Best 4 quotes of J. L. Granatstein on MyQuotes

Content is not mere facts, drummed into tender little minds under the relentless pounding of rote learning. Content--even the date of the Quebec Act, Confederation, or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, or the name of the first prime minister-- is cultural capital, a basic requirement of life that every Canadian needs to comprehend the daily newspaper, to watch the TV news or a documentary, or to argue about politics and cast a reasonably informed vote. In an increasingly complex and immediate world, cultural capital must also include some knowledge of Europe, Africa, and Asia, too.

Content is not mere facts, drummed into tender little minds under the relentless pounding of rote learning. Content--even the date of the Quebec Act, Confederation, or the Battle of Vimy Ridge, or the name of the first prime minister-- is cultural capital, a basic requirement of life that every Canadian needs to comprehend the daily newspaper, to watch the TV news or a documentary, or to argue about politics and cast a reasonably informed vote. In an increasingly complex and immediate world, cultural capital must also include some knowledge of Europe, Africa, and Asia, too. Without some factual basis, some understanding of why Afghanis, Bosnians, or Congolese act as they do, Canadians will never make sense of what is happening around them. A knowledge of fact and an understanding of trends form the critical elements of our society's public discourse, and if Canadians do not have cultural capital in common, the fragmentation of our society is inevitable.

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today.

Who, in particular, is responsible for this decimation of our history? - The provincial ministries of education for preaching and practising parochial regionalism and for gutting their curricula of content. - The ministry of bureaucrats who have pressed the "whole child" approach and anti-élitist education. - The ethnic communities that have been conned by Canada's multiculturalism policy into demanding an offence-free education for all Canadian children, so that the idea that Canada has a past and a culture has been all but lost. - The boards of education that have responded to pressures for political correctness by denuding their curricula of serious knowledge and offering only trendy pap. - The media that has looked only for scandal and for a new approach to the past, so that fact becomes half truth and feeds only cynicism. - The university professors who have waged internecine wars to such an extent that they have virtually destroyed history, and especially Canadian history, as a serious discipline. - The university presses and the agencies that subsidize professors for publishing unreadable books on miniscule subjects. - The federal governments that have been afraid to reach over provincial governments and the school boards to give Canadians what they want and need: a sense that they live in a nation with a glorious past and a great future.