Whatever Happened to High School History?: Burying the Political Memory of Youth-Ontario, 1945-1995

H. Graham Rawlinson teaches history at York University.

In 1960, history was a compulsory subject for four of the five
high-school years. By 1995, students faced only one mandatory history
course. The number of history classes taught today, as

a percentage of all courses offered in Ontario high schools, is only
half of what it was 35

years ago.

What caused the change? According to Bob Davis, in the 1960s and 1970s
the disintegration of a postwar social consensus about what sort of
history was important and what lessons it should teach made the
discipline vulnerable when it was forced to compete with new subjects
and changing teaching methods. History became associated not with
certain core ideas but with a set of reading and comprehension skills.
These skills, Davis convincingly argues, were easily assigned to other
courses, and history, at least in its traditional form, became an
endangered species in Ontario’s family of high-school subjects.

More problematic is the author’s prescription for repositioning
history at the centre of the curriculum. Davis calls for a new
historical narrative for the Ontario curriculum, based loosely on the
inclusive social history that is now the chief product of
university-based historians. What he fails to consider is what that new
narrative should contain, or how it might avoid becoming as politicized
as the old one. And what actually is lost by parceling history out to
other disciplines at the high-school level is never made clear. Still,
this is a provocative and compelling book. Its account of massive
transformation in the Ontario curriculum over the past 35 years, and of
the impact of that change on a discipline with a long and rich
secondary-school pedigree, should be of interest to parents, teachers,
and citizens.