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Since when did cultural products become "by-products"? When beer became a by-product at Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Molson, Labatt and Miller, beer culture suffered a huge setback. The very word "by-product" implies a product, a centre, elsewhere. Critics of common culture often refer to a canon that I've never seen or had to study -- some homegenous list of books by the dreaded white men, or worse, "white middle-class men" (worse yet again, apparently, if men are dead). In other words, they set up a straw man -- canonical tyranny -- which doesn't exist. 1. How can we expect Canada to survive or thrive (indeed, how can we expect any polity to survive or thrive) without some common culture? My idea of citizenship includes active political participation by the broadest range of people. Participation requires common reference points, to name but two: a legal framework, and some aspects of culture, including, but not limited to, aspects of language, mythology, history, and the arts. The question -- especially in Canada -- is not do we want canonical tyranny on the one hand or anarchy on the other, the question is how do we build on the tenuous common culture that we have? The same question persists at every level: if Canada breaks up, the same question will face Quebec, and/or the Cree in the north of Quebec, and/or people in What Used to be the Rest of Canada . In other words it's not good enough to say that the notion of common culture is problematic. Of course it is. Let's role up our sleeves and discuss in good will what the common cultures of our various communities are and might be. Incidentally, I think Anthony's fear that a Zairian immigrant might be forced to study In Flander's Fields is misplaced. All the immigrants I know crave Canadian culture and are the most enthusistic of Canadians. Attend a citizenship court sometime to observe some extraordinary patriotism (sorry if patriotism is a dirty word). A family of Chilean immigrants I know think that Canada is far too hung up about the sensitivities of its immigrants. "This is a great country! Celebrate it! I want to be a Canadian and I want my two kids to be super Canadians" my friend Gustavo says. 2. Part of my original Globe letter was motivated by the fact that neither of my kids, in grades nine and grade five, had ever been asked by a teacher to memorize a poem. I guess when I was young, I never fell on my knees in gratitude for having to memorize another poem, but as an adult, I'm glad that I was required to. I still remember much of the poetry that I memorized, and on purely aesthetic grounds alone, I think memorization can help people appreciate meter and cadence and diction and resonance. I think it helps you to understand a poem at a deeper level, and I think it helps us appreciate the oral side of poetry. I'm not sure if any one saw the replies to my letter, but virutally all of them were from people saying how important the memorization of poetry had been to their subsequent intellect and appreciation of literature. My real interest here is not narrowly on the memorization of poetry, but on a larger subject. I believe that "enabling" pedagogy has gone far too far in our schools. To generalize: too many teachers believe that you don't need to "know that" anything; you just need to "know how" to look up something. I believe that studies of cognition show us that most people in most situations develop expertise not primarily (or superordinately) by learning how, by learning process, by learning metastrategy, but by mastering a huge domain of content. I don't want my kids to be able to find the capitals of the Canadian provinces in an atlas; I want them to know the capitals. I want them to know many facts, precepts, principles, names, elements, structures, etc. I would think that most people would agree that one purpose of school is to help students to know that something. The question then becomes: what somethings do we want students / citizens to know? Might some poetry be one of those somethings? 3. Anthony seems to be upset by being forced / required to do some things in primary and secondary school. What's wrong with being forced to learn something? I've been forced to learn lots of stuff, much of it useful, much of it pleasing but not useful, much of it not pleasing and not useful to date. I wasn't crazy about the valence table, but I'm sure glad I learned it. As Anthony says, there's a pedagogical question here. As one gets older, one gets more choice, or at least forms of choice. Which brings me back. If the syllabus in primary school is largely a matter not of student choice, but of parent / syllabus designer / citizen choice, then isn't it possibly useful for my kids to know some of the same literature that kids in, say, Nova Scotia know? If they don't have some common cultural rererence points, how are they going to discuss common problems as adults?