By the same token, NATO went to war against Belgrade for a combination of historical reasons. Slobodan Milosevic was committing genocide (again) and the world, sensitized by the Holocaust and remembering Serb actions against Croats and Bosnians several years ago, could not accept this. Western critics of the war argued, on the other hand, that Kosovo could become another Vietnam - a trap out of which nothing but body bags could come. In other words, history mattered to both sides, though all too often politicians and commentators applied its lessons with a rashness that historians usually hope to avoid.

History matters to Canadians too. French Canadians cherish the humiliations they suffered at the hands of the anglais, and Lucien Bouchard has risen to prominence, in substantial part, because he can embody the sense of outraged nationalism such humiliations produce better than anyone else. Peter Lougheed, the long-time Alberta premier, similarly made himself the spokesman for a province that cherished its grievances against Central Canada. The past is important.

But not in our schools. There is scarcely a school system in Canada that obliges its students to learn anything of world history, North American history or European history. The key to understanding our civic institutions, British history, has been eliminated from the classroom because the British are seen as just another ethnic group deserving no special attention.

Worse yet, astonishingly, four provinces have no compulsory Canadian history course in their high schools. Others bury the past in a mishmash of civics, pop sociology, and English as a Second Language, eliminating anything that might offend students, parents and school trustees in an attempt to produce an air-brushed past free of warts (except for the officially approved historical sins that can be used for present-day social engineering). In Ontario, until the Tory government in 1999 announced a revised history curriculum, the only compulsory history course was a Grade 10 offering on "Canada in the Twentieth Century" that epitomized this type of history.

Just as civil servants put process ahead of policy, so have our schools put process over learning. History is hard, and to master the Canadian (or any other) past is difficult. But that is its great virtue, of course. History requires thought, demands wide reading, and almost forces those who study it to write. In an age of multiple choice examinations, few other subjects in our schools any longer demand thinking, reading, and writing. This makes history all the more important.

As bad, the way the past is presently taught is hopelessly confused in its aims. Facts are boring, dates are unimportant, and the past is, by definition, another country for the present-minded, so why bother? What matters, the education theorists say, is that students should learn to read critically and to probe texts for the writers' underlying biases. There is certainly utility in critical reading, but whether one can discern bias without first knowing some hard information is doubtful.

Whether society can function without common cultural capital is also uncertain. For example, how can Canadian voters - and eighteen-year-olds are voters - make rational political choices in the late 1990s without understanding such terms as "British North America Act", "Constitution Act", "Charter of Rights and Freedoms", "provincial powers", and "Social Union"?

History has a social utility in a nation like ours. Canada is a magnet for millions from all over the world. People choose to immigrate here because this is a land of opportunity, a nation with Western values, ideals, and a past that is attractive. Integrating the children of immigrants from Russia, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Somalia, and Albania into our society ought to be an overriding object of Canadian policy. The values and traditions of Canadian life should be force-fed to them; history explained in ways that demonstrate how and why we have regularly settled our disputes without force, how our political system has functioned, and why we have on many occasions gone to war or joined alliances, not for aggressive reasons, but to protect our democratic ideals. Those are the reasons immigrants come here, after all.

But do we teach this past to our newcomers? Not a chance. Our schools are value-free or, at least, value-neutral. Our system is but one of many, and heaven forfend that we should pronounce Western culture superior to any other. Moreover, lest our history upset anyone, we ensure that anything offensive to any group or nation is deleted. Instead, the history that is taught focuses on Canada's many sins: Canadian racism, Canadian sexism, Canadian abuses of human and civil rights -- these are all studied at length in a well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to educate children about the need for tolerance.

Tolerance, yes, of course. But what does an approach to the past that concentrates on our (relatively few) sins and all but neglects our (relatively plentiful) virtues do to immigrant children, who must wonder into what kind of monstrous society their parents have plunged them? What does such an approach tell the native-born about their homeland? Somehow in our efforts to be "unbiased" and fair to all, we have distorted our past into one full of sin and error.

Yes, in the past some Canadians have been racist, sexist, and abused governmental powers. Some still do. But that is not the whole of the Canadian past, or of our present. Although one could not tell from the way our history is taught, somehow this country became the most favoured nation on earth.

Our teaching of the past, however, focuses on victimology, and Lord knows, we Canadians are all victims: All women have suffered at the hands of men, all aboriginals who attended residential schools were abused, as were all those unfortunates who went to parochial schools, especially those operated by the Christian Brothers. Sometimes these tales are accurate, but only sometimes. Not everyone was or is a victim, despite the clamorous legal claims of the present.