In my last column I described the history section of a 1923 Report on the teaching of history and civics. In this column I deal with the civics section of that report. Each section had a different author, that on history being written by Charles N. Cochrane and that on civics by William S. Milner. The two men were colleagues at the University of Toronto where they were both professors of ancient history and their report was commissioned by the National Council of Education, a group that took a particular interest in the role of the schools in teaching citizenship, which it defined in terms of the development of "character," of service to the community, and of a pan-Canadian patriotism and sense of national identity. Stymied by the provinces' refusal to yield an inch of their constitutional responsibility for education, and unable to secure the establishment of a National Bureau of Education, the Council had to content itself with acting as a pressure group, albeit without much political clout, for its causes. Among those causes was the shaping of school curricula, especially in such subjects as history, geography, literature, to promote Canadian unity and citizenship. With this in mind, the Council asked Cochrane and Milner to survey the teaching of history and civics in Canadian schools, which they did in a Report that was published in 1923.
Milner paradoxically began his discussion of civics by virtually dismissing the very idea of teaching such a subject. There was, he wrote, "something particularly repugnant to British instinct in the conception of teaching citizenship as a subject" but went on to allow that "human perplexity in a time of need was never greater" and that both Britain and the United States were embracing the explicit teaching of citizenship. (p.17) His ambivalence to some extent mirrored that of the National Council itself. Founded at a national conference on "character education in relationship to citizenship," held in Winnipeg in 1919, the Council was the creation of a group business, religious, and educational leaders who were disturbed by what they saw as the radically unsettling forces sweeping through society in the wake of the Great War and who saw in education a conservative force for the preservation of morality and stability. (Mitchell, 1996-97) In such an age, civics, whatever its strengths and weaknesses in the abstract, obviously had a role to play. Citizenship was too important to be left to chance, especially in a country such as Canada, where in the wake of the Conscription Crisis of 1917 and the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which was only the tip of a much larger iceberg of labour unrest and working class radicalism, national unity and social peace could not be taken for granted.
Milner offered a definition of citizenship as membership in a "community of obligation" and saw duty and character as its cardinal virtues, while at the same time wondering what all this meant in a country like Canada where "we are suddenly conscious that a people is yet to be made." (p.18) Canadians, he feared, had no common idea of the kinds of citizens that society needed, and this lack of agreement meant that the Canadian state, unlike states elsewhere, could hardly teach citizenship without making it divisive and disuniting. Moreover, public opinion, even informed opinion, was itself divided on the subject. Patriotism was under question. There was no agreement on the place of religion in education. The sense of tradition, upon which any society depends, was under attack: "It is tradition itself in the field of the spirit which is now faltering uncertain, assailed, and to leave it to some blind, self-moving 'progress,' or to a progress which we believe it to be within our power to direct, without setting our course is not to know the meaning of free institutions." (p.27)
Milner published very little so that it is impossible to define his personal beliefs, but it is not difficult to see in this lament a Christian classicist's nostalgia for the kind of organic society that was thought to typify the world at least of Ancient Greece, if not of Rome, and that was under threat from the combined forces of liberal individualism and capitalist materialism. As Milner noted, the Great War had created a crisis of belief, but, more fundamentally, the triumph of the concept of evolution had destabilized human thought. Law now appeared, not as the codification of fundamental values, but of social customs that varied from place to place and changed over time. Authority was defined in functionalist terms, not as the embodiment of the right to rule, but simply as whatever it is that can enforce obedience. Morality had become, not the expression of ultimate values, but of human needs which themselves changed with time. In short, relativism had become the order of the day, so that "what alone will save us from wasted effort or sheer destruction is some sense of a Presence and purpose." (p.24)
In other words, for Milner, civics and citizenship were much more than matters of technical instruction in the institutions of government or a primer in patriotism; they involved profound questions of social philosophy, which is perhaps why he thought that the teaching of citizenship was in principle "repugnant." No amount of formal instruction could save a world that had lost its way: "Men may be forgiven if they ask, Where are the ancient pieties and loyalties of the race? It matters not whither we turn, faith, law, authority, patriotism are all alike assailed, and would appear to have been damaged. We are at a pause waiting for the vitalized leadership which shall explain us to ourselves." (p.19)
In the interim, Milner offered a series of propositions. One, some kind of primer was needed to describe the "rudiments of duty" and the formation of character. Two, the concept of duty included citizenship patriotism and loyalty. Three, moves to weaken the "sentiment of patriotism" were to be resisted. Four, education for citizenship meant, not so much lessons in civics and the like, but nurturing "the whole man." Five, citizenship and religion were inseparable, and "in Christendom no system of education is finally sound that does not accept the Christian synthesis." (p.19) Six, citizens cannot be "made" and character cannot be "imparted," but teachers can create the conditions for their nurture and growth. Seven, the "spirit of a school" and its corporate life, as embodied in games, friendships, and so on, are at least as important as textbooks and formal instruction as teachers of citizenship and have to be shaped by deliberate effort. Eight, although the idea of teaching citizenship out of a book "offends British instinct," it should not be dismissed out of hand and, especially in the early grades, a "golden book embodying the noblest tradition of the great family of people to which Canada belongs would be a noble achievement." (p.20) Similarly, in the secondary schools students and teachers needed "a collection of the noblest thought and aspiration of our people... a golden book of the British spirit at its truest and noblest...." (p.30) Nine, in addition, basic knowledge of institutions, which is obviously one element of citizenship, does lend itself to teaching from a textbook. Ten, at the same time, civics must neither become a self-contained subject nor be equated with the much wider concept of citizenship, and the concepts and values of duty and service must be incorporated into all subjects, so that, for example, geography should foster a love of the land, history should exemplify men and women of noble spirit, while even arithmetic could provide indirect lessons in thrift and prudence, for example through teaching "the value of insurance, the incidence of fire and accident and public extravagance." (p.28) Eleven, citizenship in the true sense was best taught indirectly, by example rather than by precept, so that "we must animate the teaching and the text-books so far as may be with the spirit of citizenship and say as little about it as possible." (p.28)
As this list makes clear, Milner possessed a very broad and somewhat nebulous concept of citizenship. A good citizen, he insisted, had to be a good person, but a good person was not necessarily a good citizen, since citizenship required engagement in the life of the community. Such engagement was important since the world was becoming more dangerous. Whatever its other merits, democracy had introduced a :crowd spirit" into the world that represented "the greatest practical menace to civilization." (p.29) Moreover, this crowd spirit could only become stronger with the technological revolution in communications: "For 'the public' has arrived. Millions have suddenly acquired the printed word.... Sex, conflict, the 'mass touch' - here are the arcana of a vast dominion over souls." (p.29) The result was to create unprecedented opportunities for "the demagogue, or 'spell-binder,' or advertiser 'creating a demand,' or the type of reformer who does the complaining of other people or exposes his own artistic or moral nakedness." (p.29)
Such manipulators of the newly-created mass audience were aided by the ignorance and lack of imagination of men and women, and this could be corrected only by education. Education would increase the "scientific training" of the people in the sense of making them better informed and more critical, while also equipping them with a set of ideals and standards and imbuing them with a sense of tradition that would increase their resistance to appeals to emotion or appetite: "We cannot put wise heads on young shoulders, but we can furnish them with noble ideals without which they must forever and inevitably choose the lower." (p.30) An acorn will become an oak tree despite itself, but citizenship is not an inevitable product of natural growth and development, argued Milner. Culture matters. We become the best we can be "by virtue of the tradition that nurtured what was potential." (p.30) This is why education matters: "If we can provide a nurture in our schools for the 'thought of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God,' we need have no fear for Canadian patriotism." (p.31)
Thus, Milner continued the tone established by Cochrane in the history section of the Report, albeit more allusively, and elusively at times. Like Cochrane, he was cautiously pragmatic, sceptical of utopian blueprints, nervous about the shape of the post-war world and the future it seemed to foreshadow, disappointed by the achievements of democracy and its low cultural standards, realistically aware of the limitations of schooling, and calling for the retention of traditional standards and values in a new and unsettling age. He presented no specific recommendations for action, and such recommendations as he did venture to offer appeared obliquely and almost between the lines of what was sometimes a cloudily rhetorical discussion.
The National Council of Education did go on to sponsor some collections of readers of the type recommended by the Report, and in 1924 Cochrane wrote a biography of David Thompson in a series on "Canadian Men in Action" which was designed to inject some human interest into Canadian history while also providing role models for contemporary youth. As the book concluded:
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Characters such as David Thompson are all too rare in the annals of a nation. So long as honour is due to great men, his memory deserves to be enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen; and his high qualities should be a model to those who inherit the Dominion which he did so much to make. (Cochrane, 1924: 171). |
There is something anachronistic is thus seeing Thompson as a maker of the Dominion of Canada, but as the book made clear, Thompson's "high qualities" included bravery, persistence, determination, and integrity. Reviewers of the book praised its clarity and its strong narrative line and endorsed its portrayal of Thompson as a role model for modern times.
For Cochrane, Thompson's greatest contribution to Canada, outside of his significance as an exemplar of Canadian virtues, lay in his mapping, but he also took the opportunity to pay tribute to his respect for the First Nations. Taking a condescending but not altogether unsympathetic attitude to Aboriginal society that was typical of the 1920s, Cochrane described Aboriginals as people with their own traditions and ways of life that served them well enough but that did not equip them to deal with change and novelty and that did not fit with European values and assumptions. As Cochrane put it:
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It is difficult for Europeans to associate with savages without misunderstandings more or less serious. The savage governs his life by an elaborate ritual which he has inherited from his ancestors. His code is sufficient to cover his dealings with his fellows; but it fails to guide him in his relations with the strange new beings who burst in upon him from what is in truth a different world. The white man, unless he is gifted with unusual tact and sympathy, treats with contempt and scorn the customs of the natives and seldom attempts to understand their ways. Worse still, he feels himself freed from the restraints which bind him in civilized life, and frequently gives rein to the basest passions of his nature. Thus mutual misunderstanding too often breeds hatred, and results in the shedding of blood. (Cochrane,1924 168) |
This not so implicit portrayal of civilization as a thin veneer covering our primal appetites and thereby saving us from barbarism is consistent with the worries voiced in the 1923 Report that contemporary society had lost its way and had abandoned traditional values and standards for the embrace of materialism. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to wonder if Cochrane and Milner worried that modern men and women, like fur traders in the wilderness, might not throw off the restraints of civilization and abandon themselves to their appetites. The fur trade had shown what could happen when commercial competition reigned unchecked. People such as Peter Pond, for example, had hands "stained with the blood of their competitors," not to mention the use of liquor, sharp trading practices, and intimidation, all of which "taught the Indians evil ways." (Cochrane, 1924: 169) One wonders if Cochrane saw in the triumph of capitalist values in the 1920s, promoted as they were by the mass advertising that so alarmed his colleague, Milner, the possibility of a similar state of affairs arising, albeit in an obviously different form
More directly, Cochrane obviously ignored the possibility that the shedding of blood could easily arise, not so much from misunderstanding, but from objective differences of interest (after all the Aboriginals had the land and the Europeans wanted it) and he went on to paint a picture of innocent primitives corrupted by European misconduct: "The Indians had learned that the Great Spirit hates to see the ground reddened with blood. But when they saw thuggery and murder flourish, how could they preserve their simple faith?" (Cochrane, 1924: 169) In this sad story Thompson stood out as a shining exception: "Wherever he came in contact with the natives, he easily won their admiration and respect. This was due to the insight with which he studied their customs and to the sympathy with which he regarded their way of life. For Thompson was infinitely more than a trader: he had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet." (Cochrane, 1924: 170)
The interest of passages such as this lies in part in the way they exemplify the stance that Cochrane took in the 1923 Report to the effect that history should be presented to the young as "a body of accepted truths," and in part in the way they belie his insistence that history should not be turned into a vehicle of moral education and that the historian's task was not to judge. In his scholarly writing (Cochrane 1929 & 1940), Cochrane stuck to these precepts, but in writing for the young he largely abandoned them. It is difficult not to to see his portrayal of Thompson; for example, as a sustained exercise in what in 1923 he dismissed as patriotic propaganda.
In 1926 he coauthored a civics text, revised in 1931, in which he gave more concrete expression to the ideas presented in the 1923 Report. For the most part, the text was a straightforwardly factual presentation of the structure of law and government, prefaced with an overview of the landscape and people of Canada, region by region. The text ended, however, with a description of "the good Canadian" in which Cochrane elaborated on the kind of citizenship he and the National Council of Education, for whom the book was written, had in mind.
He began by emphasizing the distinction made in the 1923 Report between the good person and the good citizen. People who refused to have anything to do with politics or public affairs, he argued, "however estimable they may be in their private characters, are a menace to society." (Cochrane & Wallace: 1931: 163) To be a citizen, he insisted, meant taking an active interest in public affairs: "It is a fundamental mark of the good Canadian that he takes an intelligent and active interest in the government of his country." (Cochrane & Wallace: 1931: 163)
This meant that citizens had to keep informed by reading a "reliable and public spirited" newspaper, and, since newspapers were sometimes sensationalist and usually partisan, ideally more than one: "To subscribe to a newspaper which is unreliable, unbalanced, and sensational is almost an unpatriotic act; and to vote merely as one's newspaper tells one to vote, without studying the questions at issue and forming an independent opinion, is equally unpatriotic." (Cochrane & Wallace: 1931: 164) Being informed, however, was not enough: "The 'arm-chair critic' may be full of knowledge, but unless he backs up his knowledge with action, it is worse than useless." (p. 164)
The highest form of action was to run for office, and below this came the act of voting. It "should be almost a religious duty" to vote at every election. (p.165) In addition, good citizens worked in election campaigns, which was something that even schoolchildren could do, for example in distributing campaign literature or providing basic information: "The important thing is that in an election every one should do what lies in his or her power to forward the cause which he or she thinks is right." (p.165) Beyond this, good citizens should also involve themselves in what we would now call civil society, through the "hundred and one organizations, all which aim at making life in Canada better and finer." (p.165)
Not least, this required Canadians to be tolerant: "In a country so vast and broken as ours, a country which has been settled by so many waves of immigration from so many different lands, we can unite in a common loyalty only if we are willing to recognize and respect our mutual differences." (p.168) The differences between Celt and Saxon, French and English, ran deep but, despite centuries of warfare around the world, were not fundamental, at least in Canada. In pursuit of this argument, Cochrane took some liberties with history, seeing the British conquest of Quebec as a sign of amity more than of division among Canadians: "In Canada, however, where on the Plains of Abraham, a joint monument to Wolfe and Montcalm stands as a symbol of reconciliation and of dedication to the common task of building a great nation, they can afford to regard these differences as superficial." (p.168) In this context, Cochrane came close to calling for the abandonment of history in the pursuit of intercultural understanding: "With our eyes fixed steadily upon the future rather than on the past, we move forward shoulder to shoulder in a common effort to make this Dominion what its founders dreamed it would be." (p.168)
In another sense, however, history was important in this pursuit of a common future. Canadians had to acknowledge what they owed to their ancestors. Abandoning the austerely scientific view of history he had propounded in his 1923 Report, but consistent with his 1924 treatment of David Thompson, Cochrane now advocated an inspirational approach to the subject, at least in schools: "The heroic example of our ancestors sets a high standard for us, below which we must not fall." (p.169) This was especially true in Canada, which was uniquely the product of its people: "Canada more than other lands is what the courage and endurance of her people have made her" As a result of their ancestors' sacrifices, Canadians "have a great tradition to inspire us." (p. 169)
In a burst of proto-multiculturalism, and an espousal of what we have since learned to think of as civic nationalism, Cochrane went on to argue that in this pursuit of a common future, Canadians' cultural and linguistic differences could be a source of strength, "because we shall be for ever free from the danger and folly of trying to manufacture citizens of a single monotonous and standardized type, differing no more than if they had all been poured out of the same mould." (p.168)
The moving force behind all this was love of country, "one of the oldest and most universal of all the virtues." (p.166) This did not mean blind nation worship, for true love is never blind: "We should all do our best to see that our country is always right, and if we think she is wrong, we should say so. This is true patriotism. The highest form of love is that which recognizes imperfections, but exists in spite of them, and seeks to remove them." (p.166)
However, the willingness to criticize one's country did not mean flouting the law. Rather, "The good Canadian will obey the laws, and will seek to preserve order, because lawlessness and revolution are things to be avoided." (p.166) Laws should only be changed lawfully and constitutionally. As Cochrane put it, revolutionaries were not patriots, but "enemies of society." (p.166) Echoing the fear of anarchy and bolshevism that is to be found in much Canadian writing on education in the early 1920s, Cochrane concluded: "To upset the whole system of government by force of arms, as revolutionists in other lands have sometimes done, is to inflict evils on one's country which no true patriot can desire." (p.167) Not surprisingly, writers on civics, Cochrane included, never attempted to reconcile this stance with their commitment to the British heritage of constitutional government and individual liberty in which the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 played such a conspicuous part. Presumably they believed that parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, as they existed in Canada, made revolutionary politics unnecessary.
As is well known, to most educationists in these years, Canadian patriotism extended to the British Empire as a whole. As Cochrane put it: "Loyalty to Canada carries with it loyalty to the British Empire." (p.167) The Empire was without parallel or precedent, "an Empire freer and greater than the world has ever seen-an Empire well described as 'the greatest secular force working for good in the world to-day." (p.167) Moreover, the Empire was the embodiment of the British heritage that was seen at lying at the heart of the Canadian experience, a heritage to which the Canadian citizen "owes, not merely his institutions, but, infinitely more important still, the spirit which will make those institutions work." (p.169) At the same time, membership of the Empire was perfectly consistent with, indeed the foundation of, a broad-minded internationalism: "And, above all, loyalty to Canada and the Empire should be accompanied by loyalty to humanity. Through the League of Nations, and otherwise, we should strive to develop good-will and co-operation among the peoples of the world." (p.169)
Such sentiments were the conventional wisdom of citizenship education and civics in Canada in the interwar years and in espousing them the National Council of Education was more their expression than their creator. In any event, by the early 1930s the National Council had largely run out of steam, and Cochrane's and Milner's vision of a school system devoted to inspiring children with the ideals of citizenship, though commonplace in ministerial speeches and pedagogical writing, were submerged in a wave of more mundane concerns: passing examinations, covering the curriculum, ensuring that children even attended school at all, and, in the hard times of the 1930s, simply surviving. In 1935, an observer noted of Canadian schools: "Somehow many Canadian schools at present seem to succeed in imposing upon the pupil a severe demand for sheer laboriousness with a very low demand for genuine, spontaneous, intellectual effort." (Clarke, 1935: 21) Sheer laboriousness no doubt constitutes a certain type of citizenship, but it is hardly what Cochrane and Milner had in mind.
References
Clarke, F. "Education in Canada - An Impression." Queen's Quarterly, XLII (1935): 309-321.
Cochrane, C.N. David Thompson. Toronto: Macmillan, 1924.
Cochrane, C.N. & W.S. Wallace. This Canada of Ours: An Introduction to Canadian Civics. Toronto: Dent, 1926; revised 1931.
Cochrane, C.N. Thucydides and the Science of History. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.
Cochrane. C.N. Christianity and Classical Culture. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1940.
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 (1996-97): 5-28.
National Council of Education. Observations on the Teaching of History and Civics in Primary and Secondary Schools of Canada (Winnipeg: National Council of Education, 1923).