| This dissertation is about the origin, evolution, flowering and decline of the subject of history in Ontario high schools from the mid 1800s to the present. History as a subject separated from the classical study of the Ancient Near East, i.e. of Israel, Greece and Rome, was the child of cataclysmic events of the late eighteenth century--the Industrial Revolution, the American and the French Revolutions, which produced two dominant nineteenth century ideas: historicism, i.e. history as the story of social and economic progress, and nationalism, which produced after 1837 the story of Canada's origins in Britain and our particular national destiny. This history program was put together by Ontario elites--with compromises at certain periods to satisfy opposition classes and groups--as their version of Canada's origins in the Ancient Near East, Western Europe and Great Britain, and, later, in relation to the twentieth-century American giant. This process of building Ontario's history curriculum reached its climax in the early 1960s when a carefully woven establishment history canon was presented in yearly doses to most high school students of the province, especially those bound for university degrees.;Twentieth century cynicism brought on by devastating world wars, by the failure of science to bring happiness on earth, by the collapse of Soviet, Chinese and Eastern European communism and by the stubborn resilience of capitalism undermined this faith in progress.;Two other forces, the renewed threat in the 1970s, 80s and 90s to Canada as a separate nation and, secondly, modern education's "skills mania"--a response to restructuring capitalism's deskilling and reskilling of work--have combined with the "death of the progress" to reduce history from a core high school subject in 1960 to a marginal option in 1992. Postmodernism's contribution to this marginalization, with its dislike of "totalizing discourses," is assessed, as is the contradictory contribution of opposition histories--like the buried history of women--not only to the renewal of vital history but also to its fragmentation.;Some hope is seen for a future revival of history in the debating of modern political and social issues in high school sociology classes. |
