“[T]he achievements of the past, and even the failures of the years gone by, can be a source of strength to meet not only today’s challenges, but tomorrow’s, too.”
Yup, it’s another Canada post. In my defense, I do try to focus on the underlying themes of these books, but I grant they’re not interesting to everyone.
Granatstein disapproves of how history is taught in Canada, and I have a suspicion he feels that way about how history is taught in a lot of places. For him, history is about narrative and causality, about learning what happened in the past, and he worries that too much of history today is about exploring political themes like racism and sexism. He doesn’t disagree that those are important, of course, but argues they should be in politics classes, not history: history should include them, but not be limited to them.
In saying so, he’s not afraid to take a controversial stance. Social history, labour history, women’s history: all as equally important as political history, he says, but too often taught at the expense of political history. In practice those are the sorts of ideas that historians fight internecine wars over, and I suspect the knives were out for him when the book was released.
I don’t know what the right way to teach history is: one has only to look at textbooks in the West Bank to see how difficult it can be. Even an attempt to have each side write alternating pages of a textbook failed in that particular case, as the views of the two sides were so different as to be irreconcilable. As this blog may betray, however, I personally love history, and so definitely believe that knowing history is important in order to be a successful citizen of a democracy. Based on the polling data, it’s not clear North Americans (I haven’t seen data for anyone else) are learning any history at all, and so there is definitely room for improvement. As perhaps with all school subjects though, the challenge is finite hours and almost infinite subjects people think should be required. Assembling a common list appears to be almost as difficult as coming up with a common history.
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