“If the Speaker of the Canadian Parliament says that this Canadian-Ukrainian Nazi fought against the Russians, he cannot fail to realize that he fought on the side of Hitler, and not on the side of his own homeland, Canada. » The sentence is from Vladimir Putin about the former Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada, Anthony Rota. There is something embarrassing, and worrying, when it is the Russian president who lectures Canada on its own history.
This is all the more true when it serves the objectives of a regime that embodies everything that is contrary to Canadian political values. At the origin of this embarrassment, the blunder of Anthony Rota, former Speaker of the House of Commons who gave a Ukrainian SS veteran a standing ovation from all Canadian MPs, highlights a particular characteristic of our time. It appears that this event is symptomatic of the way in which we construct our relationships with our own history.
Indeed, less historical notions could have easily avoided the embarrassment in which Canada has found itself in recent days. A sharp civic culture would have made it possible to have a necessary historical perspective which, itself, could have prevented many headaches in government. By this, we must understand a basic culture of history as well as a knowledge of our place within it, a reflex to question ourselves before making gestures with socio-political implications and, finally, a nuanced sensitivity to the issues of our time.
The simple fact that Yaroslav Hunka fought the Soviet army during the Second World War, a fact which was known because it was the main reason for his presence in the Canadian parliament, would have been enough to raise legitimate questions about the relevance of making it a political symbol. Despite the current diplomatic situation between Canada and Russia, one could have questioned the fact of reserving a tribute to a man who fought against allies of the time.
The fact that he belonged to an SS brigade known for its violence only adds a layer of shame to the whole situation. It seems that anyone with less historical knowledge would have been able to point out this incongruity. It is precisely to the school that this mission of raising awareness falls.
More broadly, the ovation given to Mr. Hunka therefore leads us to question the way in which our society provides its members with this civic culture. It is therefore appropriate to talk about education in this context. This phenomenon is broad, is not limited to the political sphere alone, and emanates from a global neoliberal perspective of education. Namely that it must, above all else, produce workers.
All Western societies seem to bear the weight of this glaring lack of civic education. Recently, an increasingly large part of the population has probably fallen easily into the trap of political manipulation, fake news and propaganda companies of all kinds. Thus, confusion emerges regarding the rights and duties that our life in a democracy implies.
Indeed, seeing how civil society is agitated recently, we seem to confuse the fact of giving rights to a minority and taking away from the majority, personal opinion and expert opinion as well as the use of individual freedom in a society of laws and rights. However, as education is the mother of all solutions, it is up to schools to overcome these problems.
Point-blank, however, when we ask young people why they go to school, the answer that most often comes out is something like: “To have a good job » or “To make money”. Very often, the parallel between school and the world of work is used to lend credibility to the educational approach: “You didn’t submit your homework on time? What will your boss say if you don’t do the work he asks of you later? »
Something is missing and we are only just beginning to realize it. What is all the more aberrant is that schools already have the tools necessary to resolve this problem: the human sciences, or social sciences; history, geography, philosophy, political science, sociology, etc. However, it seems that, in our ways of perceiving them and in the place we give them in our education systems, these subjects are relegated to a second level that is difficult to justify.
These “citizen” sciences are too often described as “holiday” or even “soft” sciences because they do not specifically deal with notions or subjects considered “useful”, that is to say linked to the development of “ worker ethics. This says a lot about the place occupied by economic performance and, above all, about the lack of consideration for intellectual culture in our society.
It is of course noble and necessary to train and raise awareness among younger generations about the world of work, but our social existence is not limited to that. Indeed, current socio-political events show us that it is vital that, in the name of establishing an increasingly diverse and respectful society in a constantly becoming more complex socio-political context, citizen training through the human sciences finds a new preponderant place, alongside other disciplines and not “below” them, in the way in which the West perceives and constructs its different education systems.
It would be enough to better use subjects explicitly serving citizenship to develop individuals who would be cultivated in addition to being functional.