Novembrance Day

A big buzz-word (buzz-phrase?) in education these days is critical thinking.

The thought is that, with our fast changing world, we currently have no idea what people will be doing for a living 10 -15 years from now, and so it is impossible to prepare our students with the specific skill sets that will fit into an unimaginable job market. We're encouraged instead to help them develop character traits and work habits that can help them adapt to whatever they may end up doing. Collaborative work, inventive problem solving, and critical thinking.

I mention all of this because Remembrance Day is approaching, and I have a feeling that given recent events, this year we will be even more in lock-step than usual. I've already heard predictions that the ceremonies will have “special resonance.” And I am feeling a little queasy.

I work in an elementary school, and I have to say that it is no place for an iconoclast. It's not that I try to be a non-conformist. It's just who I am. Once I went to a workshop on palm-reading, and I was shown the two lines in both of my hands that indicate my innate tendency toward non-conformity. I'll explain it to you as it was said to me. Look at the palm of the hand you use to write with. Check out the edge of your hand between your thumb and index finger. That is where you head line and heart line begin. (Don't ask me which is which, it was just one workshop..) The closer together these two lines are at their beginning, the more of a conformist you are. Mine are a full centimetre apart.

After I'd taken this workshop, I was talking to a friend and we were comparing palms. His head and heart line were completely fused, and although he's an off-centre kind of guy, I have to say that he's also very concerned about what the other off-centred people are up to. He looked at my hand and said, “Maybe if you really concentrate, you can get your two lines to move closer together.” I just looked at him, thinking, why would I want to do that? See, the conformist and the non-conformist will never agree about how the other should want to be.

All this digression to say that I am and always will be a questioner and a seeker. For a time I thought that what I needed was to find a guru, or to have one find me, or at least to discover a complete system of thought that would sort everything out and make me happy, healthy and wise. But the palms don't lie. Unlike my dear friend with the fused lines, that will never be the answer for me. For me, (not to get all zen koan-ish) the answer is the question. The answer is to question. Think, wonder, change your mind, ask again and never never accept what someone else is telling you without doing all of those things. I will never wear something, say something, sing something just because it's what people “do”. If I haven't examined it thoroughly from as many angles as I can, and come up with my own good justifications for doing something, then I am not doing it.

So here we are coming up to Remembrance Day. All ceremony and symbolism. All cliche and cant. We pin those red poppies on all the children and file them into the assembly, where they hear or recite the same lines they always do. Take up our quarrel with the foe. All those who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our freedoms. And so on.

Well, what's so bad about that? What's wrong with taking a few moments to acknowledge .... acknowledge what, exactly? That some people have a career that sometimes leads to their death and that it's too bad when that happens? Okay, I can go along with that. Here's to the coal miners and the firefighters and the nurses in emergency wards, and airline pilots and flight attendants, and the soldiers too. That's not why we're at this assembly though. We are here because we have been told that there is something intrinsically valuable and honourable about dying “for your country”. Soldiers “answered the call”, and some “paid the ultimate sacrifice” while fighting to “protect our freedoms”.

Yet how often is that actually what they were fighting for? World war one? Korea? Afghanistan? Aren't jingoism, and empire-building ambitions, and xenophobia, and paranoia (not to mention economic and diplomatic expediency) more often the driving force for sending soldiers into another country to fight? And I just don't see these ideas being presented to our young people. There is no discussion, no critical thinking. Just the same message over and over. If we aren't looking, with our students, using all our 20/20 hindsight at our past successes and failures, and teach our children to do the same, what can we expect for the future?

What happens to our society when we don't encourage our children to practice critical thinking, whatever the issue, whatever the discomfort? What kind of citizenry do we get when certain types of rhetoric shut down debate? We will never be able to take a clear-eyed view at our current world conflicts. We will not have the skills to dissect and analyze the stated aims of our national leaders. We will have a state that purportedly acts on our behalf and we will not know how to put the brakes on. We will find ourselves confronted by complex international situations, and we will not have the vocabulary required to express or even understand what we ourselves truly think and believe.

I am intensely aware of and grateful for the many freedoms that we have in our country. However, I think that gratitude is misplaced when it is given to the military. I am thankful for the trade unionists, the civil libertarians, the feminists, the artists and writers who fought for our rights and continue to keep vigilance over them. I will honour the sacrifices made by these people, not by attending public ceremonies, but by remaining committed to my individual responsibility to know what I believe in and why, and always to follow my conscience. With no poppies involved.