“From History to Memory”: Commemoration vs. History in the Classroom

Within a round-table discussion about the Great War and Education at The Great War: From Memory to History, an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Western Ontario, Robert Cupido at Mount Allison University put forward his argument: History, as taught in Canadian schools, is not really history at all. Instead, it is an exercise and engagement in commemoration. And the key distinction, the important point of difference, is that commemoration encourages a shutting-down, or shutting-off, of the critical thinking skills at the heart of historical instruction.

Oh, the joys of being surrounded by a room full of people talking about the past; oh, the challenges of their competing visions! I warn you now my blog entry today is full of questions to which I compose practically no answer. Partly because I’m unsure how to answer Cupido’s charge, and partly because I’m inclined to believe he’s right.

Other educators on the panel, including fellow blogger Laura Fraser, painted a complex vision of the history being taught in secondary schools. Commemoration, they argued, is important not only because it is part of the landscape that surrounds students – in newspapers, politics, monuments, and ceremonies of remembrance – but also because it presents a point of entry, and points of interest, to students saturated by video games, used to the immediacy of information through the internet, and surrounded by a proliferance of electronic handheld media ranging from cellphones to laptops and ipods.

Yet the question period afterward didn’t address what I thought was the most interesting charge – that what the Great War as taught in the schools is taught as commemoration, not history.
And how do we answer this charge? I’m not entirely certain.