Education

494 tq LEITERS IN CANADA: 1959 Bache post in distant Ellesmere Island. A Painter's Country is an indispensable addition to the growing library of basic Canadiana. (c. F. COMFORT) EDUCATION For the third successive year and for the sixth in the lectureship's ten-year history, the Quance Lectures in Canadian Education were given in 1958 by a Deputy Minister ofEducation, on this occasion Dr. W. H. Swift of Alberta. Two other lecturers have been Dr. C. E. Phillips and Dr. M. E. Lazerte, over the past dozen years the most prominent of our professors of education. The record suggests that the Quance Lectureship enjoys a certain official status as a forum for the views of the men who occupy the most important positions in Canadian public education. It is true that a continuing record of the views and activities of the Canadian educator is provided in the pages of Canadiatl Education, the monthly journal of the Canadian Education Association, which is the official organization of the provincial Departments ofEducation, but the nature ofthejournal seldom permits an individual to present a lengthy essay on Canadian education. It is this gap which the Quance Lectureship providentially fills. Dr. Swift's subject is Trends in Canadian Education (Gage, pp. 94, $r.so), and on snch a topic his unofficially official views must be ofinterest: where does a deputy minister think we are going? The clearest trend, he finds, is the decline of Latin, incidentally the only development in the secondary school programme since 1950. Also on the negative side, he reports little interest in educational theory: "Education in Canada is not being shaped or significantly influenced, at least overtly enough to be readily observed, by any particular set of philosophic considerations." Dr. Swift notes a decline in the importance of the central authority at the provincial level and also an increase in the importance ofsuch national organizations as the Canadian Education Association, the Canadian Teachers' Federation, and the National Conference of Canadian Universities. He hopes that the decision of Alberta to place all teacher training under the control of the university will initiate a trend. The decline of the importance of the central authority in the province is occasioned by the increasing size of urban school systems and the movement to consolidate rural schools. The old-time inspector, sent out by the Department to visit the one-room school, is now largely replaced HUMANITIES tq 495 by a superintendent, employed by the local board, who combines the function of inspection with that of supervision. The implications of this significant change in our educational system are revealed in R. H. Wallace, ed., The Superintendent as Educational Leader (Ryerson, pp. x, 62, $2.00), a collection of ten articles on various aspects ofthe superintendent's work by Ontario members of the Canadian Association of Superintendents and School Inspectors. There are eight hundred members of CASSI, an organization created in 1952 as a by-product of the C.E.A.-Kellogg Foundation project, which has provided a great deal of money for the support of "leadership courses," notably at the University of Alberta, for the training of superintendents. The category SI'perintelldent embraces anyone between the principal and the Deputy Minister; CASSI thus is a different force from C.E.A. (which is dominated by the Deputy Ministers) and conceivably a more significant one, since the superintendent is closer than the educator to the classroom. The ten articles explain the emergence of this new force and indicate the directions, both conscious and unconscious , in which it is moving. Unfortunately, the prose style of the superintendent is no improvement over that of the educator, upon whose flabby sentences and woolly paragraphs Miss Neatby had occasion to comment in So Little Jor tlze Milld; three of the articles are vilely written and one is a pasting together of quotations. The articles by H. R. Parlow, D. S. Lawless, and W. C. Lorimer are competent and clear. General views of the Canadian educational scene are offered in five publications of 1959. J. Bascom St. John's Spotlight on Canadian Education (Gage, pp. viii, III, $2.50) is a series of articles prepared as background material for the...