Real Canadian Liberal

After reviewing my nephew's Social Studies 30 course work (Alberta Education, Canada), I was shocked by the ideological bias and lack of historical literacy in the current course.  I'm a former high school honours student, who received the joint highest Social Studies 30 mark in Alberta in 1991.  I went on to study modern history, political science and strategic studies in my own time.  These studies enabled me, in part, to achieve a top three ranking on my Intermediate Staff College course at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, UK.  I value historical literacy immensely and decided to review the current Social Studies Curriculum (2005 version).  What I discovered is shocking.

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​Students in Alberta today are being explicitly taught to judge each other by race, sex and class.  This despite such judgements being illegal under a plethora of laws in every western democracy.  They are also taught a positive view of the most oppressive and genocidal ideologies in human history, while being taught to reject the most just and egalitarian socio-economic structures the world has ever seen.

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In 1984, while I was in school, an Alberta teacher by the name of James Keegstra was convicted of hate crimes for teaching holocaust denial and anti-Semitic attitudes in Social Studies.  One of the results of this conviction was that his students were sent to Europe to tour Auschwitz, Treblinka and other holocaust related sites, so they could learn the historical reality of the Nazi genocides.

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Today, students come out of school in Alberta ‘with a generally positive view of Lenin’ (to quote one recent high school graduate).  Yes, as unbelievable as this may seem to the historically literate, the architect of the Soviet Union’s Gulag slave labour camp system, the ‘Red Terror’ massacres and the oppressive police state of the USSR, the consequence of which was the third largest genocide in human history, is presented to Alberta students in a generally neutral or positive light.

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So, in 35 years we have gone from convicting a Nazi sympathizer and providing special education to his students, to teaching kids to be generally sympathetic toward a leader whose malevolence and genocidal policies made Adolf Hitler look like a rank amateur.

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There are only three men in human history who could be definitively ranked as ‘way eviller than Hitler’; Lenin, Stalin and Mao.  The malevolent trinity of egalitarian socialism who, with a bit of help from their buddies in Cambodia, Cuba and a dozen or more other socialist countries, murdered between 150 and 200 million people in the 20th century alone.  This represents a full order of magnitude more bloodshed than their anti-egalitarian socialist cousins, the fascists.

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Why the Alberta Teacher's Association hasn't launched a class action lawsuit for being expected to teach this curriculum is beyond comprehension.  In the mid-1980s, this curriculum would have triggered large protests in the streets of Alberta cities, criminal convictions of those responsible and massive programs to provide the affected students with historically accurate material.

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Perhaps today’s teachers don’t see genocide, slavery and oppression as particularly bad things, but I think it's more likely that their lack of historical literacy means they have no idea how destructive the ideas they're peddling have been.  I dedicated the bulk of my adult life protecting my fellow citizens from having to experience any of the three and I’m not particularly pleased to find our youth being led to believe that such ideas might be acceptable or even desirable.

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So, I will provide a series of articles directly pertaining to the history and values underpinning western liberal democratic civilization and the oppressive and genocidal opposition to those values.

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The range of subjects that'll be covered is not yet set in stone, but we'll cover the historical record of the political ideologies and structures that effect life in the 21st century.  We'll also visit laws like Apartheid and it's Canadian roots, the American Jim Crow ethnic caste system and it's ongoing effect on the political party that created it, and perhaps even delve into some issues of conservation and the environment, subjects close to my heart.

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With that broad spectrum loosely defined, let's get on with it!!