Appeared in the Globe and Mail, December 26, 2000

Canadian historian W.L. Morton once argued that both the historian and the poet are makers of myths, “only the historian has neglected his job of making myths in this decadent, analytical age." His voice echoes in many of the recent projects aimed at raising the profile of Canadian history in schools and universities. “We need more stories!” say educators, media pundits, and textbook publishers.

I want to argue just the opposite. We live with an abundance of myths, from the victory at Vimy Ridge to the death of Diana. Some of them feel crusty and irrelevant, some of them don't work particularly well any more, and many of them contradict each other in their social and moral messages. But they surround us, nevertheless. Neither historians nor school history teachers should think of their job as making more of them. Our job is quite different. Distinguishing between myth and history can help to clarify what the job is.

Myths evoke strong feelings. They reinforce collective identities, social values and moral orientations. But there is no way to challenge them. We don’t revise them on the basis of new evidence. The whole point of myths is to pass them on unchanged to the next generation. Heritage is similar. It involves myth-like narratives in which people can believe deeply and faithfully.

In 21st century multicultural, multinational Canada, these traditional practices are no longer adequate for supplying the meanings they once did. They provide no way to reconcile conflicting versions of the past. For this, we need to look elsewhere: to history.

Intensified Historical Consciousness: The Heritage Impulse
All around us, there are signs of intense and intensifying interest in the past. As historian David Lowenthal put it in Possessed by the Past: the Heritage Industry and the Spoils of History:
All at once heritage is everywhere—in the news, in the movies, in the marketplace—in everything from galaxies to genes. It is the chief focus of patriotism and a prime lure of tourism. One can barely move without bumping into a heritage site. Every legacy is cherished. From ethnic roots to history theme parks, Hollywood to the Holocaust, the whole world is busy lauding—or lamenting—some past, be it fact or fiction.

Interpretations of the past in museums, movies and monuments—as well as in schools—have recently aroused bitter controversies, not only in Canada around the world. The storm over the CBC television production of “The Valour and the Horror” pales in comparison to the United States Senate’s overwhelming condemnation of proposed History Standards which paid insufficient attention to George Washington. The debates have raged on every continent: What should Hollywood’s Braveheart mean for Scotland? What should the new South Africa do with the old Boer Trekkers’ Monument to racism triumphant? What will a Holocaust memorial mean in Berlin? Who will take the place of Lenin in Russia’s history classrooms?

Historical consciousness is intensified now for a number of reasons. A society whose traditions are fractured and challenged spends more energy on reconstructing a heritage to believe in. As French historian Pierre Nora put it, “Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists.” Consider the world today. People whose pasts, cultures, and traditions are radically different from each other share neighbourhoods, schools, and workplaces. Where old regimes in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Russia, and elsewhere have toppled, their successors scrap histories that no longer make sense. In Canada, even without major political upheaval, there has been a subtle reordering of power, involving changes in gender relations, new demographic patterns, and recognition of ethnic diversity. The old histories no longer fit here, either. Finally, globalization and its technologies have brought different peoples of the world into communication with each other, even if they are not physically closer.

These changes intensify historical consciousness. They drive people to puzzle and stumble over questions that used to have easy answers supplied by myth: How did things get to be as we see them today? What group or groups am I a part of, and what are its origins? How should we judge each other’s past actions, and therefore, what debts does my group owe to others and/or others to mine? Are things basically getting better or are they getting worse? What stories about the past should I believe? Which stories shall we tell? What--about the past--is significant enough to pass on to others, and particularly to the next generation?

From Myth and Heritage to History
Though asking these questions is natural in the Canada of 2000, formulating good answers to them is anything but. To answer them well, people have to move beyond the simplicity and faith of myth and heritage, to the complexity of history. They have to understand the distance between the present and the past, and the difficulty in representing the past in the present. They must consider that John A. Macdonald belongs to another era, and thus, in important sense, to a foreign country. They should see that he is neither simply a Father of Confederation, as one heritage story would have it, nor simply a racist imperialist, as would another. They must deal with multiple causes, conflicting belief systems and historical actors’ differing perspectives. They have to comprehend the interpretive choices and constraints involved in constructing historical accounts based on evidence. And above all, they must recognize the tentative and provisional nature of all historical narratives.

Much of the “history” taught in schools has failed promote these capacities in students. In a rapidly changing, fractured, mobile, multicultural, globalizing society, we can no longer hope to equip students by teaching them heritage: one coherent story as “what happened” in the past. Nor is the task simply to make new, more progressive myths. Students are exposed to too many competing claims and narratives outside of school—in their families, film, community commemorations, and popular music. These—like the successful Historica Minutes—are excellent vehicles for intensifying historical consciousness, but not for advancing it. They arouse interest, involvement and imagination by propagating myth and heritage. They are often—indeed almost always—more dramatically convincing, more appealing, more technologically current, or more persuasive than what can be offered up within the walls of a classroom.

But schools do have an important advantage that extracurricular purveyors of history lack. If advancing historical consciousness were its central aim, then schools’ sequence of graded courses over ten or more years could provide the time and focus for students to become increasingly proficient at, and increasingly committed to, the difficult work of looking at the past critically. Schools actually have the time to develop thoughtful and subtle complexity in students’ historical thinking. Discussions about school history would no longer be framed, as if the key questions were "which story should we tell?" and “how can we make it interesting?” The whole task would be conceived differently.

The very conditions of a pluralistic society that give rise to intensified concerns with the past, make the practices of myth and heritage unsuitable to address those concerns adequately. Knowing what happened and what it means for us is more complex and more multilayered than the paradigms of myth and heritage can sustain. Young people are bound to poke around, under and through the kinds of mythic narratives that once provided national cohesion, identity, and sense of purpose. We should delight in that, and get on with the challenge of helping them to do it better.

Peter Seixas is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education, Department of Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. He is co-editor, with Peter Stearns and Sam Wineburg of Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000).