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Article from the Edmonton Sun
By Ted Byfield
Sunday Comment section, pg. 44
March 9, 2003

How did Bruce not learn this in school?

The Canadian educational establishment, which spends zillions every year surveying students en mass, should go in for more individual case studies. It could begin with the case of Edmontonian Bruce McRae.

Bruce, age 24, has a wisp of a chin beard, and is described in media reports as “a former student politician.” He made it into the news last week as one of the peace activists now streaming out of Iraq where they had offered themselves as “human shields” to prevent war.

Interviewed in Amman on his way home to Canada, he conceded that things had not turned out as expected for himself and his fellow “shields”. They had hoped to station themselves in schools and hospitals to deter the Americans from bombing such places.

However, the Iraqi government had a better idea. It ordered them to locate themselves at power plants, oil refineries, food supply depots and other such facilities.

There would be no point staying in schools, said the Iraqis, because the schools would be closed, and the Americans wouldn’t attack hospitals anyway.

Which in itself is instructive, since it means the Iraqi government has higher expectations of the American military than do the peace activists.

In any event, said McRae, he and his colleagues discovered that the Iraqis were constantly interviewing them on television to let them express their views on the United States.

It gradually occurred to them, he said, that they were being “used” for propaganda purposes.

Something else was disturbing. When he saw the western news reporters, equipped with bullet proof vests satellite phones and chemical weapons suits, it alarmed him.

He realized it was dangerous there, that he might get hurt, even killed. Frankly they hadn’t expected anything like this. So he and the others headed out.

Interviews with his fellow activists were similar. “They all shared one trait,” reported the London Telegraph. It was “naiveté”.

This should be of interest to educators. According to news reports, McRae graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in political science. Meaning, he made it all the way through university without discovering: (a) that a totalitarian regime cannot be dissuaded from a chosen course of action by anything other than superior force or the meaningful threat of wing it, (b) that a regime with a history of deliberate military aggression against its neighbors will repeat such aggression at every possible opportunity, (c) that such regimes manipulate well-meaning, gullible people to their own ends and (d) that yes, people do get killed in wars.

The apparent effect of this man’s education has been to wholly immerse him in a fantasy world where there are no really bad people (apart of course from the Americans), where no war ever needs be fought, where every international controversy can be settled by goodwill and rational negotiation and where things like “human shields” can affect military conduct.

In short it is a world where bad things never need happen, where all people are at the core really nice and where good intentions and above all “tolerance” will solve all problems.

This is not the world that we live in, nor ever have lived in, and it is emphatically not the one that emerges from human history. So how did poor Bruce McRae manage to get through some 16 years of education without discovering this? Why did he have to go all the way to Baghdad to find this out? Sounds like something out of the Arabian Nights.

The other thing our case study might want to learn is whether McRae is indeed what our educators have been seeking to produce all along. Would they regard him as educational triumph, a superb end product of all their efforts?

Are they trying to produce a whole generation of Bruce McRaes? Is secluding people from the patently obvious, producing a kind of bovine gullibility and something close to historical ignorance their ultimate objective?

To which the educator might reply: In a nuclear age, how else will we prevent total human destruction? On that assumption, he sets McRae as his ideal. But what of a divided world? What if educators in some nations are zea1ously producing Bruce McRaes while others are just as zealously producing Saddam Husseins? Bruce’s doom would be certain.

One wonders: Has the modern educator considered this?

Interviewed in Amman on his way home to Canada, he conceded that things had not turned out as expected for himself and his fellow “shields”. They had hoped to station themselves in schools and hospitals to deter the Americans from bombing such places.

However, the Iraqi government had a better idea. It ordered them to locate themselves at power plants, oil refineries, food supply depots and other such facilities.

There would be no point staying in schools, said the Iraqis, because the schools would be closed, and the Americans wouldn’t attack hospitals anyway.

Which in itself is instructive, since it means the Iraqi government has higher expectations of the American military than do the peace activists.

neoolong wrote:I don't think that this has much to do with education. The man's just an idiot.

Article from the Edmonton Sun
However, the Iraqi government had a better idea. It ordered them to locate themselves at power plants, oil refineries, food supply depots and other such facilities.

There would be no point staying in schools, said the Iraqis, because the schools would be closed, and the Americans wouldn’t attack hospitals anyway.

This should be of interest to educators. According to news reports, McRae graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in political science. Meaning, he made it all the way through university without discovering: (a) that a totalitarian regime cannot be dissuaded from a chosen course of action by anything other than superior force or the meaningful threat of wing it, (b) that a regime with a history of deliberate military aggression against its neighbors will repeat such aggression at every possible opportunity, (c) that such regimes manipulate well-meaning, gullible people to their own ends and (d) that yes, people do get killed in wars.