Educational History in Canada

Part One

Canada

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1

Educational History: Themes, Movements and Moments

Theodore Michael Christou and Sean Cousins

Introduction

Progressive education is both a response to modernity and an inimitable part of it. It is the pedagogical response to the realization that the world has changed. It is also an instrument of that rapidly changing world. Increasingly, the rate of change accelerates, rendering the world around us largely unrecognizable. Ronald Wright’s Massey Lecture, A Short History of Progress makes this point nicely, noting, for instance, that for centuries – millennia, even – we could learn the same skills and knowledge that our parents learned, and enter the same trade or profession on the basis of that knowledge or those skills (Wright, 2004). We stand on the precipice of the twenty-first century, looking out into an inimi-table future even as we are a part of this future. Now, much is rendered obsolete in the span of years. Now, we are again in the throes of a progressivist affair. Once more, our curricula seem obsolete. Once more, our educational aims are being evaluated. We must prepare children not for our world, but for their world: a world of the future. If these words sound familiar, it is because they are nearly taken verbatim from John Dewey. One core problem remains that we are also told that we do not know what that world of the future will look like. Historians will have fun making sense of us some day. The Twenty-first Century Schools label is an effective rebranding of progressive education, demonstrating a preoccupation with modernity and an almost existential anxiety about the changes that this rapidly evolving future will provoke.

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24 Education in North America

Background: Key themes and issues in the history of Canadian education up to progressivism

The federal government and Canadian education

The legal basis for the current arrangement of Canadian schooling is to be found in Section 93 of the British North America (BNA) Act (re-enacted and retitled the Constitution Act, 1867 by the Constitution Act, 1982). This Act placed education within the ‘exclusive jurisdiction’ of each province. The governance of education of any kind – ‘public or private, academic or technical, from early childhood to university-level studies’ (Gidney and Millar, 2012, p. 3) – is vested under the authority of the provincial and territorial parliaments and further sanctioned by constitutional law. Today, thirteen jurisdictions’ – ten provinces and three territories – departments or ministries of education are responsible for the organization, delivery and assessment of education at the elementary and secondary levels, for technical and vocational education, and for post-secondary education (Council of Ministers of Education, 2013). While the BNA Act delegated responsibility of Canadian education to the provinces, it did not exactly rule out the Canadian government’s power to exert influence on education. The Constitutional guarantee to denomina-tional schooling (e.g. Protestant and Roman Catholic schools) is the most obvious example. Another example of federal activity in the affairs of Canadian education ‘arises out of attempts to address the educational requirements of those areas of federal jurisdiction spelled out in Section 91’ (Young and Levin, 2002, p. 51) of the BNA Act. These areas of federal jurisdiction refer to centralized cultural agencies (e.g. National Defence and the Canadian Forces, Indian Affairs, Industry Canada, Statistics Canada, Justice Canada, and Canadian Heritage) which exert provisions for the functions of national governance. Thus, the Canadian government has assumed responsibility for the promotion of cultural heritage and Canadian identity via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (1936–present), the collection and publication of statistics on Education, Training, and Learning in the Department of Statistics Canada (formerly the ‘Dominion Bureau of Statistics’, 1918–present), the delivery of educational programmes to inmates of penitentiaries, the financing of the nation’s largest research laboratory complex (the National Research Council, 1917–present), the production and dissemination of educational films and film strips to Canadian schools from the National Film Board of Canada (1939–present), the support of international programmes that work

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Educational History: Themes, Movements and Moments 25

to improve access to quality education in developing and war-torn countries through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), funding for post-secondary education, apprenticeships, and domestic and international internship programmes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics under Canada’s Economic Action Plan (2009–present). Further, the Department of National Defence assumes responsibility not only for the education and training of all Canadian Forces personnel but also for the education of Canadian military dependent children. While departments of education in each of the three territories (i.e. Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) function much like their provincial counterparts, they receive federal funding which techni-cally places them under the authority of the Canadian government. The most insidious aspect of the federal government’s involvement in Canadian educa-tional history in an otherwise provincially directed system was the Canadian Residential Schooling System.

The Residential Schooling System

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Canadian federal government operated a system of residential schools in partnership with various religious orders, including the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and United churches. Collectively, over 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children experienced the residential schooling system – an institution that included ‘industrial schools, boarding school, homes for students, hostels, billets, residential schools, residential schools with a majority of day students, or a combination of any of the above’ (Stout and Kipling, 2003, p. ii). More than 130 residential schools existed in virtually every part of Canada (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2013). An estimated 80,000 former students of residential schools are alive today. Residential schools were formally established in Canada shortly after Confederation (BNA Act, 1867) in the late 1870s. After a failed attempt for electoral office, Nicolas Flood Davin (1840–1901) was awarded with a commission by the 3rd Canadian Ministry (1878–91), under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald (1815–1891). His primary task was to study the schooling systems of Aboriginal peoples in the United States (Milloy, 2006). He reported his findings to the then Minister of the Interior (1878–83), Sir John A. Macdonald, and stated, among other things: ‘if anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young’ (Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds, 1879, p. 12). His report laid

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the foundation for the mission of the Canadian Residential Schooling System. Indeed, the enduring mission of the residential school system while in its existence was ‘to remove and isolate Aboriginal children from in the influence of their homes, families, traditions, and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture’ (Government of Canada, 2008). Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947), Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs (1913–32), gave the clearest rendition of the government’s motive in estab-lishing the Residential Schooling System. In 1920, he remarked:

I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone […] Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department. (Legacy of Hope Foundation, 2009)

By the 1930s, over seventy schools were in operation in all parts of the country. In these schools, the ‘cultural genocide’ (CBC News, 2013) was carried out on the body, mind and spirit of the Aboriginal students. Long or braided hair was barbered (Milloy, 2006); traditional clothes were removed and a formal school uniform was worn instead (Troniak, 2011); Aboriginal names fell into disrepute to make room for the adoption of Euro-Canadian names and student numbers (idem). Statements by former students testify the extent to which the residential schooling system impacted the experience of certain children’s everyday lives. Frederick Loft (1861–1934), a Mohawk nation activist and veteran of World War I who founded the League of Indians of Canada (1919–35), the first national Canadian Aboriginal political organization, had this to say in memory about his time at the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario during the 1870s: ‘I recall the times when working in the fields, I was actually too hungry to be able to walk, let alone work’ (Smith, as cited in Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2012, p. 31). Similarly, Theodore Fontaine (1941–), a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, recalled his experiences at the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School (1948–1958) and the Assiniboia Indian Residential School (1958–1960).

It was masterfully drilled into me that I was a ‘heathen savage,’ incapable of being white or doing what the white man could do. I’ve had to come to terms with the realization that Canada has tried really hard to rid the land of its First Peoples, and has contravened the laws of humanity. (Fontaine, as cited in Troniak, 2011, p. 2)

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Although the residential school system was officially disbanded in the 1960s, the last such institution operated until 1996. Nevertheless, ‘the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools has contributed to social problems that continue to exist in many communities today’ (Government of Canada, 2008). Aboriginal peoples have undertaken a number of educational organization movements in response to the ongoing trauma inflicted by the history of the Canadian residential school system. The most ambitious example concerns the case of the National Indian Brotherhood (presently the Assembly of First Nations). In 1972, the National Indian Brotherhood published the policy paper ‘Indian control of Indian education’ (ICIE). This paper was used to strike a public conversation over the design of an Aboriginal education system in the post-residential school era. It proposed that ‘education authorities, especially those in Ministries of Education, should provide for this in curricula and texts which are chosen for use in Canadian schools’ (p. 2). The expressed call to have Aboriginal teachings facilitated at the provincial levels remains frustrated today; in 2007, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Chiefs Committee on Education (CCOE) in conjunction with the National Indian Education Council (NIEC) recommended that the original ICIE 1972 policy be updated. In 2010, the AFN released It’s Our Vision, It’s Our Time, a comprehensive educational policy document that builds upon the ICIE 1972 policy. The document represents how Aboriginal peoples today envision their work to ‘support the realization of education as a tool to eradicate poverty’ (p. 3). Such an expressed call for constructing an education that empowers Aboriginal peoples to realize their potential works from an assumption that is strikingly similar to the one used to establish the provincial and territorial schooling systems in the history of Canadian education. As the following section will illustrate, the emergence of Canadian public education drew from various threads of reformist rhetoric published in print media, which helped to stage public perception of the need for mass schooling.

Conceptualizing mass schooling

Educational historians of various persuasions have examined the shaping of public education through the forces of reformist rhetoric, but few have contributed discussion on the rhetoric of racism and its influence in shaping educational policy in Canadian history. John Milloy stands out as an exemption in this regard, albeit one not frequently referenced. He has studied the first significant period of educational reform (1830–1879) in Canadian history

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through readings of texts found in the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa, the Presbyterian, Anglican, and United Churches of Canada in Toronto, and the Deschatelets Archives of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Ottawa. Milloy described this early period in Canadian educational history as the explicit pursuit of the ‘policy of civilization’ (Milloy, 2006, p. 11). Schools were seen as serving an ameliorative role in social development. Children, for instance – regardless of sex, family income or religious observance – were to receive an education that linked knowledge with industry. In Upper Canada (present-day Ontario), knowledge was understood in relation to utility, particularly as conceived within the demands of a growing class of industrial labourers. In Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), education pursued a more tradi-tional path; schools taught religion, reading, writing and the French language. Language was the heart of education, whereby both Aboriginal children and children of white, settler colonies would be made French in heart and mind. Such a system of education would persist in Quebec largely undisturbed until the 1960s (Smith and Donahue, 1999). Unlike today, the early nineteenth century saw the communication of ideas – letters, newspapers and magazines – to be somewhat of a luxury. For example, a letter sent from York (Toronto) to Kingston or London in Upper Canada, a distance of approximately 258 kilometres, would have cost the recipient ninepence, and from York to Quebec one shilling and sixpence (Phillips, 1957). A contemporary labourer could earn as much as three shillings a day, and a skilled artisan – mason, carpenter or blacksmith – might, if hired for a day’s work, earn seven shillings and sixpence (ibid, 1957). These wages were low in comparison to the cost of most articles, with the exception of food and drink. The daily income of a carpenter, for example, would mean that items like letters, tea and sugar were purchased infrequently; however, things like meat and whiskey were common fodder. Nevertheless, the vast geographical landscape of Canada and the costly exchange of information through the circulation of letters made the post office an undesirable and inefficient organ of communi-cation for ordinary people. In these same years, the costly exchange of information functioned not only to regulate the circulation of ideas but also aided in the perpetuation of the traditional practice of organizing information into discrete bundles of knowledge. This packaging and selling of information paralleled several of the contemporary teaching methods used in the British-style monitorial or pupil/teacher schools. The system of Madras schools, a type of monitorial school pioneered by Andrew Bell (1753–1832) for orphans in Madras, India,

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organized pupils around one teacher and several older pupils who acted as ‘monitors’ (Tomkins, 2008, p. 24), instructing a small group of pupils in lessons that promoted obedience and moral training. The monitorial method in its cheapness, efficiency and stern discipline mirrored the presence of a static world in which the lower orders of society acquired a body of knowledge useful to preserving the integrity of the status quo (Tomkins, 2008). As a result, few children received formal instruction; only those families who could afford payment of tuition fees and residence could entertain visions of having their son educated in the elite institutions called ‘grammar schools,’ (Johnson, 1968, p. 24) such as Upper Canada College. For most children, the family home served to engender the teachings of basic literacy skills (Gaffield, 2013). Following the British North America Act of 1791 – a statutory law that gave birth to the colonies of Upper (Ontario) and Lower (Quebec and the Maritime Provinces) Canada – the British authorities became increasingly intolerant of opposition or criticism which threatened their power to rule (Adams, 1968). With respect to methods and policies of education, the government ‘sought to provide the higher education which could at best be the privilege of the few, and neglected entirely, so far as the government was concerned the great mass of children, whose parents had not the means to give them such education’ (Bannister, 1922, p. 68). Furthermore, education grants were awarded to schooling systems only if they were within urban settings; that their schools emphasized Christianization; that their hiring practices would select teachers with English language qualifications; and the curriculum would work to imper-ceptibly impart ‘the manners, habits, and customs of civilized life’ (Milloy, 2006, p. 13). Tensions between Catholic and Protestant orders in French Canada as well as an explicit lack of public interest in formal education undermined efforts among the British colonial administrators to set up a system of mass schooling. Nevertheless, the concept of mass schooling became more widespread among the public at large thanks in part to newsprint publishing the independent commentary of editors and columnists who addressed the positions taken by political reformers. Commentaries usually featured an intersection of political, social and economic interpretations, and in the process newspapers made a rhetorical statement about the existing state of affairs. Ideas of democracy, equality and freedom of opportunity – tenets of American republicanism – had inspired some in British North America to imagine a world in the precipice of revolution. Published in the late 1830s, an extract from the Niagara Reporter shows a column that expresses intolerance for social upheaval and advocates for a type of education that aims to quell radicalism of all kinds. As it appeared:

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Every new school that is established on a proper basis is a new pillar of support to the fabric of the social order and constitutional law. Every lesson of morality and religion which is imbibed by a people weakens the chances of rebellion and insurrectionary violence. (Lawr and Gidney, 1973, p. 43)

The appearance of criticism in the newspapers was not uncommon. Some reflected a Loyalist perspective, which, in essence, was an expression of allegiance to British colonial rule. Others exhibited an anti-establishment view, which showcased disaffection with the affairs of everyday life in the colonies. Applied to education, such criticism, whether Loyalist or antithetical to the establishment, took on reformist overtones. Mass schooling was proffered as an effective instrument for instilling appropriate modes of thought and behaviour into children; in this mindset, the purpose of mass schooling was not to deposit a sufficient fund of academic knowledge in the minds of naïve children, as in the case of monitorial schools. Rather, school systems should be designed in favour of the assimilation of the individual, which propelled the need for schooling to have mechanisms in place which were capable of addressing the wider scale of perceived societal problems precipitated from the forces of mass immigration, urbanization and industrial capitalism – crime, poverty, idleness and vagrancy. For Loyalists, this type of education meant setting up a schooling system that constructed an alliance between church and state, thus systematically ‘civilizing’ the poor, the immigrants and the Aboriginal peoples according to the accepted norms of a Christian settler society (Lipset, 2001). While the majority of Upper Canadian newspapers characterized education in the image of British values and customs, not surprisingly Lower Canadian print generally reflected animosity for all things British. Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786–1871), a leading reformer in Lower Canada, believed that the French-Canadian culture and language should be supported through education en masse. His rationale was that education could be used as a means to empower the subjugated French-Canadians against the tyranny of a ‘foreign administration’ (Lawr and Gidney, 1973, p. 41). At the time of such social unrest, British North America, as Canada was officially known until 1867, was ruled by a closed circle of elite men (i.e. the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the Clique du Château in Lower Canada). These men exerted influence over the government in the Executive and Legislative Councils – advisory bodies to the Lieutenant Governor – from the 1810s to 1840s. By comparison, the popularly elected Legislative Assembly had little real power. Individuals like John Beverly Robinson (1821–96), the Reverend John Strachan (1778–1867) and the Reverend Jacob Mountain (1749–1825) occupied

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the highest levels of governance. These officials and others of the elite circle were ardent followers of the Church of England (Anglicanism). They epitomized the Loyalist heritage in holding fears of Americanization, in seeking to maintain proper allegiance to the crown, and in expressing the felt need to assimilate the poor, immigrants and Aboriginal peoples who were perceived as disruptive elements in a society that quickly began to urbanize (Tompkins, 1977). During the 1820s, British North America started to exert more influence over schooling through the creation of a colony-wide General Board of Education. Although short-lived, this administrative office headed by Strachan was established in 1823, with the authority to govern local schools, appoint teachers and select textbooks (Tomkins, 2008). These unprecedented powers held by the government foreshadowed the eventual development of a public school system and a standardized curriculum. Such powers also led to an intense public obsession over the conception of education, especially evidenced in the newspapers. As Gidney remarks:

Foreign educational ideas were discussed in editorials, letters to the editor, and in assembly debates, while proposals for improving the local schools were increasingly judged against the standards set in Scotland, or New York or Germany. (1972, pp. 48–9)

Thus an assortment of new ideas focused on education dotted the newsprint. Despite such differences, popular education was conceived as a method to achieve the realization of a better world. Schooling would be organized as a means to improve society overall – to be a ‘bulwark against democratic excesses, a weapon against oppression, a means of improving farming, expanding trade, eliminating crime, and spreading the gospel’ (Tomkins, 2008, p. 20). According to an editorial in Mackenzie’s anti-establishment newspaper, the Colonial Advocate, educational administrators should ‘seek not to put off the teacher of skill, talent, and moral character, with a miserable pittance, but reward him liberally’ (Lawr and Gidney, 1973, p. 41). His argument, along with several others that saw schooling as essential to prosperity, informed the vision that education could become the official handmaiden of constructing an enlightened citizenry.

Education as a public good

Ryerson University, in downtown Toronto, is home to 38,950 students, including 2,300 masters and PhD students, nearly 2,700 faculty and staff, and more than

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140,000 alumni worldwide. It is named for Egerton Ryerson (1803–82), a prominent figure in nineteenth-century Canada who played an influential role in several fields of discipline, including politics, religion and the arts, but perhaps most significantly, education. In front of the university stands the statue of Ryerson, originally erected on the grounds of what was then the Toronto Normal School (Teacher’s College). Inscribed at the base of the statue is written: ‘Edgerton Ryerson Founder of the School System of Ontario’. Thousands of travellers – students, faculty, staff and the public – walk past this public monument each day without a moment’s hesitation. Despite such lack of expressed interest, this landmark makes causal reference to an important period of Canadian history, one that saw schooling become a public good. The statue also casts Ryerson as the principal figure in the development of public education in Canada. He held the post of Superintendent of Education between 1846 and 1876. Under Ryerson’s administration, a series of Education Acts formally legislated and developed ‘a scheme of mass schooling at the elementary level that had the following characteristics: state control; social comprehen-siveness; non-denominationalism; a standardized curriculum; trained teachers; compulsory attendance; public support from property taxation; and absence of fees’ (Dawson and Titley, 1982, p. 15). This system of governance has not remained unaltered in Ontario, nor have other provinces and territories across the country come to embody an idyllic representation of the Ryerson model of education. As Young and Levin note:

The struggles to define what would constitute an appropriate structure for the governance of public education involving competing versions of democratic participation, professional authority, and efficiency continue to resonate into the twenty-first century. (2002, p. 32)

The development of public education also emerged in response to the favourable reputation Ryerson had amassed in his dealings with print media. He first came to the attention of the public in 1826 by writing a polemic against the Church of England, specifically in response to a sermon officiated by the Bishop of York, John Strachan, on the death of Jacob Mountain, Anglican Bishop of Quebec. In his funeral oration Strachan not only reaffirmed the claim of the Church of England as the established Church in the dominion, but he also singled out Methodists as harbingers of republican ideals and accused them of being ignorant, self-indulgent and disloyal. The Niagara circuit – embracing a region of the Niagara peninsula, from roughly eight kilometres east of Hamilton, and west across to Fort Erie – was a hotbed of ministerial activity for the Methodist

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Church. Several of its presiding ministers, notably the elder Reverend John Madden (1780–1834), were originally from the United States. They were part of a collective of itinerant preachers, travelling on horseback (thus earning the nickname ‘circuit riders’ [Putnam, 1912, p. 8]), spreading the gospel, and working tirelessly to inspire local communities with the thoughts of a better world. Madden appointed Ryerson to the circuit; for a limited period of time, Ryerson was thus engaged in a lifestyle similar to that of a modern substitute teacher. Under the signature of ‘A Methodist Preacher’, Ryerson launched a 12,000-word diatribe ‘which appeared, appropriately enough, in William Lyon Mackenzie’s spirited anti-Tory newspaper, the Colonial Advocate’ (Wilson, 1982, p. 63). This article marked the first strike in Ryerson’s campaign against the special privileges (so-called Clergy Reserves) of the Church of England and it laid the foundation of his public reputation as a vigorous rhetorician, having prose laced with nuanced arguments, flashes of insight, and powerful imagery. It also signalled the influence of Ryerson’s own upbringing. Born into a prominent Loyalist family in Charlottesville, Norfolk County (Lake Erie), Ryerson inherited a deep respect of British culture. Like the other selected clippings of newspaper articles documented in this paper, the conception of mass schooling Ryerson had in mind was not of his own creation. Ryerson shaped his imaginary of education from being an avid reader of the popular and academic presses as well as from being an international traveller, having visited several nations in Europe and during his travels having met with several dignitaries on the issue of Canadian educational reform. The characteristic conviction of school reformers like Egerton Ryerson in Ontario, Jean-Baptiste Meiller (1796–1878) in Quebec, as well as John Jessop (1829–1901) in British Columbia was that education needed to espouse an anti-American and anti-republican stance. This included opposition to the employment of teachers or textbooks from the United States. From their vantage point, a society born in revolution should be viewed with suspicion. Instead, they imported certain elements of Irish schools – most notably, the Irish Readers. Used in Scotland and England as well as in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, the Irish Readers had a broad assimilative appeal without being ‘stridently nationalistic’ (Tomkins, 2008, p. 62). Indeed, these texts were designed to inculcate in the mind of the pupil ‘knowledge of sound moral principles, and of a vast number of important facts in History, Literature, and Science’ (Tomkins, 2008, p. 62). These were a series of ‘graded’ (Wilson, 1982, p. 67) textbooks. Ryerson sought to use them in the place of a diversity of texts

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used in the common schools, which were often republican, democratic and anti-British in tone. Education historian Bruce Curtis perceived the usage of the Irish series as an attempt to provide ‘sound intellectual ailment’ to the ‘lower orders’ – to discipline the children of a growing working class (1988, p. 268).

Professionalism and organization as trends in Canadian schools

A dominant theme in the history of Canadian education is a trend towards increasing professionalism within the teaching profession. Teachers, whether male or female, needed to be seen as discriminately chosen out of a pool of possible candidates (not all of which were graduates of teaching colleges called ‘normal schools’), thus leading to the perception that the teacher was not only a licensed professional but also a ‘competent’ authority to preside over the teachings of the curriculum in the schools (Gidney and Millar, 2012). The teacher’s licence was accompanied by (and usually took the form of) a certificate that attested to the qualification the particular individual held. Certificates were ranked according to the level of qualification obtained so that the public authorities could adequately assess an individual’s competence to teach particular subjects or grades (Gidney and Millar, 2012). School districts were collections of schools systematically organized under the authority of usually three trustees. These trustees were responsible for exercising administrative duties like offering contracts to teachers, issuing terms of their compensation, and exercising (when and where deemed appropriate) termination of their contract, as well as collecting and redistributing funds obtained through local taxes and provincial grants. By 1885, the government in each province and territory had come to determine the official languages of instruction. While in most provinces the language commonly used and understood was English, with the obvious exception of Quebec, a few regions of Canada used other languages of instruction, such as French, German, and even Cree. Some pioneer schools in Edmonton, Saint Albert and Île-à-la-Crosse, for example, were known to utilize more than one language of instruction and teach more than one type of religion (Curtis, 1988). Catholic and Protestant schools received financial assistance from their own governments, and such monies allowed Boards of Education to rapidly expand and hire teachers to fill vacant positions of teaching in posts considered too remote for most urban dwellers. In most cases, schools in the late 1880s were small, rectangular, log or brick buildings. The smell of rancid clothes, the surge of blood-thirsty mosquitoes,

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and the hot, humid climate of the classroom made for appalling teaching and learning conditions, especially in the rural settings. Furnished with few pedagogical technologies but blackboards, desks and benches with possibly globes or wall maps, these differed in few respects from the earliest schools of the pioneers. A well or pump, stove, outdoor plumbing and possibly a play area completed the picture of the little country school, which was familiar to most Canadians. By 1899, New Brunswick, for instance, had 1,600 one-room school-houses. Communities had their local schools, and children generally studied with children who lived within a two-mile radius of the buildings, which served as hubs for the community. It would not be until the early twentieth century that consolidated schools, which were advocated for fervently as a means of equal-izing educational services and securing more efficient administration, would be built across the country. With increased consolidation came other admin-istrative challenges familiar to contemporary life: transportation to and from school, community-building, and programme specialization unique to different schools. The swell of urban growth and the mix of various ethnic groups not speaking in a common tongue disturbed the British sensibility for uniformity and order-liness. These social conditions incited the formation of special interest groups like citizen, parent and teacher associations. These associations, despite their specific missions, all sought to strike a political conversation over issues of curriculum. While newspapers and subscription journals had by then become an established industry in the construction of public opinion, these special interest groups began to experiment with these print media and other forms as well, such as published reports of convention proceedings, symposia and town hall meetings (Stamp, 1979). One such association was the Dominion Education Association (DEA). Formed in 1891, the DEA was an association of teachers’ organizations. Its purpose was to advance the interests of a strong public education system across Canada. Robert Patterson observes that in the period between 1916 and 1920 ‘teachers in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Ontario established provincial organi-zations’ (Patterson, 1970, p. 362). In July of 1920, at the Calgary Public Library, these provincial organizations forged a national coalition, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, with the mandate ‘to provide machinery by which the various provincial and territories [sic] organizations could be kept in touch with one another, and through which mutual assistance could be quickly and readily given’ (Canadian Teachers’ Federation, 2013). The Canadian Teachers’ Federation was founded as a coalition between the five provincial organizations.

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The 1920 mandate established by the Canadian Teachers’ Federation remains in place today. Ontario’s organization was unique, distinguished by level, sex, religion and language. As such the province established the Federation of Women Teachers’ Associations of Ontario, the Ontario Public School Men Teachers’ Federation, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association, and L’Association des Enseignants Franco-Ontariens. Parent groups also began forming across the country into various home and school associations. The first ‘was established by Mrs. A. C. Courtice in Toronto in March 1916. The Ontario provincial organization came into existence in 1919’ (Patterson, 1970, p. 362). By 1926, interest groups such as these were common across the country, but they were systematically organized only in Ontario and British Columbia. Their aims and purposes included promotion of cooperation among stakeholders in educational matters, inquiry into educa-tional problems, and the development of a healthy Canadian citizenry. Child study and child health advocates also forged organizations to support their causes. The Association for Childhood Education was established in 1932 as a merger of several associations, including the International Kindergarten Union and the National Council of Primary Education. The organization explicitly stated that its greater size could make its attacks on educational policy more potent, promoting early years education across the country.

The ‘New Education’: Progressivism in Canadian public education

Whereas traditionalism in education extols the virtues of rigorous scholarship for the benefit of achieving a disciplinary knowledge of the subject, progres-sivism in education orients the curriculum around the developmental needs of the child. Since at least the 1870s, a non-sectarian Christian philosophy of education has been woven into the English Canadian public education system. The Irish Readers were utilized as texts to instruct children in the ways of adopting a moral temperance conducive to the interests of the Canadian state. As previously mentioned, they also helped to lay the foundation upon which instruction was to be organized into distinct levels of instruction called ‘grades’ (Gidney and Millar, 2012, p. 198). Gidney and Millar (2012) recently published a work that documents how the designation of the ‘grade’ was used to introduce

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American terminology in context of Canadian schools while at the same time leading to its increasing standardization in the image of progressivist ideology. For this reason alone, Ryerson’s ideas and vision of schooling could be described as progressivist within their own context, but in the service of tradi-tional social and moral purposes characterizing Canadian education. While the reforms of the 1840s, 50s and 60s were generally marked by a period of centrali-zation –a process by which a uniform system of schooling became the dominant model of education – a new conception of childhood and family life began to take hold in English-Canadian society. Traditional child-rearing practices started to become questioned and the spirit of disquiet gradually made its way into the context of schooling. In brief, a transition occurred from what Tomkins has called a ‘work-centred regime’, a model whereby the child was conceived as instrumental to the needs of labour, to a ‘family-centred one’ in which the child was imagined as malleable and commendable to the force of nurture in a more caring society (Tomkins, 1977, p. 4). Reformers in the middle of the nineteenth century initially conceived the teacher to operate as an administrative agent capable of delivering a standardized curriculum to children of the working classes. As time elapsed and as more schools were introduced in each locality, a disturbing statistic started to appear in the registers of annual reports and in the bureau of statistics Canada. Schools were plagued by an alarming rate of truancy. Many children ended up not attending schools regularly, even though parents of children were taxed to support the educational apparatus of public education (Phillips, 1957). There are a variety of reasons for poor school attendance, including inclement weather, obligations to employment, and general perception of the school being unhygienic and an incubator of illness (Gidney and Millar, 2012). Children younger than ten years old were working in mines (Johnston, 1968). In Ontario and Quebec, a Dominion government Commission in 1882 found that children of eight and nine were working in excess of 60-hour weeks in factories (Johnston, 1968, p. 82). It concluded that the health and safety of the children and the interests of industry was a field fit for provincial legislation. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century most of Canada had laws in each province designed to protect the interests of industry through safeguarding children from exposure to harmful or unsafe labour practices as structured in factories, mines and other industrial workplaces. These legislative changes and the growth of more specialization in the manufacture of goods in the factory operations led to a growing concern over the lack of ‘practical subjects’ (Tomkins, 2008, p. 76) in the schools. Previously,

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industrial skills had been taught outside the school in the workplace through apprenticeship, but changed industrial conditions were rendering these appren-ticeship methods obsolete. In 1910 the federal government appointed a Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education under the chair-manship of Dr James Wilson Robertson. The Royal Commission’s report, presented in 1913, proposed federal financial assistance for manual training and for the occupational training of youths and adults, although the actual control of these forms of education was regulated at the provincial level (Johnston, 1968, p. 121). A series of federal laws that authorized expenditures to promote and establish agricultural, industrial and technical education in the provinces was passed under the Borden government between 1911 and 1919. These laws – the Industrial Education Act (1911), the Agricultural Instruction Act (1913), and the Technical Education Act (1919) – provided funds for the purchase or rental of land, buildings, furniture and equipment, the administration of programmes, teachers’ salaries, teacher training and general maintenance of the training facility. These grants enabled a number of industrial, agricultural and technical colleges to be constructed in Alberta, Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia, and facilitated the construction of vocational education in Canada. Federal involvement in education was in reality a partnership struck between the Federal and provincial governments. Federal assistance was given to provincial programmes in response to pressures felt from industry. A new form of reformist rhetoric emerged on the scene of public education. Educationists loosely used the term ‘New Education’ – a phrase popularized in Great Britain – to describe the influence of American progressivism in their reforms efforts (Tomkins, 2008, p. 173). This rhetoric aimed at utilizing the public school as an even more refined instrument of the state (idem). In midwinter 1917, the DEA invited Superintendent William Wirt as a keynote speaker to address its congregation. Superintendent Wirt was at the time a well-known proponent of American progressivism in education. He hailed from Gary, Indiana. The DEA had requested Superintendent Wirt to share results of his ‘Gary Plan’, a system of schooling by which children would be enrolled into ‘platoons’, that is, one platoon was for the academic classrooms, while the second platoon was divided between the shops, nature studies, auditorium, gymnasium and outdoor facilities (Cohen and Mohl, 1979, p. 13). This brand of progressivist educational thinking was aligned firmly with the tenets of social efficiency, which were heavily indebted to the time-and-motion studies discussed by engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (Christou, 2012).

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Social efficiency, which has also been referred to as being administratively progressive, is one of three principal thrusts, or interpretations, of progressive education. Social meliorism, which represented a keen interested in reforming society along with and through the schools, was the second brand of progressive education. Child study, which will be discussed briefly below, as an aspect of human development and applied psychology, was the third. These three threads are tightly intertwined and deeply influential in contemporary educational rhetoric and policy; it is for this reason that we argue in the conclusions that we remain in the wake of progressive education within Canadian education. In the Gary Plan, as Wirt argued nearly a century ago, all of the school equipment remained in use during the entire school day; this system promoted efficiency in the school operations while developing the intellectual, manual and recreational skills of the children (Lane, 1978). Superintendent Wirt was convinced his system of schooling could take shape in Canada at the discretion of school administration. After a morning resolution was adopted on a motion to form a committee to consider how the federal and provincial governments could partner in the design and administration of industrial training and technical education in Canada, the Association adjourned to attend a joint session with the Ottawa Teachers’ Association to hear Superintendent Wirt upon the subject of ‘Progress in Education Through School Administration’; in his estimation:

I think the great future for progress in education in our cities depends on the school administration, in utilizing the funds now on hand, in stimulating the home to do more for the children than it is now doing, or in stimulating the teachers to do more than they are now doing, or in stimulating those outside agencies such as libraries, or in stimulating the tax payer to contribute more liberally (1917, p. 74).

The former head investigator for the 1913 Royal Commission on Technical Education, Dr James W. Robertson, and acting chairman of the DEA at the time joined other educators in applause for Wirt’s invigorated speech on the merits of the Gary Plan and its underlying philosophy of progressive education. The infusion of progressive ideas and examples of their application in technical education programmes south of the border continued to receive warm reception in Canada during the greater part of the early period of the twentieth century. While the period between 1910 and 1930 saw the federal and provincial governments join forces to venture on a series of educational initia-tives to address labour skills shortages, the 1930s took on a different tone under

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the weight of the Great Depression. Education historian George S. Tompkins has aptly described the decades of the 1930s as a period of ‘sporadic experi-mentation’ (2008, p. 174) in the history of Canadian education. The economic depression of the 1930s forced the provincial governments to seek federal financial aid to support the non-instructional aspects of provincial schooling, such as vocational and technical training programmes. The notion of an educative elementary curriculum designed in context of scientific child study together with prescriptions for every aspect of the school environment, including hygiene, discipline, morals, teaching methods, school management, and questioning, helped to mute traditional notions of the curriculum and to phase in ideas expounded by educational theorists like John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick and Peter Sandiford. The last of these three established the first centre for scientific study of education while a professor at the Ontario College of Education in Toronto. This emphasis on empirical research to guide educational policy is one that has persisted to this day, which bears rearticulating the argument that the steam engine driving progressive education as an educational tour de force in Canadian education, beginning in the early twentieth century, has not exhausted itself. A federal government commission was struck to examine the relation between labour and capital revenue and it found that public schools were an ideal site to host ‘technical instruction’ (Royal Commission on the Relations of Capital and Labour in Canada, 1889, p. 119), a term used to describe training programmes that would help students to become fit for mechanical life in industry. A prototype of the Gary Plan could arguably be said to have been implemented into the mainstream of Canadian education.

The Child Study movement

The Child Study movement began in the United States in 1879, with the publi-cation of the measurement of the height and weight of several thousand school children of Boston, and was followed a year later in 1880 by a little-known work called Content of Children’s Minds by G. Stanley Hall. The writings of Edward Thorndike soon followed, and the work of teachers like Francis W. Parker and William T. Harris helped to found state-sponsored Child Study societies. The movement was conducted through research in laboratories and the ideas that constituted the framework of child study were based in large part upon the new science of psychology. Ideas of the movement quickly spread to Canada

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and were taken up by educational figures like James L. Hughes, Toronto’s Superintendent of Schools. Parker received a formal invitation to address the Ontario Teachers’ Conventions as a keynote speaker in 1884, Harris in 1881, and Hall three years later in 1884. In 1895 a Child Study section of the Ontario Education Association (a sister affiliate to the Dominion Education Association founded in 1891) was formed (Johnson, 1968). The Child Study movement focused attention of teachers and the general public alike on the need for a more humane and understanding attitude toward the care of children. The practical experience of early child study advocates in Ontario, such as William E. Blatz, was rooted in the rehabilitation programmes for traumatized and wounded soldiers returning from World War I. The principles of child study were, in large part:

An outgrowth of the re-education methods and psychological principles that were developed for the muscle-function training of crippled veterans at the University of Toronto during 1916–1919, namely, that patient must not remain passive and psychologically dependent, but must become a participant learner, if he is to master his present limitations and thus be able to meet later situations with confidence. (Bott, 1951, p. 15)

With respect to the study and education of children, ascertaining the stage of the learner’s development and the complexity of the tasks involved were simpler, yet the emphasis on active self-direction and the progressive achievement of small goals was the same (Fleming, 1972, pp. 187–8). In the case of a veteran, rehabilitation was slow progression toward an, often physical, objective. In the case of a child, the objective of progressive education was the successful adjustment into the next stage of human development. The foundation of all learning was perceived to be experiential. The staff of the Institute of Child Study, a centre for research into human development and education, published many books and articles explaining the relevance of child study to learning. The learner’s active engagement with tasks suitable to his or her stage of development promoted both health and happiness; in Blatz’s words, ‘if all reading, grammar, mathematics and other academic subjects were removed from the school time-table, and drawing, modeling, craftwork, music and dancing substituted, we should have in the next generation not more intel-ligent but happier adults’ (Blatz, 1936, p. 124). The most natural way to educate children, he argued, was through creative and expressive activity. The nursery and laboratory schools that were integral parts of child study were also described as ‘outgrowths […] they came into being at the same time

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when the human sciences were beginning to speculate upon the significance of childhood for human adjustment’ (Millichamp and Fletcher, p. 26). These allowed researchers to form developmental hypotheses of real children as they actively engaged in pedagogically progressive activities with their peers. In constructing such environments, Blatz appealed to his experiences at Chicago and to the model laboratory school developed there by Dewey. The children ‘worked on a loom and baked bread. There were school trips to the harbour, to art galleries, and to the train station. A newspaper was launched’ (Raymond, 1991, p. 90). These ideas, commonplace today, were a far cry from the seatwork and rote learning characterizing the traditional classrooms in Toronto at the time. The movement stood in stark contrast to a stern model of schooling known as the Theory of Mental Discipline. Teachers would give performance to the theory of mental discipline through a pedagogy designed to elicit memorization of facts and to acquire literacy and numeracy skills through fear of repercussion at the hands of the teacher, who stood equipped with powers of corporeal punishment. Child study did much to ameliorate the mental discipline model of education.

Manual Training

The subject of Manual Training was introduced in the public schools of Ontario and Nova Scotia during the 1880s and 1890s. It was taught in the elementary school where most children completed their education. Manual Training was relatively inexpensive to fund as the subject did not require an array of speciality tools nor complex machinery necessary for technical instruction. While the educational apparatus of Manual Training began in the 1880s, the movement gained real traction in the early twentieth century through the philanthropic work of tobacco manufacturer Sir William C. Macdonald. Macdonald had observed the improvements in dairying resulting from the agricultural education campaign of Dominion Commissioner of Dairying, J. W. Robertson. He partnered with Robertson to construct a new scheme of practical education in public schools from Prince Edward Island to British Columbia. This involved not only agriculture programmes like horticulture but also manual training and domestic science. Starting in 1899, Macdonald designed and set up manual training centres in one or two cities in every province and provided teachers and equipment

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to enact the manual training curriculum for a trial period of three years. Departments of education in each province soon assumed fiscal responsibility for the administration of these programmes. By 1910, over 20,000 students across Canada (mainly boys) were taking manual training as part of their regular school programme (Gidney and Millar, 2012). Courses in manual training, household and domestic science, as well as vocational training and guidance grew in degree and complexity throughout the 1920s. Despite provincial jurisdiction over education, the Technical Education Act was passed immediately following World War I by the Dominion government. It appropriated ‘$10 million for any form of vocational, technical, or industrial education which would promote industrial development or enhance the lives and/or contributions of the workers’ (Patterson, 1970, p. 362). By 1932, some 27,000 students were in vocational schools. When the Act ‘expired in 1929 only Ontario had utilized much of the available monies’ (Patterson, 1970, p. 362). The Act was renewed three times, each for a five-year interval, ending in 1944. While manual training was designed specifically for boys and enrolment in the programme was restricted to their gender, girls were encouraged to enrol in a complementary course called ‘domestic science’, a curriculum subject that taught the skills of a homemaker. The homemaker was a distinctly feminine identity constructed in the context of chores like doing cooking, sewing and laundry, and taking care of personal cleanliness and physical hygiene (Gidney and Millar, 2012). Adelaide Hoodless was a strong advocate of the Macdonald Movement; she would found the Women’s Institutes of Canada and wed Dr William Blatz of the Institute of Child Study. According to Hoodless, the feminized curriculum of domestic science complemented the overtly masculine aesthetic associated with technical instruction. She is best remembered for her defence of traditional Whig-feminist values in context of the home environment. Reporting to the Ontario Minister of Education in 1909, Hoodless remarked:

Whether the homemaker has been, or is a wage-earner, or woman of independent means, the responsibility is the same, and the influence upon the class she repre-sents of equal importance. The standard of honour, obedience to laws, service to humanity, sense of justice, respect for good work and the many other qualities which make the good citizen, be he mayor or mechanic, are directly due to the home training and early influences. (p. 3)

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Conclusions

The history of education in Canada requires a thorough encyclopaedia to be properly discussed. How public education in the country has gone from school-house to SMARTBoard is a tale longer than the one narrated within this chapter. This is not necessarily a story of progress, although progressive education is perhaps the most influential force affecting the country’s schools over the past century. Canadian education today is riding the crest of a progressivist tide, the third such wave to wash over the educational landscape of the country in the past century. The first wave freely flowed throughout the interwar period, intensifying in the years following the Depression. Half a decade after Alberta introduced a revised Programme of Studies for public schools in 1936, every province in Canada had transformed its formal curriculum, infrastructure and examination structures. A new and progressive age was on the horizon, and it demanded that school life adjust to meet the needs of a contemporary world. The second wave of progressive education followed the first by approximately thirty-five years; an indicative example is Ontario’s Living and Learning document, which was submitted to the public in 1968. More commonly referred to as the Hall-Dennis Report, a name associated with the two chairs of the committee that drafted the document, Living and Learning offered a wide set of recommendations, which challenged educationists to focus on the individual learner’s inclination towards self-discovery and exploration, to limit competition, to re-vision classroom spaces, and to abolish corporal punishment. The third wave of progressivist thinking, which is branded twenty-first century learning, is a tidal force in education today. While mediated within a discourse that concentrates upon the transformative influence of technology on our existence, three themes dominate the rhetoric; these themes have constellated about Canadian progres-sivist ideas since the 1930s, emphasizing: a) the needs of the individual learner; b) the necessity of cultivating active learning processes; and c) the correlation (integration) of schools with modern social needs (Christou, 2012). Throughout the history of Canadian public education, progressives have largely defined themselves in opposition to tradition, which bears a negative connotation. Traditional schools were derived in, and are associated with, a bygone and obsolete social context. The schools of today must relate to the world of the future, not a world that has passed. This argument is both problematic and persistent in the historical literature, having been addressed eighty-five years ago by John Dewey. He felt that the dichotomy of ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ schools is problematic:

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The general philosophy of the new education may be sound, and yet the difference in abstract principles will not decide the way in which the moral and intellectual preference involved shall be worked out in practice. There is always the danger in a new movement that in rejecting the aims and methods of that which it would supplant, it may develop its principles negatively rather than positively and constructively. (1938, p. 20)

Dewey challenged progressivists to be more critical of their own pedagogical principles and claims, but also to articulate an educational philosophy that was not defined primarily in opposition to another set of ideas, which is generally depicted in caricature. The tensions between tradition and progress, seemingly irreconcilable concepts despite a century of debate, prevail. Educational technologies are the new idols attracting adherents to the cult of progress. Interactive white boards have taken the place of many play stations in kindergarten classrooms. Laptops and tablets are increasingly supplementing textbooks. Word processing has taken the place of handwriting. An altar to interactive technology is the centre-piece of any modern, progressive learning environment. These are not lamentable changes, but the actual effects of these changes upon social and individual learning processes remain to be seen. Test scores may increase, but education is more than a mark. Future historians will have to comment on the relative progress or regress that Canadian schools have made in the past decades, but the rocking and swaying between progressivist and traditionalist camps has confused the definition of what an educated person is (broadly speaking), and what a rounded education might resemble. This confusion, identified in January 1934 by the editors of The School as ‘fluctuations, shiftings, and tinkerings’ of educational programmes and principles, is a profoundly contemporary one (p. 370).

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Educational History in Canada

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Transcript of Educational History in Canada