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The reason history provokes such tension is that history cannot be divorced from a set of ideas about how society should be organized. Of course the Parti Québécois doesn’t want the federal government interfering in Quebec schools, because the PQ wants to teach that the last three centuries in Canada have been a sack of woe. Of course the NDP doesn’t want Conservatives teaching history because the Conservatives want to tell tales of exploits in war. There would be less time to talk about Tommy Douglas. And of course a few kibitzers are eternally worried that our schools are teaching nothing at all. One favourite shorthand among the professionally outraged is that schools teach nothing but “victimization.”