In her Remembrance Day column in The Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente repeats the familiar lament that Canadians do not know their own history, particularly their own military history.

“The immense saga of Canada at war is disappearing down the memory hole,” writes Ms. Wente, who predictably blames the schools for their “collective failure to teach the next generation about how we fought, and why.”

Wente’s complaint has become so common over the past few years that it has taken on the aspect of a truism. But like most people who repeat it, she presents no evidence for her claim, and appears to have no firsthand knowledge of the history classroom or what goes on there.

My own experience suggests that despite Wente’s lament, Canadian school kids are not starved of knowledge about their country or its participation in the major world conflicts. The bookshelves in my office contain several current social studies/history textbooks, one or two of which I wrote myself, and all of them contain opportunities for students to learn about the two world wars.

And aside from school texts, there are many other ways for young people to learn about Canadian participation in the wars and Canadian history in general, from the internet to specialty television channels to movies and educational dvds.

“We no longer know how to teach war history to our kids,” claims Wente. On the contrary, I would suggest that the present generation of teens has more exposure to the story of Canada at war than any previous one, certainly more than I had in the 1960s.

I have no idea why this belief in the collective failure of our education system has become so commonplace. But it is not true. Instead of wringing her hands about “the memory hole”, Ms Wente should visit a few classrooms and see for herself what is going on in them rather than simply repeating a tiresome mantra that has no basis in fact.