Ottawa Citizen Reporter Tries To Convince Teenagers Of History's Importance
The skinny arm at the back of the room is in the air again, but this time it scoots back down before I can react. "You wanted to ask something?" The serious-looking 15-year-old shakes her mane of black hair. "Never mind," she says. "It was a stupid question."
"No such thing," I say, hoping it's true.
"Well, these guys," she begins,"they're all dead, right?"
And there it is, the essence, the nub of the quixotic challenge we've laid before the 20 Grade 10 students eyeing me warily in a classroom at St. Mark High School in Manotick.
"They" are indeed all dead -- or all but a handful: all the men and boys who endured the mud and tedium and daily flirtation with death along the trenches that ran like a scar through Belgium and France from 1914 to 1918; all the women and girls in field hospitals tending the men and boys whose endurance, or luck, had run out; all those at home waiting on husbands, fathers, brothers -- and the fate of a world in the throes of cataclysm.
All dead.
Dead, too, confoundingly, is their memory. The First World War is but three generations removed for most of these students. Their grandparents -- real, living flesh and blood extensions of their self-involved, adolescent lives -- had fathers and uncles, mothers and aunts, who lived through the war. Or died in it.
Some 8.5 million soldiers died of wounds, infection and exhaustion on both sides of the conflict that came to be known as the Great War (for its impact, not its beneficence). Among the dead, were 60,000 Canadians, 20,000 more than Canada would lose in the Second World War. In all, some 600,000 Canadians donned uniforms in the First World War, one in five of the country's work force.
In short, every family in the country was touched by the war. The same could be said of most of Europe and the rest of the British empire.
We know that nearly every student in this Manotick classroom can trace their families back to countries that took sides in the First World War, and yet when we offer to help them investigate their own links to the war, to engage in what we call "a wilful act of remembrance" to mark the Year of the Veteran, almost everyone is dead certain they have no links.
"My grandfather was in World War II," says one. "Why don't we do that? We know about that."
That's the point, of course. The Second World War is still alive in the memories of these young Canadians, in part because many of those who were swept up in its tumult are still alive. Yet the First World War, one generation further back, may as well be the Peloponnesian War for all the sense of personal relevance it engenders.
Can we reconnect the broken links? Can we make these 15- and 16-year-olds, the most over-stimulated and privileged generation the world has ever known, care about anyone whose idea of a hot time was playing 78s on a hand-cranked gramophone?
I'm having my doubts. I had assumed, with the naivete of a 53-year-old man smitten by the romance of history, that these kids would be instantly interested in the proposition the Citizen had laid before them: a chance to work with a team of historians, archivists, museum curators in a quest to, in effect, bring back to life their own relatives who had experienced "the war to end all wars."
[Editor's Note: This is a very short excerpt from a much longer piece. See the Ottawa Citizen for more.]
"No such thing," I say, hoping it's true.
"Well, these guys," she begins,"they're all dead, right?"
And there it is, the essence, the nub of the quixotic challenge we've laid before the 20 Grade 10 students eyeing me warily in a classroom at St. Mark High School in Manotick.
"They" are indeed all dead -- or all but a handful: all the men and boys who endured the mud and tedium and daily flirtation with death along the trenches that ran like a scar through Belgium and France from 1914 to 1918; all the women and girls in field hospitals tending the men and boys whose endurance, or luck, had run out; all those at home waiting on husbands, fathers, brothers -- and the fate of a world in the throes of cataclysm.
All dead.
Dead, too, confoundingly, is their memory. The First World War is but three generations removed for most of these students. Their grandparents -- real, living flesh and blood extensions of their self-involved, adolescent lives -- had fathers and uncles, mothers and aunts, who lived through the war. Or died in it.
Some 8.5 million soldiers died of wounds, infection and exhaustion on both sides of the conflict that came to be known as the Great War (for its impact, not its beneficence). Among the dead, were 60,000 Canadians, 20,000 more than Canada would lose in the Second World War. In all, some 600,000 Canadians donned uniforms in the First World War, one in five of the country's work force.
In short, every family in the country was touched by the war. The same could be said of most of Europe and the rest of the British empire.
We know that nearly every student in this Manotick classroom can trace their families back to countries that took sides in the First World War, and yet when we offer to help them investigate their own links to the war, to engage in what we call "a wilful act of remembrance" to mark the Year of the Veteran, almost everyone is dead certain they have no links.
"My grandfather was in World War II," says one. "Why don't we do that? We know about that."
That's the point, of course. The Second World War is still alive in the memories of these young Canadians, in part because many of those who were swept up in its tumult are still alive. Yet the First World War, one generation further back, may as well be the Peloponnesian War for all the sense of personal relevance it engenders.
Can we reconnect the broken links? Can we make these 15- and 16-year-olds, the most over-stimulated and privileged generation the world has ever known, care about anyone whose idea of a hot time was playing 78s on a hand-cranked gramophone?
I'm having my doubts. I had assumed, with the naivete of a 53-year-old man smitten by the romance of history, that these kids would be instantly interested in the proposition the Citizen had laid before them: a chance to work with a team of historians, archivists, museum curators in a quest to, in effect, bring back to life their own relatives who had experienced "the war to end all wars."
[Editor's Note: This is a very short excerpt from a much longer piece. See the Ottawa Citizen for more.]