Trilby Kent: Make history meaningful again

The following is an excerpt from Trilby Kent’s book, The Vanishing Past: Making a Case for the Future of History, published in 2022 by Sutherland House.

In his 1995 book, Whatever Happened to High School History? educator and activist Bob Davis tore into the “bundle of techniques” approach to teaching history: an approach which he argued emphasized skills at the expense of knowledge. Nowadays, the techniques approach reigns supreme in Canada, led by Peter Seixas’ Historical Thinking Concepts. The former social studies teacher and director of UBC’s Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness passed away in 2022, but his framework for history education endures. The historical thinking concepts have become a central part of history teaching in Canadian high schools, and they enjoy wide support among teachers. They’re particularly useful at helping students to frame their analysis of a new piece of evidence. They provide a sense of purpose to historical study and challenge the idea of history being a set of predetermined facts.

But there are limitations. Davis famously argued that too much focus on interpretive frameworks “sounds more like understanding biases in order to shoot the breeze about them.” As he wrote:

Analyzing the window (and your own eyes) is certainly a necessary part of looking out the window at life itself. But if our main purpose is to make students little armchair experts on types of glass, type of Windex, types of window frames and types of eyeglasses to the point where they don’t get around to looking through that window at life, then we are guilty of a massive irresponsibility.

What I think was really riling Davis was the broader shift toward “sociological” history: an approach that rejected narrative in favour of relativism and heavily thematic learning. I was a beneficiary of this sociological style of instruction. After the pablum of middle school courses at my private Toronto high school in the late nineties, a Grade Ten society course was a breath of fresh air, with topics that made us feel clever and grown-up (Freud! Feral children! Camille Paglia!). 

History as a traditional academic subject could never be the same. In “Mod West,” we were encouraged to answer questions with more questions, and it was hard to give a wrong answer. We listened to Leonard Cohen and analyzed Napoleon’s leadership style using the Enneagram personality test. My final project was an extended essay on T.E. Lawrence passed under a heavily pseudo-psychological filter. As for learning how to interrogate primary sources: that was something you did in AP History (Advanced Placement exams, although American, are available for students to sit anywhere). Only a few of us took the AP, and we prepared for it outside of regular school hours.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the twelve aims of history and contemporary studies that guided the Ontario curriculum in those days led with this goal: that students should “develop confidence in themselves and in their ability to deal with problems in academic and everyday life and to make sound personal, educational, and career choices.” As J. L. Granatstein noted in Who Killed Canadian History?, it’s somewhat surprising that “to acquire knowledge of historical and contemporary societies” only made it to number nine on the list of aims.  But it also chimes with my experience and I suspect would still hold true today.

Granatstein’s book can lapse into curmudgeonly complaints and sensitivity to what he perceived as an over-emphasis on “grievance history,” but he makes several points that are difficult to dismiss. Today’s single compulsory high-school history course is heavily slanted toward current events and sociology. Linking historical concerns to the present day is important, and sociological interpretations of the past certainly have their place. But if this is what students are limited to receiving, it’s easy to see that it provides an incomplete picture. Granatstein also noted a perceived association between intellectual rigour, knowledge, and elitism, which is often in evidence in ongoing debates around streaming and curriculum design. “Content remains second to process—a distant second,” he wrote twenty-five years ago. “Because it is, by definition, full of content, history is no priority, especially when it is compared with trendier subjects.”

The conflation of content and elitism is a significant obstacle to reviving history as a subject in Canada. Even a quarter century ago, Granatstein sensed that “the idea that there should be national standards in history is a political non-starter,” but given the current climate of calling for decolonized and diversified history teaching to be mandated by provinces from coast to coast, there may well be the necessary energy and commitment to pursue such a project. Whether provincial ministries, city boards, faculties of education, and subject specialists can find a way to collaborate constructively to establish common standards is another question. But it’s worth a try.

The most obvious place to start is in our schools. In conversation with Steve Paikin on TVO’s The Agenda, high school teacher Neil Orford cut straight to the chase:

Let’s make history compulsory…Let’s make the argument that history needs to be broader in the curriculum. Let’s make the argument that the liberal arts have been under assault by a math-science bias…If every high school has a pathway for math and science, there should be a pathway for history. And students should be pursuing that through graduation. We will have better informed students and Canadians.

The good news is that many people are coming to this realization already. If there’s one thing that Donald Trump’s presidency showed us, it’s that while it’s important to understand broad trends, niche histories, and how to challenge dominant narratives, at certain points in time it really does matter who’s in power and how those individuals use that power. Knowing as many stories as possible from as wide a range of societies and cultures as possible can equip us to better appreciate and shape the systems that govern us.

These same systems are often the ones slowest to respond to calls for change. And so it must fall to students, teachers, parents, and school communities to call to centre history as a subject in its own right, and to recognize that teaching history that is diverse and progressive shouldn’t be mutually exclusive to teaching history that’s purposeful and coherent. In the absence of a national movement, we can push the provinces to mandate at least three years of history in elementary school and three years in high school, as Granatstein suggested. 

I would suggest that we would do students and our country a great service by widening our scope both temporally and geographically. All students should be entitled to an overview of world history that stretches from the Big Bang to Bitcoin, and which places Canada’s history in a global context. Teaching global history is not easy, particularly given the wide range of different historical traditions and historiographies that must be taken into account; but global literacy is arguably the most pressing skill required for the next generation (students themselves appear to be on to this: world history is now more popular in the United States than European history, with more than twice as many students taking the former Advanced Placement exam). Canada’s economy, Canada’s climate, and Canada’s vulnerability to a pandemic that respects no borders do not exist in a vacuum: in order to protect our national interests, it’s vital that we understand the global forces at play. 

As historian Lynn Hunt writes, debates over history’s meanings “are a sign of [democracy’s] health, not its weakness.” Let’s have those debates, and in so doing, let’s prove that history really does matter. At the end of the day, educational psychologist Sam Wineburg notes, “When history is approached courageously and at its deepest levels, no new curriculum is needed to engage enduring questions of values. In classrooms like this, history cannot avoid issues of character.”

It’s not too late for coherent, cumulative, substance-driven, broad, and inclusive history to be made a priority in Canadian schools. With enough pressure from parents, teachers, and students, all young people can know the joy and empowerment of a strong foundational understanding of our shared history. Perhaps most importantly, they can experience the wonder of the most human subject of all. The time to restore history to the centre of a meaningful education is now. Our future, as well as our past, may well depend on it.