This book documents the failed attempt of successive social studies curriculum to create a
sustainable mythic structure of Canadian identity and it situates teachers in the uneasy space
between the modernist concepts of national identity prescribed in the curriculum and the lived
world of the classrooms they experience daily. In The Death of the Good Canadian George H.
Richardson endeavors to represent the ambivalence of curriculum «delivery» in an era when there
is frequently a striking dissonance between the rigid boundaries that the modernist curriculum
creates between «national self» and «other » and the more hybrid and problematic sense of
national identity formation as an ongoing process of the articulation of cultural difference
which is suggested by the plural classrooms of the twenty-first century.
