Recent criticisms of the new history course in the Human Sciences college program are visibly explained by a lack of understanding of the constraints specific to college, but also, on the part of certain teaching colleagues, by a deliberate omission of the major shortcomings of the current course.
Most of the speakers took a position as if the debate focused on the hierarchy of knowledge in general, and therefore unjustly rest on a single history course the weight of the transmission of general culture by requiring to deepen knowledge however. transmitted elsewhere (philosophy, literature, arts, sciences, etc.). In some cases, the “arguments” are limited to lawsuits against the supporters of change: denial of roots, hatred of the West, ignorance of the lessons of Antiquity, presenteeism, utilitarian vision or ideological blindness. under the influence of a vague “wokism”, name them! However, these accusations are never the subject of any demonstration and therefore reveal a distressing intellectual dishonesty.
While a majority of college history teachers (including lovers of ancient and medieval history) spoke out, during ministerial consultations, against maintaining the current course centered on “the essential characteristics of Western civilization” (February 2019) and for the new world history course since XVe century (March-May 2020), it is because this new course represents a substantial advance on the intellectual and pedagogical levels. Above all, this course will be better suited to transmitting humanist values, critical spirit, rigor, analytical methods, in short, to passing on the intellectual heritage inherited from Greco-Roman Antiquity to our young people in a lasting manner. ‘it has the best and the essential.
The current course is an accelerated carbon copy of the first year secondary history course, where Western civilization is already well taught, and there is no justification for such duplication. No parent would allow their child to take the same math course in CEGEP that he received at the age of 12 under the pretext that the Pythagorean theorem is essential. We believe like Quintilian that higher education must offer intellectual progression.
The current course, limited to 45 periods (15-20 hours of lectures), imposes a superficial treatment of several millennia of history which is contrary to the very spirit of the Ancients. The new course will require to address some historical foundations (but not all), thus allowing a deepening and a lasting learning of knowledge.
Expensive choice
The current price to pay to treat Antiquity and the Middle Ages at all costs is to sacrifice the history of the last 200 years, thus eliminating large parts of history that are nevertheless essential to general culture, such as the development of Nation-state, scientific advances in Western civilization, or events like the Holocaust. The new course will show our students that Greek rationality is useful for studying the history of all eras, including the most recent, like a Thucydides who addressed events that occurred during his lifetime in his life. Peloponnesian War.
The current program does not deal with any civilization other than the West. However, failing to compare Western civilization with other civilizations, it is logically impossible to bring out its originality! Many commentators point out that slavery or colonialism are also characteristic of other civilizations, while staunchly refusing that these other civilizations be included in the program! The new course will show our students to follow in the footsteps of Herodotus, who would never have been able to write his surveys if he had not left his native Greece to travel and take an interest in other civilizations. And that, while cultivating our roots, because the new course obliges us to situate Quebec in world history, unlike the current course: good news that few nationalists have rejoiced in.
But what would the Greeks themselves have preferred? That we sacrifice all the advantages of the new course to maintain at all costs the fiction of a course making it possible to “transmit the classical heritage” in two or three hours? To choose between “talking about the Greeks” expeditiously or “teaching to think like the Greeks”, we favor the second way.
By its superficiality, its redundancy in relation to the secondary school curriculum, the virtual silence over two centuries of recent history and the impossibility of bringing out the originality of Western civilization or of locating one’s own nation in world history, the current course dries up and betrays the heritage of the Ancients. Roll on the new course so that we can (finally) show us its worthy heirs!
* The authors are the spokespersons of a group of signatories of a recent open letter to the Minister of Higher Education entitled “Collegial training: yes to the new history course to strengthen general culture”, bringing together this day 63 college history teachers. The point of view expressed here is the sole responsibility of its authors.
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