, nothing will ever replace a legitimate university course in Canadian history as the best way to produce an effective teacher of Canadian history. Not a course in how to teach history, but a legitimate course in history. In other words, take the course you’re going to teach, only at the university level from a professor selected in advance by a school board or the ministry.
This can be tied to salary, the same way that the so-called Additional Qualifications courses are currently. In fact, a legitimate university course taught by an approved instructor/professor has far more value, in my opinion, than many of the AQ courses currently on offer.
It’s not a perfect world, in education or elsewhere. What I’m proposing isn’t going to solve every problem in the classroom. But it will put more qualified people in front of more students, and if carried out over time, may allow us to close the gap between subject matter and qualified subject delivery in history.
A recent poll seemed to suggest that many young people might actually consider becoming part of the United States as a good thing.
I might suggest that many feeling this way may have lost sight of who they are, and where they came from. And as well, what differentiates them from Americans
When Canadians start entertaining the notion of becoming something other than Canadians, we may have done something poorly in the telling of our nation’s story.
COVER STORY: Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash
NEWSMAGRENFREW 