Principal cancelled 'O Canada' in school

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Yes, but that would be a most unwelcome suggestion in the Gaza area.

I think they're too busy killing each other to notice anything.

When I was a kid, we sang all kinds of songs at school... There was a song for tidying up, a song for snack time, a song for nap time, and a song for saying goodbye. O Canada was just the song at the start of the day until I developed a concept of my country.
I suppose it's brainwashing, but wasn't that the idea of the education system in the first place? If you want to get rid of brainwashing in schools, look at lot further than a 45-second piece of music. In any school I've ever been in, students are welcome to sit out the national anthem if they had any reason not to participate - no big deal.

As for the "piece of dirt" some people are calling my country, I would in fact kill and die for it. It is my home and it provides me and my family with the freedom to live our lives safely and as we see fit.

Go spend a year in Sierra Leone and we'll see if you'd die for a place like Canada after that.

when it comes to dying for your country i believe there's no reason for it, you should never loose your life or take a life just for a piece of dirt or for who owns that dirt, only for the people who live there who are worth fighting for.

if i ever went to war it'd be to protect those i loved, not because the government need more bodies on the battle field.

Without that piece of dirt to live and grow food on, you and your loved ones WOULD die.
It is for that reason I say my country is worth fighting for.

Second that.

my point was that a piece of dirt is simply a piece of dirt, you shouldn't have any feeling about the soil unless there's something getting some use out of it. you could also always live in a boat and fish for your food, no dirt needed there

If you had studied Jean Piaget's research, you would know that this is irrelevant. Cognitive development is not about memorizing facts, it is about how those facts are organized in the mind, and about whether or not you can do math in your head with them (= be operational for certain concepts).

I have emailed the New Brunswick ministry of education (or department of education, or whatever it's called), cited the research study I cited above, and asked them to ask any developmental psychologist they liked, if they wanted clarification.

My bad for citing good scientific research and expecting to be taken seriously. Obviously facts have nothing to do with anything - sure sign of a brainwashed population. It doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with war, just with not being allowed to question the status quo.

Argggh! They need to make basic developmental psychology compulsory in high school, so that when scientists cite research, people actually have a clue what the subject is.

Another clarification topic

In the scheme of things, culture is relevant. Even Jean knew that is is impossible to study children in a pristine environment where a variable such as culture will not affect the experiment's outcome. Kids are not lab rats.

And yes, I have read of Jean Piaget and especially his book The Child's Conception of the World. Teaching a child of his/her country's national anthem is cultural, and to refuse to teach it is cultural also. It is also a political decision. Reinstating O Canada in that New Brunswick school was also political, and I believe it is a correct decision. It was an adult (who passed through all of Jean's schema stages) who decided that the anthem was to be omitted, and it took another adult to complain and after two years, to have it reinstated. If a child was to refuse to sing it, I do not think that child would be punished. Children do need to learn to respect the environment they are in. There are rules which do not often make sense, and if this is the case, then perhaps the children could lobby or protest in a reasonable manner (appropriate for their age) to argue that the anthem has no place in Ontario schools. Good introduction to early politics and the power of protest. Scrunching up one's nose and behaving in a rowdy manner (even for a child) will not change things.

If this classroom had problems with discipline during morning exercises, this should have been the issue to be rectified, not the singing of our country's anthem.

By the way, in all my three kids' sex education courses there was a component about developmental stages, and this helped my teens understand in a group setting what they were going through and it gave them an opportunity to discuss changes in their thinking, emotional development, intellectual abilities and, of course physical growth.

They still did the Pledge of Allegiance when I was in high school, and also allowed a moment of silence (presumably for non-monotheists).

My point is that they're not old enough to do this. If they were operational for the concept, they could argue it one way or the other. But they're not. So it's all over their heads, creating the opportunity to get the wrong ideas. As Piaget so often saw in his research (that's what started his research - seeing children consistently get the wrong ideas at particular ages).

And it is not enough to be an adult who has gone through the stages - you really need to study them to know they're there. People don't start remembering their cognitive errors until early adolescence (very rare freaks excepted). So they don't know they got it wrong before, because their brains weren't sophisticated enough to grasp that until early adolescence.

I feel mixed on this issue. On one hand, I like English things better than Canadian things. On the other hand, I like the Canadian national sport of hockey. I'm sure that the boys and girls at that school used to love singing O Canada at school, because it reminded them of both Canada and hockey. A pleasure that had been taken away from them. Why do you think that people move to Canada? The lyrics in O Canada explain their main reason.