It is a great honour for me to share your time this morning as you join in a task of historical importance. You actually play quite an important role, some of you are aware of it, some of you will of course deny it in the best Canadian fashion - "What, me matter? No, no." In a funny way, as someone who spent most of his life outside Quebec at intervals between the 50's and the 90's, I spent my life among francophone minorities struggling to survive. Their chief weapon is their school system - often an endangered school system. You may begin to recognize what I'm talking about. If there's a future for the English-speaking community in this province, you represent it. And your specialties represent it much more than the generality. Cut off by Bill 101 from the traditional means of expanding the community, immigration, lacking the institutions and values which made le taux de natalité, lacking powerful allies in North America or even in Canada for our cultural and linguistic survival, we face very long odds.

Our francophone colleagues already believe that their minorities in the rest of Canada have been lost to assimilation, or very soon shall be. Their belief, often prodded by wishfulness, is in my view highly premature but it is not wholly without foundation. Sometimes sadly, sometimes triumphantly, usually with certainty, they expect Quebec's English minority to share that fate. However, history is an art, not a science. There are very few laws with inevitable consequences, and humans are endowed with sufficient willpower to make a difference. As one of my wiser teachers said, "Only God knows what's gonna happen and she isn't telling."

After twenty-five years in Ontario and a schooling that took me across Canada, I claim no expertise in schools or public education. The school system in Ontario is large, regulated, full of new curricula, that's never actually quite come off. I have spent a certain amount of time consulting with Ontario's Ministry of Education on history curriculum and on the advisory committee to Dr. Bernard Shapiro's study on support for private schools. I would judge that my advice was received politely and filed neatly. That has not dulled my feeling that you are involved in some of this society's most complex and important work.

We all recognize the importance of History in a Quebec whose motto is "Je me souviens". Of course, we don't remember everything. The motto goes on, as we all know, to recall the contribution of the rose as well as the lily. Unlike provinces which have dropped history from the curriculum in favour of a bland and presentist "social studies", Quebec has retained history and even promised to expand it, in tune with the Lacoursière Committee, to include world history and greater reference to aboriginal peoples and "les autres" ¹ - among whom I think we number ourselves.

As Quebeckers, we know how history has been used to create, refine, preserve, reinforce a concept of identity from Quebec's francophone majority and, too often, to exclude or marginalize other contributors to Quebec's history and development. Our experience here as Quebeckers is worth thinking about. As anglo Quebeckers we are reminded of our somewhat less than close relationship with the society in which we find ourselves. English-speaking Quebeckers have no trouble in my experience seeing themselves as Canadian or as citizens of Montreal, or certainly of Pointe-Claire or Westmount, but some difficulty of identifying themselves as Quebeckers. Those anglo quebeckers who do, I think of Gary Caldwell or Kevin Drummond, are suspect among the English-speaking population as having passed over, become somewhat traitorous.That's because we live in a society that doesn't seem to particularly value, respect, admire, approve or include us. As Quebeckers, it is easy to see this as a contributor to the relative lack of a Quebec identity among the anglophones and allophones of this province. Our experience reminds us of the relationship of history to identity. It should make us sensitive to the importance of inclusiveness, not only of language groups but of the other identities of region, gender, status and interest which we find in our schools and classrooms.

When you teach L'Histoire du Québec et du Canada, you're looking for references that touch the students sitting in front of you and you don't find as many as you would like. Well, neither do some other people, maybe even sitting in your classrooms and sitting in classrooms across the whole country. So you have some very important lessons that, when defined, can help this whole country from cost to cost to understand itself better. You are living an experience that many other people in this country live. Your articulation of that experience seems to have a very important resonance for parts of the country where other majorities live, dare I even suggest Ontario, confident in their majority status and confident that others will conform. History is the experience of all. If that makes it impossibly encyclopedic, and it does, the teaching of history must open doors and give citizens of all ages the curiosity to enter more than one and the tools to access all that is inside.

The Lacoursière report, a by-product of the Estates General process, was not universally welcomed and, as usual, its implementation has been partial and sometimes perverse. Monique Nemni, editor of the federalist Cité Libre, warned that additional history would be additional separatist propaganda. Some sovereignists complained that including world history, Quebec's English minority, and les autochtones could undermine la nation. Critics await the release of detailed guidelines and approved textbooks.

Quebec historians have also complained that teacher-training guidelines no longer require any particular expertise in the subject from those who will in future stand before the province's history classes. While passing university courses does not guarantee knowledge or enthusiasm, and history is not reserved for professionals, critics argue that it will be hard for unqualified and possibly unmotivated teachers to communicate much history beyond some eminently forgettable facts.

Indeed there has been much upset about the learning of history, the kind of upset that doubtless fed Margaret Thatcher and the back-to-basics movement in Britain. The Dominion Institute was telling us twice a year just how ignorant Canadian kids were. They discovered by asking kids "When was Confederation?" and so on, that they didn't know. Well, this supposedly proved something about our rotten education system. And people of my age and even older find this deeply upsetting. It means that us old white guys aren't going to be remembered. How do we get respect? Of course the Americans had the same experience. In the late 80's, in the era of Ronald Reagan, similar studies were made of American youth population age 18 to 24. You may be convinced that the Americans do it right, they really wham that history into those little bald heads, they get it right. Funny thing, the Dominion Institute in its first study found that 60% of its 18 to 24 sample couldn't date Confederation properly and about a third of them even got it in the wrong century. Strange coincidence, 60% of American sample couldn't get the Civil War right and a third couldn't get it in the right century. This worried them enough that a private foundation, the Bradley Foundation, funded a further study of the problem. Mrs. Chaney who was then the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded a study by UCLA which came up with a History Framework. What a wonderful idea, a standard framework for all American schools.

That's when the war began, the famous History Wars. After a couple of years of this, the US Senate voted 99 to 1 to ban the history framwork that came out of UCLA. The one senator who didn't vote said it was too awful even to vote on. So, it was odd to me that the Dominion Institute's solution to its revealed ignorance problem was a national history framework. I would have thought that one of the things you learn when you study Canadian history was the absolute hopelessness of a national history framework. If you knew anything about the BNA Act, you would realize that it was designed to give us a least ten national history frameworks, one per province, it's there in Section 92 under Schools.

One of the great things about people who criticize the teaching of history in Canada is that it's completely ahistorical. Nobody realizes that people like Bernie Hodgetts, Hilda Neatby, even Northup Frye, over the years said "History teaching in Canada doesn't seem to succeed." Of course, the next step was to say "Well, it must be the teachers." Bernie Hodgetts visited some pretty bad classrooms and described them. A good thing to do occasionally. Though the people who were in those classrooms said that what they were doing bore no relationship to what Bernie Hodgetts said they were doing - "Typical private school snob, what does he know, he didn't have to teach kids like I have to teach." Standard game, they gave the same answer I do all the time. But what I'm talking about is curriculum nostaglia and the warnings it provides - the sense that history is a failure.

We addressed this issue at MISC's conference last winter here in Montreal. (For more information visit the Giving the Past a Future website.) Our goal was not to find a solution but to reveal the complexities of solutions. We were told that they only thing we really needed to do was to memorize Jack Granatstein's book. We said well no, we think there are other views. There were a lot of contradictory points of view. We assembled curriculum specialists from all provinces and territories. We showcased people like Bob Bain and Peter Stearns from the United States, Francois Audigier from Paris and Geneva, Peter Lee from the University of London's Institute of Education, Luca Codignola from the University of Genoa and more. And we presented Canadians who match their international eminence like Christian Laville from Laval, Peter Seixas at UBC, John Fielding at Queen's. Many who came to the conference thought this was a total waste of time, we knew the correct answers. In fact, the whole room was full of people who knew the correct answers, but they discovered to their dismay that no one else seemed to agree with them. So, some people left, as you do when you go to a conference convinced, " I was right all the time, the world is full of idiots." Some people thought, "Well, maybe I learned a little bit."

Many who came to the conference, especially of my generation, were proudly traditionalist. The Dominion Institute's twice-yearly reports on the lamentable ignorance of the young, and Jack Granatstein's best-selling Who Killed Canadian History encouraged many proud, dedicated and effective history teachers. ² Like their subject, they were being marginalized and disdained by education systems that prized "job-readiness" and "life-skills". Even gifted teachers find it hard to incorporate all the fashionable elements of gender, class, region, ethnicity and ability level in a 40-minute period? The National History Framework,urged by the Dominion Institute, and the return to straight-line history were very appealing.

Yet curricular nostalgia raises warnings. Are we being summoned back to approaches that did not work very well? Is this what contributed, generation after generation, to the low esteem of school history? Those who "adored" history in school are outweighed in every survey by those who recall boredom, resentment or, most often, nothing. If history is another word for experience, it would be unfortunate if we failed to learn from the past.

That's why I listened to the younger experts and sought an international perspective. What they reported was that specific content matters less than understanding learning processes and environment. Some reminded us of where we learn most about history - in the family, where experience is immediate, and events are mediated through that experience. Students start from their own experience but few want to stop there. What I learned was that, pretty obvious stuff, you've got to start where the kids are. You've got to respect their interests. You've got to do the sort of things that Christopher was talking about. What do adolescent students want from history? It isn't a big feature in there lives. Among people of my age history is a big thing. I've lived 62 years of it. I think it's fascinating. I think I'm terribly important. Let me suggest that the older you get the more you think history is wonderful, just automatically. It's pretty hard to persuade people who haven't got any that they need it. Good teachers understand that. This isn't rocket science: each of us knows the difficulty of explaining something we don't really understand. The difficulty becomes impossibility when we don't even care. And do we ever really learn things that aren't relevant or interesting? And that's the problem you face every day. And all sorts of people who are older than you are, who don't face that problem, think it's remarkably easy. I think it's amazing that you do what you do. I'm here really out of deep appreciation for what you're doing. To remind you that you are playing a role in the history of this province just by the role you play every day in this province.

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Of course, teachers don't usually have much to say about what they teach. Lacoursière was wildly idealistic in urging that they have as much as a fifth of their curriculum to develop in their own way. Outsiders -parents, politicians, officials, advisory boards -know what must be taught. Textbook writers and designers obey. What do dogfood and textbooks have in common? Both are designed for the buyers, not the users.

I sense the frustration of having to teach what govenments and elderly white males think is wonderful - compulsory history with a compulsory exam, which is very important for your students' futures. I think most people in this room would think that it would be better not to have that constraint, although some people are greatful because if it wasn't there in secondary four, you'd be out of a job. Your principal, your board would say "What's this to do with earning a living?" If it isn't compulsory, kick it out. And that of course is a serious problem. What if the Secondary Four exam was cancelled by some new government? You would suddenly have a feeling that "Maybe I don't have a job?" You would then be in the business of having to get students who came because they were interested and not because their parents were terrified. How would you make that transition? There's an old Scottish proverb which I was reminded of "God save us from having our wished fullfilled." It makes you rethink your wishes, it shouldn't stop you from having them.

What history can do for all of us? Christopher's described it in terms that I think are clear and persuasive. Let me reduce it to one word, to teach understanding. Understanding of history, understanding of the process whereby we come to that series of stories that make up history, the sources, with limitations, and understanding of how people very much like us in almost every respect came to different conclusions, saw the world differently, one hundred years ago, one thousand years ago or fifteen minutes ago in our own community.

International experimentation suggests starting where students are, and building where their interests and a teacher's knowledge and enthusiasm coincide. Is this difficult? So is anything worth doing. Does it get results? Where it is done sincerely, with teacher collaboration and support, yes. Doesn't everyone do their "own thing"? Is there any coherence, any measurable outcome? What do you want to measure? Coherence comes from the processes of history: formulating a thesis, weighing evidence, reconciling perspectives. Can our principles resist comforting myths or retain uncomfortable truths? Knowing the outcome, how do we appraise those who didn't?

These are the processes the experts call "deep understanding of history" or "critical thinking". In its report, the Lacoursière task force summarised the case for "historical thinking":

It is through history that we understand the mechanisms of change and continuity, and the many ways in which problems are posed and resolved in society. We learn to recognize and weigh the different interests, beliefs, experiences and circumstances that guide human beings inside and outside their own societies, in the past and in the present. History enables us to understand how such interests, beliefs and experiences drive human beings to construct knowledge, and makes us aware of the value of knowledge and of its relative nature. 3

Is this, on the whole, how school history has been taught? Indeed, it sounds a little subversive. Should students question received truths? If old orthodoxies look ridiculous now, how will our current verities fare over time? We teach students how democracy spread to all men and then to all women. It is now even open to the prison population. Why does full citizenship stop at age 18?

Students in Quebec's English schools will want to know about themselves. Those selves will reflect every phase of human settlement in Quebec, from First Nations to the present. We find frustration in our inability to incorporate as much as we might like about our contribution to Quebec and to Canada. First Nations people feel it too. They have a different history. Apart from the introductory class when we rattle through them, where do they go after that? Where to they disappear? Into the forests again? Where were they all that time? But where were other people too who were in the province? The merging of cultures and experiences is part of the uniqueness of the English system, but if we construct some abstract unifying past, we will be false to reality and divisive. I hope that we shall also recognize the world as crucial to our past and our future. It seems to me that we are all crippled by our intellectual parochialism in a world that envelops us daily in words and pictures. And, again, the goal of teaching must be understanding and reference skills, not simply the memorization of currently-approved but slightly dated facts.

This is the great difficulty that we come to and in the end we're going to be selective. We're going to land on spots and then we will be accused of being disconnected. What is the connection in those various episodes that get picked up and put into the history curriculum in Britain? Well the answer is not that this is the history of the world from the beginning. You get various versions of that, H.G. Wells' is as good as any, I guess and as bad. This is to increase understanding, so that you can persuade people by analogy. If they understand Elizabeth I and the age of Shakespeare which they are going to encounter conceivably in their English classes, folks were different then, but similar too - greedy, amibitious, loving, incredibly dense, just like our own people, our own citizens.

That brings me to my final point, the citizenship point. After assembling people and confusing them thoroughly about teaching and learning history in Canada and Quebec, we are going to assemble them in October 2000 and try and do the same confusing business about that larger field called citizenship, citoyenneté, appartenance . These are big issues in Quebec and big issues in our country because this is still a country in formation, a postmodern country, some say. Not knowing what postmodern is, I'm not sure myself. It is a question that runs through the heart of everybody's fears and hopes, I think in this room, and in this province and still in this country. We don't know how to handle it. We don't know to deal with the innumerable issues of efficacy, interests. As Christopher raised, if English kids are pretty indifferent to the process, you know very well that we are too.

Click here for more information on the upcoming Canadian Citizenship in a New Millenium conference.

Indeed, Canadians in 1997 achieved a record I don't think many people are fully aware of and none would like to know about. We had as low a voter turnout in 1997 as Americans routinely get in their federal elections. We dropped below 50%. Now part of that is the nature of that particular election, you might say, part of it is moving to a permanent voters list. There are a lot of factors. Political scientists would be argueing about that. The simple fact is that in a national election in Canada less than half the people bothered to vote. We've gone on thinking that we have a great system. "We're better than the Yanks" - is the ultimate Canadian self congratulation. No, we're about as bad as them. That should concern people. It certainly concerns me.

What's happening about all this? People said, "We had a conference, what's the outcome?" An organization was formed in mid-October in Toronto called Historica - the National History Foundation. This grew out of our conference, they are very kind to say. In fact they took our slogans without further analysis. L'avenir du passé and Giving the past a future are the slogans for this new organization. It is at a stage of development where input will still be able to make a difference. It is an organization that is focussing on improving, assisting, enhancing, the teaching of history in Canada's schools. It is headed by Tom Axworthy who used to run the CRB Foundation.

The point for you however is that you have ideas, you have experience, you have views. You have an organization, but you don't have to wait for the organization to be persuaded. You have the opportunity now to make contact with an organization that is trying to figure out how it can best help, with limited resources but with the strong desire to add to them. And with the strong claim, it believes, on the federal government if it can find ideas that can interest Canadian Heritage and other departments in advance. It is one of those moments when you come together to hear something else and you hear of this opportunity. It may float in the back of your minds, you are busy people, there are lots of other things to do. The chance of achieving something is not infinite, but this organization, to which I am not a full partner, I'm simply associated with it as a very external member, is looking for ideas.

As ever in these meetings, our challenge is to approach next Monday differently than last Monday. I have deliberately showcased an approach, endorsed by Quebec's leading popular historian, as a lever to help you pull harder and lift higher. May I wish you every success in your undertaking. I hope I have not left the impression that it will be easy. I promise to try harder myself, and I envy the strength and the opportunities of younger colleagues. Montreal, 4 November 1999

1. Lacoursière, Jacques et al, Learning from the Past: Report of the Task Force on the Teaching of History (Quebec, May 10, 1996).

2. See Garder, Daniel, Youth and History: A Policy for the Dominion Institute of Toronto (Toronto: Dominion Institute, 1997), pp. 8-10; and Granatstein, J.L. Who Killed Canadian History (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1998).

3. Lacoursière et al., Learning from the Past, p.3.

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