Former American First Lady Eleanor Roosvelt, writing in her famous My Day column on this date in 1957, lamented the apparent lack of knowledge about Canada revealed by a survey of American high school students.
“It would seem important that our young people coming out of school now should have studied the geography of the world,” she wrote. “Geography and history go hand in hand. We cannot really understand the history of the world without knowing its geography, and so a survey was taken of more than 2,000 high-school students in four states. The questions were compiled by Professor Herbert K. Gross of Concordia Teachers College, River Forest, Ill.
The average of correct responses was 39 percent. The questions that the average youngster failed on were, to me, interesting.
For instance, only 12 percent knew that Ottawa is the capital of Canada. This seems to me almost incredible, since over and over again they must have heard in their history classes that it is a remarkable thing that we have an unfortified line between the U.S. and Canada and that we have been at peace with each other for more than 100 years.
It would almost seem impossible to learn that the capital of the United States is Washington, D.C., and at the same time not learn that Ottawa is the capital of Canada.”
Wise words.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.