How Schools Worked: Public Education in Canada, 1900–1940 by R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar (review)

In How Schools Worked, the prolific team of R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar have made yet another major contribution to Canadian educational history. While their previous books have brilliantly explored schooling in Ontario, this one tackles the subject on the national landscape.

Given provincial jurisdiction over education, this is no mean feat. To conduct primary research, scholars must travel extensively, though they can’t go everywhere. Gidney and Millar chose four distinctive communities: Fredericton, Winnipeg, Kipp School District No. 1589 in Saskatchewan, and Blairmore, Alberta. Other parts of Canada are certainly not ignored; the book draws on a rich array of accessible primary and secondary sources and has a voluminous bibliography. The study does not include Quebec because, as the authors are at pains to explain, the data were not sufficient and/or not comparable to that in the other provinces. Nor does it explore Aboriginal schooling, educational policy, or school reform – topics covered by other historians. Instead, How Schools Worked asks simple questions and probes each in depth and with sophistication. Who attended school? Who taught? How were teachers supervised? What did they teach? How was schooling funded? The result is an exceptional profile of Canadian schooling in the early twentieth century.

Actually, it is more than that. The study opens in 1900 because the educational data for that year are especially rich. The story would not likely have changed if it had begun in 1880 or 1890, because the form and texture of schooling remained largely intact through to the 1930s. And notwithstanding local and regional distinctions, the authors demonstrate that there was a common English-Canadian public school experience. Schools were administered and funded in similar ways; teachers had comparable qualifications; and students were taught, largely, from the same textbooks and hymn books.

This is not to say that all Canadian students had equivalent educational opportunities. Inequality, particularly between urban and rural schools, was rife. While the one-room schoolhouse is the subject of high agrarian romanticism, the authors paint a less sunny portrait of this venerated institution. Inexperienced, isolated (and usually female) teachers, with too few resources, struggled to teach large classes of students at various grade and age levels who were far less likely than their urban counterparts to pursue education beyond elementary school. The book delves into the issues of gender and social class, confirming, with abundant statistical evidence, the academic superiority of female students, and the administrative dominance of male principals, supervisors, and inspectors, while teasing out the nuances and regional particularities of these patterns.

While some readers will find the quantitative, technical discussions heavy going (augmented by an extensive and valuable online appendix on attendance patterns, teacher qualifications, and school funding), the authors deserve enormous credit for going where most contemporary social historians fear to tread. Numbers matter, and while Gidney and Millar acknowledge the limitations of such data, they interpret them carefully, critically, and persuasively. Frequently, the authors engage the reader in conversation, so that their discoveries feel like a shared enterprise, notwithstanding the fact that they have done all the work.

At times, too, they are argumentative. Most revisionist educational historians, writing from a “progressive” perspective, see English-Canadian schooling up to the 1960s as “bleak,” “dry,” and fixated on memory work and formal examinations. But the authors suggest that the foundational knowledge and disciplinary skills that students obtained in that era served them well, better than the loose requirements and more relaxed atmosphere of the contemporary classroom. They ask, not entirely rhetorically, “Does it matter if students can’t tell a gerund from a gerbil . . . It is said that ‘practice makes perfect,’ a venerable dictum in many fields of human endeavour, including music and athletics; why not in the core curriculum?” (345). Readers may disagree with this and other conclusions, but they will need to do some heavy intellectual lifting to...