Border Crossings: U.S. Culture and Education in Saskatchewan, 1905–1937 by Kerry Alcorn (review)

Libraries are full of books recounting the immense influence that our American neighbour has exerted over every facet of Canadian life. In spite of that, Kerry Alcorn’s work on the impact of American thought on Saskatchewan schools addresses an existing void in this literature. Calling on historians to pay closer attention to the particularities of Western Canadian culture and thought, Alcorn draws on the earliest work of Seymour Martin Lipset to present a continentalist examination of Saskatchewan’s education system, and to denote the striking similarities of that system with the schools of the American Great Plains and Midwest. He argues, “Saskatchewan policy makers for both K-12 and higher education indeed imitated and adapted American Great Plains solutions to their Saskatchewan prairie problems” (12).

Alcorn relies on a series of old textbooks, Normal School reading lists, and school board minutes to construct an image of Saskatchewan’s public schools and only university as an emulation, rather than an innovation, of the American models. In part, American-born and American-trained instructors played an important role in the genesis of the province’s schools. In contrast to Egerton Ryerson’s agenda to establish a durable Loyalist curriculum for the schools of Upper Canada, Alcorn notes that the policy-makers in Saskatchewan showed no such suspicion of American ideals, actually embracing its Progressive principles.

One of the most convincing sections of the book identifies the interest of Canadian-born educators in Saskatchewan in American reform ideas. He notes that many school teachers participated in sociological trips to Winnitka, Illinois each summer for pedagogical training that emphasized individualized, student-centred instruction based on reading, writing, and mathematics. Furthermore, thousands of Normal School students studied under college professors who had received their specialization at the University of Chicago or Columbia University. Of equal importance, in the one-room schoolhouses of the province, American textbooks supplanted the more expensive Ontario versions that omitted a Western or Prairie perspective. Such trends necessarily had an impact on the regional culture, for, as Alcorn suggests, “textbooks were and are more than a source of information – the lessons in them represent what a society hopes to replicate in its people” (80).

Alcorn also ably demonstrates the willingness of policy-makers in Saskatchewan to consult American experts when addressing the problems facing rural schools. Plagued by a largely underqualified teaching cohort, high levels of truancy, and a high failure rate, the provincial government enlisted Harold Foght, an expert on rural education working at the American Bureau of Education in Washington, DC. Foght’s mission was to survey the province’s schools to determine the magnitude of the problems as a first step in providing scientific and rational solutions. Following an established trend in the American Midwest, provincial school inspectors advocated the widespread consolidation of Saskatchewan’s rural schools as a means of establishing centralized control. Provincial policy-makers would then rely on experts to determine their specific reforms – “a hallmark of the American progressive movement” (41). The adoption of American policies was overshadowed only by the willingness of Saskatchewan’s policy-makers to bow to the leadership of Harold Foght. “Choosing an American expert in rural education, rather than a Canadian easterner,” Alcorn suggests, “signalled rejection of the ‘back east’ conservatism … and a warm reception for American-style education reform” (97). Alcorn highlights how, despite the effort by policy-makers to adopt Americanstyle reforms, rural communities stood by their trustees and resisted efforts to centralize and consolidate their schools. Their opposition effectively symbolized a democratic “victory of the people over the expert” (154), which Alcorn deems Jeffersonian in nature.

Walter Murray’s efforts to establish the University of Saskatchewan also had American antecedents. Murray’s attempts to secure Carnegie funding mirrored initiatives south of the border, but ultimately they failed, leading to a typically Canadian dependence on government funding. The administrative organization of the university and the...