Catalyst or Caterpillar? On the State of History in Canada.

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ABSTRACT
In the Fall 1999 issue of Canadian Social Studies, editor Joe Kirman commented on Ken Osborne's article "Revisiting History in the Classroom," which appeared in the August/September issue of The Beaver. In that article, Osborne presented concerns about the teaching of history in Canada and called for "some organizational means to bring all of this together that involves teachers, historians and those with an interest in teaching history." Since Osborne is recognized as a teacher educator in the area of history, he was invited to be a catalyst and use the pages of Canadian Social Studies for this purpose. What was originally a letter responding to this invitation became an article that raises significant points for teachers and those interested in the teaching of history in Canada.
    Joe Kirman asked whether I was prepared to be a catalyst for the union of historians and teachers that I have long been advocating. It's a volatile business being a catalyst, and one is all too likely to disappear in the reaction that one is supposed to accelerate. Perhaps I'm better suited to be a caterpillar--slow, deliberate, unprepossessing, plodding (if caterpillars can be said to plod), but even caterpillars achieve a metamorphosis in the end. Since Joe posed the question, I guess I owe him an answer.
    I wrote in The Beaver, and elsewhere, that our most pressing need these days, so far as the teaching of history is concerned, is for a truly national organization, embracing both official languages and all parts of the country, to bring together teachers, historians, and all others interested in promoting the cause of history in our schools. Would I be ready to act as a catalyst in the formation of such an organization? To be honest, I wouldn't be so presumptuous. To play a part in some way, yes, but this task requires more than one person.
    In any case, it seems that such an organization is already beginning to take shape, in the form of the new HISTOR!CA foundation. It is as yet too early to foresee just what it will entail, though it seems to be heading in the right direction. It speaks of creating new resources at the elementary level, encouraging greater use of existing resources at the secondary level, supporting heritage fairs for students, and promoting professional development for teachers--all valuable activities that should do much to enhance the position and teaching of history in our schools. Potentially, HISTOR!CA might serve as the national link between teachers and historians that I think we so desperately need, though I am not sure whether it sees this as one of its priorities.
    I am more than ever convinced that two of the greatest problems facing history teaching today are, first, the failure of historians, as a profession, to engage with the schools and, second, the inability of many history teachers to feel really at home in their subject. These are both sweeping charges, and I know perfectly well that there are many individual exceptions to them. I know university-based historians who are genuinely interested in schooling and who work collegially with teachers. And I also know teachers across Canada who are thoroughly versed in the developments in their discipline--who, indeed, in some cases contribute to it as historians in their own right.
    But, this said, I think it is correct to say that most historians and teachers work in isolation from one another and that there are no institutional or organized links between historians and teachers--certainly not at the national level. Few teachers read the Canadian Historical Review or any other specialized academic journal, be it Labour/Le Travail, B.C. Studies, Acadiensis, the Journal of Canadian Studies, Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique francaise, Canadian Women's Studies, Prairie Forum, or any other. Nor do such journals take any great interest in the doings of the schools. And few historians read Canadian Social Studies, The History Teacher, Teaching History, Social Education, Social Studies, or any other pedagogical journal.
    It was not always this way. Until the 1950s, Canadian historians, including such luminaries as George Wrong, Chester Martin, Charles Colby, Walter Sage, Lionel Groulx, Arthur Maheux, George Brown, Reginald Trotter, A.R.M. Lower, and Hilda Neatby, took a serious and continuing interest in the schools. They spoke at teachers' conferences, published in teachers' journals, wrote school textbooks, commented on educational issues generally, and lobbied for the cause of history--not because they thought in some self-interested way that their work at the university level depended on the health of history in the schools, but because they saw history as a vital ingredient of education and civilization, and thus saw themselves as engaged in a common enterprise with teachers in the schools, an enterprise that they justified in terms of its contribution to the enrichment of human life and the social good. Like their American and English counterparts, they were prepared to go the extra mile to help the cause of history. To use a modern phrase, they were truly public intellectuals.
    For my money, two of the most lucid arguments for the teaching of history continue to be two reports published by the American Historical Association in 1899 and 1911. Certainly they reflect the assumptions, predilections, and, yes, sometimes the prejudices of their time, but, read with regard to their historical context, they remain powerfully persuasive. And what makes them even more remarkable is that they were written by some of the most eminent academic historians of their day: James Harvey Robinson, Albert Hart, Herbert Adams, Andrew McLaughlin, Morse Stephens, Charles Haskins, Lucy Salmon, and others. But who, except for specialists, even knows their names today, let alone reads their work? How many teachers have even heard of George Wrong or Walter Sage, Lionel Groulx or Arthur Maheux, James Harvey Robinson or Lucy Salmon, or, to take two British examples, George Trevelyan or Eileen Power--all of them at the top of their profession in their day and all of them vitally interested in the cause of history in the schools? Many of them have been the subject of biographies or of specialized studies, but few teachers read them or are even aware of their existence.
    For their part, historians today read little or nothing that has to do with the teaching of history in the schools. Granatstein's polemic, Who Killed Canadian History? (1998) struck a nerve with historians, not because of anything it said about the schools, but because of its attacks on contemporary historiography, while other books on history teaching have been largely (though admittedly not totally) ignored by historians (McKillop 1999). And two recent collections on the teaching of history and social studies, Ian Wright and Alan Sears's Trends and Issues in Canadian Social Studies (1997) and Roland Case and Penney Clark's Canadian Anthology of Social Studies (1997), have received no notice whatsoever in the historians' journals. It speaks volumes that the conference organized last January by the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada on history teaching, which brought historians and teachers together from all across the country, was the first ever such national conference in Canada's history. Gary Nash (1997) has recently written of what he calls the "long walk" of American historians away from the schools. It is true of Canada also.
    So far as I can tell, the walk began in the 1950s, at least in Canada, and became a full-fledged retreat in the 1960s. For the most part, it was the result of accelerating specialization and professionalization in both history and education. In history, research specialities multiplied; older traditions of narrative political history proved less attractive to younger scholars; and changes in the general climate of the times drew attention to questions of class, race, gender, inequality, and dominance. At the same time, old universities grew, new universities were created, and the historical profession grew by leaps and bounds. As a result, as has often been observed, historical research became ever more specialized and technical, and historians increasingly wrote for each other, not for the public at large. Indeed, historians like my old Oxford tutor, A.J.P. Taylor, who attracted a popular audience, were sometimes accused of a lack of seriousness, of insufficient attachment to the scholarly life.
    As the study of history became more sophisticated and the historical profession grew, so did the study of education, and with much the same result. As schools expanded, so did faculties of education. And with the expansion of the academic study of education and the increased availability of research funds, education professors sought to emulate their colleagues in arts and science faculties in a bid for academic status and esteem. Theory was valued over practice, often at the expense of practice. The study of education was increasingly isolated within faculties of education with their own hierarchies of merit, status, and promotion.
    At the same time, the study of education became more rigorous (its critics said more pedantic), with its own methodologies, conceptual frameworks, and vocabulary. An obvious example is provided by the history of education, which changed from what had been a Panglossian recital of the inevitable progress of public schooling, in which all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, a let-us-now-praise-our-famous-men (and a few women) version of the past designed to boost the morale of prospective teachers. It became one of the most interesting branches of full-blown historical scholarship--schools were studied for what they were, not for what they were supposed to be, and education was seen, as Bernard Bailyn put it, as the entire process by which a culture is transmitted from generation to generation (1960, 14).
    Another example of the new sophistication of educational studies is provided by the emergence of curriculum studies. The old-style curriculum engineering approach pioneered by such figures as Snedden, Bobbitt, and Charters, and continued by Tyler, Taba, and others, as well as the more high-flown kind of cultural commentary descended from Arnold, Eliot, Leavis, Trilling, and their kind, were both replaced by the sociology of knowledge. Curriculum theorists came in many forms--Marxist, Althusserian, Gramscian, feminist, phenomenonologist, structuralist, reconceptualist, postmodern--but they all agreed on one thing: The curriculum was not some neutral body of knowledge waiting to be translated into objectives and learning experiences, nor the objective distillation of the best that had been known and written, but, rather, a vehicle for cultural reproduction and ideological hegemony.
    As in the history of education and in curriculum studies, so in almost every branch of the study of education, research and scholarship became ever more professionalized. To be a student of education in a university increasingly required graduate work, not in an established academic discipline in arts or science, but in education itself. Educationists were no longer steeped in the liberal arts; they were technical specialists in psychometrics, curriculum design, special education, or some other arcane and increasingly inaccessible aspect of education. Understandably, when they organized graduate courses, they did so in areas that were familiar to them and in which they possessed verifiable expertise. As a result, when teachers took a master's degree, as they increasingly did once salaries were tied to qualifications, they did so in education, not in the discipline they were actually teaching. At all levels, teachers became better trained but less educated, and schools increasingly became centres of training and socialization, not of liberal education in any sense of the term.
    While historians were turning in on themselves, education was making itself ever more inaccessible to non-specialists. Hence, for example, the many complaints about the language of education, as it aped the social sciences and sacrificed plain English for specialized terminology--jargon or "eduspeak" in the language of its critics. The structure of the expanding university system accelerated the process. Historians found no professional rewards in working with the schools or in writing textbooks or books of general interest. Nor in many cases did educationists. Academic rewards were to be found in the archives or the laboratory, not the classroom. The secret of academic success lay in publication in reputable academic journals, which, given the conditions prevailing in English-speaking Canadian education, usually meant American journals. I remember listening in disbelief to the description of one research assessment exercise in my own faculty of education where the researchers blithely announced that were considering only publication or citation in American journals or indexes, since it was "well established" that their Canadian counterparts were of lesser quality.
    The result of this whole process has been an altogether regrettable isolation of historians and teachers from each other, with predictable consequences for the position of history in the schools. It does not seem to me a coincidence that the period when history began to lose its traditional position in the school curriculum, a process that began in the 1960s and took real hold in the 1970s, was the very period when historians withdrew from the schools. As history came under increasing pressure from the advocates of interdisciplinary social studies, from the vocationalists, from the preachers of relevance, from the skills enthusiasts, from all those who valued so-called process over product, it lost its most influential and persuasive defenders, at least so far as policy-makers and the public were concerned--the historians.
    The historians who did venture into the world of education often found themselves in a world that was no longer familiar to them, speaking a language they no longer knew. In the Bruner-inspired enthusiasm of the 1960s for structure and method of inquiry, for example, one academic entrepreneur had the bright idea of assembling a group of disciplinary experts, sociologists, geographers, and the like, and asking them to identify the structure and conceptual framework of their respective disciplines. The social scientists happily complied and came up with lists of generalizations and concepts. Only the historians found themselves at sea.

In the words of the conference organizer, [the historians] were concerned with identifying the topics and ideas that should be taught rather than with relating the concept of structure to their discipline.... Most of their recommendations pointed the way to a well-taught, thoroughly planned Western civilization course, but a course in no way based on structure. (Lowe 1969, 81)

    An American historian reflected on the consequences of this professionalization of education as he encountered it while working on a California curriculum committee:

Most disturbing of all was the difficulty we historians had in coming up with a rationale for history in the schools that was clear and convincing even to ourselves. In the face of the teachers' hardheaded insistence on precision in defining the objectives of the social studies curriculum, we became aware that our heartfelt declarations about "historical wisdom" and "a sense of the past" didn't really convey very much. (Sellers 1969, 510)

    The mutual isolation of teachers and historians not only deprived history of some persuasive advocates; it has also meant that history teachers are too often separated from the roots of their discipline. So far as teacher training is concerned, a history major (and these days many history teachers do not have even that much grounding in their subject) rarely constitutes an initiation into the practices and ways of thought of the discipline of history, but is simply a collection of miscellaneous and usually unrelated credits required to accumulate a "teachable." As Peter Seixas (1999) nicely puts it, teachers are rarely part of the "community of inquiry" of historians.
    For their part, historians do not see themselves as teacher-trainers. That is something that the specialization of the university allows them to delegate to faculties of education. Historians are sometimes inclined to dismiss faculties of education as mere trade schools and to disparage their claims to academic legitimacy, but they are not interested in taking on their work. Over the years, I have become convinced that a five-course major, taken for gaining accreditation as a teacher, rarely provides any grounding in the discipline of history as understood and practised by historians. Indeed, in happy ignorance of what some teachers are achieving even with young children, many historians consider that such properly historical work cannot be satisfactorily undertaken below graduate school.
    The result has been that too often classrooms are staffed not by teacher-historians but by pedagogical technicians. Over 35 years of teaching history, training history teachers, and working with schools in a variety of ways, the problems I most often saw in classrooms arose not from weaknesses in pedagogy or course design or from poorly implemented teaching strategies, but from a failure to appreciate and take advantage of the implications of subject-matter. Poor history teaching typically results not so much from poor teaching as from poor history. I would gladly declare a moratorium on the design of new materials and the invention of new teaching strategies and instead devote the time, effort, and money that would otherwise be spent on them to helping teachers become more familiar with the actual history they have to teach and, beyond that, more conversant and comfortable with the nature of their subject, its epistemology, conceptual frameworks, and methods of inquiry.
    There is a role here for Canadian Social Studies, for it represents one place, perhaps the only place, where historians can describe to teachers the latest developments in their various fields of study. Its predecessor, The History and Social Science Teacher, used to do this from time to time, with its theme issues on such topics as women's history, native history, labour history, military history, and so on. It's a tradition worth continuing.
    There is another, related, route to the invigoration of history teaching where I think Canadian Social Studies could be useful. It lies in the provision of a sense of historical context to our work as history teachers. For teachers of history, we are remarkably ignorant of the history of our own work. The Granatstein-inspired debate about history teaching, for example, is notable for its lack of historical reference. Granatstein does refer back to A.B. Hodgetts's What Culture? What Heritage? (1968) (another book that goes largely unread these days), but neither he nor his commentators go back any further.
    By my count, however, there have been at least five crises, real or perceived, in the teaching of history over the last 100 years, all saying much the same thing. Each generation seems to find its own crisis, as aging historians, troubled by the world they see taking shape around them, struggle to preserve the world they fear they are losing--by improving the teaching of history.
    The first crisis occurred in the early 1900s, when patriotic educationists feared that history in schools was too provincial and insufficiently national in its scope. The second arose in the 1930s, when it was discovered that, though textbooks and curricula were now appropriately national, at least outside Quebec, students found them boring. The solution favoured by educationists, historians, and publishers alike was to reduce the emphasis on political and constitutional history and to add a strong dose of romanticized social history.
    The third crisis occurred in the mid-1940s, when wartime problems exacerbated the tensions that existed between Quebec nationalists and the rest of Canada, leading some people to call for a pan-Canadian history curriculum that would unite all Canadians in a common patriotism. In 1944 the Senate even debated the need for a uniform national history textbook and called on historians to appoint a committee to identify the core historical facts that all Canadians should know. The historians declined the offer, though some of them, including such heavy hitters as Arthur Lower, Richard Saunders, and Arthur Maheux, helped the Canadian and Newfoundland Education Association (1945) design a model history programme for Grades 7-12.
    As the wartime crisis passed, so did the call for a uniform national history. But a fourth crisis erupted in the wake of the appearance in 1968 of Hodgetts's What Culture? What Heritage? As is well known (or perhaps not in these ahistorical days), Hodgetts condemned what he found in history classrooms out of hand. The only thing students were leaning in history, according to his findings, was to dislike the subject. His book had some impact but, even so, the fifth crisis came exactly 30 years later, when Granatstein said much the same thing, declaring that history had been foully murdered by a combination of anti-intellectual educrats and uncaring historians.
    All of which seems to bear out W.C. Fields' observation: "Things are not what they used to be, but then they never were."
    All five crises had much in common. It is almost as if the same crisis keeps reemerging, like a stubborn weed that resists the gardener's attempt to uproot it. Not enough history is taught and what is taught is taught badly. History fails to tell students their national story and to instil in them a sense of national identity and pride. As a result, the country is in trouble. To quote no less an authority than Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in the National Post on 28 June, if history were taught better "the nation would be healthier. No doubt about it."
    Perhaps, though, it is naive (or arrogant) to think that a country can be saved, or destroyed, for that matter, by its history teachers. If only we had that much influence. Perhaps historians, and by extension history teachers, not poets, should be the legislators of the world! It is true that H.G. Wells (1939) held history teachers ultimately responsible for World War I, for where else, he argued, but in the history classroom did young men learn to glorify war and to kill and die so readily for their country? But Wells was writing for effect, seeking to destroy what he called the "poison" of national and nationalist (he did not distinguish between them) history.
    If we know nothing of the history of history teaching in Canada, or elsewhere for that matter, and if we fail to recognize the remarkable similarity of the complaints that seem to emerge every 30 years or so, we are all too likely to be stampeded into solutions by what Sir Arthur Harris (1990) used to call the "panacea mongers" in his bomber command days, solutions that will prove to be no solutions at all, but only new ways of doing the very things that have been tried and found wanting in the past. I am reminded of an old Peter Cook line: "I have learned from my mistakes and I can now repeat them exactly."
    Too often, as history teachers, we act like grasshoppers disturbed by a passing shadow. We jump excitedly in whatever direction our instincts take us, not stopping to think where we are heading--only to find that we might as well have stayed where we were in the first place. As a profession, or trade, or craft, or whatever it is that we are as history teachers, we have no sense of our collective past, no memory of what our predecessors did, of the problems they faced, of their successes and failures, and no awareness of any kind of the development of our trade over time. Was it Isaac Newton or some Renaissance figure who compared himself to a pygmy standing on the shoulders of giants? As history teachers, we don't seem to see ourselves as standing on anything. Like that Monty Python high-rise, we stay upright by sheer will power.
    Consider these questions:
    * Who today is familiar with the 1899 and 1911 reports on history teaching of the American Historical Association or is even aware of their existence?
    * Who is at all familiar with the sophisticated work of Charles McMurry and others at the turn of the century on how to teach history to young children through stories?
    * Who is aware of the enthusiasm for teaching through primary sources that ran its course in the 1890s and early 1900s?
    * Who today reads James Harvey Robinson, friend and colleague of John Dewey and pioneer of the "new history" 100 years ago, and considers the implications of his work for the schools?
    * Who today remembers the reservations of many long-dead historians over the use of history to teach citizenship and their argument that the best reason for studying history was to become historically minded, to learn to think historically?
    * Who today takes any interest in the efforts of historians to beat back the challenge of social studies in the 1920s?
    * For that matter, even though Michael Lybarger pointed it out back in 1983, who today realizes that social studies began as a way to teach African-Americans and First Nations peoples to keep their appointed place in white society?
    * Who today reads what H.G. Wells had to say about the teaching of history (which was a lot), a subject on which he declared himself to be a "fanatic"?
    * Who today even knows of the existence of such former stars of history teaching as F.W. Sanderson, Frederick. J. Gould, and Henry Johnson?
    I could extend this list almost endlessly, but you see my point. As history teachers, we have a rich and informative history, but we are almost totally unaware of it.
    I have spent a good part of the last three years reading the education journals of the 1890s to the 1930s. It has been variously humiliating, exhilarating, and depressing. Humiliating, because I have found so much that I never knew, even though I am reputed to be one of the better-informed people in the field. Exhilarating, because I found so much that was interesting, creative, and valuable--and usually written with a verve and a clarity that puts much of today's professional "literature" to shame. Depressing, because it was obvious that most of what I was finding had been quickly forgotten, leaving us to reinvent the wheel every generation or so.
    Over these last three years of reading, I have come to the conclusion that by about the mid-1920s, we had a good idea of what was involved in teaching history well. Almost every pedagogical innovation that has appeared since the 1920s is simply an unwitting variation or reinvention of something that was once known but was then forgotten.
    Teaching through primary sources? They wrote the book on it (literally) 100 years ago. Organizing a history course as a series of open-ended problems for students to investigate? It was being done in the second decade of the century. Setting up the history classroom as a "laboratory" with students performing history "experiments," testing hypotheses, and the like? It was all the rage in the 1920s. Using reverse chronology to start with the present and work back into the past? It was being recommended in the 1890s. Teaching social history? It had become orthodoxy by the 1920s. Teaching history to expose false consciousness and illuminate the realities of race, class, and gender? Socialists, feminists, farmer radicals, and trades unionists were pushing for it before World War I. And so on and so on.
    But we have drawn a veil over all this. It has not fallen victim to what E.P. Thompson called in another context the "enormous condescension of posterity" (1968, 13). Posterity has not condescended to it. It has point-blank erased it from our historical memory. Orwell's Ministry of Truth (Orwell had some interesting things to say about history; he even taught it briefly and described some first-rate history teaching in his now largely unread A Clergyman's Daughter) couldn't have done better.
    As history teachers, we are inclined to say that people can't understand the present if they don't understand the past. It has always been something of a bromide but it contains some truth. If, as history teachers, we understood our professional past, we might, if not better understand the present, at least face it more confidently and be better prepared to tackle those who claim to know how to take us into the future.
    Here, then, is a role for Canadian Social Studies. Where better to inform history teachers of our collective past and to begin to build that contextualized understanding of our work that will help us protect and understand our subject, whether from the arrogant dismissals of the new vocationalists and skills enthusiasts or the confident superiority of the social studies advocates, who feel the wind in their sails and even now are shaping the Western Canadian Protocol for Social Studies? If Canadian Social Studies does not make history teachers aware of their history, it is difficult to see who else will or could.
ADDED MATERIAL
    Ken Osborne began teaching high school history in Winnipeg in 1961. He later joined the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba, where he taught history and methods of history teaching. He is a former editor of The History and Social Science Teacher and has written extensively about history and history teaching. His most recent book is Education: A Guide to the Canadian School Debate (1999).

REFERENCES
    American Historical Association. 1899. The Study of History in Schools: Report to the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven. New York: Macmillan.
    American Historical Association. 1911. The Study of History in Secondary Schools: Report to the American Historical Association by a Committee of Five. New York: Macmillan.
    Bailyn, B. 1960. Education in the Transforming of American Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
    Canadian and Newfoundland Education Association. 1945. "Report of the Committee for the Study of Canadian History Textbooks." Canadian Education 1(October): 3-35.
    Case, R., and P. Clark, eds. 1997. The Canadian Anthology of Social Studies: Issues and Strategies for Educators. Burnaby, BC: Pacific Educational Press.
    Granatstein, J.L. 1998. Who Killed Canadian History? Toronto: Harper Collins.
    Harris, A. 1990. Bomber Offensive. Toronto: Stoddart.
    Hodgetts, A.B. 1968. What Culture? What Heritage? Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
    Lowe, W.T. 1969. Structure and the Social Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
    McKillop, A.B. 1999. "Who Killed Canadian History? A View from the Trenches." Canadian Historical Review 80: 269-99.
    Nash, G.B., C. Crabtree, and R.E. Dunn. 1997. History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past. New York: Knopf.
    Osborne, K. 1999. "Revisiting History in the Classroom." The Beaver 79 (August/September): 6-7.
    Seixas, P. 1993. "The Community of Inquiry as a Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The Case of History." American Educational Research Journal 30: 305-24.
    Sellers, C.G. 1969. "Is History on the Way Out of the Schools and Do Historians Care?" Social Education 33: 510.
    Thompson, E.P. 1968. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
    Wells, H.G. 1939. "The Traveller Provokes His Old Friends, the Teachers, Again in a Paper Called 'The Poison Called History.'" In Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
    Wright, I., and A. Sears, eds. 1997. Trends and Issues in Canadian Social Studies. Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press.