Along with the teaching of the mother tongue, that of national history should be at the heart of any educational system concerned with the well-being of pupils and the future of society. What makes our identity, individual or collective, is our history, whether we are aware of it or not. My values and my convictions today are the fruit of my journey. It is sometimes said of a person with Alzheimer’s that they are no longer themselves because they do not remember their past. Nations are not immune to the phenomenon. Unaware of their past, they become deprived of coherence and lose their compass.
Putting history at the heart of the educational project is therefore a necessity to counter collective anomie, which leads to social tensions and individual depression. However, our history is facts, of course, but also a narrative. How should we proceed to respect both the duty of truth and the need for consistency?
Gérard Bouchard often has very original perspectives on Quebec history. For more than 20 years, he has been striving to define an interculturalist model that would make it possible to integrate into the Quebec narrative “the diversity associated with minorities without emptying the memory of the majority of its substance”.
For national history and its teaching, this “challenge of diversity” is unavoidable. The new pluralism that characterizes Quebec society is there for good, and all young Quebecers, without exception, must be able to recognize themselves in the history presented to them and say “us” when speaking of Quebec.
To carry out this mission of developing ethnocultural diversity while respecting the “symbolic foundations” of the host society, three processes are available for the writing and teaching of history, writes Bouchard in his contribution in collective work Tensions in the teaching of national history and social sciences (Septentrion, 2022), under the direction of Marie-Claude Larouche, Félix Bouvier and Pierre-Luc Fillion.
The first, that of the “mosaic of memories”, consists of making room for all ethnocultural groups by juxtaposing their stories in the form of a collage. Bouchard rejects this model, which is unsuitable “to form a real ‘we’ and to produce an integrated image of the nation”.
The second process, that of “history-contribution”, consists of making room for minorities in the national fabric by recognizing their contribution to our history. Because it “reproduces the model of silos by inviting us to treat the components of the nation separately”, Bouchard does not retain it either.
With his proposal for an “integrating history”, Bouchard wants to do better, that is to say, to think up a history “which integrates minority memories in all fairness while preserving the essentials of the majority past”. The process consists of starting from the “values celebrated in current society”, that is to say those found in our laws and charters, such as freedom, equality, democracy, secularism and the French language. , and other more informal common values, such as mutual aid, concern for the environment and respect for elders. These values, in Quebec, are shared by the vast majority — although the status of French and the model of secularism are still debated — and are therefore unifying.
With these values as a compass, we then dive into local history to “draw the archeology of this heritage” by bringing it to life. We can thus retrace, in the past, the struggles for the recognition of the rights of Francophones, Aboriginals and immigrants, the union of workers for social justice, the commitment to equality between men and women, to democracy, etc We must also retrace the moments in this history when these values were flouted.
By integrating history, explains Gérard Bouchard, we highlight the Quebec process of appropriation of universal values, but also the “work of universalizing singular values” — one can think of the status of French — which characterizes our collective adventure. .
The resulting history is indeed our national history, but takes on universal unifying accents. By directly linking the present to the past, it gives an emotional vibration to the discovery of the nation’s journey. In “Heroism des humbles”, a column published in The Press in 2018, Bouchard recounted with emotion the epic story of the settlement of the Saguenay by Quebec settlers who looked like migrants. It gives an idea of what its integral history could look like.
Bouchard announces that he will specify his project in For national history, an essay to be published soon by Boréal. I can’t wait to read this.