by Daniel Francis

Not long ago I sprang a surprise history quiz on some friends. We were helping out at one of the charitable casinos which fund most of BC's cultural activity these days. It was late in the evening, we were counting the take, and money was piling up on the table in front of us.

"Who's this?" I asked, pointing at the distinguished face staring back from a $5 bill. No one knew.

"What about him?" I tried, holding up a ten. "Or them?" pointing at a fifty, then at a hundred. Blank stares all around. No one in the room could identify John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Mackenzie King or Robert Borden, four of the country's longest-serving prime ministers.

This past Canada Day I was reminded of my little pop quiz when the results of the latest test measuring the ignorance of Canadians about their own history was released. As someone who has spent the past 25 years reading and writing about the subject, I am never surprised at how little Canadians know about their history. Nor am I particularly outraged. But it seems to surprise and outrage other people, judging by the amount of hand-wringing that accompanied the latest results.

The test, given to a group of young Canadians aged 18 to 24, revealed that only half could name the country's first prime minister, only a third knew the date of Confederation, only 16 percent knew the name of the first Canadian in space, and so on. Disappointing? Of course. But hardly news. This test, or one like it, has been given every few years for as long as I can remember. And Canadians always fail it, just like my friends at the casino.

The response to the latest poor showing is no less predictable than the results themselves. You could hear the gnashing of teeth from coast to coast. No wonder the country is in such a mess, commentators agreed, when Johnny doesn't even know who Wilfrid Laurier was. Conventional wisdom blames the schools, of course, which allegedly are not doing enough to produce graduates with an adequate understanding of their own culture.

Well, maybe.

But how many of these same commentators recall how little they knew about Canada when they were 20 years old? Surely they had other things on their minds. I know I did.

I knew almost no history. I knew about responsible government, of course, and Jacques Cartier drinking that stuff the Indians gave him to keep off the scurvy. Drinking was associated with John A. Macdonald as well, though I don't believe his "medicine" was tree bark. I'm sure that this smattering of random facts would not have earned me a very high mark had I taken a history quiz at the time. Everything I know now I've had to learn since.

Canadians are certain that we are uniquely ignorant about our history. The Americans, we think, would never allow it. In fact, similar tests in the US reveal the same lack of knowledge. "High school students hate history," remarks American professor James Loewen in his recent book on the subject. "Every year or two another study decries what our 17-year-olds don't know."

It is important that kids learn history in school, no question. We should keep up the effort to find innovative ways of teaching it, and reaffirm the importance of history in school curricula. It is ridiculous that the story of our own country should have become an "elective", like woodwork or typing. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that kids will ever start scoring 100 percent on pop quizzes, no matter how dedicated their teachers or interesting their textbooks.

I am old enough to remember the furore which greeted the 1968 publication of Bernie Hodgetts's indictment of history education, What Culture? What Heritage? Hodgetts's report, and others like it, spawned the Canadian Studies movement which flooded the schools during the 1970s with new, improved, made-in-Canada learning materials. The apparent result? Today's kids are just as ignorant about the subject as I was.

Many Canadians have a touching faith in the power of history to heal and unite the country. This belief, too, dates back many years: if only we knew about our common past it would convince us to go forward arm in arm into a common future. We think it's like broccoli. The more of it we eat, the healthier we'll become.

Again, maybe.

But wherever you look around the world, people are at each others throats, and it's more likely to be because they know too much history, not too little. Don't misunderstand me. I think it's vital to know about the past. It is naive, however, to think that this knowledge will necesarily dissolve the grievances that divide us.

I personally suspect that surveys like the recent Canada Day quiz simply reveal that history, like youth, is wasted on the young. They are too busy working through their identity problems to be interested in responsible government and Louis Riel. We can force-feed them all we want, but this latest test is all the warning we need that the results may disappoint us.

"Those who do not remember the past," writes James Loewen, "are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade." For far too many of us, the school textbook is the only history book we ever read. Instead of sniping at the school system, people seriously concerned about the low level of historical knowledge in Canada might better occupy themselves dreaming up creative ways of putting Canadians in contact with the story of the country at an age when they are more likely to be interested in it.