Rethinking Britishness in the Era of Decolonization: The Politics of History Education in Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia, 1960–75

Britishness, or a sense of Anglo-Saxon identity uniting the settler colonies of the British Empire, was pervasive in the curricula and textbooks of Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia since the beginning of public education in the 19^th century. Following the Second World War, however, both Canada and Australia experienced high levels of non-British immigration, and the British Empire itself began to dissolve, leading to significant curricular changes in Ontarian and Victorian schools. Beginning in the 1960s, the normative Anglocentric ideal came under challenge as never before, necessitating a reformulation of historical narratives as both Canada and Australia moved towards multiculturalism. This process happened slowly and unevenly between 1960-1975, but both Ontarian and Victorian educators made efforts to remove overt stereotypes of non-British peoples and to re-frame their historical narratives, marginalizing the significance of Britishness and highlighting the uniqueness of Canadian and Australian heritage. Using curricula, textbooks, and other official sources, this paper will trace these important changes in the classrooms of Ontario and Victoria as educators and policy-makers negotiated the identity crisis brought about in part by the collapse of empire.