To the Past: History Education, Public Memory, and Citizenship in Canada.

Graeme S. Mount is a history professor at Laurentian University and
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom.

In 2002, historians and educators met at McGill University, and these entertaining papers are the result. Jack Granatstein, author of Who Killed Canadian History (1998), was not there, but conference participants were certainly thinking about him. OISE’s Ruth Sandwell rejected Granatstein’s hypothesis that a conspiracy of historians, educational bureaucrats, and teachers was culpable because, said Sandwell, they had long ceased communicating with each other, let alone the Canadian public. McGill’s Desmond Morton was more optimistic than his friend Granatstein. Canadians know much less Canadian history than they should, admitted Morton, but half the non-fiction books read by Canadians deal with history, and historical programs on television are very popular.

Peter Seixas from the University of British Columbia reported two conflicting versions of the Roman conquest of ancient Britain. In one, the Romans introduced civilization to barbarians. In the other, they disrupted a way of life and fought innocent people. When asked to explain the discrepancy, students replied that they could not know because they had not been there. Chad Gaffield of the University of Ottawa related a similar story. He had delivered what he considered a brilliant lecture on the Depression in Canada, only to be challenged by an elderly student who had lived through the era and remembered it differently. What were the younger students to believe?

Timothy Stanley, also from the University of Ottawa, said that most Canadian history as taught in the schools has been the story of Europeans in North America, even when Europeans were a minority. Such an interpretation is incomplete, he observed. Keith Barton, an American who has taught in Northern Ireland, discussed the teaching of history there and in the United States. Laval University’s Jocelyn Létourneau reported the findings from a survey. At his request, 403 students wrote brief essays on the history of Quebec as they remembered it. Overwhelmingly they stressed the arrival of the French, the Conquest, and anglophone–francophone strife. There was little mention of First Nations people, immigrants, or women. Finally, Ken Osborne of the University of Manitoba explained that history is essential even to understand the names of places in metropolitan Winnipeg.