A politically correct history leads to a distorted past and a bleak future

Historical truth is both painful and many-sided

By J.L. Granatsein

If there was ever any argument about this subject, it has surely been brought to an end by the events in the last few months in the former Yugoslavia. The world watched Serbs go to war for Kosovo, an area of little intrinsic value but of supreme interest to their nationality in historical terms. History – the events of a half-millennium ago – mattered.

            By the same token, NATO went to war against Belgrade for a combination of historical reasons. Slobodan Milosevic was committing genocide (again) and the world, sensitized by the Holocaust and remembering Serb action against the Croats and Bosnians several years ago, could not accept this. Western critics of the war argued, on the other hand, that Kosovo could become another Vietnam – a trap out of which nothing but body bags could come. In other words, history mattered to both sides, though all too often politicians and commentators applied its lessons with a rashness that historians usually hope to avoid.

            History matters to Canadians, too. French-Canadians cherish the humiliations they suffered at the hands of the Anglais, and Lucien Bouchard has risen to prominence, in substantial part, because he can embody the sense of outraged nationalism such humiliations produce better than anyone else. Peter Lougheed, the longtime Alberta premier, similarly made himself the spokesman for a province that cherished its grievances against Central Canada. The past is important.

            But not in our schools. There is scarcely a school system in Canada that obliges its students to learn anything or world history, North American history, or European history. The key to understanding our civic institutions, British history, has been eliminated from the classroom because the British are seen as just another ethnic group deserving no special attention.

            Worse yet, astonishingly, four provinces have no compulsory Canadian history course in their high schools. Others bury the past in a mishmash of civics, pop sociology and English as a second language, eliminating  anything that might offend students, parents and the school trustees in an attempt to produce an air-brushed past, free of warts (except for the officially approved historical sins that can be used for present-day social engineering). In Ontario, until the Tory government in 1999 announced a revised history curriculum, the only compulsory history course was a grade 10 offering on “Canada in the Twentieth Century” that epitomized this type of history.

            Just as civil servants put process ahead of policy, so have our schools put process over learning. History is hard, and to master the Canadian (or any other) past is difficult. But that is its great virtue, of course. History requires thought, demands wide reading and almost forces those who study it to write. In an age of multiple-choice examinations, few other subjects in our schools any loner demand thinking, reading and writing. This makes history all the more important.

            As bad, the way the past is at present taught is hopelessly confused in its aims. Facts are boring, dates are unimportant and the past is, by definition, another country for present-minded, so why both? What matters, the education theorists says, is that students should learn to read critically and to probe texts for the writers’ underlying biases. There is certainly utility in critical reading, but whether one can discern bias without first knowing some hard information is doubtful.

            Whether society can function without common cultural capital, is also uncertain. For example, how can Canadian voters – and 18-year-olds are voters – make rational political choices in the late 1990s without understanding such terms as “British North America Act,” ”Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” “provincial powers” and Social Union”?

            History has a social utility in a nation like ours. Canada is a magnet for millions from all over the world. People choose to immigrate here because this is a land of opportunity, a nation with Western values and ideals and a past that is attractive. Integrating the children of immigrants from Russia, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Somalia and Albania into our society ought to be an overriding object of Canadian policy. The values and traditions of Canadian life should be force-fed to them; history should be explained in ways that demonstrate how and why we have regularly settled disputes without force, how our political system has functioned, and why we have on many occasions gone to war or joined alliances, not for aggressive reasons, but to protect our democratic ideals. Those are the reasons immigrants come here, after all.

            But do we teach this past to our newcomers? Not a chance. Our schools are value-free or, at least value-neutral. Our system is but one of many, and heaven forbid that we should pronounce Western culture superior to any other. Moreover, lest our history upset anyone, we ensure that anything offensive to any group or nation is deleted. Instead, the history that is taught focuses on Canada’s many sins: Canadian racism, Canadian sexism, Canadian abuses of human and civil rights – these are all studied at length in a well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to educate children about the need for tolerance.

            Tolerance, yes, of course. But what does an approach to the past that concentrates on our (relatively few) sins and all but neglects our (relatively plentiful) virtues do to immigrant children, who must wonder into what kind of monstrous society their parents have plunged them? What does such an approach tell the native-born about their homeland? Somehow in our efforts to be “unbiased” and fair to all, we have distorted our past into one full of sin and error.

            Yes, in the past some Canadians have been racist or sexist or have abused governmental powers. Some still do. But that is not the whole of the Canadian past, or of our present. Although one could not tell from the way our history is taught, somehow this country became the most favored nation on earth.

            Our teaching of the past, however focuses on victimology and, Lord knows, we Canadians are all victims: All women have suffered as the hands of men, all aboriginals who attended residential schools were abused, as were all those unfortunates who went to parochial schools, especially those operated by the Christian Brothers. Sometimes these tales are accurate, but only sometimes. Not everyone was or is a victim, despite the clamorous legal claims of the present.

            History matters. The way it is taught – or not taught – has shaped a tuned – out generation that can use a computer and surf the Net, but that knows almost nothing about anything important, except that anything important must be inexpressibly boring. Kosovo? Immaterial. Social Union? Incomprehensible. The future? Unknowable, but surely bleak.

By Michael Ignatieff

 Once upon a time, more than 20 years ago, I set out from Harvard with my newly minted doctorate to teach Canadian history to students at the University of British Columbia. In my innocence, I supposed there was a genuinely national history to teach. It was the story of Cartier and Champlain, the Plains of Abraham, Upper and Lower Canada, the struggle for responsible government and the achievement of Confederation.

            Try teaching that to students on Canada’s West Coast. To them, it was just an interesting fable about a land 2,000 miles to the east. They didn’t believe it was their story until the railway made it to Vancouver. It took a semester for this Torontonian to realize that the national history I took for granted was essentially regional – the story of what Donald Creighton called “the empire of the St Lawrence.”

            The other reason the history I was teaching failed as a genuinely national history was that it left out almost all of the people. It was a history of the politics, diplomacy and warfare that led to the creation of the Canadian political system. While this has to be the core of any national history, it leaves a lot out. Where were the sodbusters? Where were the Ukrainians? Where were the Chinese labours who built the railway? The people from Indian who came to cut the timber? The Japanese who worked in the market gardens of British Columbia’s lower mainland? Where were their ancestors, my students wanted to know.

The history I was teaching left out what mattered to my students. It didn’t help them make sense of the photographs in their family albums or the tales told by their grandparents. And as for the aboriginal peoples, if my students wanted to study them, they had to head over to the anthropology department. Their achievements – and their tragedy – had no place in the Canadian story.

Things have changed radically since I taught at UBC. I don’t know whether we have a genuinely national history – one that incorporates the five regions of the country equally – but I do know the story has become more inclusive. Thanks to young social historians who came out of the graduate schools of the 60’s and 70’s, ordinary people – the immigrants, workers, orphaned children, religious groups and aboriginal peoples – have returned to the centre of the story, where they belong. Of course this makes it more difficult to tell Canada’s story, for we have to keep asking who the “we” is.

My counterpart, Jack Granatstein, seems to lament this, and to feel that our history genuflects too much to political correctness, to a pious wish to uplift all our national communities. But this is not political correctness, so much as a long overdue recognition that Canada’s national story has been defined by a constant struggle over who is included, who gets to use the word “we”, and who gets labeled “they”.

Professor Granatstein also seems to lament the fragmentation of our common historical understanding, the waning sense of a “shared” history. But which history? Whose history?

Our national experience has been recurrently bedeviled (as well as enriched) by the fact that English and French Canada do not share the same history of 1759. For the English, it is a victory; fro the Quebecois, a bitter defeat. For more than 200 years, Canadian politics have been defined by a quarrel over the meaning of the battle on the Plains of Abraham. It is sentimental illusion to suppose the two communities will ever agree on what it means. At best, we will agree to disagree; we will continue the argument. And the argument – provided it remains civil – will not prevent us from living together.

It would be nice if one day the Quebecois admit the Conquest didn’t turn out to badly for them; that the British actually safeguarded their religion and laws when they imposed a common matrix of British institutions. And it would be nice if the English admitted the French are not just a troublesome people who have always threatened our unity, but instead that their presence – and the unending argument that goes with it – has defined us both and actually helps guarantee our joint survival as a distinct people. But we shouldn’t count on this kind of shared understanding. History matters to both “founding nations”, but we shouldn’t suppose it would ever be the same story.

History for Prof. Granatstein is primarily about civics, a bracing lesson in patriotism, with little room for tales of suffering or dissent. For me, history is the story of our arguments: French versus English, native-born versus race, religion versus religion. It is also the story of how we managed to resolve them, how we created a way of agreeing to disagree.

I don’t think history is – or should be – just a lesson in patriotism. It should be a lesson in truth. And the truth is both painful and many-sided. What kind of history of Canada would exclude the execution of Louis Riel, the War Measures Act, the bitterly divisive debates about conscription, the residential schools for aboriginal children? What kind of history would it be that talked only of the darker and more difficult sides of our past? Just as one-sided as a history that omits them. We all want to love our country; we all want to be reconciled to its past. But reconciliation and love require understanding, and to understand our history, we first need to tell the truth.

Jack Granatstein wants to “force-feed” Canadian history to our immigrants. He seems anxious about whether the centre can hold as Canada becomes a fully multicultural society. I think the centre will hold, provided it knows how to change. Anxieties about immigration are, as he well knows, old hat in Canada. Doubtless, there were Anglican worthies a century ago who worried about the dreadful things his ancestors and mine were going to do to their cherished idea of Canada.

But here it is Prof. Granatstein, not me, who seems to lose faith in our history. In Laurier's day we took in millions of southern and eastern Europeans. They didn't speak our language; they didn't have the slightest conception of the history of British North America. Four generations later, their descendants are helping run the country. The same thing will happen to the immigrants who are now joining the Canadian experiment.

Having disagreed so sharply, let me in true Canadian fashion, conclude on a note of agreement. Like Prof. Granatstein, I am not a relativist. I don't believe history is just the stories we happen to tell about it. History is both a set of facts about the past and a set of conflicting interpretations about their meaning. The facts matter, and all Canadians need to know them.

I don't like the idea of a Canada where no one knows who Laurier was, where everyone has forgotten what Pierre Trudeau stood for. We can argue about the facts (and I say the more argument the better) but we are truly done for if we pretend they do not exist. They do, and they set the limits of any arguments we can hope to have.