TEACHING ABOUT RACISM AND ANTI SEMITISM IN THE CONTEXT OF QUEBEC'S HISTORY PROGRAMS

Headnote

ABSTRACT

This article locates teaching about racism and other issues of citizenship in the context of history programs in Quebec. It treats their history and their curricula concluding with the need for new approaches in our teaching of national history.

This brief paper locates teaching about racism within a pedagogical conundrum. For the past half century, history programs in Quebec have been unable to escape a fundamental contradiction between themes that speak to survival of a conquered French Catholic people and those reflecting a persistent and flourishing pluralist society. To give setting, I summarize succeeding programs of national history since the 1960s and speak to their ideological contexts. The basic thrust of the paper, as Quebec authorities move to impose a new program, is the need to refresh our approach in teaching national history and to reduce a deadening tendency to political correctness. As well as suggesting the opening of Quebec's teaching of national history to competing narratives, I plea for a re-thinking of our training of teachers and for restoring the relations between academic historians and Ministry officials responsible for programs. Instead of papering over conflicts in the Quebec past with a view to what Scot historian Michael Fry has called "the inculcation of a sense of fellowship with people in the past", I suggest that by admitting instances of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, or violence in our history, we can give context and understanding to the civic issues facing young people today.1

The Setting:

Let's start with certain givens. First, it is not research into the history of neither Jews nor anti-Semitism in Quebec that is lacking. Scholars like Gerald Tulchinsky, Ariette Corcos, and Ruby Heap have shown the struggle for Jewish place in the Roman Catholic and Protestant educational systems, in labor and unions, and in universities.2 Historians Denis Vaugeois, Allan Greer, and Sylvie Taschereau have examined the political, social, and economic experience of Jews across the early history of Quebec. The place of Jews in English Canada as "undesirable settlers" or as students to be systematically excluded from institutions like McGill University have been described by Pierre Anctil and are summed up effectively by Irving Abella's and Harold Troper's effective title None is too Many.3

The second given is the...