How Schools Worked: Public Education in English Canada, 1900–1940 by R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar (review)

How Schools Worked is a weighty work of historical scholarship. It is literally weighty: it examines the first four decades of educational history in Canada with such meticulousness and care that the text swells to over 500 pages (including references and an index). And it is also weighty in the academic sense, as R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar have written a book that is required reading for all historians pursuing research on the landscape of twentieth-century education. There was a copy of the text on my shelf before this review was initiated. Its bright red jacket stands out boldly, even as the scholarship itself is outstanding with respect to its ambition and the legacy that I trust it will leave.

Not since George Tomkins’s A Common Countenance (1985) has a study endeavoured to examine Canadian educational history on a national level. The overwhelming majority of published articles and books are framed in terms of provinces and cities because of the distinctly provincial character of Canadian education, the sheer mass of archival information, and the wide array of research topics that educational historians face when telling stories about the past. As a result, we have a somewhat fractured and spotted history of Canadian education in the twentieth century. Only with respect to particular themes (i.e., progressive education, childhood, curriculum reform) are we able to tell a national story.

This is a story aptly and succinctly summarized by the book’s title (Gidney and Millar have shown a rare and uncanny ability to craft titles that are simultaneously descriptive and playful). How Schools Worked concentrates on a thick description of public schools’ functioning, structure, population, and composition. Working from a framework proposed by the political scientist Ronald Manzer, this book explicitly seeks to examine the scope, resources, substance, and distribution of public education.

As the authors note in their introduction, there are limits to the story told in How Schools Worked. Quebec is an outlier, not probed in depth but included in discussions and analyses that draw on broader sources and statistics. Statistics are seminal to the analysis and discussion, as the sources that informed this study are largely quantitative. The authors argue, quite reasonably, that statistics from Quebec cannot be interpreted in the same light as those from other provinces. They are excluded because they are problematic for reasons relating to the role of the Catholic Church and religious orders in educational matters.

Progressive education, which may be the single most transformative force to affect schools across the country, is another outlier. During the interwar period, progressivist ideas surged like a tour de force, transforming curricula, discourse, and policy, yet Gidney and Millar feel that these have been given undue attention by historians. Educational rhetoric, in general, is given short shrift. As a direct consequence, this study tells us a great deal about how schools worked but not so much about the extent to which people thought they worked or sought to make them work better.

How Schools Worked tackles important questions that will make life much easier for Canadian scholars seeking to understand the context of schooling between 1900 and 1940. Their analyses consider attendance patterns, teacher qualifications, spending, age-grade distributions of students, rural and urban attendance numbers, retention rates, and percentages concerning ethnic diversity. The book would be valuable if it considered only these subjects, and yet this list barely scratches the surface. There is nothing superficial about this book, which is bold, unrepentant, and required reading.