I was not aware that it has been a full twenty-five years since J.L. Granatstein published his polemical Who Killed Canadian History?:

In that work, Granatstein asserts that the rationale for the history taught in Canadian schools was political, not historical. And sexism and racism were being taught, not history.

In the postmodern era, the priority of vast areas of history teaching and historiography, and Granatstein is far from the only academic who noticed this, transitioned from evidence and facts, to morals and emotions. Western oppression became the source of historiographical obsession. And the practice, which has shaped Western historiography since at least the turn of the twentieth century, of injecting moral judgements adjacent to facts and timelines, became entrenched.

This has happened because important areas of historiography, and historical pedagogy, have been subsumed into social sciences. My 9 and 11 year old children do not have a history class. What they learn about history, which isn’t much, is in a class called “social studies”. My son, who is in grade 6, and who was never previously taught anything about the Holocaust, is learning about Nazis Germany’s persecution of the Jews in the most obscure way. His introduction to the Holocaust included a lesson pertaining to the MS St. Louis, a passenger ship carrying 907 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution that was refused entry into Canada in 1939.

The ship’s Jewish passengers were safely returned to four European countries, but tragically 254 were later killed in the Holocaust. A terrible outcome. Indeed, one of the rare dark stains on Canada’s otherwise quite exemplary record of offering sanctuary to refugees. But if Canadians at the time had known that refusing entry to the MS St. Louis would result in the cold-blooded murder of 254 innocent people, would they have allowed entry? A question not raised in my son’s class.

As well, what Canadians knew or didn’t know about the genocidal ambitions of the Nazis did not come up in my son’s classroom discussions. Indeed, that would be too complex and nuanced for 12 year old’s. They also did not discuss conditions in Canada at the time that may have played a role in the consequential decision to turn away the MS St. Louis. Nor did they mention the Evian Conference, which occurred the year prior to the MS St. Louis‘ ill-fated arrival to Canada.

The Evian Conference of 1938 was held in the French resort town of Évian-les-Bains. There were 32 participating nations, including Canada, who were “to seek, by international agreement, avenues for an orderly resettlement of (Jewish) refugees from Germany and Austria”. Shockingly, at the close of the talks, none of the nations involved had offered to accept any Jewish refugees.

From the London Spectator (1938):

If the Conference has not been a complete failure, it has achieved little to boast about, all the States sympathizing and none desiring to admit refugees. Even the United States, as prime mover, offers no more than the quota.

My son did not come away from his class with an impression that Canada was not alone in its reluctance to accept refugees. This, and other such lessons, seem as if they are designed to implant a sense of revulsion over Canada’s past failures, instead of patriotism over its achievements and victories. What a disservice to young Canadian learners.

This cherry-picked event from history, which doesn’t really deal with the Holocaust, but assumes kids will appreciate related events that occurred over the backdrop of the Holocaust, is doubly misleading in that it presents Canada as a racist country hostile to refugees, before establishing that the opposite was (and is) overwhelmingly true throughout the arc of Canadian history up to the present.

It’s not even clear if my son took away from the lesson that Hitler was the far bigger villain, compared to his “racist colonial” country of Canada.

Clearly, Canada eventually let in Jewish people, and people from all ethnicities. We became the world’s first multiculturalism, and our large cities are among the most cosmopolitan and multicultural places in the world. This needs to be established first for young learners of Canada’s story. Clearly established, before one starts teaching the exceptions to the rule. But my son is getting some weird blend of oddities presented as introductory material to larger subjects which hold historical conclusions opposite to the ones the cherry-picked exceptions portray. It only makes sense that these exceptional events are selected deliberately for political, not educational, reasons.

Twenty-five years ago, Granatstein wrote of Canadian schools,

The material taught stressed the existence of anti-Aboriginal, anti-Metis, and anti-Asian racism, as well as male sexism and discrimination against women, as if these issues were and always had been the primary identifying characteristics of Canada … The history taught is that of the grievers among us, the present-day crusaders against public policy or discrimination. The history omitted is that of the Canadian nation and people.

Who Killed Canadian History? also criticized the teacher-curated practice whereby early exposure to Canadian history is random and discontinuous concerning time periods and individuals, and “without much regard for chronology”. Exactly what I have been experiencing with my kids, decades after Granatstein identified the problem.