Who Killed Canadian History?

In the 1960s, A.B. Hodgetts in his groundbreaking What Culture? What Heritage? bemoaned the loss of our history. Some 30 years later, in this brilliant and impassioned new evaluation, J.L. Granatstein points to an even more appalling situation in both the educational system and in our daily lives. As he argues so articulately, Canada is one of the few nations in the Western world not to teach its history to its young people and to its new citizens. The result: a nation that does not understand and respect its own past. How bad is the situation? In a 1997 survey at York University's Glendon College, 66% of first-year students could not name a Canadian author, most could not name the first English- and French-speaking Prime Ministers, over 50% could not give the date of Confederation. In a Dominion Institute Poll of the same year, 77% were unaware that Remembrance Day commemorated the end of the First World War and only 10% could identify the Quiet Revolution. What is worse, when history is taught in our schools, it is too often processed through the filter of political correctness. Who is responsible for this unthinking conspiracy to eliminate our history? Granatstein lays the blame with a number of culprits: schools that are too busy teaching trendy subjects, and dealing with the needs of recent immigrants; universities where history has been reduced to a series of arcane subjects; ministries of education that have dropped Canadian history as a required course and approved dumbed-down textbooks; the federal government with its misguided multicultural policies; even the media, which should be above political pressures, too often uses history to search for villainy. Granatstein shows that other countries, much older than Canada, have understood how to treat history as a necessary and important condition of existence. He offers wise and reasoned solutions to a problem that undermines our sense of ourselves at a time when national understanding is essential. Parents who want their children well-educated, educators who face difficult decisions, policy makers who balance many needs and all those who care about their country must read this book.