Education

~OCIAL STUDIES 487·lah could not weather the storm. ·chapter Sixteen is· the excellent summary . Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen are, in the opinion of this reviewer, the weakest in the book. They deal with the period immediately. prior _ tp the invasion of 1956. Here, Mr. Berger seems to rely almost entirely-on a single source-E. Childers, The Road to Suez (London, 1962). Thi~ is most unfortunate as the positions of the Western Powers at the time were crucial and certainly deserve more careful consideration than Mr. Berger is able to provide from secondary ·sources. His analysis of the policy of.John Foster Dulles, fo~· example, provokes rather than explains, and compares.very unfavourably with Robert Murphy's excellent account of the period in his Diplomat Among Warriors. Yet this account by a distinguished Foreign Service expert is not even cited in the bibliography. In summary, this is an important and useful book, although nbt definitive. (E. BuRKE INLOW) EDUCATION Robin S. Harris The difficulties that educators have experienced in their efforts since the 1880's to establish education as a subject of study and investigation that deserves a proper place in the university community can be largely explained by the failure to recognize that it is an area of activity rather than a discipline. Education is adjectival, not substantive: educational history, educational philosophy, educational psychology, educational sociology. The situation is not changed by the alternation of "educational history" to "history of education"; of education here is no more substantive than of Britain 1485 to 1789 in the title of a course offered·by a Department of History. It is historians who contribute to our knowledge of British history, not Britons, (or 1485- 1789 Britons) and it is as historians, not as educators, that people contribute to the solution of education's current problems by drawing attention to what has happened in· the past. This is perhaps simply another way of saying that education is an art, not a science. The proper way to approach educatio~ is to apply the knowledge and ideas which emanate from traditional disciplines to a particular set of problems. This being ·the case, it should appear as no surprise that an important 488 LE'ITERS IN CANADA: 1965 work about Canadian education should be written by a sociologist, nor that the work in question should be a rigorously conducted sociological study. John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (University of Toronto Press, pp. xxii, 626, $15.00) has immediately been recognized as an important contribution to Canadian sociology; the possibility exists that it may in due course assume the status of a classic study of its kind. This would not disqualify it from also being regarded as an important or even a classic study in the field of education. None of the books which are regarded as educational classics, from Plato's Republic to Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, was conceived by its author as a text for a course in education. As its subtitle indicates, The Vertical Mosaic is a study of the organization of Canadian society: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada. Based on a massive body of data bearing on the population of Canada in the mid-1950's-ethnic origin, income, occupation, education -with extensions forward to the statistics of the early 1960's and back as far as 1948 and 1949, it is an almost clinical examination of the political and economic systems, with particular reference to the persons who appear to exercise effective control: According to Porter, control is exercised not .from a single point but in a number of areas which, though related, run parallel to each other-the worlds of corporate finance, politics, labour unions, the civil service, and the mass media. Thus there are a number of power groups: the economic elite, the labour elite, the political elite, the bureaucratic elite, and the ideological elite, the latter including the influential figures in publishing, radio and television, the universities, and the leading churches. These elites are analyzed in Part n, The Structure of Power. Part I, The Structure of Class, is an...