A McGill University associate professor has written a controversial editorial to the Montreal Gazette about what he feels is a biased Canadian history exam.
Jon Bradley and his co-author, Sam Allison, point out what they believe to be historical inaccuracies in Quebec’s education curriculum. Inaccuracies, Bradley insisted, which are consistent with the idea of the province as both a nation and state. Additionally, English contributions to the building of Canada are being diminished, Bradley said.
“This is the central issue . . . that the Quebec curriculum is simply bad history,” Bradley said. “It lies. It tells falsehoods.”
There are three fundamental problems with the history that is taught in Quebec schools, Bradley said. The first is that the exams are written in poor English, due to the use of “straight translations” from French that don’t take the language’s context into consideration, he said.
A complicated exam structure and the use of French captions and documents is the second issue, according to Bradley.
But it’s the third, a combination of the omission of English accomplishments and Quebec nationalist undertones, that Bradley said he finds most troubling.
“Any contribution made by Anglophones,” he said. “Anything that was particularly English . . . it is simply not talked about.”
Quebec is constantly referred to as a nation, and compared to independent countries instead of provinces in the curriculum, Bradley said. The traditional English names of historically important locations are also ignored and translated into French, he wrote in his editorial. For example, the ‘Eastern Townships’ becomes ‘L’Estrie,’ and ‘St. James Street’ turns into ‘Rue Saint-Jacques.’
Bradley said he is also irked by the failure to include Bill 101 in exam questions involving migration. Bill 101 is a controversial piece of legislation passed by Quebec’s National Assembly in 1977. It defines French as the only official language of Quebec, and prompted the migration of hundreds of thousands of Anglophones from the province.
“This is a major orientation on the part of the Quebec government to present a stylized, romanticized view of Quebec history,” Bradley said.
Yining Su is a recent Carleton graduate from Montreal. Having attended both a French private school and an English public school, she said the difference lies more in the way the courses are taught, not the curriculum itself.
“It’s not that the teaching material was necessarily different,” she said. “In French schools . . . teachers and students talk about ‘us’ being conquered a lot. In the English school I went to, it was more like, ‘the English conquered New France.’ ”
“It’s just the collective memory of the people involved that was different,” she continued.
As for the feedback he has received from his editorial, Bradley said it has all been positive, and that he has yet to come across someone who disagrees with him.
“No one has said we lied,” he said.
“No one to my knowledge has written and said, ‘Bradley and Allison are wrong.’ Nobody has said that.”
