Education

454 LEITERS IN CANADA: 1964 preserves some details of First World War soldiering that do not normally appear in more official histories. H ence it gives some revealing instances of breaches of the laws of war governing the treatment of prisoners. Some of these incidents might perhaps have been better left unrecorded; but this is a sentiment which a historian, who should seek the truth above all other considerations, ought not to profess. EDUCATION Robin S. Harris It would appear that 1964 was the year of the educational report. Of the more than one hundred works on education that have been reviewed in Letters in Canada in the eight years since a section on Education was established in 1956, less than half a dozen can be described as reports such as the printed proceedings of several conferences, the 1962 Report of the Royal Commission on Higher Education in New Brunswick, and the Williams Report on University Library Resources of the same year. This year there are seven, and two of them run to several volumes. If this is the beginning of a trend, we are either in for a frightening amount of reading or we shall cease to read books about education and simply refer to them. In either case there is the prospect that the crucial element in the work will be not the text but the index. Reports are normally either surveys of what is being done or proposals that something new should be attempted; and about all one can do with them is either take note or take action. They are seldom books in the usual sense of a work that tells a story or constitutes an argument. There are examples of educational reports that have the artistic form and the stylistic grace to qualify as literature, but they are very rareRyerson 's first annual report and the report of the 1906 Royal Commission on the University of Toronto are the two Canadian examples that immediately come to mind. Reports pose, therefore, a particular problem for a reviewer whose space is limited. Their importance is too significant to ignore, yet it is not always enough simply to list the title; what is reported (and proposed) is usually too extensive for easy summary, yet in contrast to genuine books it can be argued that they do not deserve detailed treatment. Of the reports at hand it is sufficient in one case only simply to cite the full title: Beatrice V. Simon, Library Support of Medical Education and Research in Canada: Report of a Survey of the Medical College Libraries of Canada, together with Suggestions for Improving and Extending SOCIAL STUDIES 455 Medical Library Service at Local, Regional and National Levels (Association of Canadian Medical Colleges, pp. xviii, 133, $2.00). With E. P. Nicol, ed., Guideposts to Innovation: Report of a Presidents' Committee on Academic Goals (University of British Columbia, pp. xii, 67), it is necessary to add that the subjects investigated include the length of the academic year, the quality of student life, the problem of assessing achievement, and the virtues and vices of academic administration. D. L. B. H amlin, International Studies in Canadian Universities and Gilles Lalonde, L'Etude de relations internationales et de certaines civilisations etrangeres au Canada are bound together in one volume and published, with separate paging, by the Canadian Universities Foundation (pp. xxiv, 120, and pp. xx, 100, $3.00); while covering the same ground (Asian, African, Latin American, Russian, and East European Studies, International Relations, the responsibilities of Canadian universities to foreign students and in foreign countries), the approaches of the two authors differ and so do some of their conclusions. It is a document which the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism should examine as a case study in English-Canadian and French-Canadian attitudes. The remaining three reports are wider ranging in scope and revolutionary in their implications. The basic recommendations of the Royal Commission on Health Services depend upon an extraordinary expansion of our facilities for training not only doctors, dentists, nurses, and pharmacists but as well a whole host of paramedical personnel (to use the current jargon) at the technological rather than the professional level; the...