My argument is simple. Anyone who gives any kind of a history course
has to make choices about the content of that course, judging that
some content is more important than other content. If we call our
courses Canadian history, honesty compels us to make choices about
Canadian content. In courses that purport to give an overview of Canadian
history there is a certain content relating to the history of the
Canadian nation or Canadian people or Canadian peoples that ought
to be taught.
It's surely hard to disagree with these elementary propositions.
Perhaps you can attack them by saying that it's all wrong to think
about any specific content in history courses — that the job is not
to teach what happened in history, but rather the job is to teach
how to think historically, how to analyze problems the way historians
do, how to use sources and so on.
There may be some truth in that if you happen to be teaching people
how to be historians, just as if you're teaching people how to be
computer programmers you would teach them how to program computers.
But if the purpose of your teaching is to impart to your students
knowledge of Canadian history, then the job is like teaching them
the fundamentals of making a computer work — how to use the keyboard,
the desktop, the software, and so on. The main purpose of history
teaching at practically every level below graduate instruction is
to teach content.
So what content are we to teach in Canadian history courses? The
operative word is the adjective "Canadian". What makes a
course a course in Canadian history? By definition it's about Canada,
which means that it's about the experiences the people who call themselves
Canadian recognize as Canadian, which is to say it's about experiences
they have had more or less in common, which means that it's about
the public history of the country.
What is that public history? I suggest that it is the anatomy and
physiology of the evolution of Canada through time. When we discuss
that anatomy and physiology most of us would reach a rough agreement
on what we have to talk about, just as if we were giving a course
on human anatomy and physiology we would largely agree on the organs
and processes that we have to cover. We would certainly agree that
it would be wrong to give a course on human anatomy and physiology
that only included two or three organs, let us say the genitals and
the parathyroid glands, or looked at only a couple of processes, such
as skin pigmentation and the operations of the sweat glands, ignoring
everything else. No doubt our medical friends will tell us that there
are many different ways of approaching the study of anatomy and physiology,
with differing emphases, but you still have to study the major organs —
the brain, the heart, the lungs, and so on — and you have to study
the basic physiological processes, respiration, nutrition, the circulation
of the blood, and so on.
If we're studying Canadian history honestly, we have not done a very
good job if we don't talk about certain key historical episodes or
turning points. Have we talked about Canadian history adequately,
for example, if we have not talked about the first interactions of
aboriginals with Europeans? Have we talked about Canadian history
adequately if we haven't considered the history of New France, if
we haven't considered the Conquest, if we haven't considered the effect
of the American Revolution, if we haven't considered the evolution
of the Canadian economy within the shifting contexts of British trade
policy, if we don't talk about the rebellions of 1837, if we don't
talk about the coming of responsible government, if we don't talk
about Confederation, if we don't talk about Western expansion, if
we don't build the CPR, if we don't talk about Canadian contributions
to the two Great Wars, if we don't talk about the depression, if we
don't talk about Sir John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Mackenzie
King, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, if we don't talk about the crises
caused by Quebec nationalism from the 1960s? Have we talked about
Canadian history adequately if we don't talk about bilingualism, multiculturalism,
constitutional reform and the coming of the Charter of Rights? Have
we talked about Canadian history adequately if we haven't talked about
the realignment and integration of the Canadian economy with the American
economy before and after and including the decision to enter into
a free trade agreement? Most sensible people would say that these
are the events integral to the anatomy and physiology of Canadian
history and they have to be taught if we're going to give students
a proper overview of that subject.
Putting this another way, but retaining my analogy to the body, if
we make a distinction between political and social history, it might
be like the distinction between the bones and the tissues of a body.
You can't teach a proper course of anatomy without discussing both
bones and tissues. Similarly a Canadian history course that is all
political history is like presenting a skeleton without flesh — only
the bare bones of history. A course that is all social history is
like a serving of tissue without bones or structure — a lot of soft
mush.
Putting this yet another way, I do not have a problem with the notion
that Canadian students ought to be able to answer those factual questions
asked in the Dominion Institute's surveys. Knowing some basic facts
and yes, even dates, in history is like having a vocabulary or like
having basic typing skills. It is where you start, it is the foundation,
and then you go on to build on it.
In his polemic, Who Killed Canadian History? J.L. Granatstein makes
two simple points. His main point is that we are distorting history
and failing to do the teacher's obvious job of preparing students
to be literate citizens if we don't teach a balanced overview of Canadian
history. Granatstein is saying that it's unprofessional in the fullest
sense to give students Canadian history courses that do not include
content relating to, for example, Confederation, Canada's military
history, and Canada's national political traditions, among other subjects.
Granatstein's second point is that certain teachers of Canadian history,
mostly in the universities, are failing to do their job as communicators
when they talk only to themselves and a few senior students in esoteric,
jargon-laden language. When they do this they cut themselves off from
the main body of students, they cut universities off from the rest
of society, and they cut their discipline off from contact with the
rest of the intellectual world (much the way that many academic economists
have, to take a less contentious example). Some of you will know that
in a scholarly article published in 1991 ("Privatizing the Mind:
The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada",
Journal of Canadian Studies, 26, 4 (Hiver 1991-92 Winter), pp. 5-17)
I anticipated some of Granatstein's points, stressing that from the
1970s on Canadian history had turned inward, becoming personalized,
privatized, and solipsistic, and that in succumbing to these trends
we were failing in our basic duty as teachers to the point where the
capacity for Canadian citizenship was being imperilled.
Perhaps both of us were wrong, however, to worry so much about the
universities, to worry about how certain professors were distorting
and deadening our subject. Even as we were writing our laments, other
historians, mostly outside the universities were hard at work generating
what has welled up into a quite tremendous flow of popular writing
about Canada and Canadian history, a volume of writing that means
that Canadian history shelves in bookstores are groaning with books
on all manner of subjects.
Magazines too. Here in Winnipeg we should pay special tribute to
the national history magazine published in this city, The Beaver,
which in the 1980s thanks to a few real visionaries (especially Rolph
Huband of the Hudson's Bay Company), was transformed from a company
house organ into a slick glossy and comprehensive popular magazine
of Canadian history with what for this country is an enormous circulation,
now standing well over 45,000. The Beaver may never be quite so fat
with ads and circulation as the magazine it's always trying to catch
up to, the Canadian Geographic Journal, but that just underlines what
we all know about Canada having more geography than history.
And of course we also now have videos — stacks and stacks of videos —
most notably the whole 32 hour course in Canadian history put together
by the CBC, "Canada: A People's History". Many of you know
much more than I do about how or whether videos can work as a fundamental
teaching tool, but what interests me about the CBC's approach to Canadian
history is that it exactly proves the point of my comments. When Mark
Starowicz and his staff set out to produce the most intellectually
up-to-date course they could in Canadian history, when they bent over
backward to consult historians of all stripes, when they bought into
the idea of telling history from a "people's" point of view,
and when they put it all together - the result looked remarkably traditional.
Much is going on in the episodes of "A People's History" —
a lot of attention to aboriginals, a lot of attention to workers
and women and the immigrant experience — but there is also an enormous
amount of military history and political history. Most of the check-points
I listed earlier in these remarks are covered, because to their credit
the CBC people touch all the bases as they circle the field. Good
for them.
But my final argument is that to achieve a balanced content in Canadian
history courses -ie. to have a truce in one version of the history
wars - is only a beginning. It does not solve the crucial double problem
of (a) how to make the instruction in these important subjects interesting
to our students and (b) how to show the students that history is not
just a set of agreed upon facts. These problems are often linked,
but as a professional historian I'm most interested in the objectivity/interpretive
issue.
Our crying need in Canadian history is not so much for new approaches
to new content, but rather for new approaches to and serious discussion
of the issues swirling around the old content. Here is where our texts,
where many of the courses we teach, where "A People's History"
and where our current generation of university historians all tend
to let us down. You can't do Canadian history without talking about
the rebellions of 1837, for example, but should you really assume
that you understand these rebellions and their consequences? Were
they crucial in bringing about political change in the provinces of
Canada or did they retard political change? Similarly would the Métis
people have been better off with or without the Northwest rebellion
of 1885? Was it really important to Canada that Macdonald rushed through
the building of the CPR when he did, or could it have been built a
decade later with less risk, less conflict, and more profitability?
I can go on raising these interpretive issues — hard interpretive
ones, mostly involving the problem of counter-factual reasoning and
assumptions — almost endlessly. I can suggest to you, for example,
that the Winnipeg General Strike is hugely over-emphasized in our
history books — that it was both an abject failure and little more
than a product of the hyperinflation of prices and expectations between
1915 and 1919. It's very important, many of us feel, and it's a very
easy argument to make after September 11, 2001, that Canada's experience
during Hitler's war be studied, and particularly that our military
traditions not be neglected. But I tend to part company with my friend
Granatstein and many of our military historians in believing that
it's not enough to just list Canada's contributions. We have to evaluate
our military engagements with cold critical intelligence. We have
to raise all the hard issues that for the most part are skimmed over
in our military histories and in textbooks and in "A People's
History", but were raised for example, in the hugely controversial
and immensely interesting series "The Valour and the Horror"-such
issues as the failure of Canadian troops in Normandy to take their
objectives, the morality of the terror bombing of Germany, and the
very serious problems the Canadian navy had in the battle of the Atlantic.
Even within a balanced presentation in terms of basic content, then,
history is not cut-and-dried. It's always contentious, always resting
on interesting and intricate arguments about might-have-beens and
contingencies, always subject to reinterpretation. If we are to have
a country, Canada, if we are to teach something that's called Canadian
history, our content has to be the public events of our common history,
as well as some of the varieties of the private events. It is not
being super-nationalistic or excessively patriotic to suggest that
our sense of our selves, especially our sense of where we have come
from, is fundamental to our civic sense. If our civic sense, which
has never been all that strong, is allowed to erode and wither in
ignorance and subjectivism and misplaced pluralism and narcissistic
solipsism, then our democracy is going to function even less well
than it does now.
We need to build a platform of a sense of a common history. And then
we need to realize that every plank in that platform is contingent —
from the moment we nail it in place we should start examining it
critically. Is it really good wood? Is it properly fixed? Can we replace
it with something better?
A healthy foundation is always being poked and prodded, tested, repaired,
rebuilt. If you have no foundation at all, which describes too many
people's understanding of Canadian history, then the buildings that
you try to put up on that no foundation are all going to fall down.