“Anti-Glocality” Grounds New Quebec History Program

Abstract

In sharp contrast to the musings of a senior student, the mandatory history texts follow a narrow provincial orientation. The recently introduced Quebec high school history program offers adolescents a slanted narrative devoid of larger interconnected contexts as hailed; for example, by Oakeshott (2004), MacMillan (2009), and/or Canadine (2013). In our view, secondary students are forced to travel a historical journey that deals with Canadian and Quebec events through a “unique” Quebec lens (Woods, 2014). The widely engrained twenty-first century concept of global interconnectedness, first articulated on a wide scale over a hundred years ago (Wells, 1920), has been replaced by one anchored in a retro-nineteenth-century construct viewing only carefully selected unconnected historical snippets devoid of a contextualized narrative. Anchored in a narrow political perspective, this secondary course of study forces adolescents into a stilted and fragmented “patch-work” historical landscape. This journey silences many voices, brushes others from the chronicle, and twists recognized historiography to fit a specific contemporary self-determined internalized orientation. We review the official course of study to unpack several major world themes demonstrating this constrained point-of-view via a close investigation of one of the approved English language student texts. Further, we illustrate how the deliberate manipulation of historical stories, as well as “alternate facts,” leads adolescents into a realm deprived of meaningful connections.