My second hot take of the day

[sabotabby]

Apparently 40% of Millennials don't know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust but I'd wager 90% of Boomers don't know that the death toll in the Holocaust was actually 12.5 million.

Comments

[lapinlunaire]

I'd love to hear more about the perception of history Canadian Kids These Days have, if you don't mind talking more about it! Sorry if that's weird, how history is taught is just a minor weird obsession I have.

[sabotabby]

Caveat: I don’t teach history, I’m hearing what kids learn secondhand, and it’s been two decades since I’ve studied history in high school. Also I think there are genuinely great high school teachers, and even bureaucrats in charge of curriculum, who try to do things differently.

BUT. The focus is on Canadian settler history. Every attempt at inclusivity means that something else is taken out. So the history text will be white dudes and dates, focusing mainly on Prime Ministers and wars, and you’ll have a segment on The Role of Women or the Horrible Treatment of Chinese Immigrants or Oh Yeah There Were Indigenous People Here and We Were Shitty To Them. And every so often, someone points out that, say, the contributions of queer people aren’t acknowledged enough. So we need less women’s history, etc. Or worse, we have a Black History course so there’s no need for it in Default History.

There’s also set curriculum that happens in chronological order, students drag their feet, and so in my various post-Renaissance history classes, we never got past the 1960s, and it was usually a day or two on that. And then you have teachers who attempt to teach the entire Cold War though the Cuban Missile Crisis, to use an example of what a teacher actually proudly did at my school.

The result is that students come away with a patchwork knowledge that mainly focuses on WWI and WWII. (Canadian history has a huge focus on WWI because we’re very patriotic about being used as cannon fodder for the British Empire.) Students who find the focus on primarily white male achievements during wars not particularly interesting get turned off the subject. Students who do find this interesting will delve further and often find themselves in murky, Alt Reich waters. Similarly, I think the focus in American History on the Civil War leads kids who are into history to the glorification of the Confederates and anti-Black racism.

I was fortunate in that I was already interested in history, and I happened to have very excellent history teachers on different sides of the political spectrum. The right-wing teacher still taught mainly dates and wars, but at least he was much more narrative about it, and it being a more contemporary class, we got up to the 1970s and I got to focus on the FLQ, which was far more interesting to me than wars. And then I had a left-wing teacher who was much more interested in looking at, say, feminist perpsectives of Ancient History (I had no actual interest in Ancient History but I took the course because he had a Certain Repuation), and even more interested in class discussions that digressed into how the NDP betrayed the Waffle.

My history textbook had just under half a page on the Holocaust in the chapter on WWII, and of that, one sentence was devoted to victims other than Jews. But to give the right-wing history teacher credit, we covered it in class in a lot more depth, and we had field trips to a Holocaust museum and one where we met with survivors in small groups and listened to their stories.

I would say this is very much a minority experience; I went to a really good school. And also I was in an art program, so we covered perspectives on history that weren’t in the curriculum through that. But for most of my students, they’re bored, they tune out, and they get that there were two wars and Nazis had a big army. So they come away with a very depoliticized view of history, which is in itself a political framework.