Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End by John Willinsky (review)

114 LETTERS IN CANADA 1998 Beausoleil, Claude. The Grand Hotel of Foreigners. Trans Jed English and George Morrissette. Nuage. 62. $12.95 Bissonnette, Lise. Cruelties. Trans Sheila Fischman. Anansi. 160. $19.95 Brossard, Nicole. She Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel/Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman. Trans Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood. Mercury. 152 . $17.95 Caccia, Fulvio. Alcnos and Other Poems. Trans Daniel Sloate. Guernica. 60. $12.00 Caccia, Fulvio. Interviews with the Phoenix. Trans Daniel Sloate. Guernica. 224. $20.00 Carrier, Roch. The LAment ofCharlie Longsong. Trans Sheila Fischman. Viking. 266. $29·99 De, Claire. The Sparrow Has Cut the Day in Half. Trans Lazer Lederhandler. Exile. 148. $18·95 Elkhadem, Saad. Two Avant-Garde Egyptian Novels. Trans Saad Elkhadem. York Press. 96. $15.95 Godbout, Jacques. The World of the Gift. In collaboration with Alain Caille, trans Donald Winkler. McGill-Queen's University Press. viii, 250. $29.95 Gravel, Franc;ois. Miss September. Trans Sheila Fischman. Cormorant. 186. $18.95 Lalonde, Robert. One Beautiful Day to Come. Ekstasis. 132. $16.95 Nepveu, Pierre. Romans-fleuves. Trans Donald Winkler. Exile. 104. $18.95 Peloquin, Claude. Pellucid Waters. Trans Lucie Ranger. Guernica. 62. $12.00 Tremblay, MicheL A Thing of Beauty. Trans Sheila Fischman. Talon. 224· $1.6.95 Tremblay, Michel. Bambi and Me. Trans Sheila Fischman. Talon. 158. $15.95 Ungaretti, Giuseppe. A Major Selection of the Poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti. Trans Diego Bastianutti. Exile, 1997· 472 . $39-95 Where Worlds like Monarchs Fly: A Cross-Generational AnthologtJ ofMexican Poets in Translation. Anvil. 166. $14.95 Humanities John Willinsky. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End University of Minnesota Press. x, 306. us $22.95 The Englishes spoken, written} and taught in Canada, historically and currently, tell an important part of the story of English as a world language directed bycommercial, technological, and geopolitical interests to facilitate exchange but also to imperil difference and discourage dissent. Canadian English has attracted much attention over the past two years, with the publication ofsignificantnew dictionaries and language studies. Itis all the more appropriate, then, that John Willinsky continue his contributions to ' this steady, potentially transformative flow. Willinsky's earlierbook Empire of Words: The Rule of the OED deserved to be widely praised, and it has stirnulated or strengthened scholarly work devoted principally to relations HUMANITIES 115 between linguistic and other forms of authority. Willinsky correctly understands his own discipline of Education as thoroughly implicated in the reproduction of forms of authority, but he does not use this as an excuse for glibly reductive criticism of language and other components of education. He endeavours instead to nourish more searching and rigorous engagement with the multiply overlaid and shifting structures and practices of authority, setting an excellent example even for those who would promote quite different readings of the materials and issues he discusses. The title of the current book captures in the play on 'Learning' as both product and process the special dynamic of capitalist empires. Such empires create resistance even as they try to extend their hegemony, so that they have to keep learning to deal with thatresistance through even further dividing of labour and fracturing of emergent solidarities. The learning on which empires depend in order to educate and motivate their'own' citizens and manage by means other than main force those peoples whom they colonizehas to be constantly updated without endangering the impressions of stability, continuity, and superiority on which empires so desperately depend. How we understand - and distance - difference and discrimination , in fully freighted versions of these terms, is key to the analysis of empire, and to the transforming of education from 'a tireless chronicler of what divides us' into a I great redeemer of prejudices,' Willinsky insists that 'In more than one sense, the educational project of postcolonialism in the West is only beginning,' and he tries to identify more precisely what these senses are and how we can move beyond them. In so doing he ranges widely and demonstrates a remarkable command of the issues in discrete and complicated scholarly fields, sometimes overextending himself (,To move to another instance and another continent') but always coming back wiser...