The past is vanishing, argues Trilby Kent in her new book The Vanishing Past. The past is always vanishing, but this isn’t what Kent is talking about. She means the ghostly absence of historical memory in Canada and the disappearance of history as a vital, useful, memorable field of study in Canadian schools.
The Vanishing Past is another in a long phalanx of books documenting, lamenting, cursing, and eulogizing the death of liberal learning and the catastrophes lurking for the society that forgets itself. Kent’s entry doesn’t have the fire the of Douglas Murray’s The War on the West, the immediacy of Robert Bevan’s Monumental Lies, the erudition of Peter Kreeft’s How to Destroy Western Civilization, or the seasoned perspective of John Agresto’s The Death of Learning, but it does have prose so neat and tidy that the enormously difficult task Kent lays out in the book seems reasonable and realistic. Her pleasing prose makes the impossible seem easy.
The core of this book and its most persuasive feature is a sad truth about historical studies: History is taught badly in public schools. And not just taught badly. History hardly teaches anything at all.
The main problem with history and the reason it is vanishing, Kent argues, is that history classrooms don’t teach any content. History as a discipline has been overtaken by methods. Theories of historiography and methods of investigation crowd out the pleasures and wisdom found in harrowing tales of the past. What content is taught is thinly deployed over 12 years of public school.
Even more damaging to the discipline, as Kent details at length, is the dada-esque nature of history curricula. Fragmented, scattershot, accidental—the history has no larger narrative arc or any sense of organization. The result is an aimlessness that trivializes our collective past.
What Kent laments in the history classroom happens in other humanities classrooms. English students talk about theories of reading instead of reading books. Art students talk about art instead of making art (and what they make is more often transgressive and political than beautiful and wonderous). Liberal arts students in nearly every institution learn to view the world through various theoretical “lenses.” Like rose-coloured glasses, these lenses distort everything. Read history with a feminist lens, for example, and—surprise—you see history as a feminist political project.
The emptiness and distortions of so much liberal education has led to well-documented declines in enrolment in these disciplines, especially history. While Kent is right to credit fragmentation for the decline of history, she does not give enough attention to the other reason so many students and their parents reject history as something worth studying: So much of what passes as history is, to be generous, inaccurate.
Here, a reader will need to turn to a writer like Murray who documents at length the slander that passes for professional history these days. The fabrications at the heart of the Rhodes Must Fall movement are one out of many corruptions he investigates in The War on the West. The Rhodes Must Fall movement sought to remove the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes’s name and likeness from the myriad buildings, colleges, and awards named after him. But as Murray shows, the campaign at Oxford University was built on statements attributed to Rhodes that were either fabricated or taken widely out of context. Activists shouldn’t have to resort to fabrication to defenestrate such an apparently awful person.
Yet they do fabricate. Fabrication is a necessary part of maintaining an asymmetrical approach to history, an approach that holds people like Rhodes, Churchill, and other totems of the West to higher moral standards than their contemporaries. This asymmetrical history amounts to “kicking at the foundations” of society, as Murray puts it. Yet kick these activist historians do, with hardly any pushback.
For another example of how the field of history struggles with honesty, readers can investigate the concoction that is A People’s History of America by Howard Zinn. This book, a staple of American classrooms, has had enormous influence on American society and popular culture, despite seam-splitting inconsistences, lies, and plagiarism. Less widely read in classrooms is Mary Grabar’s demolition of Zinn’s confection, Debunking Howard Zinn. Why is that? (Short answer: Most people refuse to read outside their tribe.)
For something closer to home, Canadians may wish to consider the legion of factual errors in Gord Downie’s Secret Path, a text that has been used to teach the history of residential schools to Canada youth. To take one error, Chanie Wenjack, the subject of Downie’s history (and of a fictionalized account written by the Joseph Boyden, who was cast from the upper echelons of CanLit for inventing an indigenous heritage for himself), was not sexually assaulted by his teachers at the public school he attended, nor was he abused by the indigenous couple who ran the residential school where he boarded. Secret Path does not point to a general truth about residential schools or a specific truth about Wenjack. It can’t, not with all the errors it contains. The history of residential schools is a history that should be taught in Canadian schools, and taught accurately. So why must students read falsehoods?
Agenda-driven histories—many of which are generated by professional historians working inside universities—are accepted by helpful educational administrators who then, like Victorians emptying chamber pots out their bedroom windows, pour this refuse onto students and expect them to like it. And they might indeed enjoy that spring rain until they discover what it is. At that point, you have lost them forever.
People can smell excrement. They know when they’re being told a story. Until historians get back to the business of reporting reliable and honest accounts of our shared past, nobody will want to study history.
A major strength of The Vanishing Past is the effort Kent puts into offering solutions to stem history’s decline. She advocates for more and better histories. She wants history woven into the lives of students at every turn, rather than sectioned into dull, decontextualized, one-off courses. It’s a brilliant idea, an obvious solution, and possibly too brilliant and too obvious to put into practice.
Kent also wants classrooms packed with world histories to expand the horizons of Canadian children. Readers can only hope this means a broad, multicultural study of history, one that speaks honestly about saints and sinners found in every society and the imperfection of universal humanity, and not a catalogue of histories tailored to the temperaments and prejudices of each individual culture and society, with special vindictiveness reserved for democratic civilizations.
Kent’s finest lesson appears in anecdotes about how she models a love of history for her daughter. She herself reads history. She helps her daughter find a reason to love stories from the past. Her child is surrounded by history books and with the help of her parents indulges her curiosity about the past. This is the way. This is how to repair the damage to the cloth of history committed by anarchists, activist scholars, and propagandists who today are given too much credibility by curricula writers and publishers.
Another strength motivating The Vanishing Past is the optimism Kent places in the study of history. In polished maxims and firecracker aphorisms she speaks of a belief that society can improve if students learn their history. It’s a hopeful belief. It might even be true. (You can hear the same pleading coming from the English, Classics, and art history departments.)
Kent’s problem is that she defers far too readily to the professional class of historians who have made such a mess of their discipline. In a lengthy disclaimer in the book’s introduction, Kent confesses that she isn’t a “professional historian or curriculum designer” and she doesn’t “presume to write as a historian, educational specialist, or policy maker,” but assures her readers that she loves history, she’s studied history in university, and she’s taught history on the fringes of the academy. With a keen understanding of the naked prejudices of her audience, she states that she isn’t a conservative Christian man who subscribes to “one of the nuttier homeschooling programs.” She is, fortunately, “an atheist, a woman, and a public-school parent.”
Kent may think her disclaimers pre-empt criticisms among historians with letters after their names, but all she does is give these snobs a reason to dismiss her book without reading past the introduction. She may not know how much the overclass hates their lessers. They hate them because it will be the proles, not the over-educated elite—and certainly not historians—who save us.
It is a shame that an intelligent, literate, award-winning writer like Kent feels she cannot comment on historical studies, school curriculum, and any manner of issues relevant to the public interest without first justifying herself. By the last page, Kent proves her bona fides by what she writes, as anybody who takes the time to read her will discover.
The Vanishing Past was published by Sutherland House in 2022.
Robert Grant Price is a university and college lecturer and writer.
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