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Abstract
This article brings the Italian activist and thinker Antonio Gramsci’s theory of organic intellectualism and the Canadian historian Ian McKay’s theory of liberal state-formation to bear on the “Indian Question” – or how best to yoke Indigenous children and young people to the modern Canadian state. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, often violent and disease-ridden “Residential Schools” were the primary means to this end. In the 1960s, a new approach was sought by the province of Ontario, culminating in the landmark education reform document, Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario (1968). Gentler forms of progressive educational “normalisation” informed by social science were pursued by the committee as a means of generating consent to a Canada now redefined as a postwar “Peaceable Kingdom”. This ostensibly kinder strategy nevertheless carried the colonial assumptions of the earlier period into the later one. This was made clear to the committee during the report’s preparation by Indigenous intellectuals advising them on Indigenous issues. They saw this liberal-technocratic approach for what it was – a novel form of neocolonial pedagogical violence. Though they were largely ignored by the committee, their dissent is instructive (as is the committee’s resistance to it) and allows us to put the darker corners of Canadian progressive education into historical perspective.
Notes
1 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2: 199–210.
2 Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario, Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario (Toronto: Ontario Department of Education, 1968), 9.
3 Ryan Edwardson, Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 16.
4 Provincial Committee, Living and Learning, 9.
5 Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 623. Rich interpretations and critiques of McKay’s thesis can be found in Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds., Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
6 Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003), 10.
7 McKay, “Liberal Order,” 623; Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 1968.
8 McKay, “Liberal Order,” 600, 623.
9 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 59.
10 McKay, “Liberal Order,” 637.
11 Paul Axelrod, The Promise of Schooling: Education in Canada, 1800–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 70–1.
12 John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999), 27.
13 Axelrod, The Promise of Schooling, 73–5.
14 Axelrod, The Promise of Schooling, 73; 74; Milloy, National Crime, 8.
15 Milloy, National Crime, 33, 31. See also James Rodger Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).
16 See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, 1990).
17 A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1993), 264, 283.
18 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 30.
19 Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 43–4.
20 Roland Barthes, Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 196–7.
21 Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 120.
22 Thomas Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States (New York: Berg, 2001), 103, 115–16.
23 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 114–15.
24 Allan Kerr McDougall, John P. Robarts: His Life and Government (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 44.
25 R.D. Gidney, From Hope to Harris: The Reshaping of Ontario’s Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999), 43–4.
26 W.G. Fleming, Ontario’s Educative Society, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 19.
27 Gidney, From Hope to Harris, 51, 55.
28 Robert Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1976–1976 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 209.
29 Gidney, From Hope to Harris, 48–51.
30 W.G. Davis, Education in Ontario: Statements by Honourable William G. Davis, Q.C., LL.D., Minister of Education (Toronto: Ontario Department of Education, 1966), 31–2.
31 Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage, 1997), 147.
32 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Belknap, 2008), 35.
33 “Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada, Proposed Education Project,” in File: “Sim, A.R.,” in Archives of Ontario, RG 2–168, Box no. 15, 1–3.
34 Sim, “Indian-Eskimo,” 4.
35 Ibid., 9.
36 Ibid., 48–9.
37 André Renuald, “Needs in Indian Education,” in Documents Relating to Studies of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objective of Education in the Schools of Ontario (Toronto: Department of Education, 1968), 2.
38 Ibid., 2–3.
39 Ibid., 4–5.
40 Ibid., 6–11.
41 Ibid., 13.
42 Ibid., 19–20.
43 Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education Under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal and Radical Debate Over Schooling (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1985), 35.
44 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York and London: Verso, 2013), 145.
45 Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (New York and London: Verso, 2005), 38–42.
46 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25–26 (1990): 67.
47 Aronowitz and Giroux, Education Under Siege, 35; Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1994), 44.
48 Lee Maracle, “Red Power Legacies and Lives: An Interview by Scott Rutherford,” in New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, ed. Karen Dubinsky, Katherine Krull, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009), 359–60; Himani Bannerji, “On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of ‘Canada’,” in Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 329, 331.
49 Maracle, Red Power, 361.
50 Archives of Ontario, RG 2–168, Box No. 4, File: The Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada, Brief A-76, pp. 1, 4–5.
51 Archives of Ontario, RG 2–168, Box [no number], File: Solomon, Mr. Arthur, Brief B-3, p. 3; Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 35.
52 Archives of Ontario, “Solomon,” 3, 1–2.
53 Ibid., 1–2.
54 Archives of Ontario, “Indian-Eskimo Association,” 6; Archives of Ontario, “Solomon,” 3.
55 Provincial Committee, Living and Learning, 10, 16, 111–12.
56 Ibid., 16, 112–13.
57 Ibid., 1.
58 Ibid., 15–16.