59% of Canadians and Their History
April 9, 2007 · By Shane Edwards
So, 59% of Canadians don’t even recognize one of the most significant battles of World War , that first really defined Canada as a nation separate from the British Empire.
That’s because our school system is too busy teaching kids how to have sex. No time for history. And who needs history anyway?  Everything we did in the past was shameful and not worth knowing. I am sure some cultural/ethnic group/race was offended/oppressed by our taking of that ridge.
Canadians also have a poor knowledge of First World War heroes – with only 34 per cent correctly identifying both Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps, and Air Marshall William Avery (Billy) Bishop, a Canadian flying ace.
I’ll bet you they have no problem naming a handful of champions of gay rights though.
[I am sorry you have reached your daily limit of sarcasm today. Please come back tomorrow.]
Or could it be, Shane, that since 1980, that over 2 million new immigrants have come to Canada, and have not went through our education system?
There are far more plausible explanations to this statistic.
Math is a wonderful thing.
30 million divided by 2 million is 6%. (For Bob, who simply won’t give slack to those he disagrees with, there are 30 million Canadians roughly. 2 million immigrants accounts for 6% of all Canadians. Assuming the number from the poll is truly representative, then 6% of Canadians may not have been educated with information on Canada’s history.)
Assuming that they did not have to learn facts like this to gain citizenship in the country (and last time I checked, there IS some basic knowledge you need to become a citizen), 53% is STILL an embarrassing record for our educational system.
“30 million divided by 2 million is 6%.”
And it’s the people who don’t know who Currie is who have a problem?
Smartypants. The math is right for the calculation under discussion.
Try fighting the argument rather than nitpicking. Post fixed, just for you, Bob. Do you feel special now?
Well, if you’re going to use stats to question peoples’ knowledge of history and sugest students spend too much time learning about sex then your math skills might be fair game. Since the answer still isn’t right then well…
2/30 = 0.066666…. which is rounded to 0.07 which gives 7%. If you’re going to quote stats of 59% perhaps getting the one significant digit in 7% right might not be out of line.
and yes, I can’t spell.
Shane:
As a pretty strong conservative I read this post and I was nothing short of appalled. I think the situation is sad on many fronts.
First, I think that it is absolutely shameful how so few Canadians know of Vimy let alone understand the significance of it from the perspective of Canada as a nation but also in the terms of the human sacrifice (not just for Canada but for all troops involved including the Germans and Austrians). Vimy is the quintessential allegory of greatness being born from tragedy and carnage and represents both the best and the worst of human kind.
I can tell you this that I don’t even remember learning about Vimy, Paschendale or any other significant battles involving Canada until my post secondary years. I think that this is a travesty and that it flies in the face of everything that we strive to commemorate every November 11th .
However, I also look to what nations of all kinds who have fought for freedom throughout history really stood for and I can’t help but hang my head in sadness at this post. Did the Canadians who died at Vimy, or Pashendale or Arnhem die for true freedom and equality or just specific renditions rendition of freedom?
I will be the first to admit that our school system is flawed and that it needs a tough and hard reset but to bring in ethnic and racial and homophobic sterotypes into an argument like this flies in the face of EVERYTHING that these brave people in Vimy and everywhere Canadian troops have died, were fighting for.
I was first directed to thepolitic.com by one of your authors (Kelly Konechny) who I have come to respect over the past several months. However, this post and a number of the homophobic posts I’ve seen in the last week or so reveals to me a some of the uglier undertones here at http://www.thepolitic.com.
When people who call themselves conservatives begin making the shift to social ideologues who see their way as the only way (weather it be the “white†way or the “moral†way) they, by definition make the shift to requiring more government involvement in how people live their lives. To me, this is a very “unconservative†thing.
As conservatives I think we need to understand that society evolves as do social views.
Let me give an example. I’ve seen the gay marriage debate come up in several posts. Gay marriage is a very polarizing issue. Thing is, forty or fifty years ago, the debate would have been very similar only instead of gay marriage the discussion would have been around interracial marriage.
At the end of the day we need to be cognizant of something that most of us can never understand and that something is what a person facing the real aspect of death on a battlefield for something as intangible and fragile as freedom and, at least in my mind, to stand up and to think to speak for these individuals while hurling out statements like “some cultural/ethnic group race was offended/oppressed by our taking that ridge†sullies and demeans EVERYTHING that EVERY person who died for their belief in a higher ideal fought for.
Shane, although I think I understand your point, and I’m not accusing you of racism, your choice of words and your manner in presenting it more detracts from your post than helps it and, to add fuel to the fire, provides the liberal left leaning hypocrites more fodder for the stereotype of the “scary conservative racistâ€Â
damn, sorry about the typos I was on a rant
OK, and now lets look at literacy statistics. Approximately 5% of the Canadian population is functionally illiterate.
Now, lets look at high school drop out rates. The national average for high school students that dropout of school each year is 18%. That means 120,000 high school students a year leave school.
Keep doing the math, Shane. I think once you actually start looking at the real reasons Canadians do not know about our history you can get past all of the things that don’t really matter.
Demographic information may also be useful. 25.9% of all Canadians are below the age of 19. I am sure you don’t expect all those under the age of 12 to know anything about this, right? That leaves 61.1% between the ages of 20-64 and 13.0% who are 65+. So, if you only want to talk about people who have graduated from high school (i.e. 82% of those who are over the age of 19), and when you take into consideration immigration and literacy, then just under 60% isn’t so bad.
No, Bob, math isn’t fair game. I am not stupid enough to not know that basically instead of dealing with the statement I made you opted to simply call me stupid.
Hank, I appreciate your sincerity but I am surprised at the same time that you fell into the same labelling trap as those left-leaning people you decry. “Homophobe – BANG!” You’ve now labelled me and written me off. Worse, you as a Conservative have also given more license to continue such labelling instead of dealing with the issues.
I frankly refuse to be labelled. Explain to me again how any of my statements in this post were homophobic. You READ INTO what I said to call me homophobic. All I said was that if I surveyed a group of recent graduates of our school system, I am willing to wager that they could name a handful of gay activists before they could name a single significant Canadian from the Great War. I did not say anything about whether or not it is wrong for them to know them. Human rights activism is and should be a part of the curriculum. So too should the history of this great land.
I echo your statement that even I myself didn’t learn anything about the World Wars in class until college. (Check that. I remember covering one thing. We dealt with the Japanese Internment issue for about a month. Nothing about why the wars started, nothing about significant contributions of Canadians in the wars, only how we Canada, were just as bad as “they” were because we threw people in “camps” too.)
Mr. Ezra, yes, there are more important problems in the school system, like literacy. So why the heck are leftists still pushing more “socialization” and “ethical teaching” in schools when they should be focusing on the 3 R’s? Socialization is for after school. Ethics should be taught by parents. We are not all wards of the state.
Secondly, do you think this survey was a full cross-section of all age groups in Canada? Don’t be silly. It was a survey of adults. The numbers of kids under 18 in Canada don’t enter into it. The percentages hold – if anything they lean towards making the problem worse, because (and I could be wrong but I don’t think so) immigrants generally have more kids than Canadians by birth – hence, there would be smaller relative numbers of adults eligible for the survey.
Shane:
I was very careful to stress that I was NOT labeling you. In fact I said I think I understood your point. However, although most conservatives (like most liberal minded people) are not racists or homophobes, the liberals have consistantly painted anyone with a conservative agenda anti gay anti “insert ethnic community here”.. As such, because of the unfair scrutiny we face we have to be beyond reproach. I think I agree with your post but your wording was less than ideal (sarcasm or not)
However, although I would agree that the left leaning zealots in our country have watered down our rich and cherished heritage and made us feel like outcasts when we claim our own cultural heritage and we have sacraficed significant Canadian iconic symbols at the expense of others’ cultures. I’d also say that to hint (even in jest) that ANY ethnic or racial group would be offended by the sacrafices of any Canadian in any battle detracts from the sacrafices that these brave men and women make (even the ones who don’t die in battle).
As for gay activists or human rights activists in general, I would say that I may not always agree with individual causes and, although i would never equate their struggles with the men and women in uniform, I would submit that many of these people do sacrafice and do struggle to actually perpetuate the rights that our uniformed people fought for and are fighting for. However, my patience for them ends when they injure people or compromise the property rights of others (see the current terrorist activities in Caledonia)
A person in Canada may or may not agree with the concept of same sex marriage but is this much different than a person in Afaghanastan who believes a woman should not be allowed out in public without a Buhrka or that a woman should never be educated? The concept of oppressing women may seem barbaric to us and inconceivable but to some people in that part of the world these things are just as abhorant as same sex marriage are to some people here.
Freedom is a fragile and sacred thing and men and women have died defending it. We can’t be selective about the freedoms we choose to embrace and those we choose to restrict in others.
At the end of the day, I’m a believer that a person should be allowed to do whatever they please as long as that behaviour has no ill affects on others.
Hank, you go from saying,
to,
Talk about backpedaling… Which is it Hank – are we a bunch of ugly homophobic racists or are we being unfairly painted with the “anti gay anti ‘insert ethnic community here’” brush?
It was a survey of adults. The numbers of kids under 18 in Canada don’t enter into it.
Then don’t count them in your 30 million.
Greg:
There was no back peddling. In reading the post I actually understand how I was misinterpreted. I would say that I have read a number of posts here that I would interpret as homophobic. That’s my opinion and I’ll continue to voice it. Where I was made my mistake was in poor sentence structure that linked this post with those I interpreted as homophobic. For that, I’ll extend my apologies to Shane.
However, you Greg, totally missed my point. My point was simply that we can’t pick and choose our freedoms because NONE of us have a corner on what is right and what is wrong in how others live their lives outside of the realm of how their actions affect others. Whether you like it or you don’t, liberals have repeatedly painted anyone with a conservative leaning as racists and homophobic and they have done so very successfully with the help of the CBC and left leaning media. That is a reality that 12 years in the political wasteland stand as proof to.
Their success in doing this is in no small measure due to a small minority of right leaning individuals who actually do have these tendancies. Every comment like these (whether taken out of context or not) adds to that perception. In short, we need to be above reproach and use logic and reason to save this country and avoid becoming blind idealogues who, like most Liberals, wait to be told what to think.
When a right leaning individual then makes a comment that could be leveraged by the left and does so to make a point regarding the role and history of our military I, as a conservative, take exception on how that may reflect on me, how it reflects on others of like mindedness and, ultimately, on our ability to keep the left out of power and actually save this country from the likes of Stephane Dion and Michael Ignatiaff.
“However, although I would agree that the left leaning zealots in our country have watered down our rich and cherished heritage and made us feel like outcasts when we claim our own cultural heritage and we have sacraficed significant Canadian iconic symbols at the expense of others’ cultures.”
WRONG!
I would like to point out that the Liberals never made reparations to the Japanese or Chinese. On September 22, 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave a long-awaited formal apology and the Canadian government began a significant compensation package, one month after President Ronald Reagan made similar gestures in the United States. The package for interned Japanese Canadians included $21,000 to all surviving internees, and the re-instatement of Canadian citizenship to those who were deported to Japan. In 2006 Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a full apology to Chinese Canadians for the Head Tax and expressed his deepest sorrow for the subsequent exclusion of Chinese immigrants from 1923 until 1947. This was also followed by a symbolic individual payments of $20,000 to living Chinese Head Tax payers and living spouses of deceased payers. So if anyone is watering anything down, it is the right and not the left.
Oops…multitasking tonight and ranting is killing me lol…
I actually meant to say “we have sacraficed significant Canadian iconic symbols for the benefit of others’ cultures”
Still, I don’t get how this equates to us paying out some compensation to people (often loyal Canadian citizens) who either had their property taken from them and were interred or were charged a head tax, not because they were immigrants, but were a specific kind of immigrant
“However, although most conservatives (like most liberal minded people) are not racists or homophobes, the liberals have consistantly painted anyone with a conservative agenda anti gay anti “insert ethnic community hereâ€Â.. As such, because of the unfair scrutiny we face we have to be beyond reproach. I think I agree with your post but your wording was less than ideal (sarcasm or not)”
Oh, darn. I suppose that I should just stop writing about topics labeled as controversial by the left altogether then. Does anyone have a good bunt cake recipe? Hold on! Is bunt cake a prohibited category of discussion?
No, keep it up Aaron. It gives us all a reason to think you are a whack-job.
Hank:
“Every comment like these (whether taken out of context or not) adds to that perception.”
I disagree. I cannot be held responsible for quotes taken out of context. Nobody can. Wilful misrepresentation cannot be guarded against. It’s simply a fact of life in this dishonest society where every attempt at open debate is stifled.
“My point was simply that we can’t pick and choose our freedoms because NONE of us have a corner on what is right and what is wrong in how others live their lives outside of the realm of how their actions affect others.”
BS. It is the ultimate cop-out to suggest that nobody has a corner on right and wrong. All of our actions affect others. There is no such thing as consequence-free behaviour. Does that mean I think government should legislate every single aspect of our lives? No. But don’t break out the “nobody has a corner on right and wrong” crap. There are consequences to actions. Gay marriage has consequences. This isn’t homophobia, this is fact. Mr. Unruh pointed out one of them just the other day – that in countries with gay marriage, marriage itself is weakened as an institution. This has effects on everyone in society, most of all on our young.
Ezra:
“would like to point out that the Liberals never made reparations to the Japanese or Chinese. On September 22, 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave a long-awaited formal apology…”
Yeah that’s great. Conservatives actually take responsibility for the actions of other governments, so suddenly they’re to blame. Typical Liberal. You know, that’s how I got fired once. I was the only one of a group of us who owned up to our mistakes, so I got the shaft. Gotta admire that kind of ethic that keeps your mouth shut to avoid responsibility.
Canada has no history. The only thing that seperated them from anything was the War of 1812 that Canada won with the Help and Strategy of Native people at that time. For the Help.. Canada came up with the idea of Treatys so that later on, they could botch those agreements and squat on every inch of Land that is so called Canada..