Historical Memory Loss: What’s Happened to the Story of Canada imparted in our Anglo-Canadian Schools?*

Five years into a $2.5-million seven-year Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) study known as “Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future,” funding support from 17 universities and 31 educational  organizations has grown  to exceed $8.6-million. Given that sizable investment, the whole project would benefit from more public scrutiny.

The ‘Thinking Historically’ project is the first major review of K-12 history and social studies in Canada since 1968. From my vantage point, it appears as if the project leader Carla Peck, a professor of social studies education at the University of Alberta, and her team are mostly focused on ‘perfecting teaching’ rather than carrying the torch in the ongoing debate over saving history as an endangered species in our schools. .

The project is headed and driven by education professors very much wedded to prevailing thinking and contemporary trends in North American social studies education. The goal is not to resurrect a shriveling subject discipline, but something else, as Peck told Brian Bethune in a recent University Affairs feature on dwindling history enrolments. Their goal, in her words, is to “understand how a critical historical thinking approach to teaching and learning history — and by critical, I mean analytical, not finding something wrong with everything — can support the development of critically minded citizens.”

Fine distinctions are important when it comes to delving into the state of history in today’s social studies curriculum. History as a subject in schools and universities is in crisis. Historica Canada, sponsors of the Canadian History Report Card, as well as most history department professors and high school teachers tend to favour “more history, taught better.” The key priority, reaffirmed since 2009 in the national Report Card reports, was to ensure that all high school students completed a required course in Canada’s history before graduation. Yet, even today, only five of our provinces meet that threshold.  On the 2021 Canadian History Report Card, prepared by Samantha Cutrara, Alberta was awarded a D-, ranking last among the provinces and territories.

Many history professors and high school specialists question the effectiveness of the Historical Thinking  approach in turning back the tide. That advancing tidal wave is most evident in the erosion of history-anchored curricula and in declining high school and university course enrolments.

Long before the late Peter Seixas established his Historical Thinking framework and Benchmarks of Historical Thinking, he described history as “a discipline cast adrift”   the British Columbia social studies curriculum. The founder of the Thinking Historically movement, it should be noted, supported the centrality of history in a social studies curriculum.

History as a subject always seems to be imperiled, even in Ontario with its more robust tradition of providing it with preferred status in the social studies curriculum. The problem was flagged in 1995 by the late Bob Davis in Whatever Happened to High School History: Buring the Political Memory of Youth Ontario:1945–1995. In Ontario, where history formed part of the core curriculum, Davis discovered that enrolment went from accounting for 11.4 per cent of all classes in 1964 to a mere 6.6 per cent in 1982. In addition to losing ground, history and social studies became afflicted with what he aptly termed the “skills mania” afflicting our schools. Abandoning narrative history contributed to the decline by depriving our students of opportunities to engage with the larger national story and to develop a stronger sense of historical consciousness and collective memory.

Trilby Kent, the author of the 2022 book The Vanishing Past, concurs with Davis’s earlier assessment. Since the early 1970s, social history, Davis and Kent both point out, not only squeezed out older forms of history (political and economic) but contributed to fragmentation and sectarianism. In her book and in the Bethune article, Kent makes a persuasive case that such changes undermined “the sort of story that draws children to history,”  Much of it was driven by the turn away from teaching engaging narrative history and towards critical-thinking-focused pedagogy. “By the 1990s, Kent observes, “‘learning how to learn’ had all but replaced learning content”

The Historical Thinking movement, launched by Seixas, never really gained as much traction among Quebec historians or history educators.  History, memory and collective consciousness have always found resonance in French-speaking Quebec. From the late 1990s onward, history education researcher Jocelyn Létourneau eschewed what he termed “historical studies” and focused his research on how history shaped the historical consciousness of youth. Instead of working on perfecting how to teach history, he conducted surveys in 2000 and 2014 to ascertain how history conveyed a narrative and discovered that young Quebeckers exhibited a distinct and abiding sense of collective memory and consciousness.

More recently, University of Ottawa history education specialist Stéphane Lévesque has called into question the near exclusive emphasis on the “Seixas matrix” and pointed out the fact that “little policy has been informed by research about students.” Following the trail blazed by Létourneau, Lévesque and Jean-Philippe Croteau’s 2020 book, Beyond History for Historical Consciousness, examined what are termed “mythistories” based upon a 2016 survey completed by  635 high school students in Quebec and Ontario. While it was a relatively small sample study, it did break with the orthodoxy and made the case that history can be a potentially powerful force in shaping collective national identity. Teaching history, Lévesque and Croteau demonstrate, is not just about training students in historical thinking, but about “an essential cultural factor” – the “process of gaining narrative competence.”

One of Canada’s leading public historians, Trent University Canadian studies professor Christopher Dummitt, sees the writing on the wall. The current “presentist and potted-plant”   to teaching history and social studies not only robs the subject of its broader appeal, but can be repelling if it is all cast within a history of victimhood and subjugation. The new national narrative will have no trace “of the fact that there really was a Canadian story amidst all this [oppressed] diversity,” he says. The implicit message, whether intended or not, is a story of an “illegitimate ‘settler colonial nation, steeped in a racist history.’”

History is also losing ground in the battle for students at our universities. The American Historical Association has identified enrolment decline in history courses as a critical problem and tracks the numbers, including trends in six Canadian universities. Prompted by fierce ‘culture war’ debates, the AHA is also surveying educators to assess its impact upon the teaching of U.S. history in American high school classrooms. From a peak enrolment in 2010–11, humanities enrolments at Canadian universities tumbled significantly until levelling out in 2016, according to  by Alex Usher and his consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates. History took the biggest hit as students turned away from “narrative” humanities.

The decline in humanities enrolment, Usher points out, has reduced numbers back to where they were around 2000, when universities still had “a functioning humanities system.” The STEM, health, and business enrolments, which have been growing through the twenty-first century, have boomed even while history majors have declined  from more than 15,000 to around 10,000.

Forty years ago, one of Canada’s most respected education professors, Kieran Egan, took dead aim at the “expanding horizons” framework in his courageous 1983 essay, “Social Studies and the Erosion of Education.” To the shock of many contemporaries, he claimed that much of elementary social studies was based upon a “flawed” psychological theory, amounted to little more than “socializing children,” and eroded the foundations of sound education (Egan 1983, 1999).

Today social studies experts in the United States are beginning to reject “expanding horizons” as an overarching integrative framework. The most recent policy statement of the National Council for Social Studies, issued in 2017, put it this way: “The ‘expanding communities’ curriculum model of self, family, community, state, and nation is insufficient for today’s young learners. Elementary social studies should include civic engagement, as well as knowledge from the core content areas of civics, economics, geography, and history.”

History needs to be significantly upgraded in the holistic Alberta social studies curriculum and revivified elsewhere in Canada.  A whole mélange of social studies courses is crowding out history in high schools in Alberta and in other provinces.  It’s hard to imagine the Historical Thinking project making much of a difference, given the social studies focus of its director and its core Alberta supporters, exerting considerable influence in shaping its direction.

Focusing exclusively on teaching and learning historical thinking skills may well have obscured the essential role of history education in building “narrative competencies” in students and shaping our collective historical consciousness. More public advocacy where it counts is needed if we are ever to achieve the goal of ensuring that all students complete a high school course covering Canada’s history in all its diversity and complexity, reflecting a range of perspectives.

*An abridged version of Saving History in Canada’s Schools (ML Institute, April 18, 2024)

What would happen today if we asked senior high school students to “tell us the story of Canada” and conducted the same survey in every province/territory from coast-to-coast?  Would our graduating students know the major turning points in our history and be able to provide a coherent response? Would the responses give credence to Dr. Chris Dummitt’s worst fears — eliciting a garbled explanation that Canada is an “illegitimate settler-colonial nation” harbouring sublimated racism?  Or would a whole generation of students lack “narrative competency” and be unable to provide any kind of answer?

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Age of the Web Demigod: What if Seth’s Blog is ‘Full of Crap’ on Education?

The rise of the Internet has created a new generation of edu-gurus initially showcased in TED Talks and now powered by their personal blogs and popular e-books. One of the most influential of the crop is Seth Godin, the creative force and animator famous for his rapid-fire commentaries on Seth’s Blog. Hailed by Business Week as “the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age,” the marketing whiz also has, since 2012, acquired a following in the education world. His TED Talks, published in an e-book as Stop Stealing Dreams, have been wildly popular with educators and shared millions of times on the Internet.

Watching Seth Godin in action is very alluring and entertaining, but, when you break down his performances and closely examine his bold assertions, you wonder if there is less here than meets the eye. Marketing is all about mass persuasion and pleasing your customers and some practitioners are essentially mesmerizers or worse, con-artists. In his own field, he is regarded as a star performer and has been likened to “the JFK of the blogosphere: revered, quoted, beloved.” Many in his field were likely aghast in June 2007 when one of their tribe posted a critical commentary that dared to ask “What if Seth Godin was full of crap?” 

Godin is a rather unlikely guru for educators. After working as a software brand manager in the mid-1980s, he started Yoyodyne, one of the first dot.com direct marketing enterprises. His firm was acquired by Yahoo in 1998 for $30-million and the global Internet giant hired Godin as vice-president of permission marketing. He’s authored 18 books, mostly in marketing, including such attention-grabbing best-sellers as Permission Marketing (1999), Purple Cow (2003), All Marketers Are Liars (2005), and The Icarus Deception (2012).  It’s rare for a global marketing expert like Godin to find a friendly audience in the education sector.

Today’s educators know Godin through Seth’s Blog, his personal platform generating a steady stream of posts and tweets, some of which venture into education. He made his name in the field with an October 2012 TEDxYouth Talk entitled Stop Stealing Dreams – The School System and a subsequent YouTube Interview on Education Reform. “When we put kids in the factory we call school, the thing we built to indoctrinate them into compliance,” he stated, “why are we surprised when they ask ‘what’s on the test’?” Comparing work with art, he used his rhetorical skills to make the case that schools were monolithic in their structure — not only factory-like but trained kids for “compliance” and “obedience” rather than meaningful, engaged lives.

Godin poses a Big Question – “What are Schools For?” and that raises expectations that he will be providing a fresh perspective. Much of his system analysis lacks depth and is derivative. He encourages us to freely “steal ideas from others” and, in this case, he offers up simplified versions of John Taylor Gatto (factory system and weapons of mass instruction), Sir Ken Robinson ( find your ‘creative’ element), and Alfie Kohn ( gradeless schools, learn at your own pace).  He’s either oblivious to, or dismissive of, more firmly grounded answers to that question, including the highly original formulations of Mortimer Adler ( The Paideia Proposal), Kieran Egan (Getting it wrong from the beginning), Martin Robinson ( Trivium 21c), and Paul A. Kirschner (future-proof education)

As a former dot.com executive, Godin put tremendous faith in technology to transform schools and learning.  “For the first time in history,” he proclaimed, ” we do not need humans standing in front of us teaching us square root.” His technology-driven agenda set out eight proposed education reforms, many now parroted by his followers. His key tenets were:

• Flip the classroom by exposing students through homework to world-class speakers on video at night and devoting class time to face-to-face interactions and discussion of concepts and issues;
• Open book, open notes all the time, based upon the belief that memorization is pointless in the Internet age;
• Abandon grade-level and subject knowledge progression in favour of access to any course anywhere in the world, anytime;
• Measure experience instead of standardized test scores and focus on cooperation rather than isolation;
• Precise, focused education instead of mass, batch-driven education;
• Transform teachers into coaches;
• Life-long learning with work happening earlier in life;
• Depth of study in college rather than attending famous ‘brand name’ universities.

Stepping back and zeroing-in on Seth’s education reform agenda, it becomes clear that most if not all of these reforms embrace what is known as “21st century learning” and are prime examples of “romantic progressivism.” Furthermore, it is mostly technology-driven and bound to undermine the remaining autonomy and disciplinary expertise of teachers.

A more recent July 2019 Seth Godin post, “Pivoting the education matrix,” reaffirms his  well-known ‘meta-model” and reform agenda. Schools and classes, Godin continues to insist, “do not teach what they say they teach” and still focus on inculcating “obedience through comportment and regurgitation.” That would seem to imply that most student-centred methodologies featured in PD sessions and model constructivist practices posted on Edutopia are either just for show or figments of the imagination.

His proposed menu of skills is rather odd, like a grab-bag of ill-defined options. Most surprising of all, Godin utterly fails to draw a distinction between the proposed curricular skills (cooperation, problem-solving, mindfulness, creativity and analysis) and the implicit or hidden curriculum (management and obedience). Buried in the curious mix is one nuanced, evidence-based idea: “teaching domain knowledge in conjunction with the skill, not the other way around.” 

TED Talkers like Seth Godin are quickly becoming passe and facing increasing challenges from educators far better versed in school settings, evidence-based research, and what actually works in the classroom. His view of the contemporary school system, in my view, is a rather crude caricature and his reform proposals come off as amazingly facile. His regular Blog posts likely do provide fodder for career-building administrators and needed sustenance to those pursuing the latest educational fads.

What explains the success of Seth Godin and Seth’s Blog in the educational space? Does his simple caricature of the school system appeal to those looking for a neat, clean and uncomplicated picture? Where exactly do teachers as professionals with disciplinary knowledge fit in Seth’s ideal school? Where’s the research in cognitive science to support any of his claims about the process of student learning?  

 

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