Does Ottawa Matter?

“What is the capital of Canada?” This seemingly innocuous question has been at the center of a veritable firestorm ever since The Crimson released a video of interviews with several Harvard students, none of whom were able to name the capital city Ottawa—except for the one who turned out to be Canadian. People’s visceral reaction was one of shock and contempt, confirmed by the panoply of websites and newspapers that covered the story—from Yahoo sporting a headline on its front page (garnering 8,204 comments at the time of writing) to coverage by the Huffington Post and the Toronto Sun and the vitriolic comments on these news articles and the video. But rather than accepting our emotional reaction to the video, it is necessary, to delve deeper and analyze what the underlying issues actually are.
First off, it is important to note that this video was released to the public devoid of any form of context. How many people were asked the question? What percentage answered correctly? How did The Crimson team choose the answers they portrayed on the final video? By deliberately omitting these details, the video becomes a willful and dishonest misrepresentation of what could be a very different situation at the College. This irresponsible reporting is surprising from an organization that is nearly a hundred and fifty years old and that has counted some of the country’s most feted journalists on its editorial board.
However, let us assume for a moment that the situation is as The Crimson portrays it to be—the vast majority of students at Harvard do not know what the capital of Canada is. The most common objection to the ostensible ignorance of the students in the video is that somehow, there exists a greater burden of geographical awareness for Harvard students. This is both untrue and unfair. While Harvard is a selective institution, its chosen criteria for selection are diverse—academic excellence, extracurricular achievements, leadership and so on. As a student on a Harvard Facebook group was quick to point out, a “world trivia supplement” is not among them. The fact that these 17- and 18-year-olds do not know (or were unable to recall) the capital of Canada does not take away from their significant achievements—one of the young men in the video, for instance, is a champion figure skater who has competed at national and international championships. Thus, while students at Harvard might individually have qualities that differentiate them from the average high school graduate, these qualities are diverse and multidimensional and it is unjust to pass judgment based on an answer to this single question.
This is not to detract from the importance of general knowledge. It is absolutely pivotal to have an understanding of countries and cultures different to ours; that is what helps break down barriers and help cultivate peaceful societies. If more Americans took an effort to understand the tenets of Islam, for instance, they would be far less likely to tar all Muslims with the broad brush of being violent extremists. Learning about other countries also gives us perspective about our own issues and problems and the responsibility we owe to our brothers and sisters in other countries by virtue of belonging to a common humanity. Perhaps more tangibly, an understanding of international affairs and basic geography makes us more educated citizens, capable of making rational choices when participating in the democratic process—if we have given our army the legitimacy to fight a war in our name, it is incumbent upon us (at the very least) to spot the country that we are waging war in on a map.
But the importance of knowing about the world around us cuts through university borders. The problem in assuming that a significant majority of Harvard students don’t know what capital of Canada is doesn’t lie in the fact that they are from Harvard, it lies in the fact that this could be indicative of a more widespread culture of willful ignorance of countries different to our own. When Americans (or, for that matter, people of any country in the world) are unable to name the capital of Canada, it is not okay to brush it away by claiming that it’s a trivial detail that one can look up on a smartphone. If we do not know a detail as commonplace as our neighboring country’s capital, do we know what our political relations with it are? Do we know how to weigh the economic promises our politicians make in the next elections with regard to international trade? If this video turns out to be symptomatic of a wider plague, then it is necessary to take a serious look at the state of our educational systems and the information we receive from the media. One thing, however, is clear— while it is very important to discuss the implications of this video, the current discourse is unnecessarily vitriolic and unfairly directed.