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

Kerry Alcorn’s Border Crossings makes a significant and original contribution both to our understanding of the evolution of Saskatchewan’s school systems in the early decades of the twentieth century and to the complex transborder dynamics shaping political and educational cultures in the Great Plains in this period. In contrast to traditional histories of Canadian education premised on an east–west perspective, with progress accompanying settlement westward from Ontario and Anglo-Celtic cultural norms dominating institutions, this history of Saskatchewan education posits a north–south perspective, emphasizing the US cultural influence on the province’s educational development from 1905 until 1937. Indeed, in the best tradition of social history, Alcorn uses this study of schools to explore wider transborder cultural diffusions and details the transplantation of US midwestern and Plains culture to the province of Saskatchewan through migration and settlement, cultural diffusion of agrarian movements, political forms of revolt, and adoption of shared meanings of democracy and the relationship of the West relative to the East.

The book is divided into two parts; the first contains three chapters that explore American culture and consider how aspects of that American culture were transferred to Saskatchewan. The second part of Border Crossings looks specifically at the making of Saskatchewan’s education system, stressing its predominantly rural character.

The author also devotes attention to Saskatchewan’s postsecondary sector, arguing that the province’s sole university, the University of Saskatchewan, mirrored even more closely American midwestern and Plains models. Essentially, the University of Saskatchewan was a transplanted version of the University of Wisconsin. Under the guidance of the University of Saskatchewan’s first president, Walter C. Murray, the “Wisconsin idea” permeated the practice and meaning of his university. His persistent pursuit of Carnegie Foundation financial support throughout his tenure meant Murray had to pattern his university after its American antecedents. Though Murray largely failed to gain substantial financial support for the University of Saskatchewan, the result was a university identical to many American land-grant and public universities.

Border Crossings is based heavily on Al-corn’s PhD dissertation completed at the University of Kentucky in 2008. On balance it is a very strong piece of scholarship that significantly enhances our understanding of American influences on Saskatchewan schools at the turn of the twentieth century. It occasionally suffers from the excess of detail and narrowness of focus that characterizes the genre. While focusing so closely on comparisons between provincial and state systems, Alcorn completely ignores profound similarities in the educational experiences of Indigenous peoples on both sides of the border during this time, as federal governments in both Canada and the United States were creating the infamous colonial residential school systems. The idea of schools as a vehicle to assimilate Indigenous children into the dominant society flowed from the United States to Canada in the Davin Report of 1879, which was an early and influential form of transborder “evidence-based policy making.” Such policy making sought foreign examples of policies and practices to borrow, and likewise sought empirical data on the effects of foreign policies and practices as evidential support for policies advocated at home. Given that this data provides strong evidence for the permeability of the forty-ninth parallel regarding schools and education policy, which is Alcorn’s central thesis, this is a significant and surprising omission in an otherwise impressive and original study.