Experimental course proves prescient

“Next Stop: Latvia.” That was the headline of a recent Brandon Sun story about soldiers from Shilo on their way to a NATO operation in the Baltics. Unremarkable, yet unthinkable until recently. Reading that headline reminds me of the prescience of a high school course I took decades ago.

The year was 1968 and I was in Grade 12 at Vincent Massey Collegiate in Winnipeg. By chance, I found myself taking an experimental social studies course. It was taught by Gerry Labies, a history teacher at the school. Labies explained to our class that he was a member of a curriculum development committee. As part of that project, he would be testing a new course with us. We teenagers didn’t appreciate it at the time but we would be treated to a gifted teacher free to explore his vision, untrammeled by precedents or textbooks.

The course was centred on the rise of authoritarianism in the 20th century. We studied communism in Russia and China, Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and South America.

Even more than 50 years later, I can recall the scenes Labies painted with his passion and his words. We could imagine that we were there: with V.I. Lenin in 1917 on a sealed train speeding across Germany towards Russia; with Adolf Hitler in 1923 in Munich during the failed beer hall putsch; with Mao in the 1930s in China on the Long March.

We got a sense of the two great drivers of history. One is the power of underlying forces, like economic or technological. The other is the power of dynamic leaders who grab the steering wheel of history and yank it in one direction or another.

The overarching theme: the future is uncertain. Countries could become democratic, but democracy is fragile. Propaganda is powerful, any country could slide into authoritarianism.

The course was also a civics primer: how governments function, the roles of institutions and of the people. Labies addressed us students as “citizens.”

Mr. Labies — as we students knew him — was a consummate professional. He gave us no hint of his personal life. Today, checking his obituary online completed the story for me. He died at age 77 in 2004. Born in 1927 in Germany, he grew up during the Nazi regime. He emigrated to Canada after the Second World War. His life infused his teaching. He had personally experienced how a society could go terribly wrong. He was giving us a warning.

I am amazed at how much ground Labies covered. And the lessons of that course have echoed through time. Right up to today, they resonate for me with events and trends such as the surveillance of the population in China, the Putin dictatorship, disinformation, conspiracy theories and the rise of populism.

One phenomenon we learned about was how Russia waging a disastrous war can backfire and cause a revolution. The Russian defeat in 1905 in the war against Japan resulted in revolution. That uprising was put down. But the Russian czar was overthrown a few years later, when the Russian debacle in the First World War led to the imposition of communism.

Years later, I recognized that same pattern again playing out. In the 1980s, the fiasco of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan became a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet regime.

And now Russia is waging another costly war, this time in Ukraine. Will history repeat itself? What will be the outcome for Russia and the Putin regime? Unknown: the future is uncertain. But we learned that history teaches us to consider possibilities of what could happen.

I will conclude with another example — with a happy outcome. Labies included lessons on the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. I bet we were the only students in Manitoba that year who learned the names of those countries. They were then three obscure republics in the Soviet Union. They seemed doomed to be imprisoned forever by that dictatorship. But Labies emphasized that the future was not predetermined, that the Western democracies did not recognize Soviet control, that a factor was people yearning to be free.

Decades later, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became not only free of Soviet rule, but also members of the European Union and NATO. It is hard today to convey how surprising that would have been to our Grade 12 class. Yet the sliver of hope that we learned about back then would blossom. It was a victory for freedom and democracy. This should not be taken for granted, which is why Canadian troops are serving in the Baltics.

The potent lesson I learned in Grade 12: the future is open. We read now what has become an ordinary headline: “Next Stop: Latvia.”