What Role Should Remembrance Play in Schools?

Remembrance education must and will continue to evolve and change as time gradually erodes away the living memory of past wars. With the passing of veterans of the First World War, and even the passing of the vast majority of civilians who lived through that conflict nearly a century ago, what is it that we in the present are supposed to remember about a war that is not part of our living experience? Remembrance Day began as a veteran’s event to recognize, recall and honour the deaths of comrades. The notion of brothers-in-arms is, for many Canadians alive today, outside of our personal life experiences. Necessarily and obviously, the nature of veterans’ remembrance is never going to be the same as our own.  That differences exist in the nature of remembrance is key to appreciating the possibilities for teaching and learning about our national stories, our identifications as Canadians, our values, ideals and commitments as a national community, and how are understandings of the past are at play in our perceptions of the present, and influence our possible futures. As teachers we have a responsibility to unpack, explore, and complicate remembrance for our students, working with them to better understand what it is to engage in remembrance as a purposeful annual and everyday practice.

Our collective memory of war inhabits public spaces such as cenotaphs, memorial monuments and plaques, building names, places and road names. Yet, how does the ubiquity of memorials in the day-to-day life of Canadians impact our relationships with the stories and sacrifices they commemorate? How often do we encounter these memorials without giving much if any thought to why they were erected and dedicated in the first place? While we present the past to students everyday in history and social studies classes, why is the past that is present with us so absent from the living of our lives?

Remembrance is a complex and multifaceted concept that offers opportunities for teachers and students to engage in purposeful research and conversation to help them to ask and respond to powerful and important questions. Remembrance curricula should be built around teachers and students working together to develop insights and understandings about national identifications, the nature of nation states, the role national narrative in shaping national identities and mythologies and the struggles of nation states, kingdoms, empires and other politically coherent entities to secure their geo-political, economic, and religious interests through war.  Further, but not less importantly, students and teachers need to give attention to remembrance as a dynamic concept that evolves with and in relation to the temporal, spatial and social distance each of us experiences in relation to war. Additionally, remembrance curriculum and pedagogy needs to attend to all of the domains of war from the front to the rear and all the way home.

Unquestionably, much attention in history education is focused on the battlefield and how effective strategies, tactics and weapons were at particular moments of a conflict, that we, as teachers and students of the past lose sight of both the bigger picture and the many smaller pictures of other domains of war. As a social studies teacher, I found it disturbing how much some students seemed to enjoy content that explored the technologies of killing people. Yet, studying the efficacy and efficiency of weapons of should be used open up the exploration of the ethics of human conflict, the demonization and dehumanization of others, and inquiry into the economic, political and social power that drives weapons research and development and the belligerency of nation states. But the study of sharp end of war must not preclude the exploration of the spaces and places where war reaches into non-military lives, too.

For most students in schools in Canada, war and military conflicts are abstract and distant. For those students who have experienced war, they recognize that war reaches into every domain of life, and most modern wars are total wars. Recent conflicts have not put our national economy on a war footing. A large majority of Canadians have never experienced rationing or the possibility of conscription.  The war on terror seems a lot like peacetime, albeit we take our shoes off at the airport more than we used to in the 90s, and this is the new normal. How does the absence of experiences of the violence of military conflict in our own lives impact our individual and collective capacities to engage in remembrance of war? How can we make the memory of war meaningful to students who have no memory or war? In what ways is the act of remembrance about peace?

Much attention in the media about Remembrance Day education focuses on the nature of encounters students have with veterans, and the public discourse gives a lot of attention to experiential learning opportunities as the focus of remembrance pedagogy. Witness accounts can be powerful in classrooms, but they have limited sticking power in students’ day-to-day lives. Students need a lot of guidance to help them contextualize the experiences of veterans and the experiences of others who lived through war, to help students situate such knowledge in relation to their lives. Remembrance Day and everyday acts of remembrance need to be more than ritual, more than custom, and more than tradition. It has to inhabit us and be at play in our learning, our thinking, and the way we live our lives, everyday.