Andri Ruel, 19, a recent graduate of Garneau Catholic Secondary School in Ottawa, wasn’t impressed with his history classes in high school. “I really, really hated anything to do with Canada because it was just so boring. It was constantly the same thing over and over again,” he says.

“We had the War of 1812 and that’s pretty much the interesting part of our history, according to me, at least.”

Sophie Peterson, 15, now in Grade 10 in that city’s Canterbury High School, agrees: “It’s interesting the first year, and then it’s sort of the same stuff again and again, because Canada was really only made in one way.”

Catherine Gauthier, 17, poised to study health sciences at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., liked high school history, but says in large part that was because of the teacher. “I think I just got lucky, if I’m being honest,” she says.

Learning Canadian history, for many students, isn’t their cup of maple syrup. And provincial governments aren’t forcing them to study very much of it. In some places, students are required to take only one history course in high school.

That worries Paul Bennett, director and lead researcher at the Halifax-based Schoolhouse Institute and a senior fellow on education policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank. “History is disappearing under our feet in schools across Canada, particularly in high schools,” he said in a recent interview.

“We have a U.S. president that’s threatening to make us the 51st state,” yet Canadian students aren’t getting an introduction to their past that fully explains the seriousness of that threat, he says.

In an article in Policy Options, Bennett called for a “complete curriculum reset.” It’s “fair to assume (students) have little or no knowledge of critical events of U.S. pressure on Canada, such as the American invasion of Quebec in 1775, the War of 1812, the 1911 election reciprocity debate, the nuclear warheads controversy of the 1960s or American pressure to join the Iraq war in 2003,” he wrote.

Many educators agree schools should devote more time to teaching history. But there is disagreement on how much — and whose version of — history to teach; which methods — or mix of methods — is best; and which skills students should learn through their history courses.

A debate with new momentum

The issue has a history of its own. During the era of the Quebec referendums and Meech Lake negotiations, historians such as Jack Granatstein and Bob Davis argued for more compulsory history classes.

One camp wished to see Canadian history teaching become more diverse and multicultural, focusing more on the lives of workers, immigrants, First Nations and minorities; another argued to continue or boost nationalist, Eurocentric traditions, including the study of military campaigns, elections, wars and global relations.

The Donald Trump era abruptly reignited the debate. An Ipsos poll for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in 2025, shortly after the U.S. president’s annexation threats began, found more support among younger Canadians than other age groups for the notion — under certain conditions — of joining the United States.

“An alarming proportion of those … didn’t see the threat posed by Trump and Manifest Destiny . They had no idea what Manifest Destiny is, so how can you confront it?” Bennett says.

What, then, do Canadian teens know of their history? National Post asked a half-dozen high school students or recent grads two questions: “Who was the first prime minister of Canada?” and “What happened in Halifax in 1917?”

One gave a lightning-fast response on the prime minister: “John A. Macdonald.” Another said: “Holy, I should know this.”

Among the other four, two got it right when hints were given. Two more confessed to learning about the first prime minister but couldn’t remember. “It’s been too long,” said one.

On the Halifax question, one student answered correctly that the 1917 explosion that levelled much of the city and killed up to 2,000 people involved “two boats crashing into each other and causing a major blast.”

Two more students provided correct answers, and two more were unsure.

Who’s teaching what?

Part of the challenge of teaching history in Canada is that the primary and secondary school history curriculum varies by province.

• In Ontario , students now must study history for three years. They learn pre-Confederation history in Grade 7, followed by post-Confederation to the First World War in Grade 8. After that, they cover all of the 20th and early 21st century in Grade 10.

• British Columbia requires students to take interdisciplinary social studies courses that feature history along with geography, law, economics and other subjects. In Grades 11 and 12, one social studies course is mandatory, but students pick from several options, such as Francophone History and Culture or Asian Studies.

• In Alberta , students take no dedicated history courses between Grades 7 and 12, as history is embedded in mandatory social studies. There are three history-focused high school electives in Alberta, but only one of them concentrates on Canada.

• In Manitoba , Grade 4 students are introduced to the history of the province as part of a broader social studies course. Canadian history is mandatory in Grades 5 and 6, while world history is studied in Grade 8. Students re-examine the entirety of Canadian history in Grade 11.

• In Saskatchewan , no history classes are offered in middle school, but mandatory social study classes from Grades 6 to 9 feature some history. In high school, students choose between social studies, Indigenous studies and Canadian history in Grades 10 and 12. They must take at least one.

• Quebec ’s curriculum features two mandatory Canadian history courses in Grades 9 and 10 (secondaire III and IV, according to Quebec specifications), which cover Canadian history from discovery to the modern day. In primary school, history is taught alongside geography and civics.

• Nova Scotia ‘s curriculum features four mandatory history courses in middle school and one more history-focused Canadian Studies course in high school.

• New Brunswick requires students to study just one history class between Grades 9 and 12, which can be either national or global in scope.

• The territories draw heavily from the Prairie and B.C. curriculums.

Then it gets political

The politics of history in the classroom can be sensitive, depending on where you are in the country.

Alberta is a recent example. Attempts to overhaul the social studies curriculum in 2018 and 2020 spurred anger. In the first instance, the NDP government of Rachel Notley was accused of ignoring key points of the province’s and Canada’s history. When the United Conservative Party government launched its own overhaul in 2020, critics accused the Conservatives of minimizing the role of Indigenous peoples, and of hiring curriculum workers with racist attitudes.

In a commentary in the Edmonton Journal in 2021, Christie Hurrell, a public education advocate and volunteer with Support Our Students Alberta, decried “the narrow perspective the draft takes,” writing “the mentions of Indigenous histories and world views are a token effort; there is no mention of francophone histories or perspectives; the LGTBQ+ community is absent; non-Abrahamic religions are omitted; and there is no discussion of human rights at all.”

Even when the province adjusted and unveiled its updated proposed K-6 curriculum ideas in 2024, some experts felt they were outdated.

At the time, Carla Peck, director of Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future — the first national study of social studies and history education since the 1960s — told the Edmonton Journal that some topics, such as taxes or the Supreme Court, weren’t right for the grade they had been assigned, and criticized teaching proposals she said relied too much on memorization of facts.

Today, the revised curriculum “ignores all current research on what it means to teach history,” Peck said in a recent interview.

Meanwhile in British Columbia, students study the history and contemporary issues of the First Nations. “I think that gave me a more comprehensive understanding because it was focused on one particular topic,” says Julia Bohnen from Vancouver, now a third-year psychology student at Huron University in Ontario.

“If you were to ask me about First People’s issues in B.C., I would say I have probably a better understanding of that than I have on any of the topics that I focused (on) for one month in a Grade 8 social class.”

Indigenous History was “a huge gaping hole in the curriculum” when he was kid, says Andrew Moore, a former history and social studies teacher from Ashbury College in Ottawa, and now CEO of the tutoring startup CustomAILab . Today, he says, “You have to teach the Indian Act. You have to teach residential schools, the ‘60s Scoop. So those are important topics that we teach now that give our students a better understanding of Indigenous history and a little bit of sympathy.”

On that point, however, Claire Masson, the Ottawa mother of Andri Ruel and his brother, Alexandre, 17, says that for her children, Indigenous history education did not always land well: “I know for them, they feel like it’s just the same narrative, the same story is repeated across different courses. And so, it makes you kind of … pull out because I think at first it’s interesting and then you’re like, OK, I heard this.” Andri says that while that what was done to Indigenous people was “horrendous,” the way it was taught to him was “repetitive.”

In the Maritimes, the emphasis on history can be quite different from what students study in the West.

“I grew up in Nova Scotia,” Peck says. “We learned all about the Halifax explosion. This was a very significant event in not only Nova Scotia, in the Maritimes … But in British Columbia, they don’t learn about that. Instead, they learn about the Komagata Maru incident, and we didn’t.”

And in Quebec, history has always been taught in the context of being a minority surrounded by anglophone traditions and culture.

Colin Coates, president of the Canadian Historical Association and a professor at York University, Glendon Campus, in Toronto, says that during his tenure at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) in 1990s, “francophone students would (often) see the history of Canada through their understanding of their own identity” as an oppressed minority.

There is still a knowledge barrier between the French- and English-speaking parts of the country, he adds.

“Students in English-speaking Canada today have even less exposure to French Canada,” he says. And to this day “there are relatively few resources available for teaching about anglophone Canada in French.”

“History has always been vulnerable to manipulation by government,” notes Moore of CustomAILabs, adding that while this vulnerability is more prominent in autocratic one-party states, “democracies are not exempt from this.”

The classic example of how history teaching continues to change is, of course, the case of Sir John A. Macdonald.

“If you are an Aboriginal Canadian, you have excellent reasons to see John A. Macdonald as a villain,” says Moore. “The decisions that he made that affect you to this day were pretty negative, and that perspective is completely understandable.

“There were other things that John A. Macdonald did that had a really dramatic impact on the growth and development of our country. Would we have had a Canada without John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier hammering out an agreement between 1864 and 1867?” Moore asks. “Maybe. Who knows? … The fact is that they did it. And we do have a country … that was an achievement that many Canadians also have a right to celebrate.”

Facts exist independently of their interpretation, he says, and “we can argue about the meaning” provided that our argument is “based on a more or less agreed upon set of facts.”

Peck raises concern about the “content game”: “There’s always going to be somebody” who will stay upset about not including a particular date or event in the curriculum.

Challenges in the classroom

What counts as history teaching in our schools? And what constrains it?

Social studies, in many cases, are meant to include some Canadian history — at least in theory. In practice, Bennett says, even Ontario’s designated history classes are rarely fully dedicated to history.

James Pedrech, a retired history teacher and a member of the London (Ontario) District Catholic School Board, confirms this: “Schools and teachers sometimes have to get creative in terms of when geography and history are taught.” They might lump both Grade 7 and 8 history curriculum into one year, and Grade 7 and 8 geography into the other, for instance.

Under the current system, the biggest constraint is time and attention, says Rachel Collishaw, president of the Social Studies Educators Network, and a history teacher with 20 years of classroom experience. “The fact is, you can’t cram everything in, and you’ve got 15-year-olds in front of you. There’s a reality of how much a 15-year-old is going to be excited to learn about history.”

World history also faces the time crunch. In Ontario, it is an elective half-credit course, available in Grades 11 and 12, but it still must cover 60 centuries of human history from the Stone Age to Silicon Valley, in just 75 minutes per week. “It’s going to be an overview. We’re not going to get into the detail of everything,” Collishaw says.

Peck raises another challenge: Often teachers must deliver subjects for which they have no professional training, including history.

“I think that we often do teachers and students a disservice when we say to somebody, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re a great science teacher, but I need you to teach social studies next year,’” she says. “The curriculum only gets us so far, and it’s what teachers do in the classroom that brings that curriculum to life.”

Yet another pressure on enthusiasm for history, Bennett suggests, is the steady rise of “skills mania.”

“Many of our students are taught by their parents — and I would say in our culture broadly — that high school should be vocational training,” says Moore. “That when you go to high school, you’re … plotting out, which lily pads do I have to jump on to be an engineer or get my business degree or, you know, to earn a livelihood. And that has produced some very smart people who are profoundly ignorant about really important things.”

Politicians have also pushed vocational training over humanities. Earlier this year, for instance, Ontario Premier Doug Ford told post-secondary students : “You have to invest in your future, into in-demand jobs … You’re picking basket-weaving courses, and there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”

The focus on “transferable skills,” while not inherently detrimental, has clouded judgment, Peck says. “Everybody loves a metric to be able to measure things, but, in my mind, we’ve lost the true purpose of education, which is about human flourishing.”

Mix-and-match history

Asked whether they know about The Seven Years’ War, the Expulsion of the Acadians or the War of 1812, all of which are part of the Ontario history Grade 7 and 8 curriculum, Ottawa sisters Sophie Peterson, 15, now in Grade 10, and Emma Peterson, 18, entering Toronto Metropolitan University, say they learned about some of these events either from elective global history courses or from disciplines entirely unrelated to history, such as music — not from mandatory history class.

Sometimes, kids are getting tidbits of history in interdisciplinary social studies courses that mix “historical bits and pieces” with other disciplines, says Collishaw. “It really gives students a strong grounding in what it means to be a human in the world.”

F or Sophie Peterson, music turned out to be one discipline that offered a window into the world of history. “I learned about most of the battles, the wars, the important things that would really affect a bunch of people through music history,” she says.

Pedrech taught a student who wanted to be an architect. “Can you learn about ancient history through studying Egyptian architecture versus Greek or Roman or Japanese architecture? You bet you can, right? And so, I think the same thing is true for music, math, science,” he says.

The mix-and-match approach doesn’t impress Bennett. “Historical snippets ripped out of context and captive of the present moment will not rescue reason or save liberal democracy.” He argues that history as a school subject should empower students “with knowledge about Canada, its history,” to help them “shape the future of that country.”

This goal is different from citizenship education more broadly, which he says “is motivated by engaging students in making them politically active, getting them engaged in causes, and showing that they’re socially conscious.”

Philosophical differences

All of which brings us to an ongoing philosophical battle about how history should be taught.

The “history as narrative” school says, generally, that students should be learning names, personalities and dates involved in major events, with explanation and description, depending on the student’s learning level.

The “thinking historically” school is less concerned with timelines and memorizing facts, and more focused on encouraging students to explore and analyze social or cultural context around historical events.

Under the “narrative” school, for instance, study of Canada’s role in the First World War might involve learning when and why Canada entered the war, what main actions it took or battles it engaged in, who was in charge and what the impacts and results of our involvement were.

The “thinking historically” approach might focus on a specific aspect of a Canadian soldier’s experience, say, life in the trenches. It might entail study of soldiers’ letters home, or the changing role of women. It might focus on the role played by Indigenous soldiers or Black regiments.

Exemplifying the debate is Bennett, on the one hand, who defines the role of history in the curriculum by its function of “knowledge-building,” covering a comprehensive grasp of historical events, causes, and consequences, embedded in a unified narrative that still permits divergent perspectives.

“If you don’t have a narrative, you can’t tell the story of your country,” he says. “I learned that from my colleagues in Quebec … their curriculum has a very, very clear Quebec nationhood focus.” The benefit of that, Bennett said, is that “an amazing percentage of Quebec students can tell their story … they have taught us a great deal about the power of narrative.”

Not everyone shares his enthusiasm for the narrative approach. Claire Masson, mother of Andri and Alexandre, says history was an ordeal for her when she went to school. “When I remember what a history class is, I felt like it was a focus on facts … Whatever it was, when did it happen? Who was it? It was a recitation of facts. Actually, I couldn’t do it,” she says.

Peck, in contrast to Bennett, exemplifies the “historical thinking” school. She agrees that “if young people know their past, they will be well equipped to act as citizens in their communities.” However, there has been a shift toward also “getting kids to do history: to work with artifacts, to work with sources, to help them understand … how do those things actually get created?”

For example, says Collishaw, “One of the projects that we did, that many teachers do across the country, is looking at the lives of Canadian soldiers who were involved in World War I and World War II.”

“The students are confronted with conflicting information,” she says, and must “think through the problem” to reconcile the evidence and make conclusions.

“Students are going to forget individual little facts,” says Pedrech. “We’re humans. We’re not going to remember every single thing we learn in history class. But if we leave (students) with that kind of (historical) thinking … I think that’s excellent. It means you now have a way to approach the world, a way to make sense of information in the past.”

Isabelle Miranda, 17, in Grade 12 at Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, cites a Grade 10 history class where students got to design money. They were given a choice of four historical time periods to depict. She picked the Liberation of the Netherlands and the first woman appointed to the Senate for her project. She says the exercise allowed her to explore events and people not covered by the curriculum in-depth.

Dealing with actual artifacts, like looking at old family photos, is supposed to spur students’ curiosity about the past and how we choose which stories we tell. “We want students to learn how to become the storytellers themselves by looking at photographs and diary entries and letters and newspaper articles and to try and figure out what happened in this event or what happened on this day,” Peck says.

But this teaching approach puts “the cart before the horse,” argues Bennett. “Knowing your history is a precondition for being able to meaningfully apply historical thinking, to truly understanding any problem and its origins.”

Still, there is merit in historical thinking, Moore says. “I think the most important thing that we teach students in our history classrooms is how to evaluate a claim … I think that that skill of learning primary, secondary source evaluation isn’t taught anywhere but in our history classrooms, but it is critical to responsible citizenship.”

A few years ago, Peck’s team conducted a national youth survey, the results of which, she says, are still being finalized for official publication. Based on analysis to date, she says “students who are engaged in what we call historical thinking activities in the classroom are learning history in deeper ways. They see the meaning behind history, they understand its importance and, importantly, they start to make connections between why learning the past matters for themselves today.”

“We did a unit on the American Revolution in my socials 9 class and we watched (the musical) Hamilton and had to analyze a song from Hamilton as a part of our course,” recalls Bohnen. “I think there is a lot of benefit in linking the past to the present and teachers and curricula that are able to do that, I feel, are particularly relevant and land better with students.”

Bohnen says that although she does not “maybe have the most robust understanding (of history)” as a science student, “if I had like weekly quizzes of dates and names, I can assure you that I would not today remember what I was quizzed on when I was 12 years old.”

“Do I remember more about the Boston Tea Party because we sang songs about it? Yes.”

Common national standards?

Does Canada need a consistent national standard for history education? According to Bennett, having at least one mandatory Canadian history course “in all its diversity and complexity reflecting a range of perspectives” across the country would be desirable.

That is unlikely to materialize on its own. Peck says it has been extremely difficult to develop a common curriculum framework for social studies and history.

“You’re not going to win that battle to try to have a unitary educational system. It’s just baked into the Constitution, particularly from the point of view of Quebec,” agrees Coates.

“Is that a failure? No, I don’t think so,” Peck says, adding that “learning history is also about figuring out what is relevant to folks in the context in which we’re teaching.”

“If we want to share an equal society with others who are not like us, it requires us to accept or embrace those differences … And you know what? Our students are a lot better at doing this than the adults that I know are,” Moore says.

Bennett agrees that the crux of Canadian identity has always been “unity out of diversity,” and that education should represent that, by allowing for regional differences in content and teaching methods.

But he says it is important to do two things: first, “restore basic knowledge-building,” which involves spending more time learning the facts; and second, rebuild a national narrative that is unifying, but also allows for diverse perspectives.

Ideally, students are “part of constructing that identity” says Pedrech. “I think that’s why it’s important to have many voices and stories in that narrative.”

“The challenge is that there is no single narrative,” says Moore. “The story of Canada looks different from the perspective of a woman who grew up in the 1950s or an Indigenous kid who was taken from their home in the 1960s.”

But he also does not rule out that it is possible to bridge this challenge. “You try, to some extent, to get a narrative of core facts that is fair to everyone. And then through their research projects, students look at those from multiple perspectives,” Moore says. “You allow students to do a much deeper dive on specific topics that interest them.”

If a student is asked to write an essay on whether the first Canadian prime minister was a hero or a villain, “they’re going to have to go into both sides, and they’re going to understand that he was complicated … there was a lot going on there. And that requires them to look at the evidence and come up with a conclusion,” says Moore.

What parents can do

One of Canada’s biggest history enthusiasts is Craig Baird. Postmedia reached him in Blomidon Provincial Park along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, where he was travelling the country with his dog, Berton, named after a famous Canadian popular historian.

Baird, active on social media with frequent historical snapshots about the country, is host of the almost eight-year-old Canadian History Ehx podcast . “Everything that I’ve learned with Canadian history, I’d say 98 per cent, I learned on my own,” he says. In his experience, the best way to express a grand national narrative is through “focusing in on a smaller story on an individual,” which is what his snapshots often do.

It’s not the only way, he notes. His mission, however, is “to reach the regular person out for a walk or out for a jog or on their morning commute … I keep things simple and I keep things relatable and personal.

“We need to tell more Canadian stories.”

Even simplified narratives in popular culture are an important part of learning history, Baird says. “We never make movies about our war heroes or anything like that,” he said, offering rare exceptions such as The Rocket (2005) or Passchendaele (2008)

“If we don’t tell our stories … then we will start having generations of people who are being raised on the stories that Americans tell,” he cautions.

An example: Tommy Prince was one of the most decorated First Nations soldiers in the Second World War and in Korea. “He was a member of the Devil’s Brigade, and he was the most decorated member of the Devil’s Brigade. The things that he did were astonishing. He was an incredible soldier.

“But when the Americans made (the movie) The Devil’s Brigade, they omitted him completely,” says Baird.

“It is up to parents nurture” interest in history, he says. “Instead of taking a trip to the lake, take a trip to the city and go to a museum or go to a historical site.” Even “talking to older people in a community” can be a big step forward.

Catherine Gauthier, at Queen’s University, knows what he means. “My mother was very invested in our education outside of school as well,” she recalls. “So, when other kids had PD days or snow days when I was in elementary school, we would have museum days. We would go to Ottawa and visit the history museum or the art museum, or sometimes we would go to the NAC (National Arts Centre) … You get one day off a month and you’re going to the museum.”

Moore turns to the U.S. for a lesson. Americans are ” just as smart as they’ve ever been,” but “they haven’t been taught history properly. And that means when they see politicians making outlandish claims, they don’t stop and say, ‘What is your evidence for this?’”

This makes for a gullible voter, Moore suggests. History, he says, “is a story, but it is a story that needs to be evaluated and critiqued and looked at.’”

We may wonder whether history as a curriculum subject is all that important. Perhaps the loss of it is not that lethal. Perhaps there were societies that succeeded without it. Perhaps they even prospered.

But then again, without studying history, how would we know?

Main image: Wounded Canadians take cover behind a pillbox during the Battle of Passchendaele in November 1917. (Colourized by the Vimy Foundation and Canadian Colour.) Photo by Canada Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada