Between Education and Catastrophe: The Battle over Public Schooling in Postwar Manitoba by George Buri (review)

From the end of World War II to about 1960, two opposing groups battled over the aims of public schooling in Manitoba. In fact, they were locked in a larger contest over who would get to reconstruct and ultimately define post-war society through the public schools. Progressives stood on one side of the struggle; traditionalists stood on the other. In their vision of the public school curriculum, the former preferred a "life adjustment" approach and the latter wanted a "return to basics." In their vision of the post-war society, progressives backed what the author of this book defines as "the new liberalism," which was basically the postwar compromise. Meanwhile, traditionalists supported a conservative vision of a non-involved state, old-style religious and cultural values, hierarchical social structures, not more egalitarian ones, and were Cold War hardliners who saw progressive education as weakening the West's hand. The outcome of the struggle, in public schooling at least, was "synthesis" – a stalemate in which neither the progressive nor traditionalist educational philosophy prevailed totally. This is in a nutshell author George Buri's argument in Between Education and Catastrophe.

There are already books like this one that look at similar developments in Canadian public education in a parallel time frame in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario (and an extensive American literature exists as well). Buri adds Manitoba to the Canadian quilt. But he does not stitch the province into this historiographical fabric as well as he could. He needed to either deliberately compare his findings to those of other authors or at least to advance unique analytical insights about Manitoba that even on their own might add to our understanding of the common causes and effects of similar developments that arose around the same time in different places in Canada.

There is also something that may be illogical about the book's conclusion. In it, Buri states that the fight to define the schools ended in a tie of sorts, a progressive-traditionalist educational synthesis. But, in the fight to define society, the conclusion also asserts, the advocates of "the new liberalism" (progressives) routed the proponents of preserving the old order (traditionalists). Does this mean then that the scramble over the schools had little or no bearing on the outcome of the fight for the political order? This is an important question given that the author is attempting to connect school and society. But Buri sidesteps it in his conclusion. The progressives had actually wanted an even more interventionist welfare state, the reader learns in the book's dying pages, but traditionalists stymied those efforts. Well, if they wanted a socialist-style state all along, how could the progressives be the advocates of the post-war compromise that Buri claims they were and that he defines as "the new liberalism" elsewhere in the book? The answer could lie somewhere in Buri's theory of hegemony. It appears to explain or accommodate multiple ideologies and interests lying at the heart of a single "historical bloc" (to use the phrase Buri adopts from Antonio Gramsci). But, while he presents that theory in the introduction, he never returns to it to resolve seeming paradoxes in the conclusion.

Despite some clumsy stickhandling of the book's arguments, the author manages to score a few goals with his well-documented and lively accounts of key controversies in Manitoba schools in the post-war period. He covers the debate over look-say versus phonics in reading instruction, the rise of, and opposition to, composite high schools, embittered school district consolidation efforts, difficult teacher recruitment in a time of shortage, and a royal commission on education. All of these issues were encountered and discussed just as energetically in other Canadian jurisdictions around the same time.

Between Education and Catastrophe succeeds in bringing a desired Manitoba perspective to the history of Canadian education in the postwar period. We need other studies like it...