Addendum

News this morning that the Legion in Kenora, Ontario, fired its chaplain because she criticized cuts to veterans' care during her Remembrance Day benediction. Good for them. The day is supposed to be about the simple act of remembering, not politics. In fact, next year I expect to see no politicians laying wreaths at my local cenotaph. Also, they better not breathe a word about "freedom" and "democracy" either, because those are political concepts. National anthem? Got to go, because it mentions "Canada", which is a political construct.  God Save the Queen? Please.  Oh, and no poppies, either. According to the Legion, the money raised from them goes to veteran's care, and we don't want to bring that up on Remembrance Day.  So make sure your next Remembrance Day bears no relationship to anything in the real world, especially if it happened in the past. Just do what you're supposed to, please: stand there and feel guilty because your generation hasn't had a world war, you bunch of entitled slackers.

Remembering

I don’t want to trust a seventeen year old memory very far, but I think it went something like this. I was watching a debate on CBC or CTV about Canada’s involvement in Kosovo. They assembled a panel: a journalist, somebody from a peace group, an RCAF veteran from the Legion (for some reason), and finally a political scientist, because in a debate it’s a good idea to have one person who might know what the hell is going on. I don’t recall much about the debate, but one thing is lodged in my memory. In rebuttal to the one panelist’s opposition to Canada’s participation in the air campaign, the veteran  said, “This young lady should go watch the first twenty minutes of the movie Saving Private Ryan to learn what soldiers sacrifice for freedom.” 

This might seem like a non-sequitur and a particularly incoherent one at that, but au contraire. Have Canadians had any societal debate in the past century that hasn’t witnessed an effort by one side or another to imbue their position with the sanctified suffering of The Fallen? Back in the day, when I read actual newspapers (and worked for one) I used to keep a clip file. In it were examples of people deploying mawkish memories of our own “Greatest Generation(s)” into debates over everything from multiculturalism to same sex marriage to educational reform to indoor smoking bans, as if the worldview of the dead – and especially the war dead – were entitled to hold dominion over the living forever. And it happens in debates over history, too. We needn’t look far for examples of historians or historical institutions who have been bullied into silence by people that Paul Fussell called “the loony patriotic.” 

I’ve written before about my growing unease with Remembrance Day, and especially about the day’s tendency to blur the distinction between commemoration and historiography. Historiography is evidence based, skeptical, and provisional in its conclusions; commemoration is subjective and emotional. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t mind so much, if it were only for a single ceremony and for an hour. One doesn’t go to a funeral and expect to hear the unmitigated truth about the departed, after all.  But when have our circumstances ever been normal? Not since September 2001, to be sure, fourteen years in which we’ve seen the Western powers engaged in perpetual low-level war, turning the world upside down and killing – even if not intentionally – far greater numbers of innocent people than ever were killed on 9/11. 

“Oh, stop,” I’m told. “The day’s not about that. The day is simply about remembrance, not politics.”  Oh, please, I reply. What does that even mean? Remembering is not simple – not cognitively, not socially, not historically, and remembering for commemorative purposes complicates it still further. It is most decidedly not apolitical. Commemorate what? Those who fought for freedom? Tread lightly, friends, around so subjective a term: not many of those who went to war in 1914 or 1939 shared your conception of freedom. Victory, then? So am I to exclude the enemy, many of whom were, to quote Bertrand Russell, “fellow sufferers in the same tragedy as our own”?  Commemorate all combatants, then? But that would include perpetrators of hideous war crimes, and you’ll forgive me if I choose not to spare a moment to reflect on those who served that the Holocaust might continue. For starters. 

Okay. Maybe you need a moment to “just remember” (whatever that means) and you can cut through the cognitive dissonance. Maybe you don’t cringe when you hear “fought for our country” when you know damn well that sometimes they fought for our government; maybe you don’t clench your teeth when you hear “fought for our freedom” when you know that sometimes they categorically did not.  So, do what you need to on November 11th. Commemoration, like funerals, are about the living, after all, and the stories we tell ourselves so that we can carry on.  I’ll go, and reflect on victims of war and especially on those who died to defeat enemies for whom martial virtues were the only ones worth having. But I’ll also reflect that, too often, our own commemorations tread too close to that terrain, terrain where there is an implicit contempt for civilian life; terrain where there is no distinction between serving one’s country and serving one’s government; terrain where it is assumed that there is an inherent nobility in military service, regardless of the cause in which one served; terrain where, as C.P. Stacey put it in a different context, the golden haze of historical romance combines with the fog of war to reduce visibility to zero.

 “Support our troops” doesn’t mean support every stupid and immoral thing that our government wishes to do with them, and people who can’t understand the difference shouldn’t be allowed to play with soldiers.

Hockey

Your noble author contains multitudes, faithful readers, and so it came to pass that on the 23rd day of February in the Year of Lord 2014, he rose at his customary hour on Sunday, fed the felines, made coffee, and turned on the computer.  Heedless of the peril that he might start drinking Coors Light, calling other males “man” “bro” and “buddy” and giving them suspiciously long hugs punctuated by thumping yet strangely tender pats on the back, he watched the Olympic Gold Medal hockey game. It was the first hockey game he had ever watched from one end to the other. In commemoration of this momentous and never-to-be repeated event, he took notes on his reactions to the extraordinary spectacle of watching millionaires skate around for an hour. Well, half of them are millionaires. He isn’t so sure about the Swedes. Below is the unedited transcript:

===

7 AM. Coffee in hand (done right,  in a French press); cats are momentarily content. Computer is on. I am one of 4 million people live-streaming this on CBC.ca.  Don Cherry, who ranked 8th on the list of Greatest Canadians a decade ago, is screaming at me. To quell the noise and incoherence I contemplate banging some pots and pans together while shrieking like Yoko Ono but the moment passes.

7:07 AM. They are playing. There is much analysis going on between the CBC Broadcasters. The Canadians need to play a tight defense. And a tight offense. I am a hockey neophyte and have trouble keeping up with their strategizing.

7:07:28.  Swedish player goes off the ice after less than thirty seconds. This must be some kind of hockey rule or something.

7:15 AM or thereabouts. Canadians score. I miss this as I was reboiling the kettle for more coffee (I have a problem, I admit.) CBC broadcasts crowds of Canadians in various places across the country, cheering like mad. The shots look staged, or at least highly performative. They do not replay the goal.

7:18. People are skating.

7:21 AM. Occurs to me that nobody is racist about Swedes.

7:22 AM. I minimize the viewer to the corner and check e-mail. Send a couple of replies to the usual morning dross. (“Dear Professor, I have been very sick and my dog died and my grandmother has been diagnosed with certain death and my girlfriend left me for Bill Clinton. Can I please get an extension on the essay that was due last month?”)

7:23 AM. I look at bicycles. Surly Long Haul Trucker or the venerable Trek 520? Do I want a Rohloff hub for my touring bike? Good for 100,000 KM they say.

7:26 AM. Paying more attention to the game for a bit. Men are skating around. Looking at the uniforms, I keep thinking “stop if you can” and “stop”.

7:27 AM. Intermission. This is called the “end of first period.” Ah.

7:28 AM. More Don Cherry. Shouting. Intolerable. Didn’t he support Rob Ford? Say something about pinkos on bicycles, too? Strange: as I understand it cycling is a core component of off-season training for many hockey players.

7:35 AM. Don Cherry says to Canadian kids that if they work hard they too can end up NHL players, just like their heroes. I check.  There are 5.6 million Canadians under the age of 14. There are 488 Canadians in the NHL.  Assuming the same percentages:  you’ve got one shot in 125,000.  So stop readin’ books you sissies and get out there and skate.

I lose track of time.

Second “period” begins. Men skate around. At one point, a bunch of them gather by the boards and there’s this cluster trying to get the puck. They hack at it like a bunch of guys trying to chop up a gopher emerging from a hole. Best metaphor I had for this.

Skating.

Minimized viewer again. It plays in the corner while I surf the web. Twitter. Hilary Clinton’s tweet feed identifies her as “Wife, mother, U.S. Senator” in that order. They had a focus group for that, you know. They did - guaranteed. They had focus groups and ran small polls to determine the best order in which to put that. Senator, mom, wife? Wife, Senator, mom? Gotta please the family values types…

Hockey. People are skating. Icing call. I picture my mother calling me to the kitchen to lick the spatula when she’s finished a cake. Icing call.

Skating. I Facebook. A friend notes that Ikea doesn’t sell hockey sticks. Ten minutes too late I reply that hockey sticks are hard to assemble with an Allen key.

Penalty against a Canadian. Occurs to me that there are slight advantages to getting a penalty: you get to rest for a couple of minutes, and you have an awesome seat for the game.

Skating. Am joined by Amanda. Tea and more coffee.

Canadians score another. I feel mildly elated but am reminded of the immortal words of Han Solo: “Don’t get cocky, kid.” Always good advice.

Carey Price probably got made fun of in school for his name. Those people are sorry now, because they’re watching him play. And drinking Coors Light before 8 AM.

Is it checking or chequing? Which way do we spell it in Canada?

16:08 in second period. Champlain founded Quebec that year.

Skating.

Skating.

Whistles.

Some chequing.

Why is there no fighting? Is this hockey not as good because it doesn’t have fighting?  If I were a hockey player, I would use reasoned argument to solve problems on the ice. “Sorry about that ill-timed cheque, kind sir. It was my fault entirely. Can we discuss how to avoid such incidents in the future? Again, my most sincere apologies.”

Second period ends. Swedes are down by two. More analysis. Hockey analyst guy is very incisive. Actual quotation: “Swedes need to play a tough offensive game now. When you’re down by two, you can’t lay back and be defensive.” I find this very helpful. I would have thought that when you’re losing by two goals the key would have been defensive play.  Forgive me, I am new to the game.

Third period.

Skating. Skating. Skating. Play-by-play announcers could be making up names for all I know.

Puck goes over the glass. Do they show a fan catching it, holding it up in the air? No. Odd.

Skating.

I check Sweden’s population. Just under 10 million. Could we take them in a war? Hard to say. They had conscription until recently. I consider how much I would have hated military life. Orders. Conformity. Shouting. Large groups of aggressive men. Green. I would have used reason argument with my senior drill instruction. “Sarge, I don’t respond well to the shouting. Maybe we could discuss this over coffee?”

Skating. I notice on Wikipedia that most Swedish military kit is home grown. How can they afford the R & D for such small procurement numbers? I need to look this up.

I like Saab automobiles. I had a Saab ball cap when I was a teenager. I wore it everywhere. It was part of my identity. Weird: I don’t drive.

Skating.

When I was ten or eleven my parents sent me to a sports day camp for two weeks. The people who ran it were awful: mean, slovenly, foul-mouthed. And I was not good at sports, which pretty much was the equivalent of a tattoo on my forehead that said “please beat me up”, which the other boys did with enthusiasm, and the beatings were usually accompanied by all manner of homophobic epithets. Sports build character. It did in my case. I learned that coping with being bullied is an important life skill. Certainly it has been one of the keys to success in my chosen profession.

Skating.

Skating.

Oh my god.

Skating.

Skating.

I check the news from Syria, which nobody seems to care about anymore. Many dead. Upheaval. Also, Canada’s Senate scandal seems to have blown over. But Harper got a case of beer from Obama. Sam Adams. Not a bad choice.

I begin to make breakfast. Tex-Mex breakfast burritos.

Skating. Whistles. Canada gets a third goal. I feel bad for the Swedes now. They are nice and have a fine social welfare system. And Ikea. And write good crime novels. I thought Kenneth Branagh was good in the BBC version of Wallander. I check IMDB to see if it’s coming back for more. It is. Awesomeness. But so is Heroes.  Why?

Skating. Whistles. Swedes look sad. I feel bad for them. Is their king watching? I look up the king of Sweden, guess his name is either “Carl” or “Gustaf”.  Holy crap: he’s Carl Gustaf. There’s a picture of him. He’s an Honorary Admiral in the British Royal Navy. Weird. He also is a Knight with Collar of the Order of the Elephant in Denmark. This I have to check on Wikipedia.  It’s the highest order in Denmark. Nothing to do with actual elephants, which are not native to Denmark.

I watch hockey. Amanda is reading about Ukraine. This will end badly.

Skating. Three minutes remain.

Breakfast is about ready. Eggs got a bit browned on the bottom. We fold them into wraps with onions, mushrooms, peppers, avocado, and goat cheese. I wonder again if I could or should be vegetarian. Probably yes to both.

Skating. Countdown. Ten, nine, etc.

Canada wins. I feel a tiny twinge of national pride. And also that this is vengeance for all the poorly drilled holes and missing pieces from Ikea furniture over the years.

Mentally, I cross “watch a hockey game” off my bucket list. It comes just below “write a bucket list” and just above “get a colonoscopy”.

Much cheering across Canada on CBC. Looks staged again. In Russia, the players shake hands. Some replays. I see Sidney Crosby remove his helmet. I was hoping for female and flowing red hair, like Eowyn in Lord of the Rings when she reveals herself. “I am NO man!”  That would have been awesome.

Am pretty sure I see a Canadian player mouth, “Fuck, yeah.” Camera moves away from him rather quickly.

According to CBC, 15 million watched the game. I check: 13 million voted in the last federal election. Apples and oranges? I dunno. I’m just sayin’

Surrender

“And the day after Christmas, the whole family gathered into the SUV and drove to the big box plaza, which was FAR, FAR away from the core of the city where nasty hipsters and EVEN people needing social assistance lived. Then they returned all the crap they didn’t want and snapped up things they did at bargain prices!  And ran their credit card balances UP and UP and UP! The end.”  

For immediate release:

The War on Christmas, one of the least effective military campaigns in the history of the world, has been lost. Anti-Christmas forces, having been reduced to a handful of deviants muttering something about the winter solstice and Jesus not having been born on the 25th of December, surrendered unconditionally, their efforts having been proven futile for the 50th year in a row. 

Once again this year, the Christmas season returned on November 1st (some localities waited until November 12th out of respect for those who gave their lives in the early battles to save Christmas) and stayed for its customary seven weeks. During this period, multicoloured lights appeared on trees and rooftops everywhere, alongside the visage of the Great Leader – who, you will recall, has children under perpetual surveillance to ensure their compliance with behavioural norms – and variations on the same dozen songs played incessantly from speakers in every public place in the Western hemisphere. A minority even went to “church”, but most, as is the custom of the past half-century, went to shopping malls and spent themselves into oblivion, despite the cluck-clucking from a handful of Christian conservatives, who represent the last bastion of anti-capitalist thought in our society. Meanwhile, televisions bombarded revelers with hours of familiar but repetitious entertainment, including Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and of course the annual mawkish, maudlin, mediocre and incomprehensible Dr. Who Christmas Special. As usual, the North American Aerospace Defense Command issued reports of the Dear Leader’s progress across the Northern Hemisphere on Christmas Eve, part of an ongoing disinformation campaign. On the day itself, "families" (groups of people associated on a biological basis but barely known to one another) gathered for stressful meals where they outwardly cooed over how very good everything tasted, but inwardly reflected that pretty much everything was overcooked and cold by the time everybody sat down to eat.
 
In other news, on a local street corner, one of the few surviving anti-Christmas cranks was heard to say,  “Political correctness has run amok. You used to be able to say 'Happy Holidays' and 'Seasons Greetings' to people without anybody getting offended. Now, if you don’t go around saying “Merry Christmas” they jump all over you." He has been evacuated to a nearby Toys ‘r’ Us where he will be required to listen to “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” over and over until he is fit to rejoin society. 

-30-

Commuting

Behold, my friends, the form of self-inflicted brain damage called the rush-hour commute. Is there any single greater waste of time, productivity, and money that our society has imposed upon itself?

Well, my wife and I have rarely had to contend with anything that bad, but we've spent our share of time accomplishing nothing but raising our blood pressure and the global temperature while sitting in an expensive automobile going nowhere. 

So we've made an important decision. This week, we’re getting rid of our car. It’s an experiment. It might fail. I doubt this will be our last car, and we’ll be renting occasionally, too. But there’s no harm in trying it for a while. We're three-quarters of the way there, anyway. In four years we’ve put a paltry 25,000 kilometres on a car that, all told, costs us around $500 per month. 

Still, people look at us like we’re crazy. Getting rid of the car! It’s like we told them we’re getting rid of our heads. Some people have told us that not owning a car is irresponsible: the automotive industry being one of the cornerstones of our economy, after all. And a couple of people have actually gotten angry. Actual anger. The problem, you see, is all that fancy book learnin’ we’ve done. Don’t know what the real world is like.  No common sense. Them degrees are just expensive bits of paper. Can’t see the forest for the trees.  One wonders how we function at all, boneheads that we are.

Speaking of forests and trees, they’re one of our major concerns. I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority of peer reviewed scientific evidence proves that climate change is real, potentially catastrophic, and that human beings are the major contributor to it.  So one way or another, sooner or later, we’re all going to be driving less, or at least driving vehicles that are less polluting. But there I go again, with my fancy-pants evidence-based thinking.

An interesting thing: for millions of people, there is an astonishing invention that offers inexpensive, reliable, emission-free transportation. It can hugely reduce urban traffic congestion if properly utilized. It can even help its operator lose weight. It’s called a bicycle, and in some cities it’s just taken for granted that it’s how huge numbers of people get where they’re going.

My wife and I are bicycle commuters for about nine months out of the year, and in snatches for the winter months, too. We're fortunate to live near bike paths and most mornings can beat the rush-hour traffic to work. People always ask about the rain and cold, but it’s a mild inconvenience next to the stress of the morning commute for drivers. Seriously: when is the last time you enjoyed driving to work? By contrast, our commute is stress-free and nothing quite matches that feeling of smug superiority when you ride up and your colleagues avert your gaze, simultaneously envious of you and humiliated about the hideous state of their own decrepit and decaying carcasses.

The bicycle has been a mature technology for a better part of a century now. This bike might look like a revolution in design but fundamentally it’s not that much different than sometime your grandfather might have owned. And yet there was a time in North America, not long ago, when bicycles were considered something for children and a small number of adult hobbyists. In the last three decades, however, a huge adult bicycle culture has emerged. For a while, the industry floundered around trying to find the right bikes for ordinary people. The bike shops are full of beautiful, featherweight carbon frame bikes that cost thousands of dollars, but for the average person looking to commute those are like buying a Ferrari to go to the mall and back. Thankfully, for a few hundred dollars now you can get a very good commuter bike (and I don’t mean some ten-ton hunk of junk purchased at Canadian Tire) that will suit your needs perfectly.

Now have a look at these. They’re breathtaking, decadent, handmade titanium bikes from a company called Budnitz. They’ll cost you about $8,000. Seriously: have a look. The bike community has its share of snobs and on the message boards these have generated a lot of hate, mostly about the cost. But really it’s just expensive in the way that a luxury car is. Now, I’m not endorsing this particular brand, just using it to illustrate a point: even one of these sumptuous machines, the Rolls Royce of commuter bikes, is actually a pittance compared to what people spend on their cars.

In 2012, the CAA estimated that a car on average costs its owners $10,452 dollars per year – that’s the cost of payments, insurance, gasoline, maintenance, and depreciation factored in.  Consider, too, that after ten years most cars are hunks of junk ready to go to the scrap yard. By contrast, a good bicycle frame will last forever and a day. Maintenance and replacing parts on most commuter bikes will set you back a couple of hundred bucks per year.

So, we have a means of commuting that is cheap, environmentally sound, and makes us healthier: the bicycle. Why do more people not use it? Well, some people just can’t. I get that. It’s hard to haul your tool kit to the job site on your panniers. Or they have kids to get to soccer practice. Or maybe their commute is too long, or it’s just not practicable to show up at work and have to shower and change. And heavy snow is a big obstacle, though perhaps not to these. There are safety issues, because cities don’t often factor cyclists well into their transportation plans. But the biggest problem for people with short commutes is simply a psychological one. They can’t quite imagine getting where they’re going without their cars. But millions of people do, every day. The way I see it: we’re going to do what we’ve mostly been doing anyway, and get paid $500 a month to do it.

Atheism

The worst thing is when people try to talk me out of it, as if it’s just something soft I’ve gotten stuck in. "Stalin was an atheist," they say. Okay. And? What do they expect to me say? "Stalin was an atheist? I had no idea. In that case, I do believe in God." And yes, I’ve heard of Pascal's Wager, and Paley’s pocket watch on the heath, and every other variation of the argument from design. These things do tend to enter your consciousness after three decades of daily study and reflection.

And yet my personal progress towards disbelief involved no turning points, revelations, or eureka moments. It simply began with a gradual realization, in boyhood, that my school’s daily prayers and Bible readings were just white noise to me. I stopped believing in God by the time I was about twelve and this early, intuitive disbelief has been buttressed by three subsequent decades of study, all of which has deepened my conviction that there isn’t enough evidence to support the God hypothesis.

There’s no reason to get all uppity about it, but people tend to. This was the second or third column I wrote for Measure of Doubt, nearly five years ago, but it’s the 109th that I’ve actually posted. I keep hesitating for a simple reason. I've found it’s best to keep quiet about my disbelief because it’s a stigma. I'll say that again: disbelief is a stigma. I almost never discuss it with family or friends. This is the first time I’ve unequivocally professed my atheism in public, and I raise the issue now with serious trepidation. 

Oh, I know that some believers think of themselves as the persecuted minority, huddled around the flickering candle of faith in the encroaching darkness.  Well, maybe. But it must be crowded around that candle, what with ninety percent of the population elbowing for room. The assertion, made by some conservative believers, that atheists aggressively dominate the public discourse on religion is based on the worst sort of hyperbolic selection bias. 

And I really don’t see what the problem is. Why would anyone be bothered by my skepticism, let alone offended by it? I don’t think believers are delusional, I think they’re wrong. Why would anyone be offended by this? It's precisely what they think about me.  Moreover, I assume that most Christians reject most non-Christian beliefs. Presumably they don’t believe that God has taken human form on many occasions, that First Nations have occupied the Great Plains since the beginning of time, that we’re bound to an endless cycle of reincarnation unless we follow the Eightfold Noble Path, or that the Qu'ran is the final and perfect revelation of God. That being the case, they too are atheists – about other peoples' religions. Again, I fail to see what the problem is.

Admittedly some people are faithful in a more amorphous way, arguing that all religions are just different versions of the same truth. When they consider such things at all, they say that they believe in some sort of "divine spirit" a warm and fuzzy though sometimes disapproving God: a celestial Oprah. Confess your sins. Jump on the living room set sofa forever and ever.

 "Maybe God is just the word we give to love," I heard a liberal theologian say on TV one time.  "Oh, please!" I shouted. I nearly dropped my copy of The Satanic Verses. And yet the amazing thing was that this purveyor superficially conceived, cloyingly sophomoric ooze got a free pass from the fundamentalist on the same show. "At least she believes in something," he said. By contrast, the atheist on the panel, who professed a thoroughly considered, rigorously examined, and continuously re-evaluated disbelief was told he was going to Hell. The fundamentalist described how he himself had always suffered persecution for his faith. Incredible: he goes around telling people they’re going to be tortured for eternity but says he’s being persecuted when they defend themselves. Incredible.

Well, I don’t think anybody’s going to Hell. In fact, nothing follows automatically from my atheism, and certainly not any conclusions about religion as a social institution. I don’t believe that it "poisons everything" as the title of a recent book put it. Personally, as I’ve grown older, I’ve taken far more interest in religious studies and my respect for certain aspects of religious institutions has grown, even as my atheistic convictions have solidified. I was very irritated not long ago to hear someone remark with pride, "I’m an atheist and I’ve never been in a church in my life." That’s a shame: he’s missed out on some great architecture and a pile of history. Comparative religion is one of the cornerstones of a good liberal education and I insist that my students know something about it. But people often mistake the meaning of all this.  A few years ago, on a teaching evaluation, one student wrote, "Prof. Broad seems very religious." I should have framed it.

Moreover, I teach at an institution with a religious affiliation.  Why?  Well, for many reasons, not the least of which is because it is an excellent liberal arts college with a superb faculty.  But it is also because that institution is actually far more amendable to the serious discussion of religion than the secular university I graduated from, where legions of the self-righteously politically correct maintain that the critical discussion of religion is the exact equivalent of racism. Their position – that ideas have rights – is both insipid and insidious, and is one that, moreover, they do not themselves believe, as they are perfectly willing to hurl stones in the direction of the Catholic Church, for example, when its precepts on matters concerning abortion, the ordination of women, and same sex marriage differ from their own.  Let us be very clear about this: you hear that academe is dominated by atheists. It isn’t. I can count on my fingers the number of real ones I’ve met. It’s dominated by moderately secular liberals, most of them positively popping with New Age spiritual beliefs. They're just mad about organized Christianity. Criticize other religions and they’ll haul you before a human rights tribunal. I tremble slightly to type those words.

Friends among the faithful, it's not the nonbelievers you should worry about. They just think you’re wrong. It's the devout of certain other religions and denominations that should concern you. They think you're wrong and that you're going to Hell for it. Some of them even believe that they are retribution's earthly instruments.  And since even the largest single denomination can claim no more than a fifth of the world's population as even nominal adherents, it is undeniably the case that, regardless of what faith you profess, the majority of the world's population thinks you’re wrong, that you’re guilty of some degree of theological or liturgical malpractice, and indeed from countless thousands of temples, mosques, and churches there emerges an even stronger claim from millions of truly devout believers.  They know in their hearts that you are not just wrong, but are wicked, sinful, and destined to spend eternity in damnation.

 So I'll see you there. 

Remembrance

The brouhaha about white poppies is back and boring again, this year exacerbated by a seething campaign of fake indignation mounted by the herd of hacks at Canada’s worst newspaper. Well, it gives them something to do in the brief period before they begin to seethe with fake indignation about retailers who say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” and all that portends for the imminent collapse of civilization. This year, Ottawa’s Rideau Institute produced something like 2,500 white poppies versus the Legion’s 18 million red ones and yet to read the populist piffle in the Toronto Sun (and its various unwilling progeny) is to get the impression that this insidious commie plot, well, portends the imminent collapse of civilization. Can’t make a living as an ideologue if you don’t have a crisis.

More and more each year I find myself discomforted by Remembrance Day, and especially by the efforts of some organizations to impose a singular interpretation on the memory of the wars and how we should feel about them.  As an historian of the home front, I find the most remarkable thing about Canadian society in wartime to be the disjuncture between propaganda that stressed unanimity and common purpose and the actuality of what went on. Political, social, and economic debates were not set aside for the common good in wartime: they intensified as virtually every group with an axe to grind surged forth to argue that their cause had greater urgency than ever before. Propaganda, persecution, and misty-eyed patriotism tended to to paper over the unpleasantness (and this time of year it still does), but the fact is that some of the most divisive social and political debates in this country’s history occurred during the world wars. The generation of Canadians that fought them did not agree about why they were fighting, how they should fight, and what they wanted when peace resumed. And so it is positively incredible that some groups seem desperate to fix the meaning of remembrance after the fact, as if we could find consensus where wartime generations could not.

On Monday, though, we will hear about how the generation that fought the world wars fought “for us” and “for our freedoms.” But did they? Fight for us? Fight for our freedoms?  Surely they fought for their world, and if they fought for freedom at all it was almost certainly not for our conception of freedom. We may grow misty eyed over the grave of a young man, cut down in his prime in 1918, but reflect that, were he typical of his generation, he would hold attitudes on matters of (for starters) gender, race, and sexuality that many of us would consider positively repugnant and indeed totalitarian today. What would a typical soldier, killed at Amiens, having died without ever having heard the radio or seen a colour photograph, think of the world a century a later? Think of our secular, smoke-free, multicultural, Canada? Think of women in Parliament, a black man as President of the United States, of same-sex and interracial couples, Breaking Bad, Twilight, and hip hop?  Even the idea of a fully independent Canada might very well repulse him.

An eminent colleague of mine believes that, on November 11th itself, such questions of politics and history should go by the wayside and instead the day should be dedicated to the simple act of remembrance of those who fell. But what does this mean? Remember who? Remember what? And how? The act of “remembrance” – and in the context of Remembrance Day that almost always means "veneration" – is not simple. Consider even the question of "who": am I just remembering Canadians? And what does that even mean, prior to 1947? A great many of the 65,000 “Canadians” killed in the First World War weren’t born here, and probably didn’t think of themselves as Canadians at all. What about those who fought badly, were cowardly, or who even betrayed their comrades? And am I remembering our allies, too? The French? The British? The Americans? All their wars? Even the cruel and stupid ones? Even the Red Army, which brutalized its way across Eastern Europe, the spearhead of a totalitarian state whose cumulative death toll exceeded Hitler’s?  And am I remembering the enemy fallen, too – remembering those who fought against  “our freedoms”? Tread carefully here.

Consider, if you will, the rifleman in the infamous photograph above, about to gun down a woman and her infant child and then, presumably, the others, huddled defenceless, terrified, and weeping, perhaps begging for their lives. Very probably he was killed or maimed in subsequent fighting on the Eastern Front. Should I “remember” him tomorrow, merely because he wore a uniform and fought for a cause he believed in, even though that cause was objectively evil? Even though the success of that cause would have spelled the end of European civilization as we know it? Is his uniform some sort of totem that grants him moral absolution, regardless of his actions or the cause in which he served?  I find the notion that it does positively fascistic – a sign that no small part of his ideological worldview has, in fact, not merely survived eradication, but actually emerged victorious from the war. I know some people reading this will disagree.

But that's my whole point. I object. I object, I object, I object. I object to the idea that there is single, simple meaning to “remembrance” – that there is a correct way to remember the wars that has been passed down to us from the generation that fought them. Above all I object to the idea that the worldview of the dead – even assuming that a unitary worldview belonging to the past generations could be located – must somehow determine our own. We impart meaning on the act of remembrance, we write history for our own purposes and for the benefit of our own society.

So there I will be, tomorrow,  with a red poppy on my lapel and a white one in my heart, unsure about what to think of any of it. And perhaps that’s the real reason why I’m there – because of that uncertainty. Because if the liberal democracies succeeded in accomplishing anything in the world wars, it was in defending at least one part of the world from consensus. 

Violence

A true story. On the 24th of November, 1326, four horses entered the marketplace at Hereford, England, dragging behind them Hugh Despenser the Younger, recently convicted of treason, while the Queen, Isabella, and the assembled crowd of courtiers and commoners hooted and jeered. Already wearing a crown of nettles and disfigured by crude tattoos of verses concerning matters of retribution from the Old Testament, Despenser was stripped naked and “half-hanged” — that is, hoisted by a noose until semi-conscious — at which point they cut his genitals off. This was considered very fitting by all assembled since Despenser was known to have been the lover of the King, Edward II (himself to die the following year by means of a red-hot “trumpet” thrust into his anus, according to at least some accounts.) 

The writer Alison Weir recounts that Despenser then emitted a “ghastly, inhuman howl”, but his punishment was very far from over. Weir then picks up the account of a contemporary chronicler who wrote, “Then his belly was split open” – this while he remained conscious — “and his heart and entrials cut out...when the other parts of his body had been disposed of, Sir Hugh’s head was cut off and sent to London. His body was then hewn into quarters, which were sent to the four next largest cities in England.” You can see the event depicted, above. I bet nobody accused Isabella of being soft on crime.

Despenser was no saint. Weir speculates he may have raped the Queen. Certainly he had tried to bribe the French into killing her, as she was herself plotting against the King. All this is part of the point I'm trying to make, so bear with me.

Grisly though it was, Despenser's execution was kid’s stuff by Medieval standards. Consider, if you will, the words of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas who recounted that Spanish conquistadors in the New World would “hang 13 natives at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the 12 Apostles.  Straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive.  They took babies from their mothers’ breasts, grabbing them by their feet and smashing them against rocks.  They would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and threw others to the dogs and thus were torn to pieces.”

Well, that’s (late) Medieval justice for you, a fact that Shakespeare was very much aware of when he had his hero Henry lay the following threat onto the governor of the French town of Harfleur in his great play Henry V.

    Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
    Take pity of your town and of your people,
    Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
    Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
    O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
    Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
    If not, why, in a moment look to see
    The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
    Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
    Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
    And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
    Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
    Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
    Do break the clouds

It’s Shakespeare, yes, but historically accurate: Henry really did make a threat like this and the actual execution of such threats was commonplace throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, the people of innumerable towns and cities have suffered similar fates from ancient times through to Nagasaki and beyond.  But this particular passage was excised in the 1944 Olivier film version: it wouldn’t do in 1944 to have a Shakespearean hero employing Gestapo methods against England's enemies even though at that very moment, the planes of Bomber Command were burning German cities and the people in them to the ground, night after night.

And what do all these people have in common? These crowds who cheered for the drawing and quartering of a homosexual? The medieval kings who ordered their men remorselessly to rape and murder their way through towns and villages? The conquistadors who actually did spit naked infants upon pikes?  Well, for one thing, they were all Christians, devout believers of utterly unshakable convictions. And, why not, really? In the Old Testament, Mr. Tough-on-Crime himself orders all manner of massacres and whatnot.  Yahweh is not merely vengeful and jealous but is also fiendishly diabolical in the manner of a James Bond villain. In 2 Kings 2, verses 23-24, He sends a couple of “she bears” to rip apart forty-two children for making fun of Elijah’s baldness. Do not mess with this cat. Seriously.

Am I saying that religion is the problem, that it “poisons everything” as a recent book put it? Certainly not. The claim that “religion poisons everything” is an empirical one, and until such time as we have studied religion in relation to, well, everything, we can’t possibly reach that conclusion. And there is, moreover, the undeniable fact that, in absolute terms, the secular (and in some cases aggressively irreligious) dictatorships of the 20th century: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, killed perhaps 100 million people between them. Indeed, Stalin, the foremost mass murderer in history, studied for the priesthood for only about four or five years so.

Here’s the catch, though. In absolute terms, the 20th century was undeniably the most violent in history. But there were also a lot more people to kill, and I am very far from convinced that, in relative terms, the 20th century was necessarily more violent than any of a number of centuries that preceded it.  For Americans, the death rate from their Civil War, fought amongst themselves in the 1860s, was about six times greater than World War Two; a Frenchman was more likely to die in the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars than during the World Wars;  the average person living in early 16th century “Germany” during the Thirty Years War, was almost certainly more likely to die from violence than the average German living in the first half of the 20th century, and all these wars were fought amongst Christians. We could go on and on. Need I even begin to enumerate the catastrophic death toll of the Atlantic Slave trade?

Anyone who studies military history long enough eventually reaches the conclusion that there is basically nothing that people won’t do to one another. There is no act of betrayal or violence or cruelty so profane that people will not do it to their fellows in order to impose their will, and every human religion, doctrine, or philosophy can be and has been utilized to sanctify acts of unfathomable cruelty. But history also shows that people are often selfless, will sacrifice themselves for one another, and will die to defend the lives of otherwise defenseless people who they have never met and from whom they can earn no reward. As historians, we need to devote greater efforts to understanding what motivates actions such as these, in addition to understanding the everyday kindnesses, of which there are a multitude, that go unrecorded and unnoticed in the annals of history.

Rhinoceroses

A funny thing: about three years ago I arrived at work to discover that somebody had put a rhinoceros in my classroom. Nobody told me it was going to be there. I didn’t ask for it, either. I just showed up one day and there it was. It’s an enormously disruptive beast, and I spend a lot of time trying to cajole it into a corner. Believe me, I’ve complained. But whenever I do, I get told, “Well, Broad. Get with the times. We all have rhinoceroses in the classroom now. Adjust your teaching style. Deal with it. Work it into your lectures.”  Some say the problem is me.  “Maybe if you were more interesting, students would pay less attention to the rhinoceros.”  Relax. Deal with it. Adapt. Make the flying leap into Rhinoceros Age.

Actually, none of that happened. Instead, somebody decided it would be a great idea to install wireless Internet instead. Now half of the two-thirds of the students who show up for my lectures have something else to do while I’m trying to talk to them. Is that lecture about the Holocaust getting you down? Never fear – here’s a video of a panda bear sneezing. Update your Facebook status. Multiplayer Call of Duty awaits.

Well, we all used to fade out sometimes, didn’t we? I recall doodling and making to-do lists the odd time, and fighting to remain conscious against the sonorous drone of a handful of sonorous droners. But that’s not really the point. Good lecturers can compete with everyday classroom distractions. I personally can blow the student paper or an idle game of hangman out of the water, any day of the week. What I can’t do is compete with Youtube, Facebook, and Call of Duty. If I could do that, I’d create a website called grahambroad.com, upload my lecturers, and be a multi-billionaire by the end of the year. They’d make a movie about me, with George Clooney in the starring role. We’ll call it The Asocial Network. But I can’t compete with those things, and for a simple reason: I’m not in the entertainment industry.

A few weeks ago, I had a “eureka” moment while a student was giving a presentation. I should haul out my laptop and phone and start surfing the web and texting while this student is talking, I thought. And then, when the student appeals his grade on the grounds that I wasn’t paying attention, I’ll tell the Powers That Be, “Well - that student should have just incorporated my web surfing and texting into his presentation.”  Nonsense, isn’t it? And yet another example of the double standard (or perhaps lack of standards): we profess to be preparing our students for their professional lives, but we permit them to behave in ways that would be considered highly unprofessional if we were to do it.

Oh, puh-leeze, I can heard the digerati saying. This discussion is so 2007. This generation of students “lives on the Internet” and they communicate by texting. You can’t ask them to stop. 

Oh, yes we can.  Can we all say it together, like at an Obama rally? Yes. We. Can. We ask students to do things they don’t want to do all the time, like write essays, take tests, and read books. Or does anyone think that, if it weren’t for university, they’d be quizzing each other on Plato’s Republic and writing papers about it?

Okay, I admit it. I’m getting on. I blinked and suddenly I was middle-aged fogey. “That lecture was sick!” one of my students said after class a few weeks back. Only later did I learn that “sick” means “good.” And I was just getting used to “bad” being “good.” Now it turns out its bad again.

So let me put the question another way. What have we wrought? PowerPoint. WebCT. E-mail that effectively renders our office door open 24/7. Wired classrooms. Digital databases. WikiLearning. Educational podcasts. Flat-panel displays mounted on nearly every square inch of empty wall space. Tweeting to students, sometimes from the front of the lecture hall. Clickers. And for all that, for all those billions of dollars and millions of labour hours expended, do we have so much as a tiny, tattered, threadbare shred of evidence that our students are smarter than they used to be? Are their essays better researched or written? Are their exams more accurate? Are they more literate? More articulate? Better able to critically assess what they read and learn? And if they are not — and I have searched the pedagogical literature in vain for evidence that they are — then why is the rhinoceros in my classroom?

Christmas

Last Christmas, I wrote a long column in which I objected most strenuously to the whole season. I consider it my best and most important blog post to date, and I made several reasoned arguments against the Christmas season, the foremost of which is that it sucks and I hate it. At the mall this week, however, I was dismayed to discover that my objections have gone entirely unheeded. Unaccountably, Christmas has returned. Come on, people! Is no one reading this thing?

If this blog has railed against one thing from the outset it has been against the hypocrisy of compulsory sentiment, and nothing so exemplifies this condition as a visit to the shopping mall or supermarket this time of year. The same dozen songs, endlessly repeated (however often they are re-recorded - I see that Bob Dylan has an album of Christmas standards out); the same message (be merry, or else); the same visage of the Merry Leader (Santa, not Jesus) and the incessant reminder that he is watching you and knows when you are sleeping and when you are awake. There's an Orwellian thought for you. I say again that in the seven weeks separating Halloween from Christmas we get a small taste of what it’s like to live in North Korea. Merry! Merry! Merry! Happy! Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Merry Leader is Watching You And Expects You to Conform.

And, please, don't get me started again about the clichéd holiday specials ("Next week, on a very special episode of Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons learn the true meaning of Christmas" etc.) and the vapid holiday films with trailer tag lines like, "This Christmas, the only things some families can stand more than being together, is being apart."

Come on now, Broad, you middle-aged grump. It's not all bad, is it? Well, I admit that I don't mind some Christmas music. Emile-Claire Barlow does a thumpingly great version of "Little Jack Frost" (if you have iTunes, download it now – you won't regret the 99 cents) and, of course, there's Dean Martin's effortless take on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." But these are songs about winter rather than Christmas per se. In my view, there's only one authentically good modern Christmas song: Fairytale of New York, by the seminal Irish band the Pogues and the late Kirsty MacColl. It’s about a drunk and a druggie and the sentiments of genuine affection (and contempt - she calls him a "scumbag" and a "maggot", he calls her an "old slut on junk") that they share at Christmastime. Brings a tear to these jaded eyes of mine.

I find myself in complete accord with my Christian friends who regard the season as too commercial. There's nothing new about this complaint – C.S. Lewis made it half a century ago and he wasn't the first. Indeed there is something cold and crass about the idea that we will express our affection for family and friends once per year through the mandatory purchase of commodities that are in most cases both unwanted and unneeded. In many families it's reached the point where people simply tell each other what to buy for them, which raises an obvious objection about cutting out the middle-man. I know, of course, that for many parents Christmas is a time of genuine joy — many children love it — but let us not forget, too, that for many parents of modest or little economic wherewithal Christmas is a time of genuine anxiety. Young children are consumer aware but not, generally, comprehending of their parents' economic circumstances. And let's not forget that some parents, too, are positively insane this time of year. Remember the Cabbage Patch Doll riots?

Judging the volume of e-mails I received (about a dozen), my blog last year was my most widely read ever. After it was published I was approached by a couple of activist-minded students who had seen it and who were preparing to petition my workplace over its overt displays of Christian Christmas symbols. This, they felt, created a "hostile" atmosphere for non-Christian students, faculty, and staff. Would I join them? My reply was "certainly not." Apart from the obvious objection that it's rather silly of anyone to voluntarily work at or to attend a Catholic institution and then act surprised to discover Christian symbols there, I explained to them that my affinity for the Grinch goes only so far. Like him, I find the season loud and crass. But we have an emphatic parting of ways over the fact that he believes that it's his right to stop other people from celebrating it, too.

The fact that the students ­— and they are by no means alone in this — could not differentiate between these two worlds-apart positions, is indicative of how badly our educational system often handles such things. Out of mistaken notions of "respect" for differing worldviews, many schools have decided that it's best if people don't express their differing worldviews at all. But respect, of all things, is a sentiment that cannot be made mandatory. It emerges, if it emerges at all, through a process of engagement — which must necessarily include argument and disputation among people who do not always agree. The efforts at this time of year to ban carols and lighted trees and harmless expressions such as "Merry Christmas" are not merely silly but insidious. They undermine rather than promote discussion between faiths and between people of faith and nonbelievers.

Orientation

A mentor of mine said recently that I was wrong when I told my students that the purpose of education was to get smarter. No, he said, the purpose of education is to get wiser. The difference, you ask? A smart person knows when he’s right; a wise one knows when to say it.

I raise the point because last week I received an intriguing invitation to address the incoming class of undergraduates during their September orientation. I'm going to do it, but I'm not sure what to say. Certainly not that I’ve always been mildly irritated by "O-Week" – the initiation of first year students to university life. Twenty years ago, I attended the first few events of my own and then headed for the hills. How I hated it. Everything about it: the binge drinking; the compulsory “fun” (two words that should never go together); the uniformity of, well, uniforms; the inane group cheers; the shabby slogans; the unimaginative activities; the inculcation of "school spirit" amongst students who have not yet had time to decide for themselves if their school is any good, struck me then and strikes me now as antithetical to one of the larger purposes of university education: to produce independent thinkers.

On my very first day, twenty years ago, a trio of third-year students, complete with painted faces and enormous excesses of personality, made me sing the national anthem – readers of this blog know my feelings about that song – before handing over $20 for my "mandatory frosh kit", which turned out to be a bag of flyers, pamphlets, and junk being freely distributed elsewhere. Well, hell. I left high school hoping to escape precisely that sort of nonsense and precisely those sorts of people, and there I was in the thick of it two months later.

Over the years, I’ve had a great many students, and even organizers of these events, tell me that they found none of it "fun" in the least. But try being the one who says, "Actually, I don’t want to paint my face and wear this t-shirt another day and chant this, well, rather insipid and offensive cheer. And my roommates are binge drinkers who won’t do dishes and think it’s funny not to flush the toilet. This isn’t quite what I was promised at the University Fair, where all the talk was about cultivating the mind and the human spirit."

A few years back, during "O-Week", members of my former faculty's "student fun team" scrawled "Social Science: the Biggest and Best Faculty!" in chalk on the sidewalk outside of our oppressively ugly faculty building. (Some wag respond by writing: "Would you like fries with that?" underneath.) Later, I saw students practicing a cheer on the same theme. But a good education in the social sciences should actually call such conclusions into question. A proper slogan might read: "Objective, long-term consideration of the available evidence leads to the highly tentative conclusion that for a significant portion of motivated undergraduates in the social sciences, their undergraduate experience is, on the whole, intellectually fulfilling. More longitudinal studies are required to determine whether or not social science degrees are of actual utility in the rapidly-reorienting job market in terms of both starting salary and lifetime earnings. " But try making that into a cheer.

Anyway, there I will be, during O-Week, and when the time comes I hope I'll have the wisdom to not say what I'd really like to say, which is that if you’ve come to university to learn to think for yourself, now is the time to start. In fact, consider O-Week your first test.

Twenty years. Did you catch that part, students? It was twenty years ago this month that I hopped on bike, rode up to the university, and chose my classes. English, History, Political Science, Philosophy, and Psychology (stupidly, I did not take French.) I remember all the profs. They seemed unfathomably old and learned to me, but I know now that two of them were ABDs, and a good deal younger than I am now. Twenty years. I can scarcely believe those words as I type them. And so I've decided that there is one thing I'm going to say for certain five weeks from today, and it's this:

"You’re seventeen or eighteen. I don’t mean to condescend, but it’s hard to appreciate at that age the rapidity of the passage of time. Twenty years ago this week I started university. The intervening years have passed so quickly I can hardly describe it. I still have projects, left over from high school, that I’ve been meaning to work on. For me, there have been good things and bad things in the past twenty years. I wouldn’t go back, even if I could, but I can tell you that I would like an extra twenty years before me. So my essential message to all of you is this: the greatest asset you possess is time. It is also the one asset that you have less of with every passing second. It is therefore urgent that you use your time well. If there's one thing that you derive from your education, I hope it's a better understanding of how to do that."

Time. Hear that ticking sound, students? It gets louder with every passing second.

Reform

This column will be of interest to history teachers only, and I don't think that many of them will like what I have to say. But I've been thinking about this for a decade now, and it's time. If it makes you feel better about me, take note: what I'm about to say is far, far less radical than a lot of what you'll read in most pedagogy journals that are available in your libraries.

If you have not yet read my columns entitled "Teaching", "Learning", and, especially, "Reflecting", or if you have forgotten them, you should read them before this one, as they form part of an extended argument about what I believe to be a much-needed curricular reform in my profession.

I contend that the manner in which history typically is taught to first and second year undergraduates, with its emphasis on "coverage" of the historical narrative, serves neither the purposes of imparting a sophisticated and lasting understanding of history, nor of fulfilling the loftier purposes of a liberal education. Those lofty purposes aren't discussed; the history is forgotten in short order. Such are the consequences of adhering to "coverage" - of demanding breadth over depth.

Most disciplines have survey courses, but in history they are considered the backbone of an undergraduate education – "Plato to NATO" courses, they are sometimes called. Surveys are designed, in theory, to provide students with a foundation upon which further, more specialized studies can be built. In my last three entries I argued that that the unavoidable tendencies towards superficiality in survey course coverage, combined with the well-documented inadequacies of our attention spans, of memory, and of our ability to apply lessons outside of their immediate curricular context, present serious queries against the standard justifications for why and how we teach history.

What, then, is the solution? The first step is to discard the whole notion of the survey with its emphasis on "coverage". Rather than trying to survey a whole field— which will in the case of all but the most unusual student lead to superficial understanding — we should reduce drastically the number of topics covered. A mentor of mine once joked that he had fifty lectures and fifty decades to cover, so it worked out well. I propose, instead, that we examine a very small number of topics in great depth rather than many in surface detail for the sake of doing so.

In American history this might involve, say, a careful, lengthy, multifaceted, and indeed interdisciplinary examination of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. Everything else would be left aside. In this way, weeks rather than an hour or two could be devoted to each topic. In Canadian history, it might involve the conquest of New France, Confederation, the First World War, and a thematic topic such the creation of a social welfare state or dominion-provincial relations. It needn't be those topics, of course: the point is to promote deep and lasting understanding of a few important issues, as a means of teaching the real lesson. The real lesson is not "the narrative" (this can be learned by anyone willing to a read a textbook.) The point is to teach students disciplinary methodology by exposing them to different approaches to a single subject, to encourage them to approach the subject in an interdisciplinary fashion, and, perhaps most critically, to offer them actual opportunities to apply what they have learned outside of the confines of the classroom.

At this point, I know I have lost many of you. You're wondering, "But what about all the other important stuff that they won't learn if I don't lecture about it?" My response is that they're not really learning it anyway, and I'm willing to bet that you saw ample evidence of this on your last set of final exams. I'm sure that, like most professors, you spend much of your time these days not sure whether or laugh or cry over exam answers such as, "the Emancipation Proclamation was Woodrow Wilton's idea to give women the right to vote." (Yes, I actually got this.)

While the emphasis on coverage will only produce a marginal and short-lasting understanding, an in-depth examination of a few topics could have an entirely different outcome. As Howard Gardner argues in The Disciplined Mind, "Only a rich, probing, and multifaceted investigation of significant topics, makes it reasonably likely that more sophisticated understandings will emerge." If "gaps" between the topics covered in depth really need to be filled — and in some cases they will be — they could be covered by the simple act of having students read from a good textbook. This, too, will produce a surface understanding, but it will be sufficient to support the immediate curricular needs , and the students will graduate from the class better equipped and, hopefully, more willing to explore those other topics in greater depth on their own. The purpose of an education, after all, should be to equip students to go on learning for their entire lives - not just to prepare them for the final exam.

Imagine history classes where we could say, "Next day, we're going to take an hour to discuss how differing historical perspectives on the New Deal might shed light on the Obama's administration's bailout plan" or "One of the stated goals of this institution is the building of moral character - let's go beyond a recitation of the mere facts of the bombing of Dresden, and spend some time assessing them in the light of moral philosophy. Get on your laptops. After the break, I want you to tell me what Utilitarianism is, and why it might be useful for this discussion."

Needless to say, the approach I am proposing will require us to reduce the number and length of lectures that we give in favour of other instructional approaches. This should not alarm us. We have not years, but decades, of research that has by now demonstrated quite conclusively that even well-designed and expertly delivered lectures are only about as good as solitary reading for conveying raw information and not much good at all for engaging higher-order thought processes. Study after study has proved conclusively that students need to be engaged actively in their own learning: at times, listening, but also and predominantly discussing, debating, reading, researching, writing about, and teaching the subject to themselves and others. Much more than lip service needs to devoted to these approaches.

The allegation will be made that I am saying that students have no responsibility for their own education, and people will protest that the old methods worked just fine for them. I'll leave aside the obvious observation about anecdotal evidence, and merely note that the approach that I am proposing hugely increases students' responsibility for their own education by reducing the emphasis on the professor as the fountain of all knowledge. But it also involves a proportional and somewhat intimidating increase in the responsibility of the professor. No longer a sage upon the stage, the professor becomes a fellow traveler, pointing the way ahead, as Shaw put it in another context, ahead of ourselves as well as of our students.