J. L. Granatstein

3.5 Stars.

This was a good thrift store find, and I'm glad I read it. I'm a homeschooling mom, so naturally I'm very interested in making sure my children receive a good education. It's been surprisingly difficult to find good homeschool resources to teach Canadian history, especially since I'm so ignorant about it myself. This book is absolutely bang on in terms of just how ignorant my entire generation (more or less) is - and it was written in 1998! The children coming of age today are at show more an even greater disadvantage.

I am a firm believer in the classical style of education, which emphasizes fact knowledge as well as critical thinking. The author of this book rightly points out that students can't JUST "learn how to think", but must also learn the people, places, and - yes - dates that make up a comprehensive knowledge base.

I share his concerns with "multicultural" "feminist" and "anti-racism" education. While I do think some of the sub-topics concerning these things are important to learn (I of course teach my kids about great women, people of other races, different cultures, and such), it should NOT be at the expense of reality. And that reality clearly includes the basic fact that most of the great people who shaped our country were indeed straight white religious men.

Where the author goes wrong, in my opinion, is in his solutions. He strikes me as a typical "conservative" that is actually just a progressive in slow motion. He treats the amount of immigration we have as basically irrelevant, as though we can just get millions of people to accept the very Canadian values that he admits we are struggling to transmit to children born here. On top of that, I really don't appreciate his conflation of defensive Christian crusades with the Armenian genocide, for example. I get the feeling this guy isn't very much a fan of religion and especially not Christianity.
Sorry sir, but you can't preserve the West without teaching about the Christianity that largely shaped it.

Also, his core solution seems to be some kind of federal Canadian history Common Core...thing. No. No no no. The only thing that could possibly make our school system worse is giving MORE power to the feds. At least there's some hope for a couple of provinces as things stand now!

Overall, this was an enjoyable read and I got through it in a couple of days :) show less

This is in some ways an angry book: anger about the neglect, and worse positive dismissal, of the value of history and the efffect that not having it has on Canada and Canadians. Who killed it? Any number of people and fads according to Granatstein, from the educational bureaucrats to the multicultural enthusiasts, to the academics who revel in trivia and wallow in negativity that given with no contexts portray a brutal, racist, sexist society in Canada. I am the converted on this issue as I show more think Granatstein is right: history is terribly neglected and all the political correctness of our mutlicultural society and the revisionist attempts to rights the wrongs of the past do us a considerable disservice. Kids emerge today from high school appallingly ignorant of the most basic historic facts of the 20th century, never mind some of the smaller details of world or Canadian history. show less

A survey that answers the question "Who Killed the Canadian Military?" with chapters on how this diminishment happened one Prime Minister at a time from Pearson on to Jean Chretien, and closes with a call for more funding, more public education , military leadership and a return to the concepts of the classical profession of arms, nation, duty, honour. Not a very surprising argument for an RMC graduate, but he remains a great historian of Canada and this book was aimed at starting a debate show more in Canadian society. show less

Jack Granatstein has written a book lamenting the lack of teaching of Canadian political and military history from a national perspective. I agree with him.

He notes that what history is taught in Candian schools and universities has largely become regionalized, and is now almost exclusively social history. He supports the need for social history, and for the inclusion of multiple perspectives. He just wants national political and military history included as part of the mix. I agree with show more him.

I like his writing style, and his frankness in putting his personal views on the line throughout the book.

At 186 pages, though, the book is too long. It is repetitious. It could have been a magazine article without losing any of the messages, and would have been equally compelling. show less