The Uses of the Past: The Importance of Teaching History in Ahistorical Times

In his novel, England, England, Julian Barnes raises the question of what history is and what the "uses" of the past are, observing

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past; it was what made the present able to live with itself. (Barnes, 1998, 6)

In Canada, questions about the content, methodology and purpose of history teaching remain very much at issue in the public domain. As Barnes suggests, we have a deeply felt need to find ways to live with ourselves, and history is placed in the service of that need. Unfortunately, if the criticisms leveled against history teaching in J. L. Granatstein's 1998 work, Who Killed Canadian History? or the (predictably) disastrous results of the Dominion Institute's annual Canada Day Quiz, are any reliable gauge of the success of education in meeting this need, it would seem that school teachers, academics, and public officials have generally failed to develop in students anything like the "common imagining" of the nation that Benedict Anderson (1991) describes as the mythic force binding a state together.

The concerns Granatstein and the Dominion Institute—among others—raise certainly suggest the necessity to question the content, methodology, and intent of history teaching in Canada. But are these concerns new, and do they point to the existence of some kind of "crisis" in the teaching of Canadian history?

In many ways it could be argued that concern over history teaching is, itself, a historically recurring phenomenon related to ongoing questions about what pedagogies are most appropriate to enliven the discipline, or responding to significant changes in the social fabric of the nation. As an example of the former, an Alberta public school inspector made the following observation in 1910, "the treatment of history by many teachers is faulty from the fact that they spend too much time on unimportant details and fail to impress the minds of their pupils with the main action of the drama of the past and its intimate connection with the present" (Embree, 1952, nd). The impact of the latter was well expressed by E. D. Hodgetts in his 1968 work What History, What Heritage? when he noted, "it is both futile and undesirable to search for it [some kind of consensus view of the nation's history] in a vast, multi-ethnic country like Canada" (1968, 119).

But despite the obvious similarities between current and past concerns over history teaching, I think it is fair to say that today there is a crisis in history teaching. However, unlike Granatstein and supporters of the Dominion Institute, I see the crisis in broader terms. As we move further into the 21st Century, there are unique forces—among them a form of decontextualized individualism born of an unfortunate confluence of liberalism and globalization—at play in society that have combined to promote the growth of a kind of ahistoricism (Beiner, 1997; Giddens, 2000; Putnam, 2000). Among other things, this ahistoricism results in the perception that "the past is another country," somehow divorced from and irrelevant to the insistent demands of the present and the urgent need to cope with a future that is approaching all too quickly.

However, as the philosopher Hans-georg Gadamer reminds us, the artificial division between self and world that characterizes this perception and suggests that individuals can somehow stand outside of history is false and dangerous:

We cannot extricate ourselves from [history] in such a way that the past becomes completely objective for us.…We are always situated in history.…I mean that our consciousness is determined by a real historical process in such a way that we are not free to simply juxtapose ourselves to the past. (Gadamer in Gallagher 1992, 90)

For Gadamer, our identities are constructed in relation to others and realize themselves in communities. In the absence of community, society risks degeneration into what philosopher Albert Borgmann terms a "cancerous" form of individualism in which people live "in a state of narcissism and pursue loneliness" (1992, 3). But community is more than a contemporary social structure composed of interacting groups and individuals; it has a chronological dimension that is bound up with traditions and historically grounded understandings. As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor notes,

Each young person may take up a stance that is authentically his or her own; [but] this stance does not originate just in that person: the very possibility of this is enframed in a social understanding of a greater temporal depth, in fact in a 'tradition'" (1989, 39).

What is more, history, or rather the study of history, serves as an important component of the infrastructure of civic society. As historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob remind us, "the effort to establish a historical truth itself fosters civility. Since no one can be certain that his or her explanations are definitively right, everyone must listen to other voices. All histories are provisional; none will have the last word" (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, 1997, 217). Philosopher of education Eamonn Callan (1994) makes much the same point when he notes that a clear-eyed examination of the past produces what he terms the "emotional generosity" that allows diverse groups to live together in one society. Lacking such a predisposition, and without the benefit of the study of history, Callan warns, "politics in a society in which public emotions have largely atrophied will tend to become a matter of apathy and cynicism" (1994, 191).

The question, then, is not so much why study history—the dangers of ahistoricism are far too apparent—but, instead, how to approach the study of history. Should it be in the context of public story telling held in service of the development of Anderson's "common imagining" of the nation, or should it be in the context of developing the knowledge, skills, and attitudes deemed necessary for active and responsible participation in civic society?

Taken together, many of the contributors to this issue focus on the important question of the "uses of the past" in contemporary education. Michael Bliss, arguably the preeminent Canadian historian in English-speaking Canada, suggests that it is critical that Canadians are made aware of the "public events of our common history." For Peter Seixas, whose work on historical consciousness has made important contributions to the field of history teaching in Canada, history teaching serves a double purpose: the development of a deep understanding of the past as well as an in-depth appreciation of the "processes" of knowledge making in history. Finally, Mark Starowicz, producer of the immensely successful and award winning series Canada: A People's History takes up the question of how popular history can become a vehicle through which Canadians of all ages can become engaged in their own history.

References

Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism. London: Verso.

Appleby, J., Hunt, L., and Jacob, M. 1997. "Telling the truth about history." In K. Jenkins
(Ed.), The postmodern history reader, 209-218. London: Routledge.

Barnes, J. 1998. England, England. Toronto: Vintage.

Beiner, R. 1997. Philosophy in a time of lost spirit: Essays on contemporary theory.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Borgmann, A. 1992. Crossing the postmodern divide. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Callan, E. 1994. "Beyond sentimental civic education." American Journal of Education
102 (February): 190-221.

Embree, D. 1952. The beginning and growth of instruction in social studies provided by
the schools of Alberta. Unpublished Med dissertation. Edmonton: University of
Alberta.

Gallagher, Shaun. 1992. Hermeneutics and education. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Giddens, A. 2000. Runaway world: How globalization is reshaping our lives. London:
Routledge.

Granatstein, J. L. 1998. Who killed Canadian history. Toronto: HarperCollins.

Hodgetts, A. B. 1968. What culture? What heritage? Toronto: OISE Press.

Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community.
New York: Simon and Shuster.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of self: The making of modern identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The Editor