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The Institutional Context for Educational Reform 169 sure to conform on the other came first the idea, then the belief, and finally the ingrained social habit that going to school was not only what all children did as a normal part of their childhood but that they did so as a matter of course promptly every day over the whole school year for a gradually increasing number of years. The bureaucratic aspect of all of this activity affecting Albert and other schools in English­speaking Canada calls for some comment. To carry out these internal changes and to try out and introduce new programs the managers of Canadian education had to specify what trustees, teachers, and pupils must do and perhaps add modestly to the rolls of supervisors to ensure that they did so. Some see this gradual bureaucratization as the most important change in educa­ tion in the latter years of the nineteenth century.63 As early as 1918, Peter San­ diford argued that the day of centralized authority in education, so necessary in the pioneering stage of Canadian society, had passed.64 While the matter is peri­ pheral rather than central to the main interest of this study ­ which is the making of the new program of what society ought to do with children rather than the way in which this program was implemented ­ a brief survey of the evidence sug­ gests three tentative conclusions on the matter. First, the supervisory staff of Canadian education did not grow substantially between the 1880s and the 1920s. In 1890, Ontario maintained a staff of 81 school inspectors to supervise 9201 teachers, or roughly 113 teachers per inspec­ tor; thirty years later, 125 inspectors supervised 15,331 teachers, or about 122 teachers each. Over the same period, the number of headmasters of collegiate institutes and high schools in the province increased from about 120 to about 170, while the number of assistants in such schools rose from 332 to 1207.6S Urban staffs grew more rapidly. In 1913, James Collins Miller discovered that the median number of schools per inspector ranged upward from 75 in Ontario, through 83 in Manitoba, 117 in Alberta, 139 in Nova Scotia, 152 in Quebec, to between 181 and 239 in New Brunswick.66 Since his examples do not show the growth of municipal supervisory staffs, such as Vancouver's, they are by no means definitive.67 What they do suggest, however, is that in much of Canada the growth of the administrative staff in education barely kept pace with the growth in the system as a whole. Second, in the latter part of the twentieth century, English Canadians may well be able to argue that bureaucracy is the dead hand on the system. In a period characterized by well­trained and well­organized teachers, of parents and parent groups with the initiative and the affluence to demand and to subsidize a range of alternative styles of education, and of self­confident students who insist on a share in the making and implementing of educational policy, an elaborate compulsory apparatus may no longer be necessary. One must not, however, apply 170 Using the New Education to Make the New Society these as yet not proven conclusions retrospectively to an earlier period of Cana­ dian history without a very rigorous examination of the actual situation as it then was. For English­speaking Canada between 1890 and 1920, one cannot make a clear­cut case on the matter of the bureaucratization of education. On one side, officials used their control of finance, teacher supply, and curriculum to effect a very gradual improvement in the quality of rural schooling in Canada. In doing so they had to work with a very inexperienced corps of teachers. In his study of rural education Miller determined that in 1913 the great majority of rural teach­ ers were between seventeen and twenty­three years of age.68 School inspectors and supervisors gradually transformed the central, graded curriculum from a pious hope into a reasonably accurate guide as to what actually went on in the schools. With the help of their compatriots in the growing public health service, they began to enforce minimum standards of sanitation and preventivemedicine to the benefit of children attending both rural and urban schools. A small body of specialists in civic and provincial education offices laid out, explained, and demonstrated the new elements being introduced into the curriculum. On the other side, professional educators carried out the wishes of...

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