Montreal Gazette - Quebec exam is bad history, written in bad English
(Jon Bradley, associate professor with the Faculty of Education of McGill and Sam Allison, a recently retired secondary-school history teacher): "In his book Who Killed Canadian History?, one of the country鈥檚 foremost historians, Jack Granatstein, says: 鈥淣ationalism in Quebec is not propagated in a haphazard way by individual teachers. It starts at the ministry level and it permeates the textbooks.鈥�
We can now add official history examinations to that. For over 20 years, Quebec has been producing dubious nationalist history in its compulsory examinations. The most recent exam for History and Citizenship Education (which replaced the old History of Quebec and Canada) avoids issues that are politically uncomfortable for nationalists and is an excellent example of bad history.
Quebec has long trumpeted educational reform and independent thinking, but reality shows the opposite is true. Many advocate independent commissions to oversee the police and to investigate the construction industry. Perhaps the time has come to demand an independent commission to oversee the evaluation of education, especially history education, in Quebec. Nobody is guarding and holding accountable the nationalist educational guardians of Quebec鈥�"
