John Ibbitson and Michael Valp: Debate ... Should we can Canadian history?

John Ibbitson: Studying Canada's past is parochial — not to mention divisive. And who really cares about Louis Riel anyway? Bring back the history of Western civilization

Your province's history curriculum is propaganda designed to brainwash children and stoke ancient resentments, and should be abolished.

A Canadian history curriculum, properly constructed, would focus primarily on the role that our nation has played in the ongoing advance of Western civilization — the most important fact of the human story. Paul Johnson splendidly defended this approach in his introduction to The Offshore Islanders, way back in 1972.

"What ideas has Soviet Russia produced?" he wrote."Or Communist China? Or postwar Japan? Where is the surge of discovery in the Arab world? Or liberated Africa? Or, for that matter, from Latin America, independent now for more than 150 years? It is a thin harvest indeed, distinguished chiefly by infinite variations on the ancient themes of violence, cruelty, suppression of freedom and the destruction of the individual spirit."...

Michael Valpy: Sex in canoes — as well as other facts and myths about Canada's past — defines who we are. Dropping Canadian history from the classroom is the ultimate dodge

We don't want to kill off the teaching of Canadian history. Or dilute it. We want to be smarter and more diligent about it, more devious than we have been in the past about making it serve the integrity of the nation.

Because anything else is a cop-out that gives up on Canada. v Because those of us who live here together now, and who will be joining us in the future, are entitled to stories about our common experience, derived past and present from our institutions, laws, customs, behaviours and relationships to each other and to our land.

Because the country itself is entitled to a history of what has transpired within its borders.

The preponderance of thought among today's academically prissy (historians and educators alike) is that national history is ruled out by our limited identities — Albertan here, Québécois there, black, Asian, aboriginal, women, urban, rural, rich, poor and so forth. There's an attitude, moreover, that Canadian historiography is an immutably flawed project, forever fleeing one ideological captor only to be imprisoned by the next.

Thus, pan-Canada history is offered to us as a desiccated husk — relativist and sucked dry of juice, like Christmas, lest it cause any offence. And the events of our past are deemed irrelevant to hundreds of thousands of immigrants turning up each year who are encouraged to think Canadian history begins with their arrival and who care, in John Ibbitson's words, not a fig why the 1837 rebellions occurred or that Louis Riel got hanged.

However, there is this matter of what holds us together. Because without a sense of the common experience and the common project called Canada, we won't do things together — fix medicare, support public schools, for that matter go to Afghanistan....