In 1923 the National Council of Education published a report on the teaching of history and civics in Canadian schools which still makes for interesting reading, not least in the context of today's history debates. The National Council was an outgrowth of a national conference on education and citizenship (officially, the "Conference on Character Education in Relation to Canadian Citizenship") held in Winnipeg in 1919. The conference had been organized by a group of businessmen, religious leaders, and educationists who were motivated in part by a determination to ensure that the national patriotism inspired by the Great War continued into peacetime and in part by fears that the War might mark a radical discontinuity in social life. In both cases, education was seen as a crucial enterprise. In the first, to instill in the young a sense of national unity and pride in Canada as a nation in its own right and as a member of the British Empire. In the second, to develop in them a sense of service to the community that would inoculate them against radical and socialist ideas. Faced with the reality that Canada's political and constitutional structures made a national education policy unattainable, the conference decided to create a Canada-wide, non-governmental organization to shape education and to stimulate inter-provincial cooperation, preferably with the help of governments, but if necessary without it. The result was the National Council of Education (Chaiton, 1974; Mitchell, 1996-97).
Not surprisingly, the Council's preoccupation with citizenship, defined in terms of character, service, and pan-Canadian patriotism, led it to take a particular interest in the teaching of history and civics, and one of its first actions was to examine the state of these subjects in the schools. To do this, it commissioned a group of academics at the University of Toronto to undertake the task. Their report was published in 1923. It consisted of three parts: one on history, written by C.N. Cochrane, a classicist and ancient historian; a second on civics, written by W.S. Milner, also a classicist and ancient historian; and a third consisting of an extensive list of textbooks, accompanied with brief evaluative comments, designed for the use of schools and compiled by members of the University of Toronto history department. Both Cochrane and Milner enjoyed national reputations as scholars and their names, together with the imprimatur of the National Council, with its own list of contacts and supporters, meant that the Report possessed solid credentials.
Cochrane hoped to organize the history section of the Report around three questions: one, what did provincial governments expect history and civics courses to accomplish: two, were these expectations reasonable and realistic; and, three, what were the actual results of the teaching of history and civics in the schools? In fact, he addressed only the first two. He lacked the resources to do the kind of empirical work needed to answer the third question, though he provided some impressionistically brief answers to it. He noted, for example, that university professors were "frequently startled by the ignorance of history" displayed by high school graduates, while also observing that "thoughtful people" across Canada "lament the lack of intelligent interest in world problems which the teaching of history should inspire" (p. 3). There was, it seemed, at least a prima facie case for assuming that the schools were not teaching history as well as they should, though it is also worth noting the Report's assumption that the study of history should produce an interest in contemporary affairs. As their teaching and writing attested, neither Cochrane nor Milner believed that the study of history was its own justification. Rather, they saw its value lying in the shaping of intellect and character.
At the same time, the Report cautioned that people should not expect too much from the schools. If history is "past experience," understood as the experience of the human race as a whole, it could say little to children and adolescents who by definition knew very little of life. In the words of the Report, "much of the material of history is permanently beyond the comprehension of any school-child" (p.3). Indeed, even in "advanced" countries such as Canada mature adults often lacked "the historical sense," a state of affairs that suggested that what adults found difficult, students would find doubly so (p.4).
Even so, observed the Report, democracy, which Cochrane and Milner defined, not in Dewey's sense of a participative community of conjoint experience and shared values, but more austerely and institutionally as "the successful working of democratic government," depended on the existence of an intelligent and informed electorate, aware of national and international problems, which in turn depended on a knowledge and understanding of history. Thus, whatever the difficulties students faced in learning history, schools nonetheless had to teach it.
In surveying what Canadian schools actually did, the Report found that history was a compulsory subject in all elementary schools (i.e. below Grade 8), usually beginning around Grade 4 or 5, with textbook-based formal instruction beginning in Grade 6, and usually taught in connection with geography, with the aim of arousing students' interest in their social, political and physical environment. So far as subject matter was concerned, curricula in the early grades involved a combination of local studies and "great figures of universal history" pursued through selected readings, with the systematic study of Canadian and British history beginning in Grade 6.
Regarding the secondary schools (defined as containing Grades 9-12), the Report found that history held a prominent place in all provincial curricula, though it was not always made compulsory, especially in the Maritime provinces. It identified a fairly consistent pattern across all provincial curricula: Canadian history and institutions; British history (or French history in Francophone Quebec); and European history if and when time allowed. The Report noted that civics (a subject about which Milner in particular displayed some ambivalence, as we shall see in a subsequent article) was especially prominent in the Western provinces and observed that this was a response to local conditions, meaning, presumably, that it was a response to the high proportion of immigrant children in Western Canadian schools. Beyond this reference, however, the Report explicitly disavowed any attempt to assess provincial curricula, on the grounds of unfamiliarity with the kinds of local conditions that shaped them.
Having provided this general survey of provincial curricula, the Report turned to questions of goals and purposes. It took as its standpoint a definition of history as "a reconstruction of the past with a view to the understanding of the present" (p.10). The word "reconstruction" is susceptible of two readings here. On the one hand, it can be read as suggesting that the Report followed the positivist conception of history as the description of what happened in the past. On the other, it can be read as embodying the claim of such advocates of the "new history" as James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and Carl Becker (all of whom were well known in the early 1920s and in one of whom, Carl Becker, Cochrane took a particular interest, planning in later life to write a book on him) that there was an unbridgeable gulf between what happened in the past and what historians made of it, so that the historian could only interpret the past, not describe it. In the event, the Report embraced both positions, arguing that, though history was at root an interpretative discipline, school-age students were too immature to understand it in this way and so had to be taught it descriptively, as simply the record of what happened in the past.
Using its definition of history as directed at achieving an understanding of the present, the Report rejected any notion of history as antiquarianism or as romance, though it conceded the obvious point that history's "considerable romantic element" had many advantages for teaching. Perhaps telling the National Council of Education what it did not want to hear, it also denied that history should be made a vehicle for any kind of moral education, though it acknowledged that to study history obviously afforded materials for the exercise of moral judgment. However, insisted the Report, if morality was the goal then the proper subject to teach was not history, but religion or civics. The historian's task, it went on, was to understand, not to judge. The Report also rejected the argument that history should be used to teach either patriotism or internationalism. In its words, "there are grave dangers in assuming too readily that history is a natural medium for teaching either patriotism or internationalism" (p.10).
In this context, it took dead aim against those on the liberal-left who, in the war-to-end-war spirit of the early 1920s, were urging that history be used to teach internationalism or pacifism, or to create an anti-war spirit in the young. To this argument the Report counterposed the objection that war and conflict were as much a part of human history as peace and cooperation and thus should not be hidden from students. In its words: "History is a record of conflict no less than of cooperation. Ugliness and brutality are as necessary a part of the picture as beauty and goodness" (p.10). It did, however, add the proviso that teachers should not dwell on "the unpleasant aspects of the past" more than necessary, which was presumably a reference to teachers' tendency to spice up their lessons by emphasizing those sensational aspects of the past that they thought would appeal to students. Moreover, argued the Report, in a not so indirect reference to the Great War, in which Cochrane had himself served in a tank battalion, how could students appreciate the benefits they enjoyed, such as freedom, unless they knew of the sacrifices that brought them into being?
The Report extended this anti-pacifist argument to include a criticism of the tendency of some on the liberal-left to push for the inclusion of more social history in the curriculum as a way to make history less nationalistic and more democratic. The Report acknowledged the value of social history but insisted that it could not and should not be separated from other aspects of historical study. In its view, social history was simply one aspect of historical study, not its centerpiece. Above all, institutions, no matter how dull they might seem to students, had to be understood; they were the "sheet-anchor" of any society and embodied "the ideas which constitute its motive power" (p.10). In this way, the Report made a case for teaching political history, which in the 1920s was under attack not only from anti-war organizations such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, but also from educationists looking for ways to make history more intelligible and therefore more appealing to the young. On this question, however, the Report was unequivocal: "It is hard to see how political history can ever be displaced from its position in the center of the stage" (p.10).
As the next step in its investigation of history curricula, the Report set out to see to what extent these "truths" were accepted by provincial departments of education. After quoting extensively from Ontario and Nova Scotia documents, it noted that provincial governments saw history as a vehicle for instruction in patriotism and morals, and, with some provisos, it repeated its earlier warning that this was to distort the true nature of history. The Report admitted that the case for teaching patriotism was usually stated so guardedly that "little exception" could be taken to it, and acknowledged that a "very high and worthy" task of history teaching was to alert the young to what they owed to previous generations, but went on to repeat its concerns about "the prostitution of history in the cause of propaganda," be that propaganda either patriotic or moral. The Report stressed that "truth and justice" had to be the guiding principles of historical study (though it offered no explanation of either of these much contested terms) and that history was not the study of winning causes at the expense of lost ones - a sort of shadowy anticipation of E.P. Thompson's later and well-known expression of his wish to rescue the people of the past from the "enormous condescension of posterity" (Thompson, 1968: 13). At the same time, in a warning against the dangers of presentism, the Report urged that "teachers should not accustom either themselves or their pupils to see the hand of God in the triumphs of Democracy or of Industrialism" (p.12).
The Report adopted a similarly cautious stance regarding the teaching of world or "universal" history. This had been put on the educational map by the success of H.G. Wells' Outline of History, which enlisted history in the cause of a world state and had become a best-seller on its publication in 1921, attracting considerable attention in Canada, as elsewhere. Wells used his book and its success to drive home the message that history as conventionally taught, with its emphasis on national politics and war, was dangerously chauvinistic, and that it was best taught as the story of humanity's attempts to cooperate on a global basis. For Wells the Great War was the almost inevitable result of the kind of history (he was later to describe it as "the poison called history") that had been taught in the schools (Wells, 1939). His argument that if another, even greater, catastrophe was to be avoided, history teaching had to be internationalized met with a positive response from many educationists and from liberals and socialists generally. In this context, the Report recognized the growing demand for the teaching of universal history that had arisen from the Great War, but emphasized the need for, and the difficulty of, selecting what to include in any school curriculum that attempted to tackle such an enormous subject as the history of the world. Ignoring the globalist arguments of Wells and others like him, the Report took it as self-evident that British and Canadian history, focussed on institutions, should have pride of place in any curriculum and argued that "the good citizen of Canada will also prove to be a good citizen of the world" (pp.12-13).
Pedagogically, the Report argued that world history, like the concept of humanity itself, was too abstract and amorphous to have any meaning for school-age students, so that a local emphasis was "inevitable" (p.13). Since the Report understood a local emphasis in history teaching to mean, not local history in the conventional sense, but dealing with Britain and the whole of Canada, its argument seems a little forced. It is far from clear that British history, or indeed many aspects of Canadian history, would be any more concrete and tangible to the average Canadian student than world history. By the early 1920s there were plenty of suggestions available for how to teach world history in the schools. Obviously, as the author of the history section of the Report, Cochrane was not convinced by them, despite his insistence that history should be taught so as to throw light on the problems of the present. Wells was later to lament that though he largely won the battle of public opinion, he was unable to move the policy makers in education. The Report makes his point.
Having aired its concern lest history be turned into propaganda, no matter how well meaning, the Report concluded that, overall, provincial departments of education were right to see history as a "humanistic study," taught in relationship with geography and literature, and designed "to develop the intelligence and inspire the systematic imagination which makes good men and good citizens." (p.12) Thus did the Report resolve the tension between teaching history as a discipline with its own integrity and using it to shape citizens. As the Report saw it, and as it defined citizenship, there simply was no conflict. To be a good citizen meant possessing a solid understanding of history, and for most people the foundations for such an understanding were laid in school.
At the same time, the Report argued that provincial departments of education were justified in paying most attention to Canadian and British (or French in Quebec) history. The regrettable consequence, however, was that there was little room in the curriculum for general European history. and here the Report expressed some concern, though without offering any solutions to the problem it identified. The problem was that in the post-war world European history was too important to ignore, and, more generally, Canada seemed to be severing its European roots. Here, no doubt, Cochrane, as the author of the history section of the Report, was speaking as the classicist he was, convinced that Western civilization could be understood only in the context of its foundation in Ancient Greece and Rome, and voicing his distress that the increasing materialism of North American society was making people less conscious of their past, not least at a time when North America, thanks in part to its intervention in the Great War, was losing its sense of indebtedness and inferiority to Europe. As Cochrane put it, a place in the curriculum needed to be found for European history, "because on the North American continent, the danger of spiritual detachment from the Old World is very real and great; and this in spite of the facts that the roots of our civilization lie in Europe, and the economic and political problems of Europe are of direct concern to all who live in the New World" (p.13).
Having thus considered, albeit impressionistically and unsystematically, the content of school history programs, the Report went on to consider how effectively they were taught. It is not clear what evidence Cochrane used in doing this. He certainly did not accumulate any empirical data, whether in the form of surveys, classroom observations, or any other form of investigation. In the Report itself, he said nothing about his research methods and one can only assume that he relied on personal contacts and anecdotal evidence, together with any other material, such as provincial reports, he could find. The Report noted that provincial departments of education all advised teachers to take account of the increasing maturity of students as they moved through the grades, but voiced a certain skepticism regarding the claim that secondary school students had reached "the stage of reflection." In many cases, noted the Report, this was "manifestly false," though it acknowledged the possibility that more might be done if the teaching was of a sufficiently high quality. On this score, however, the Report expressed considerable doubts. It noted that even first year university students thought that all history was to be found within the covers of a single (often "quite inferior") textbook. The "intellectual timidity" of university students was the most serious problem confronting university teachers, and if this was true at the university level, argued the Report, it must be doubly so in the schools.
The Report did not entirely blame teachers for this state of affairs. It recognized the validity of the criticisms of the "cast-iron examination system, by which pupils are more often than not encouraged to memorize verbally large sections of a text which they do not understand and in which they are quite uninterested" (p.14). To this extent, the Report agreed with the vocal minority of teachers and educationists (some of them otherwise quite traditionalist in their educational views) who had long criticized provincial examinations as destructive of good teaching. It disagreed, however, with those who simply wished to get rid of examinations altogether. Such people, in the Report's view, were "educational anarchists" who ignored the real task, which was not to abolish examinations but to reform them so that they required students to demonstrate a capacity for "organized thought and expression" (p.14).
In the Report's diagnosis of the weaknesses of history teaching, however, it found a much more serious problem than the rigidity of provincial examinations, and it arose from the working conditions facing teachers whose training had not prepared them for the real world of the classrooms in which they found themselves. As the Report put it, the failure of history teaching arose from "the difficulties under which teachers labor; for they are too often asked to perform a hopeless task" (p. 14). These difficulties arose in part from conditions outside the control of teachers: irregular student attendance, indifferent parents, inadequate resources, unsympathetic school boards, low salaries, lack of status, and the like. All these things combined to make teaching an unattractive prospect to the kinds of people it needed to attract, notably career-minded, professionally oriented men who would be attracted to teaching only by decent salaries, good career prospects, and a suitable social status. As a result, argued the Report, reflecting a gendered but not unrealistic perspective typical of its time, teaching, especially in the small rural schools which most young Canadians attended, attracted young, poorly educated, and often immature women who either gave up or were forced to give up their careers on marriage, or who moved too frequently from job to job in a perfectly understandable search to improve their working conditions and career prospects.
In the Report's analysis, these material deficits had pedagogical consequences, as seen most conspicuously in "the outrageous importance which the prescribed text book possesses in the system of instruction" (p.15). Textbook teaching, observed the Report, had some obvious practical advantages, but, above all, its basis was to be found in the wish to compensate for inferior teaching by providing a minimal level of competence below which no teacher could fall.. True to its cautiously pragmatic stance on other issues, the Report concluded that, like examinations, textbooks were necessary but needed substantial improvement. Equally important, they had to be supplemented by adequate school libraries, which were as essential to good history teaching as laboratories were in science.
Above all, improvement was to be found in reforming the status, training, and qualifications of teachers. Anything else, such as prepackaged lesson plans or improved textbooks, could only be a stop-gap. As the Report put it, "the better way is to have better teachers" and this meant teachers who were qualified as history specialists, as was increasingly the case in large city high schools. If teachers were to teach history better, they first had to understand it as what today we have learned to call a form of disciplined inquiry. Few teachers, noted the Report, had "any idea of what the writing of history implies" and thus were as tied to the textbook as were their students (p.16).
At the same time, the Report dismissed as "absurd" any claim that historical research could be done by students below the higher levels of undergraduate study. As a consequence, it insisted that history at the school level must therefore be taught as "a body of accepted truths" (p.16). The obvious problem that arose, as the Report recognized, was that this confined students and teachers alike to the pages of the single textbook, a strategy that it had already condemned as producing "intellectual timidity" in students. The Report's not altogether consistent solution was to recommend that even when history was taught as a body of accepted truths, teachers "must be able to illustrate the problems which lie beneath history as written" (p.16). The Report did not elaborate this point any further than this, but one can only assume that it intended that, though teachers had primarily to teach the facts (the "accepted truths") of history to their students, they should also do what they could to alert their students to the nature of historical facts, to raise questions concerning the basis of historical knowledge and of what constituted historical significance and as Cochrane said in another part of the Report, when dismissing antiquarian history, "it is sometimes difficult to say when an historical fact is really vital and when it is merely of interest to the curious" (p.10).
Furthermore, the Report accepted as valid the psychological truism that people learn most from what they do for themselves, drawing the conclusion that teachers must therefore be able to guide their students in the pursuit of knowledge. most especially by using school libraries. The Report noted that children were the subject of more intensive study than ever before, and that one of the key findings of all this child study was that children were driven by "an instinct of mastery and ownership" and "a power of adventure." In what can almost be seen as an anticipation of Vygotskyan pedagogy, the Report argued that the "secret of teaching" lay not in "pouring knowledge into but in bringing knowledge to our young human as a discovery of his own" (p. 23). In other words, the Report did not endorse the view that knowledge already existed in the child's mind, nor did it see the teacher's job as being simply to facilitate children's development, as some progressive educators believed in these years. Rather, teachers had to bring knowledge to students, but in a form in which they would learn it for themselves. Were this to be done, observed the Report, striking a blow against what it no doubt saw as pedagogical faddism, there would be less outcry in favor of the "sciences of direct observation" in the schools, an outcry which for obvious reasons worked to the detriment of a subject such as history in which direct observation was not possible (p.16).
Thus, as well as improving the working conditions and training of teachers, it was important to attract into teaching people who understood history, and to support those teachers who already did. University extension programs and refresher courses, oriented towards history, were essential as a way of initiating teachers into what Peter Seixas has taught us to think of as "a community of inquiry" linking historians and history teachers alike (Seixas, 1993). As the Report put it:
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By means of such classes, teachers would be brought into contact with the leaders of thought in their several branches of work. They would renew their acquaintance with the literature of their subjects, of which they too often lose track in the course of their onerous, routine duties. Difficulties and problems which have arisen in their work could be discussed. Inspiration could be gathered for fresh and vigorous instruction when they return to their schools (p.17). |
What is noteworthy about this quotation, in view of recent research on the importance of pedagogical content knowledge, is its acknowledgement that professional development for history teachers should embrace not only subject matter knowledge but pedagogy also, and that pedagogy should be rooted in the problems actually facing teachers. Such a professionalization of history teaching, for this is what the Report was in effect calling for, was. in the Report's view, the only way to improve the state of history in the schools. As the Report observed: "It requires many years of experience to make a good teacher; and the necessity of having good teachers can never be overcome by the use of text-books, however excellent" (p. 15).
Despite its negative description of the state of history in Canadian schools, albeit a state for which it did not altogether blame teachers, the Report ended with a mildly up-beat conclusion, though one which came close to damning with faint praise. The position of history in Canadian schools, it declared, "is certainly not bad" and "its prospects are by no means hopeless." What was needed (and how many time have we heard this over the years?) was for all interested parties to work together for the common goal of improving the teaching of history. Teachers needed better training, more support, and better working conditions: "If this is done, the teaching forces will themselves, though slowly, raise the level of intellectual and spiritual life throughout the country" (p.17). And genuine improvement, said the Report, had to come from the teachers, not be imposed on them: "It is in encouraging and supporting the efforts of the teachers rather than in spasmodic attempts to interfere directly with their work, that the real contribution of the public must consist" (p.17).
Perhaps this rejection of externally imposed reforms helps to account for the apparent lack of impact of the Report. Its recommendations called for deep-seated structural reforms that went far beyond revising a curriculum or producing a new textbook, and no provincial department of education was willing to enter such unpredictable waters. Moreover, despite its well-placed connections, the National Council of Education found itself unable to exert much leverage on provincial governments beyond the exercise of moral suasion, and as the 1920s proceeded the Council ran out of steam. Neither the historical nor the educational journals took much notice of the Report, except to announce its publication. It says something about the Report's lack of impact that, when the two principal authors died (Cochrane in 1945 and Milner in 1931), neither man's obituaries said anything about their involvement with it, and subsequent biographical dictionaries have remained similarly silent (Innis, 1946; Briggs, 1994). It led to no public debate of any significance and provincial departments of education carried on their work undisturbed. Two years after the publication of the Report, the President of the Canadian Historical Association declared history to be "one of the weakest subjects in the school curriculum" and announced that he was giving "serious thought" to tackling the subject of teaching methods. Cochrane served as secretary of the Association in 1926, but the task of dealing with teaching history in the schools proved to be beyond the resources of the Association, and in 1930 and again in 1953, investigations into history teaching reported a state of affairs that was little different from that described by Cochrane in 1923 (Barbeau, 1925: 11-13; Sage, 1930; Katz, 1953; Osborne, 2000).
Note
This article deals only with the first section of Report, dealing with history teaching. A subsequent article will deal with the second part of the Report, on the teaching of civics. All quotations are taken from the text of the Report, Observations on the Teaching of History and Civics in Primary and Secondary Schools of Canada (Winnipeg: National Council of Education, 1923).
References
Barbeau, M. "Report of the Secretary-Treasurer." Canadian Historical Association Annual Report, 1925: 11-13.
Briggs, W.W. Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994: 104.
Chaiton, A. The History of the National Council of Education of Canada. University of Toronto M.A. Thesis, 1974.
Innis, H.A. "Charles Norris Cochrane." Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, X11 (1), February, 1946: 95-97.
Katz, J. The Teaching of Canadian History in Canada: A Survey Study of Canadian History in Junior and Senior High Schools. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1953.
Mitchell, T. "'The Manufacture of Souls of Good Quality': Winnipeg's 1919 National Conference on Citizenship, English-Canadian Nationalism, and the New Order after the Great War." Journal of Canadian Studies, 31 (4): 5-28.
Osborne, K. "'Our History Syllabus Has Us Gasping': History in Canadian Schools - Past, Present, and Future." Canadian Historical Review, 81 (3), September, 2000: 404-433.
Sage, W.N. "The Teaching of History in the Elementary Schools of Canada." Canadian Historical Association Report of the Annual Meeting Held in Montreal, May 23, 1930: 55-63.
Seixas, P. "The Community of Inquiry as a Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The Case of History." American Educational Research Journal, 30 (1993): 305-324.
Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 1968.