'Why weren't we taught this history in school?" is a whiny cliche

Browsing notes (no, really browsing, not reviewing the latest "browser" software):

• I'm browsing through the current Literary Review of Canada, and I find Donna Bailey Nurse's thoughtful review of Steal Away Home, a new book recently noted here. But the reviewer, having picked up on various intriguing small details the author has unearthed about Toronto's 19th century black community, is moved to complain: "'Why hadn't I encountered this history in school?"

• I'm browsing through the local paper, and there's Toronto's lively urbanist Shawn Micallef describing how a detour off the soul-destroying Highway 401 leads him, via a historic plaque, to the remarkable pre-contact Southwold Earthworks near the Lake Erie shore. But he can't simply admire the place, he has to complain that, even though he once went to school, "It's a place and history I wasn't taught."

• I'm browsing through a soon-to-be-published book with a lot to say about dysfunction in parliament. But I'm continually brought up short by the author's explanation that parliament is so dumb because "inadequate education in the primary and secondary levels' has not taught Canadians what they need to know about democracy.

Yeesh. Where does this whiny cliche come from, particularly from otherwise smart people?  It seems to articulate a deep social consensus that if only we hired people to ram enough history down kids' throats in Grade 5, then we could all lead blissful adult lives, never again learning one new historical thing -- indeed,complaining when we actually do.

Nurse mentions her contacts with the Ontario Black History Society. Micallef constantly researches the surprising past of Toronto neighbourhoods.  The parliament book is based on some wide reading. All these writers, in other words, actually do learn new things, new historical things, all the time. 

It's just that they all think they should complain about that, that they have to blame some negligent or possibly malevolent education system for not telling them already (at a time when they probably would not have been interested in the slightest.)

People, your Grade Five history teacher was never going to teach you everything ever to be known about history, any more than your Grade Five science teacher was going to teach you everything about nuclear fission, or your Grade Five math teacher was going to teach you everything about the algorithms behind derivatives trading. With the science and the math, you probably accept that.

But somehow, with history (and the associated civics), there seems to be this deep understanding that it is a subject only to be learned by children and that if there is some historical fact or interpretation we have not yet informed ourselves about as adults, it's the schools' fault.

No, it ain't. It's your own damn responsibility to keep educating yourself. There are new books, there are magazines, there are historical societies and historical plaques and sites and filmed docs, and.... Jeez, there are actually websites with all this stuff. You could keep kids in Grade 5 history class for twenty years, and they still wouldn't learn a tenth of what people seem to expect them to absorb, and most of it would go over their sweet childish heads anyway.  

But if adults accepted that learning new history (civics too) is an ongoing adult responsibility (and a cultural enrichment, and a pleasure), then young people would pick up that model, and not disdain their history classes because they see their elders disdaining historical knowledge too.

We have had subways in Toronto for some sixty years. Every time I notice how many people have not yet learned it is sensible to let the people on board get off through the doors before they try to get on through the doors, I reflect on the limits of what public education can achieve. The idea that a couple of lines in a classroom textbook somewhere will save democracy... I can't even.

Update, same day:  Jerry Bannister likes (and defines) it:

Great rant on the whole why-weren't-we-taught-this thing.

Mark Reynolds also likes it, but has a point to raise:

I think Micallef has a point about Southwold: it's possible the education system's improved since I was subject to it, but First Nations / Mi'qmaq history was almost entirely absent from my curriculum. If we could make it out to the Halifax Citadel, the Neptune Theatre, and the Fisherman's Museum in Lunenburg, I'm pretty certain we could have managed a field trip to the Glooscap Cultural Center in Truro or the Powwow in Millbrook.

Thanks, Mark. I'm going to take the opportunity to acknowledge that two of my examples do indeed relate to topics that surely have been minimized in schools and popular historical culture alike:  Black Canadians and First Nations.

But I doubt that even the most enlightened curriculum would give very much time to Southwold or to abolitionism in 1860s Toronto newspapers  (the examples given) -- or that kids would remember the details years later!  And the third example I mentioned is evidence, I hope, that exactly the same "Why don't the schools...? cry is heard about the most traditional subjects: Vimy Ridge, John A., Loyalists, parliament, whatever.

And from Chris Raible:

Over the years I have spoken to many historical societies - usually about some aspect of the life and times of William Lyon Mackenzie.

I think I never did so without some attendee commenting, "why were we not taught this in school?" (or words to that effect).

As an immigrant (now citizen) whose public education was in another country (the US) I could never do much more than shake my head in sympathy, and add that when I was in school my own mind was on much more urgent matters than history - so much I was probably taught I didn't really learn.

March 20:  From Donna Bailey Nurse:

Ah. I see you are using the word whiny to describe my concerns about dishonest history - perhaps to get back at me for using the word whiny to describe white racists in The Star a whole ten years ago. Way to hold a grudge! I am sorry if my criticizing white racism has hurt your feelings. At the same, your comments regarding my essay are mendacious and it is just this sort of dishonesty that causes more and more people -of every race- to distrust white historians. All I am asking is that you do your job with integrity. In other words, if you are going to write about slavery, do it honestly. And if you are going to teach slavery, do that honestly as well. Not everybody should be writing about racism. I know that many white people have a difficult time with that subject; You all have too much invested in keeping things the way they are.. But you've got to start taking responsibility for the enormous damage you have done in the world. You really must try harder to do the right thing.

Let me just say I rarely even read The Star ten years ago , let alone retaining a word-perfect memory of it. Beyond that, must say I agree with all that follows "All I am asking...."

:

History of Anglicans: Ridley College at 125

At the private Catholic boys school where I did my high school years, the understanding was that there were Catholics and then there was a vast undifferentiated mass of non-Catholics all pretty much blurred together. It was something of a surprise to me some years later, to encounter an Anglican with a precisely reversed perspective: she saw the world as C of E and then everyone else. I’m not sure it had much to do with theology or faith in either case. For the Catholics it was a tribal loyalty; for my friend it was maybe more tinged with class consciousness.

Much later, the DCB asked me to write its Volume 15 entry on one Newman Hoyles. Hoyles was being included mostly for his legal career, which I knew something about. But I became intrigued to encounter through him another Christian subdivision I’d never really considered before: the low and the high Anglicans, and particularly the feud between them in Toronto and Ontario in the late 19th century.

As I now understand this (mostly from my immersion in Hoyles), low Anglicans were/are “protestant:” evangelical, anti-hierarchical, and aspiring to a direct, unmediated experience of faith, while the high Anglicans were/are “Anglo-Catholic:” respectful of hierarchy, convinced of the wisdom of authority and received tradition, and not entirely accepting that there had ever really been a “protestant” schism between Rome and Canterbury. (There is a good deal of scholarship, notably by Curtis Fahey and Alan Hayes, to put this corner of Canadian church history much better.)

Anyway, my man Newman W. Hoyles was not at all low society but he was very much low Anglican. Alongside his career in the law, he lent much time to helping build up low-Anglican institutions to parallel the high-Anglican ones Ontario had inherited from the Bishop Strachan/established church/clergy reserve times. By the end of Hoyles's career, the low Anglicans had Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto to match the high Anglican Trinity. They had the elite girls’ school Havergal as their alternative to Bishop Strachan School. They had the Evangelical Churchman to balance whatever the high Anglican paper was called.

And in 1889 they launched the private boys’ school Ridley College in St. Catharines to counter Upper Canada College in Toronto. Newman Hoyles, then 45 and established in both his legal career and his low-Anglican good works, was very much involved. The name alone suggests what the evangelical Anglicans thought of Anglo-Catholicism. None of that Cardinal Newman stuff for them: poor Nicholas Ridley was burned at the stake in England during the Catholic restoration under Queen Mary. My tribal-Catholic remnant found this all two-churches-in-one thoroughly implausible, but my more dominant historian side was kinda charmed.

Which is all to say that this year Ridley College school (not just boys any more) is observing its 125th birthday, and I was asked if I’d like to take note. Duly noted.

Image: Ridley College

John A Macdonald's Birthday Party

I haven't got a photo of the cake yet, but the history students of Pitt Meadows Secondary School in British Columbia rocked their school on Monday with a party for John A. Macdonald's 194th birthday party. It turned into a national event. There was media coverage. (News story here) The Heritage Minister came. A prominent Canadian history blogger spoke.

I wouldn't have missed it. Thanks: to the Dominion Institute (their coverage here) who made my participation possible, but mostly to teacher Heather Brown, one terrific school, and the gang of students who made it happen.

There was a moment when we were google-mapping ourselves through the fog and the new construction in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, my lap encumbered with a large cake bearing the face of our first prime minister, when I wondered about the strange things the practice of history gets one into. But hey, the event was a triumph.

The Passchendaele Letters: Congratulations to Shobha Mehta

In association with the Passchendale movie, the Dominion Institute recently organized a contest among high school students: to write a letter, either from a soldier at the front or to a soldier from someone on the home front, at the time of the Passchendaele battle in the autumn of 1917.

I had the pleasure of being part of the jury for this contest, along with Paul Gross, R.H. Thomson, Adrienne Clarkson, Charlotte Gray, Margaret Conrad, Paul Franklin, and jury member extraordinaire the 108 year old war veteran John Babcock. I' m sorry to say we were a "virtual" jury and did our work online without ever assembling.

The Dominion Institute has just announced the winner here and additional details here. Their remarkable varied and imaginative letters are posted for reading.

The top prize winner is Shobha Mehta of Unionville, Ontario, who wins -- no small prize -- a trip to the battlefields in Belgium. But I might add I was greatly moved and impressed by all the top ten entrants from all over the country (listed in the second link above) -- and the schools and teachers who encouraged and supported them.

Writer in the School

I had the pleasure of visiting Ryerson Community Public School yesterday to talk about history and writing with Grade 6 and 5/6 classes there. I talked about Champlain and The Story of Canada and The Big Book of Canada (details here) and about being a writer and a historian, and the kids had questions forever -- good, smart, thoughtful questions too. The kids are alright. That's not a kid I'm hugging in the photo. That's the teacher!]

I had not visited a school class for a while, and I discovered afresh that flood of energy that comes in from the kids, particularly kids realizing for the first time that the names they see on books are connected to real live people who may even live in their community and will drop in to talk with them. I was pumped for the rest of the day.

Ryerson PS is at Dundas and Bathurst in central Toronto, and lots of the kids are immigrants to Canada. But then so am I and so is their teacher, and we had a good talk about how people have been coming to Canada for a long time and getting to do great things. Thanks, kids, and thanks to Charmaine P-M for inviting me.

I went for the pleasure of it, and the public service too. But teachers and principals in Ontario might like to know about the Writers-in-the-Schools program, which can help fund them to bring writers into their schools too. (For BC/Yukon, it's here.)

Black History School

Last night the Toronto school board approved plans to create a new "afrocentric" school within the public system. It was a close vote, preceded by a lot of thoughtful debate in the black community and in Toronto generally.

Some of the advocates and commentators keep talking about a school in which young black Torontonians will learn the history and culture of Africa and the African diaspora -- and be empowered. That's an argument that reminds me of the notion if we just taught more Canadian history to the kids in school, we could Save The Country.

I favour teaching Canadian history in schools; I favour teaching black history too. But I don't think history alone will save the country or save black Toronto either.

You know, lots of kids are just not hugely interested in history when they are kids. For many people, history is an adult interest, discovered when they are adults. I suspect that many young black kids in the highrises or townhouses around Toronto would not get a lifechanging experience from being immersed in the history of the kings of ancient Zimbabwe or trade union activism in Jamaica or the underground railroad. Many of them have no more engagement with that material than their white counterparts may have with the United Empire Loyalists or Prairie dustbowl life. For a lot of kids, and adults too, today's crucial history and culture is post-1990; it's right around them. Sell the school on history, and you have may have a hard sell engaging the students it's intended for.

The basis for afrocentric schools: it's reported that right now 40% of black students do not graduate. Black achievement, black success, black economic progress is what Toronto's black community, and Toronto itself, urgently need. Academic success is what this school should aim for. When kids are coming out of Afrocentric High with great marks, great report cards, and great scholarships, then it's working. If an Afrocentric school can create conditions in which black students can thrive, succeed, be stimulated, and go on to great things, then I'm all for it.

That can happen. The great success of all the alternative and specialty schools that Toronto already has come not so much from their various curriculums. It is how they give students a sense of belonging. Just by applying, just by being accepted, just by being placed in a like-minded group of students and teachers, students know they are not just being warehoused in the local school. They have exercised a choice, and with choice comes allegiance. It even works for kids who chose not to go specialty. Because they could have, they too know their own local school is a choice they made.

An Afrocentric school, well planned, can foster that. And if there are kids in it who want to immerse themselves in black history and culture, good on 'em. But the school itself should judge itself on how it fosters academic achievement.