The purpose of this column since its inception has been to draw attention to the historical development of history teaching in Canada over the last hundred years or so. I write it in the belief that, as history teachers, our ignorance of our collective past is both a professional and a political weakness.
Professionally, it has meant that we lack any sense of corporate tradition and solidarity, that we lack any sense of continuity with our predecessors, so that we work in virtually total ignorance of the methods used to teach history in the past, methods that often anticipate what we think of as innovatively contemporary and that, in any case, are interesting in their own right. As a result, each generation of history teachers begins its work anew, unable to profit from the experience of those who have gone before them, indeed oblivious to the fact that there is any experience from which to learn.
Politically, our indifference to our professional past has done us no favors either. By its very nature history is more politically exposed than other school subjects, especially in these days of identity politics where the past is remorselessly corralled to serve the needs of the present. In the last few years the tendency has been to abandon history in the pursuit of more vocationally oriented subjects, though there are some signs of its now being harnessed to the cause of citizenship. A generation ago, sparked by Hodgetts' 1968 report on history teaching, What Culture? What Heritage?, history was pressed into the service of national unity and Canadian identity. A generation before that history's defenders were bemoaning Canadians' ignorance of their past and were looking for ways to enliven history teaching, notably by turning to social history. And so on and so on. The whirligig of time has seen history shaped by a steady succession of enthusiasms, fads, and causes, and our lack of any sense of craft tradition has made us unnecessarily vulnerable to those who would enlist us in their campaigns.
This column, like its predecessors, is intended to be a step, albeit small and sometimes tentative, towards rectifying this state of affairs. It is easy to embrace innovation when we have no sense of tradition to guide us. It is easy to be enticed (or pushed) on to a bandwagon when we have no firm connection to the ground on which we stand. And, given the current national debate over the teaching of history, we are likely to see plenty of bandwagons rolling our way over the next few years.
Whatever else might be said about it, the 1998 publication of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? put the teaching of history squarely on the national agenda and, now more than ever, we need to know what we are about as history teachers. George Orwell famously wrote that whoever controls the past controls the future, but, as he himself demonstrated in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the surest way of all to control the future is not so much to control the past as to obliterate it. Once we have lost our memory, we are vulnerable to every suggestion that is thrown at us.
It is in this spirit that this column turns back to a now almost completely forgotten episode in the teaching of history in Canada, a report published by the Canadian Historical Association in 1930.
The author of the report was Walter Sage, a historian at the University of British Columbia, who at that time was one of the pillars of the academic history establishment in Canada. Though his reputation largely died with him - he does not rate even an index entry in Carl Berger's survey of Canadian historiography - in his lifetime he was one of the mainstays of the small community of academic, university-based historians in Canada. In 1929, for example, he co-authored, with two of the then stars of Canadian historiography, George Wrong and Chester Martin, a junior high Canadian history text which went on to become a multi-year best seller.
The CHA survey was part of an international movement to examine school history courses and texts for signs of nationalist and militarist excess that gained increasing momentum in the 1920s and early 1930s. H.G. Wells more than once blamed history teachers for creating the state of mind that made the First World War possible, arguing that it was in the history classroom that young boys were indoctrinated in the cult of war and patriotism that made them so willing to kill, and if need be die, for their country. Few historians went that far but many of them, perhaps out of a sense of guilt for the haste with which they had turned their skills to patriotic purposes in the War, felt that it was time that history was taught more dispassionately in schools, that it be treated as an academic discipline rather like physics or chemistry, and not converted into a set of patriotic exercises or lessons in citizenship. In this view, the purpose of learning history was to learn to think historically, a subject which I discussed in an earlier column.
At the same time, history, properly taught, could, or so many historians thought, teach boys and girls to look beyond the confines of their national or cultural boundaries, to see the whole world as their possession. History, in other words, rather than being a source of nationalism, could promote the cause of international cooperation and understanding. Thus, the League of Nations, through its Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the International Committee of Historical Sciences, and a variety of other organizations, sought so to shape the teaching of history that the Great War would indeed be the war that ended war.
As a member of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, the Canadian Historical Association undertook to survey the teaching of history in Canadian schools, a task that, for obvious political reasons, neither the federal nor any provincial government was inclined to undertake. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the path to the reform of history teaching in Canada was tended by non-governmental hands.
The survey was confined to Grades 1-8 for the practical reason that most students did not stay in school past Grade 8, and indeed many did not proceed even that far. For the great majority of Canadians, the only formal study of history that they undertook took place in those grades. For reasons of economy and because of limited resources the survey was further limited to the examination of provincial curricula and programmes of study. Sage had no researchers at his disposal. Nor did he visit any classrooms, though he had his own personal contacts with teachers, both direct and indirect. In the event, Sage did not see this limitation as a problem since what interested the international community was precisely what schools were required to teach. The focus, in short, was on content and goals as officially prescribed in programmes of study.
As a result, the great majority of Sage's report consists of a factual account of what the nine provinces (this was pre-1949 Canada) required to be taught, grade by grade. Even so, however, certain things stand out which make for some interesting comparisons with today's practice.
Perhaps the most obvious is that every province taught some kind of history in the early grades. In 1930 only Manitoba and Alberta had adopted the nomenclature and assumptions that we associate today with the expanding horizons approach of community-based social studies, and even these two provinces began the systematic teaching of history relatively early, no later than Grade 4 in Manitoba and Grade 6 in Alberta.
All other provinces, and even Manitoba and Alberta in a more limited way, taught at least some history in Grades 1-3. They did not timetable history as a set subject at these grade levels but they taught it nonetheless in the form of stories, usually of explorers and other "famous" people and events, usually though not exclusively in British and Canadian history. Though Sage did not explain this in his report, the reasoning was that since students had to learn to read anyway, they might as well as read something worthwhile, interesting and even exciting, that had the added advantage of being based on fact. In addition, such stories were intended to convey general knowledge (cultural literacy as we would call these days); to lay a foundation for later more systematic historical study, for example by creating at least an awareness that there was a past and that it differed from the present; and to provide a certain amount of moral training by illustrating the rewards of virtue and the punishment of vice.
The systematic study of history began around grades 4 or 5 (except in Alberta). From Grade 5 through Grade 8 the curriculum was divided between Canadian and British history, with some time allotted to civics and government. In most provinces a selected period of British and of Canadian history was studied in each year, but usually with no correlation between them. Occasionally, but rarely, a whole year was devoted to either British or Canadian history. There was also a certain amount of repetition of some topics, in a sort of anticipation of what later came to be called a spiral curriculum. Conspicuously absent was any study of European or world history, which was left to the high school grades, with the obvious result that relatively few students took it.
The emphasis on Canadian and British history needs little explanation. Canadian history was intended to strengthen national identity, to instil a moderate patriotism and to lay the groundwork for the understanding of contemporary problems. So far as British history was concerned, many Canadians, at least outside Francophone Quebec, still saw Canada as a British nation, valued its Britishness as something that distinguished Canada from the United States, and saw no contradiction between being a British imperialist and a Canadian patriot - indeed, seeing Canada's membership in the British Empire as a guarantee of Canadian independence and a means of gaining added presence on the world stage. The Ontario curriculum put into words what other provinces believed: "The teacher should not fail to emphasize the extent, power and responsibilities of the British Empire, its contributions to the highest form of civilization, the achievements of its statesmen and its generals and the increasingly important place that Canada holds among the overseas Dominions."
Sage found that most, though not all, provinces said something about the aims and objectives of teaching history. Saskatchewan, for example, warned teachers against turning history into "a mere exercise of memory," advising them that "History is a continuous narrative of events closely linked together, and efforts should be made to give the pupils vivid impressions of the conditions of living and the customs held in other ages." Ontario, for its part, said that the primary goal in teaching history was "to interest the pupil in historical reading, to give him a knowledge of his civil rights and duties, to enable him to appreciate the logical sequence of events, and eventually to give him the power to interpret present conditions in the light of the past."
Most provinces advised their teachers to look for ways to make history both intelligible and interesting to their students. Manitoba, for example, told its teachers that "social and industrial history should be emphasized and not too much attention devoted to constitutional changes and the controversy over these." For his part, Sage doubted that many teachers were able to take advantage of the advice they were given. Though he did not venture into classrooms, he had his personal contacts, and he allowed himself to speculate about how history was actually taught, taking what might best be described as a pessimistically realistic view. He noted that "laboratory methods" were favored in a number of provinces, but doubted that many teachers were able to use them effectively.
Though Sage did not say so, "laboratory methods" were much discussed in the pedagogical literature of the 1920s and by 1930 had become the ruling orthodoxy of many provincial departments of education so far as the teaching of history was concerned. In many ways they anticipated what in the 1960s we learned to think of as discovery or inquiry approaches to teaching: history was to be presented to students in the form of problems to be investigated and students were to use a variety of different resources to explore them, with the teacher acting, not as lecturer, but as organizer and adviser.
As Sage observed, however, the key to the successful deployment of laboratory methods was a good library and this was precisely what most schools lacked. As a result, the programmes of study easily became mere lists of more or less meaningless scraps of information to be memorized for a test. By and large, Sage concluded, "the course of study outlined is, to quote an experienced teacher, 'away ahead of practical usage.'" He went on to say: "School boards are very slow in building up school libraries, and one reference book among forty pupils does not tend to develop 'modern methods'. It leads inevitably to oral teaching and the dictation of notes which are to be learned by heart."
As Sage obliquely noted at one point, these overly didactic methods of teaching were further reinforced by the pressures of examinations, and especially by the provincial "entrance" examinations that came at the end of Grade 8 or 9 and determined whether or not students could proceed to high school. As he observed of Alberta, "modern methods and ideas are prominent in the work of the early grades" but by Grade 7 "the shadow of the departmental Entrance examination is lengthening and instruction is based upon textbooks. The spontaneity of the course is gone."
If this was true of Alberta, the province which in 1930 had advanced furthest along the road of child-centered, so-called progressive education, one can only assume that in the other provinces the situation was even bleaker. Indeed, although Sage surprisingly did not refer to it, an earlier survey of history teaching, conducted by the University of Toronto history department in 1923, had said as much. This earlier 1923 survey, which will be the subject of a column in a subsequent issue of this journal, pointed to the poor preparation and training of many teachers as another reason why history was often taught poorly, but Sage did not address this subject, presumably because he deliberately concentrated on the content of curricula and programmes of study.
To the modern reader. perhaps the most interesting parts of Sage's report are his conclusion and recommendations, many of which strikingly anticipate what is being said today about the teaching of history and how to improve it. First, he drew attention to the lack of consistency and uniformity across the curricula of the nine provinces. Second, he observed the absence of any "national view" of Canadian history, noting that Francophone Quebec taught little beyond the history of New France ("The story of French Canada is stressed, the exploits of Jacques Cartier are studied by the pupils no less than four times"), while the Atlantic provinces ignored everything west of the Great Lakes. Third, he marked the almost total absence of world history, "including ancient history, and medieval and modern European history." Fourth, he pointed out that Canadian and British history were usually divided into discrete periods, grade by grade, having no connection with each other, rather than being taught "comprehensively," so that history too easily became fragmented and devoid of meaning for students. Fifth, he complained that Canadian history was treated too parochially, with disproportionate attention being given to topics of primarily regional interest and, even more, divorced from "its British Empire and world settings." Sixth, as we have already seen, he suspected that, despite the admonitions and exhortations of curriculum guides, history was often taught as little more than a recital of facts to be memorized for a test.
To remedy these problems, Sage turned to the Canadian Historical Association as the most likely source of inspiration and guidance. It was, after all, the Association that had commissioned his report, and it was obvious that no government was likely to act on his findings. He presented the Association with five specific recommendations. One, he wanted to see a clearer definition of "the aims and objects of history teaching in Canada." Two, he urged the "evolution of a national point of view in Canadian history." Three, he advocated greater "correlation" of provincial curricula. Four, he called for "closer co-operation between writers of history, teachers of history; also between university professors and teachers in normal, high, and elementary schools." Five, to do all this, he recommended the creation of "a commission on the teaching of history to consider the aims, methods and content of history courses."
Needless to say, his recommendations went nowhere. He noted that the American Historical Association was active in furthering the cause of history in American schools and observed that the Canadian Historical Association had "a golden opportunity" to do the same, asking: "Will it take advantage thereof?" The short answer was, no, it would not and could not. The CHA lacked the resources to do anything of the sort and, as history at the university level became ever more professionalized, was not even sure that it should concern itself with the schools. The federal government, like its provincial counterparts, had no intention of stirring up a constitutional hornet's nest. As for educationists, they were by 1930 beginning to listen more and more to the siren song of present-oriented, interdisciplinary social studies emanating from south of the border and promoted by the stream of American professors of education and school superintendents who appeared regularly on the Canadian professional development and summer school circuit. For many educationists in the 1930s, the priority was not so much to reform history as to merge it into the new social studies, as recommended by such American enthusiasts as Harold Rugg, W.H. Kilpatrick, Jesse Newlon, Carleton Washburne, and their Canadian followers. All such plans, however, were stalled by the onset of the Depression which as the 1930s unfolded gave educationists and schools more pressing things to worry about than curriculum reform.
The result was that Sage's report was soon forgotten. His recommendations obviously anticipate much of what has emerged from today's debates about the teaching of history, but no-one these days does him the courtesy of referring to him or his report, presumably because hardly anyone knows that it exists. History teachers are fond of quoting Santayana's dictum that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. Perhaps Sage's report is one of those rare cases that suggest Santayana was on to something.
Notes
All quotations are from the report, The Teaching of History in the Elementary Schools of Canada, which was printed in the Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, 1930. 55-63. The only mention of it I have seen in recent years occurs in Paul T. Phillips, Britain's Past in Canada: The Teaching and Writing of British History, Vancouver: UBC Press, 1989. 11-12.
Walter Sage (1888-1963) joined the UBC history department in 1918 and was its head from 1932 to 1953. He served for twenty years on the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and in 1944 was elected President of the Canadian Historical Association. According to his obituarist, Margaret Ormsby, the history of British Columbia was his "passion" but "His own contribution, he knew, lay more in the stimulus which he had provided for generations of students than in his published works, numerous and significant though they were." See Margaret Ormsby, "Walter Noble Sage," Canadian Historical Review, XLV (2), 1964: 180-182.