Source: Fraser Institute
Michael Zwaagstra of the Fraser Institute starts from a comparison that ought to embarrass a school system. Anyone who wants Canadian citizenship has to pass a test on the country’s history, institutions and political culture. A child born in Calgary or Halifax can finish high school without ever being required to cover the same ground. The guides that shape social studies have drifted away from the story of how the country was put together, and toward a narrower list of wrongs.
Zwaagstra is not arguing that the Chinese Head Tax or residential schools should be skipped. He is arguing that those chapters have been asked to stand in for the whole book. Confederation was a set of hard compromises in 1867, not a morality play. Loyalists left the American Revolution rather than join it. Canada sent a disproportionate number of people into both world wars. Jack Granatstein has been saying for decades that curriculum guides stopped telling that larger story and stopped expecting students to remember names, places and dates. A classroom that treats memorization as the enemy ends up with students who cannot follow an argument about John A. Macdonald because they have never been told what he actually did.
The reading numbers sit beside that complaint for a reason. From 2018 to 2025, Canadian PISA reading scores fell by about 30 points, roughly a grade and a half. Background knowledge is part of how people understand a hard text. A student who has never been taught the sequence of events has less to hang a news story or a debate on, and “critical thinking” becomes a slogan for having an opinion without the facts underneath it.
Citizenship tests already assume that a working knowledge of the country is a reasonable thing to ask of an adult. Schools should be able to ask it of the people who grew up here. A curriculum that dwells on discrimination and leaves Confederation, the wars and the basic institutional story to chance is not a more honest education. It is a thinner one, and it leaves graduates less able to argue about the country they are supposed to inherit.
