Commentary
Due to President Trump’s tariff war, tensions are high between Canada and the United States. Many Canadians are showing their support for our country by flying Canadian flags and buying Canadian products.
Part of being proud of your country is understanding its history, both the good and the bad. This means giving students an accurate and balanced understanding of our country’s history. Sadly, this doesn’t happen as often as it should in our public schools. Instead, many schools promote a warped version of Canadian history that focuses more on our failures than our successes.
For example, the Eby government’s K-12 Anti-Racism Action Plan begins with the statement that “Systemic racism and settler colonialism have shaped our province for generations” and that schools hold “great responsibility in addressing the systemic and interpersonal racism that continues to exist throughout the education system today.”
With statements like these, it comes as little surprise that the B.C. social studies curriculum focuses primarily on negative events in Canadian history. For example, the Grade 5 curriculum requires students to learn about past discriminatory government policies such as residential schools, the Chinese head tax, the Komagata Maru incident, and the internment of various people during the two world wars.
The Grade 9 social studies curriculum also requires students to learn about past discriminatory policies and lists the same examples given in the Grade 5 curriculum. Incredibly, the Grade 10 curriculum provides the exact same list of discriminatory policies that students must learn about. Thus, B.C. teachers who faithfully follow the social studies curriculum will teach students about these same dark chapters in our history no fewer than three times during their time in school.
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Unfortunately, the B.C. social studies curriculum guides contain far less guidance when it comes to positive aspects of Canadian history. While students are required to learn about “big ideas” such as “Canada is made up of many diverse regions and communities,” there’s no specific list of significant Canadian accomplishments that all B.C. students must learn about.
Simply put, while some dutiful history teachers will no doubt ensure that students learn about positive events in our history (e.g. helping American slaves escape during the Civil War, providing outsized contributions during both world wars, standing against apartheid in South Africa, etc.), nowhere does the B.C. curriculum specifically require it. In fact, teachers could provide students with a totally skewed history that paints our country as a failed colonial state without going against anything in the social studies curriculum.
Some textbook companies appear to have picked up on this narrative. For example, “Righting Canada’s Wrongs” is an eight-volume “anti-racism” resource that focuses exclusively on past incidents of discrimination in Canadian history—including those listed multiple times in the B.C. social studies curriculum.
Unsurprisingly, the publisher proudly notes on its promotional website that “Righting Canada’s Wrongs” “supports history and civics curriculums.” This is certainly true the case in B.C. since the social studies curriculum focuses on these topics.
Clearly, the B.C. social studies curriculum does not provide an accurate and balanced portrayal of Canadian history. No one will want to be part of our country if they think it’s a genocidal state built on settler colonialism. While Canada has obviously made mistakes, there are also many positive things in our history worth learning about.
Simply put, our very existence as a country shows the ability of people from different backgrounds to work together. Our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, was uniquely gifted at bridging the divide between English Protestants and French Roman Catholics. Yes, Macdonald was a flawed man of his time, but he was also someone who had a vision of a country that one day would have dominion “from sea to sea.”
If we want to resist the continental pull of the United States, we should stop denigrating our own country and ensure that students learn about the good things in Canadian history, not just the bad.
Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
