Meanwhile, back at those in higher education

Why were these college students so pig-ignorant (sorry human rights commissions) about what had been all over the Internet, our television and newspapers for a year?

[...]

Stan Persky: Last fall, in a college ethics class I was teaching, I was trying to make a perhaps obscure point about how the fundamental ethical question, “What should I do?” gradually but inevitably shades over into the question, “What should we do?” My would-be lesson for the day was how individual ethics is necessarily connected to political philosophy’s “we” questions, which is basically the question of, “How should we go about living together?” Since, at that moment, Canada was in the midst of a major debate about the country’s participation in the United Nations-authorized Afghanistan mission—and there were nightly lead stories on every TV station and on the front pages of every newspaper in the land—I innocently asked my students, “Why are we in Afghanistan?”, figuring that they would all have opinions on the subject.

The politer students looked up from their computer screens or turned off their cellphones or even pulled one earphone out of their iPod-connected ears. I was then treated to a display of typical Canadian politeness, one of our major national traits. The students knew we had troops fighting out there somewhere, but they politely claimed they didn’t know much about it. They knew it was all happening in some faraway Absurdistan, but weren’t exactly sure where it precisely was, although several of them politely offered to bring their recently-purchased Global Positioning System devices into play in order to locate it. When I asked, “Should we be in Afghanistan?”, the façade of politeness gave way to another national trait: they were simply flummoxed.

I worried. My worry went like this: if our best and brightest have only the foggiest notion of what we’re doing in Afghanistan, what do you suppose the national state of mind is on this question?...

I doubt most university students would have done much better. As for the "national state of mind", I would respond "dismal". Not that our political and chattering classes themselves paid the slightest attention when our mission moved from Kabul to Kandahar in 2005/2006. Hell, there was the prospect of an election, and then the election itself, to concentrate minds wonderfully on important things. The new mission was (almost) totally ignored at the time.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at May 8, 2008 04:51 PM