Why is it so important to learn about Canada’s involvement in World War II?

This was the driving question for our most recent Humanities project, Save Juno Beach. Our goal was to answer this through the means of a formal essay.

To kick off this project, we watched the first scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan and talked about the importance of the storming of the beaches of Normandy (D-Day). This was a very important event for WWII and for Canada as Canada played a big role in the victory.

At the end of last year for our Dulce et Decorum Est project, we explored World War I. We picked up right where we left off and started by learning about the fallout of WWI and the start of the Great Depression. We then learned all about WWII. We learned about the causes, the victories, the losses, and the advancements that were made. We focused heavily on Canada’s perspective of the war.

After learning loads about WWII, we learned about defining historical significance. If something is historically significant, then that event, person, or thing should be remembered. Our goal for this assignment was to determine the historical significance of WWII. Click here to see what I wrote.

Now that we had learned all about World War II, we could move on to our final essays which answered the driving question. It took a lot of work, but my essay turned out great. I created an outline, did lots of research, and went through multiple revisions. I had as many people as I could critique my essay to find any errors or flaws. The final essay that I created does a great job of answering the driving question with lots of evidence and reasoning to back up my claims.

Click here to read my final essay.

Every November 11th in Canada, we take the time to remember the millions of Canadians who sacrificed their lives during World War II. As part of this project, we created a display in the hallway at our school. We each wrote a couple sentences to answer the driving question. This is what I wrote as the summary to my answer to the driving question:

It is important to learn about World War II so that we can learn about how times of desperation can lead to the wrong people receiving unimaginable power. If we forget about this, something similar is bound to happen again.