Still not dead yet again

When the terrific Winnipeg journalist Annalee Greenberg was editor of The Beaver (now Canada's History), she kept on hand a standing headline, "Still Not Dead Yet." She would use it above each of the magazine's frequent notes about how Canadian history was thriving among Canadian readers, tv viewers, museum-goers, tourists, novelists and playwrights, heritage site visitors, and all the rest. 

Actually, she may have started the not-dead-yet tradition after the success of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History?

My own variant on Annalee's headline was autobiographical: I was a freelance writer about Canadian history, and if the obituaries for that subject were true, I would long since have starved to death.

So I'm maybe a bit jaundiced about a book being published today on the dead-again theme: Trilby Kent's The Vanishing Past: Making a Case for the Future of History.

The thought of living exclusively in a blinkered present is scary. Scarier still is the thought of an entire generation, not to mention society, operating from a position of historical ignorance. And yet that is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves today.

The giveaway is the phrase "an entire generation." The Vanishing Past isn't about history somehow ceasing to exist after all.  It's a parent's complaint that there isn't enough history in the schools, and a declaration that what history is taught there is done all wrong.  

That is, it's about  education policy.

Since I don't teach, I don't engage much with this whole pedagogical debate presented as a survival crisis. Also I'm pretty confident that my kids got a decent historical education in the Toronto public school system and Ontario universities (and that other kids still can), despite what everyone always says. But if public debate on history curricula engages you, there's a new book for you.