Re: “Irresponsible” by Adam Bégin – September 15
Dear Editor:
I am responding to the article about the removal of the Confederate statues in the USA.
The Confederate statues should not be removed. They are an important lesson from the past to the present. While Mr. Bégin is correct in saying that we can’t “cherry-pick the words of great people”, we still can learn from them. We must remember our history so we can make sure that it never happens again. As George Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
America is not the only country smothering offensive history. So is Canada. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario is pushing to remove Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from Waterloo schools because of his discrimination against indigenous peoples. I don’t agree with Macdonald, but his actions reflected the culture of his time. But we still must learn!
The teachers can’t sanitize history, They must teach the truth so we grow from our past mistakes. The truth involves both the good and bad parts of history. If we don’t know our past, we can’t know our present and we can’t know where we are going.
Caleb Hoeksema