Teachers, Students and Pedagogy : Readings and Documents in the History of Canadian Education

by Bladwin, Douglas O. (NA)

• ISBN13: 9781552441008
• ISBN10: 1552441008
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-30
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

This new collection is an ideal sourcebook for courses in the history of education and social history and for the general reader interested in the history of education in Canada. It focuses on the historical and social contexts of education, the role and status of teachers and, above all, what actually went on in schools and classrooms.

Excerpts

INTRODUCTION

 

Formal education is one of the few aspects of life that virtually every Canadian has in common. Between the ages of approximately 5 and 16, we spend six hours a day, ten months a year, in a classroom. It is here that many youth (whom politicians and the general public declare to be our most precious resource) have significant defining life experiences. Yet, Canada’s educational system is often in turmoil. Teachers’ strikes, work-to-rule, low achievement results, funding cuts, back-to-work legislation, accountability, and standardized testing are everyday news. As public confidence in our educational system wanes, Canadians wonder what happened and what needs to be done. Although this collection does not claim to provide the “solution,” it offers an historical perspective for some of the more important issues in the history of Canadian education.

To learn about the past is to discover that life was not always as it is today, and that it need not remain the same in the future. The best way to demonstrate the need for changing contemporary ideas, methods, and institutions is to show that the original rationale for their existence no longer applies. The writing of history is not a harmless exercise. In 213 BC, for example, the emperor of China ordered that all histories written about China before his reign be burned. The "Burning of the Books," he wrote, was to prevent historians from studying "the past in order to criticize the present age.” German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's famous comment that “peoples and governments have never learned anything from history,” is somewhat cynical, but it is true that the “lessons” of the past have not always been heeded. It is difficult to disagree with Greek philosopher Sophocles' belief that “a sensible person judges the present by past events.”

Historians are products of their time. The topics they choose to research are generally what their society finds interesting and relevant. Since historians usually suffer both from too much and too little information, they must reconstruct and interpret the past by selecting what they believe to be the most significant material. This task is more akin to the work of the painter than to that of the photographer, and the result is a likeness rather than an exact duplication. “Facts” are not always facts. As British historian E.H. Carr wrote, “Facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometime inaccessible ocean: and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what parts of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use, these two factors of course being determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch.”1

The history of Canadian education has mimicked the general trends in historical writing. Prior to the late 1960s, most history writing was “whiggish” in nature. Historians focused on great men and their heroic deeds, which were usually political, economic, or military in nature. Thanks to these altruistic men, history was a record of continuous improvement in which class, gender, and ethnic conflicts were minimized. When the history of Canadian education was discussed, it was usually only when it impinged on politics, as in the case of the Manitoba Schools debate at the end of the nineteenth century. Those few historians who discussed the history of Canadian education chronicled the evolution of public education from pioneer times to the present in a laudatory tone. Statistics showing increases in the number of students, teachers, books, and schools charted the vigorous growth of education under the leadership of great men like Egerton Ryerson, who initiated centrally-controlled, free, and compulsory education. Few writers reflected on these changes, questioned their efficacy, or investigated the motives of their promoters.2

In the late 1960s, the rise of feminist and New-Left historical writing sparked interest in family, gender, the working class, and underprivileged groups in society. This “new” social history critically examined the motives and actions of “the great men,” often employing sophisticated quantitative methods and model-building, and eschewing traditional narrative history. Influenced by Michael B. Katz at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the new “revisionist” historians of education believed that the educational system was simply a reflection of the inequalities in the larger society, and that schools served to buttress the social order. Some historians asserted that the goal of “heroic” school promoters of the past was to socialize rather than educate. These “social control” historians portrayed a hierarchical educational system run by white, Anglo-Saxon, capitalist, middle-class men that deliberately sought to perpetuate the existing racist and class-based social order – a system that had remained fundamentally unchanged ever since.

The social control school had its critics. “Moderate revisionists,” for example, believed that although the system had its flaws, society had benefited from universal, free education. As schools became an ideological battleground in the 1970s, the history of education emerged from the periphery of scholarly work to become an exciting and stimulating field of study. Empirical research methodologies and new sets of questions on such topics as literacy, gender, school attendance, and curricula raised new questions and provoked intense debates.

By the 1980s, the views of proponents of social control were criticized as being too simplistic and deterministic. New researchers (and some old social controllers) discovered that parents and local communities were often directly involved in educational reforms and that the central educational bureaucracies were frequently sensitive to local needs. Educational policies were a product of negotiations between the centre and the periphery, rather than an imposition from the top down. The revisionists were also accused of characterizing the ruling class as more homogeneous than it actually was, in both composition and ideology. In addition, studies in gender, ethnic, and working-class history indicated that such groups were not passive recipients of top-down decrees, but were often active participants.

The field of educational history gradually widened as its complexity became apparent. Regional studies replaced national works as researchers explored more limited topics in greater detail. Some of the best articles were reproduced in anthologies devoted to Western Canada, British Columbia, women, or the Native Peoples. Not only were issues of gender, race, ethnicity, power, and class investigated, but the field of inquiry was also expanded to include such non-formal educational settings as the family, apprenticeship, libraries, mechanics’ institutes, and Sunday schools. In 1989, E.G. Finley’sEducation in Canada: A Bibliographylisted over 14,000 entries in two volumes. That year, the Canadian History of Education Association transformed its newsletter into a biannual journal,Historical Studies in Education, and sponsored regular conferences. A recent volume of this journal included a bibliography of approximately 600 articles written in the 1990s. The history of education had come of age.

Today, articles by historians of education can be found in journals relating to economics, to medicine, Native studies, art, and political history. Whereas earlier historians studied the makers of educational policies, and later researchers examined education from the viewpoint of ethnicity, class and gender, more recent writers have turned their attention to the actual experiences of teachers and school children, the culture of the classroom, and the ways in which adults of different eras conceptualised childhood.

THE READINGS

How can we make sense of the scholarship on the history of education in Canada, especially in light of the explosion of interest in this subject during the past several decades? The articles and primary documents that follow focus on three broad themes that are at the core of education. The readings on teachers explore who became teachers, how they were trained, and what their experiences were in various parts of the country, in different time periods. The articles on pedagogy investigate changing methodologies and curricula, and the reasons behind these changes. The material on student experiences seeks to understand how young people of differing ethnic and social backgrounds responded to the classroom experience. For each topic there are many excellent articles from which to choose, with new ones being published almost every month. What follows is my own personal selection, informed by several years of weekly seminar discussions with Acadia University students taking courses on the history of Canadian education.

FURTHER READING

The best guide to the literature on the history of Canadian education is in the annual bibliographies published inHistorical Studies in Education. In 1999 (vol. 11, no. 2) this journal printed a bibliography of the “works related to” the history of education from 1980 to 2000. This source, which promises to be updated regularly, can also be found at http://www.edu.uwo.ca/hse/index.html. For earlier bibliographies, see Alan H. Child, “The History of Canadian Education: A Bibliographic Note,”Histoire Sociale(November 1971); Micheline Dumona, et al., “Bibliographie sur l’histoire de l’éducation des filles au Québec,”Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation sur la recherche féministe, vol. 14, no. 2 (July 1985); Susan Gelman and Alison Prentice, eds.The History of Gender and Teaching: A Selected Bibliography of English Language Published Sources(Toronto, 1990); Valerie Giles,Annotated Bibliography of Education History in British Columbia(Victoria, 1992); and Neil Sutherland, et al.,Contemporary Canadian Childhood and Youth: A Bibliography(Westport, Conn., 1992). For bibliographies on Native education see, Kathy Vermette, “Bibliography of First Nations Pedagogy,” in Marie Battiste, Jean Barman eds.First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds(Vancouver, 1995), and Katherine Graham, et al.,Public Policy and Aboriginal Peoples, 1965-1992, vols.1 and 4 (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996).

Since education is a provincial responsibility, provincial history journals such as Acadiensis, Ontario History, Saskatchewan History, and BC Studies regularly publish articles on the history of education.Education Canada, Atlantis, History of Education Quarterly, McGill Journal of Education, and Canadian and International Educationare also worth consulting. The most readily available primary sources are provincial annual reports of departments of education. Each report includes curricula, inspectors’ reports, and statistics on students, teachers, and courses. Printed compilations of primary documents include J.G. Hodgins,The Documentary History of Education in Upper Canada from the Passing of the Constitutional Act in 1791 to the Close of Doctor Ryerson’s Administration of the Education Department in 1876(Toronto, 1894-1910); Douglas Lawr and Robert Gidney, eds.Educating Canadians: A Documentary History of Public Education(Toronto, 1973); and Alison L. Prentice and Susan E. Houston, eds.Family, School and Society in Nineteenth-Century Canada(Toronto, 1975). For archival guides see: Patrick A. Dunae,The School Record: A Guide to Government Archives Relating to Public Education in British Columbia, 1852-1946(Victoria, 1992); and Diana Moore and Andrea Schwenke,New Brunswick Schools: A Guide to Archival Sources(Fredericton, 1992).

For the historiography of the history of education see: Paul Axelrod, “Historical Writing and Canadian Education from the 1970s to the 1990s,”History of Education Quarterly, 36/1 (Spring 1996); Chad Gaffield, “Children, Schooling, and Family Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,”Canadian Historical Review, 72/2, (1991); Harvey Graff, “Towards 2000: Poverty and Progress in the History of Education,”Historical Studies in Education 3(Fall, 1991); Eric W. Ricker, “Historians and the Study of Educational Policy: An Overview,” in Eric W. Ricker and B. Anne Wood, eds.,Historical Perspectives on Educational Policy in Canada: Issues, Debates and Case Studies(Toronto, 1995); Neil Sutherland and Jean Barman, “Out of the Shadows: Retrieving the History of Urban Education and Urban Childhood in Canada,” in Ronald K. Goodenow and William E. Marsden, eds.,The City and Education in Four Nations(Cambridge, 1992); and J. Donald Wilson, “Some Observations of Recent Trends in Canadian Educational History,” in J.D. Wilson ed.,An Imperfect Past: Education and Society in Canadian History(Vancouver, 1986).

This book is dedicated to four future students — my grandchildren, Riley, Cole, Chase, and Ella.

1E.H. Carr,What is History?(London, 1964), 23

2 Charles E. Phillips’ pioneering text for teachers’ colleges and faculties of education,The Development of Education in Canada(Toronto, 1957), is an excellent example of this school of writing.