Content area
Full Text
Very different in temper, purpose, and point of view, the three books under discussion (for I rather invoke them than review them below) converge around a seminal development: Canadian history, as taught in the schools, has changed drastically since the 1960s, and in ways disturbing to more than one side in the country's ongoing culture wars. On the one hand, J.L. Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? is the latest offering from a prolific author and retired distinguished professor of military history, known otherwise for his stinging neoconservative critique of current Canadian higher education -- including attacks on tenure and journal subsidies as well as multiculturalism and political correctness. On the other hand, both Ken Osborne's In Defense of History and Bob Davis's Whatever Happened to High School History? reflect the concerns of two educator/teachers who have grown up in liberal or left circles and who are by instinct much more sympathetic to the new histories of recent decades as well as the social democratic politics they inspire. Considering the books at their points of greatest overlap and fiercest differentiation offers a revealing window on problems that go to the heart of history's role within a democratic culture -- in Canada and beyond.
In this heterogeneous field, it is perhaps surprising (at least to an outsider) that everyone can agree more or less on when and how things changed for Canadian history teaching, if not exactly on the whys and merits of the transformation. All three authors, for example, point to A.B. Hodgetts' 1968 report What Culture? What Heritage? as a pivotal moment in a great shakeup of history education in the nation's schools. A history teacher himself who generated a bully pulpit he called the National History Project, Hodgetts assailed a decline of national civic culture which he blamed on an antiquated educational curriculum and method. History was indeed a fat target to swing at. Up through the 1950s, according to Ken Osborne, the discipline had "enjoyed a prominent place in the curricula of most provinces," and by the early 1960s, as Bob Davis recounts, Ontario high school students were taking a required five-year history load. Yet, the substance of such a curriculum sagged from its own obsolescence. Osborne, for example, recalls without sympathy an...