Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus

Acknowledgments [Includes Image Plates]

x Children in English­Canadian Society Francophones outside of Quebec—whom they intended to assimilate into their culture. The school doctor, for example, may have seen the urban white child before he saw the rural Indian youngster, but the promoters of public health intended that the doctor should eventually get to the reserve. In this regard, it is clearly true that public health workers knew that they would not entirely eradicate diphtheria in the cities until they had also stamped it out amongst native youngsters. Most reformers, however, looked beyond such narrow self­interest. They believed that, through their own children and the children of all the minorities in their midst, that they could create a new sort of Canadian—or more accurately—British North American society to which all but the most stubborn Francophones might aspire to belong. What success did these reformers have? The broader answer to this question—nothing less than a statement about the quality of life in late­twen­ tieth­century Canada—is clearly beyond the scope of this book or its intro­ duction. I can, however, comment on how I think young people fared. Much contemporary discussion of childhood, the family, and education in Canada emphasizes the enormous, accelerating, and often pernicious changes that the twentieth century has wrought in each. Many Canadians believe that these changes were the unplanned and unwanted offshoots of such impersonal forces of "modernization" as the growth of industries and the spread of cities. Indeed, some of us seem to think that an increase in the proportion of badly behaved youngsters, a decline in and perhaps the collapse of the family, and a virtual abandonment of standards in schooling and education are amongst the social costs of our higher standard of living and the other bene­ fits of an affluent society. This over­simplified but not inaccuratecharacteri­ zation of contemporary Canadian opinion is wrong on at least three counts. First, it is ahistorical. It is based on a sentimental,romantic, and very inaccu­ rate view of our past; from it one infers a golden age in which happy, produc­ tive, and well­disciplined*children were enfolded in the embrace of a stable "old­fashioned" family and were all well taught a high­quality core curricu­ lum in well disciplined schools. Second, it greatly exaggerates the serious­ ness of contemporary problems relating to children,families, and schools; the social world of Canadian children is not disintegrating.Third, it ignores the fact that Canadians carefully planned most of the changes that they have made in the lives of their youngsters. In fact, over the half century from the 1920s to the 1970s, certain English Canadians—mostly from the middle class—worked hard to bring to bear on all children in their midst notions about child­rearing and child care that had become their "conventional wis­ dom" on these matters as early as the end of the First World War. In this book Preface xi I examine the evolution of this "wisdom," which I call "the twentieth­cen­ tury consensus," on childhood in English­speaking Canada. These new ideas were created in the half­century between the 1870s and the 1920s. Over these years a Canada characterized by a way of life domi­ nated by farming, fishing, and lumbering made itself over into a modern industrial nation. In an effort that was inextricablyintertwined with these eco­ nomic changes, over these same years Canadians also created and embedded into themselves new ways of perceiving and behaving and into the national fabric new political and social policies. In turn, new institutional arrange­ ments flowed from these broad changes. In the context of a national transfor­ mation, English Canadians created a new set of social policies on the child— policies governing the rearing of the child in his family, policies directed to maintaining and protecting his health, policies designed to transform the means and methods of his schooling and education, and policies laid out to prevent him from becoming a burden on society. Part 1 of this book lays out how, in the last three decades of the nine­ teenth century, English Canadians arrived at a new set of beliefs about child­ hood and some of the ways that they tried to put them into practice. Part II shows how they established two special health services to bring to infants and children the benefits of recent medical discoveries. Part III demonstrates how the new notions of child care brought them to shift the care of...