{"id":10106,"date":"2011-07-01T12:33:59","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T16:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=10106"},"modified":"2011-07-01T12:33:59","modified_gmt":"2011-07-01T16:33:59","slug":"why-canadian-students-learn-so-little-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/07\/01\/why-canadian-students-learn-so-little-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Canadian students learn so little history"},"content":{"rendered":"

An article in the newly launched Dorchester Review<\/em><\/a> discusses the teaching of history:<\/p>\n

\n

Here in Canada the preoccupation with victimhood has mostly centred on Japanese Canadians and residential school \u201csurvivors.\u201d Peter Seixas in Teaching Canada\u2019s History<\/em> (pp. 18-21) thinks children should be encouraged to condemn Caucasian writers who used terms like \u201cEskimo,\u201d \u201cprimitive,\u201d and \u201cpagan.\u201d What Seixas, a professor of education, seems not to appreciate is that schoolchildren are too young for this kind of academic pseudo-complexity and that their worldview is warped by pretentious classroom efforts to \u201cheal the wounds.\u201d Indeed what he advocates is what we have already had in many locales for a generation and counting. <\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

In its more recent form, the classical model proposes that various integrated fields from science and math to English and second or classical languages should be covered at three stages (hence \u201ctrivium\u201d), each time to a deeper, more systematic and engaging degree. For example, one approach for history could look like this, in four fields: (1) classical antiquity, (2) medieval-renaissance, (3) modern history, and (4) national, regional, and local history. Taught as a trivium, each of these four fields would be covered three times between grades one and twelve. Students today complain about repetition, but that is because they are tortured repetitively with the same introductory material by different uncoordinated teachers — rather than going into the subject more deeply and systematically as they grow older and more capable. As Anna Clark wrote in her 2008 paper on history teaching in Australia and Canada, \u201cThere is little point mandating the subject if it does not engage students and teachers.\u201d Textbooks should be used as a guide not a crutch, as classical educators have long maintained.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

We all have far to go. First, the evidence suggests that effective historical memory work is haphazard and unsystematic in public and many private schools. Students arrive at senior grades fundamentally culturally deprived and ignorant of facts. Even if narrative history is \u201ccompulsory\u201d in Britain to age 14, in practice pupils lack \u201cchronological understanding,\u201d according to Ofsted, the agency that inspects school standards. Teachers have failed \u201cto establish a clear mental map of the past.\u201d Students \u201cknew about particular events, characters and periods but did not have an overview.\u201d In Canada, social studies curricula in the English-speaking provinces reveal a similar prevalence of disconnected, episodic case studies. In England (and presumably elsewhere), as Michael Gove\u2019s critics admit, \u201cThe real problem is not with the curriculum, but with the schools\u2019 failure to deliver it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secondly, \u201ccritical skills\u201d are introduced too early. \u201cWhere ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down,\u201d remarks one Financial Times writer: \u201cBy age 16, students will have as much cynicism and \u2018distance\u2019 as any educator could wish.\u201d In Canada, a typical curriculum (Alberta\u2019s) prescribes \u201chistorical thinking\u201d in grade nine, \u201ca process whereby students are challenged to rethink assumptions about the past.\u201d But how can students \u201crethink\u201d something they haven\u2019t learned in the first place?<\/p>\n

Regrettably, the British curriculum downgrades history to an elective after age 14, a premature cut-off that sabotages the three-stage process that classical educators promote. It reduces history to an elementary subject. It\u2019s similar in Canada: after children are immersed in relativist \u201ctraditions and celebrations\u201d (grade two in Ontario), they jump around in grades three to seven social studies from settlement in Upper Canada backwards to the middle ages; backwards again to antiquity, followed illogically by first nations and explorers and a survey of Canada. After grade seven, as in Britain, history becomes an elective. We have all seen the schoolbus with some banal motto painted on the side such as \u201cOn the Journey of Learning.\u201d Most parents may never realize what this really means: \u201cOn a Journey to Nowhere in Particular.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I went to school in the 60s and 70s and I loved<\/em> history . . . just not the crap that was taught in history classes. It seemed to me that they deliberately tried to make Canadian history as boring as humanly possible. I had a few teachers who really seemed to enjoy teaching the subject, but for most of them it did appear to be just a tedious exercise they had to go through.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An article in the newly launched Dorchester Review discusses the teaching of history: Here in Canada the preoccupation with victimhood has mostly centred on Japanese Canadians and residential school \u201csurvivors.\u201d Peter Seixas in Teaching Canada\u2019s History (pp. 18-21) thinks children should be encouraged to condemn Caucasian writers who used terms like \u201cEskimo,\u201d \u201cprimitive,\u201d and \u201cpagan.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,79,7,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-education","category-history","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2D0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10106"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10109,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10106\/revisions\/10109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}