Positivism and post-World War I elementary school reform in Ontario

Abstract

Following the end of World War I, the Ontario Department of Education initiated a series of reforms aimed at both elementary and secondary schooling. This article examines the reforms that were made to elementary school curriculum and pedagogy. These were initiated within the context of a call for a general reconstruction of education and society as a response to the tragic consequences of World War I. They were also based on a series of denunciations that identified scientific materialism, the unity of science and psychology, as the principal causes of war. In numerous public declarations, the religious, political, and education elite of the province expressed their belief that scientific materialism and the unity of science posed an obstacle to the development of education in the province. Although these reforms were the result of a political assessment that fervently rejected scientism, they were, in fact, underpinned by a positivist science that entailed processes of counting, measuring, and sorting to build a system of state-directed human capital formation. This article considers the nature of the scientific knowledge that underscored elementary school reform and assesses whether it represented a significant departure or simply a reconfiguration of knowledge and techniques that ensured the state’s ability to govern and administrate.

Keywords:

• educational reconstruction
• positivism
• pedagogy
• science of education
• epistemology

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Kevin Brehony and David Levine who read and commented on earlier drafts of this article. He is also grateful for the insightful comments and helpful suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

¹R. Falconer, The German Tragedy and its Meaning for Canada (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1915).

²H.J. Cody, “Will There be a New Canada?,” Proceedings of The Fifty-Sixth Annual Convention of The Ontario Educational Association, [hereafter Proceedings] 1917, 172–9.

³Cody’s status was such that he was brought into the cabinet by Conservative Premier William Hearst to “rescue Ontario education from within”. Robert Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1876–1976 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 304.

⁴Department of Education, Report of the Minister of Education, Province of Ontario for the year [hereafter Annual Report], 1918, 5.

⁵Maurice Hutton, “Education and the War,” Proceedings, 1917, 82–93.

⁶Ibid.

⁷Cody, “A New Canada,” 176.

⁸Gregor Schiemann, Hermann von Helmholtz’s Mechanism: The Loss of Certainty, trans. Cynthia Klohr (Darmstadt: Springer, 2009), 245.

⁹Ibid.

¹⁰Ibid.

¹¹Ibid., 247.

¹²Cody, “A New Canada,” 176.

¹³A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1979), 229.

¹⁴M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse of Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 129.

¹⁵Thomas Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” in The Cambridge Guide to Foucault Second Edition, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30.

¹⁶Ibid., 115.

¹⁷Cynthia Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2006).

¹⁸Stamp, Schools of Ontario, 105.

¹⁹Neil Sutherland, Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 218.

²⁰Robert S. Patterson, “The Implementation of Progressive Education in Canada,” in Essays on Canadian Education, ed. Nick Kach, Kas Mazurek, Robert S. Patterson, and Ivan DeFaveri (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd., 1986), 79–93.

²¹See Amy von Heyking, “Selling Progressive Education to Albertans, 1935–1953,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 10 (1996): 67–84; Lynn Speer Lemisko and Kurt W. Clausen, “Connections, Contrarities, and Convolutions: Curriculum and Pedagogic Reform in Alberta and Ontario, 1930–1955,” Canadian Journal of Education 29 (2006): 1097–196; Patrice Milewski, “‘The Little Gray Book’: Pedagogy, Discourse and Rupture in Ontario in 1937,” History of Education 37 (2008): 91–111.

²²Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc., 1990), 48.

²³John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 195.

²⁴G. Stanley Hall, Confessions of a Psychologist (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1923), 566.

²⁵See P. Milewski, “Educational Reconstruction through the Lens of Archaeology,” History of Education 39 (2011): 261–80.

²⁶K. Brehony, “From the Particular to the General, the Continuous to the Discontinuous: Progressive Education Revisited,” History of Education 30 (2001): 431.

²⁷Eckhardt Fuchs, “Educational Science, Morality and Politics: International Educational Congresses in the Early Twentieth Century,” Paedagogica Historica 40 (2004): 757–84.

²⁸Ibid., 769.

²⁹See the following: J.G. Workman, “The Morbid Results of Persistent Mental Overwork,” Proceedings, 1881, 76–101; M.A. Oldright, “School Hygiene,” Proceedings, 1883, 64–76; and J.T. Thompson, “Physical Exercise,” Proceedings, 1892, 46–58.

³⁰J. Middleton, “The Overpressure Epidemic of 1884 and the Culture of Nineteenth-century Schooling,” History of Education 33 (2004): 419–35.

³¹The importance of data collection of all sorts is well made by Pedro Martinez in his analysis of the hygienist movement in Spain. See Pedro L. Moreno Martinez, “The Hygienist Movement in Spain,” Paedagogica Historica 42, (2006): 793–815.

³²Étienne-Jules Marey’s (1830–1904) investigations of motion and Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso’s (1846–1910) laboratory study of fatigue were key aspects and figures of this research. According to Rabinbach, the latter sought to do what Helmholtz (and others) had done for the universe and that was “to establish the dynamic laws of fatigue by rigorous experiment and new techniques of measurement”. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkley: University of California Press, 1990), 7.

³³Ibid., 51.

³⁴Ibid., 42–3.

³⁵Ibid., 44.

³⁶Boas, “Anthropological Investigations in Schools,” Pedagogical Seminary 1 (1891): 225—8.

³⁷Gillian Sutherland, Ability, Merit and Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education 1880–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), 10.

³⁸Ibid., 5–24.

³⁹Ibid., 128–63.

⁴⁰Ibid., 115.

⁴¹Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990), 104.

⁴²Ibid.

⁴³Department of Education, Regulations and Courses of Study and Examinations of the Public and Separate Schools, 1907.

⁴⁴Bakker, “The Dangers of Schooling: the introduction of School Medical Inspection in the Netherlands (c. 1900),” History of Education 38 (2009): 505–24.

⁴⁵Knight, Introductory Physiology and Hygiene: A Series of Lessons in Four Parts (Toronto: The Copp, Clark Company, 1905).

⁴⁶Knight, The Ontario Public School Hygiene (Toronto: The Copp, Clark Company, 1910).

⁴⁷Robert A. Lyster, School Hygiene (London: W.B. Clive, 1908).

⁴⁸For details about hygiene manuals see Martinez, “Hygienist Movement,” 807.

⁴⁹Ludwig Kotelmann, School Hygiene, trans. J.A. Bergstrom and E. Condradi (Syracuse, NY: C.W. Bardeen, 1899).

⁵⁰Knight, Ontario School Hygiene, 204.

⁵¹Hacking, Taming, 120.

⁵²See Bruce Curtis, Building The Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (London: Althouse Press, 1988).

⁵³Department of Education, Science of Education (Toronto: William Briggs, 1915).

⁵⁴Department of Education, Grammar (Toronto: William Briggs, 1915), 1.

⁵⁵Melvin, The Professional Training of Teachers for the Canadian Public School as Typified by Ontario (Baltimore: Warwick & York, Inc., 1923), 75.

⁵⁶ Annual Report, 1916, 23.

⁵⁷Robert Patterson, “Society and Education During the Wars and Their Interlude: 1914–1945,” in Canadian Education: A History, ed. Donald J. Wilson, Robert M. Stamp, and Louis-Phillipe Audet (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 372.

⁵⁸Angelo Van Gorp, Marc Depaepe, and Frank Simon, “Backing the Actor as Agent in Discipline Formation: An Example of the ‘Secondary Disciplinarization’ of the Educational Sciences, Based on the Networks of Ovide Decroly (1901–1931),” Paedagogica Historica 40 (2004): 591–616.

⁵⁹Ibid.

⁶⁰Rita Hofstetter and Bernard Schneuwly, “Introduction Educational Sciences in Dynamic and Hybrid Institutionalization,” Paedogogica Historica 40 (2004): 569–89.

⁶¹Hacking wrote that Quetelet “discovered that Belgian lilacs burst into bloom when the sum of the squares of the mean daily temperature since the last frost adds up to (4264°C)”. Hacking, Taming, 62.

⁶²Ibid., 60.

⁶³Ibid., 1.

⁶⁴Ibid., 186.

⁶⁵Ibid.

⁶⁶Ibid., 187.

⁶⁷Ibid., 174.

⁶⁸Galison, “Introduction,” in The Disunity of Science, Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3.

⁶⁹See note 67.

⁷⁰Rabinbach, Human Motor, 45.

⁷¹Hacking, “Disunities of Science,” 39.

⁷²Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18.

⁷³Ibid., 107.

⁷⁴Ibid., 66.

⁷⁵Ibid., 120.

⁷⁶Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone Books: Brooklyn, 2010), 138.

⁷⁷Ibid., 213.

⁷⁸Schiemann, Helmholtz, 178.

⁷⁹ Annual Report, 1918, 6.

⁸⁰ Annual Report, 1919, Appendix A, 2.

⁸¹Curtis, Educational State, 183.

⁸²McLaren, Master Race, 47.

⁸³Cowles, “The School Attendance Law,” Proceedings, 1920, 214.

⁸⁴ Annual Report, 1923, 73–4.

⁸⁵ Annual Report, 1930, Table 5 Judicial Enforcement of Attendance, 51.

⁸⁶Annual Report, 1929, 40.

⁸⁷ Annual Report, 1921, Appendix A, 5.

⁸⁸ Annual Report, 1920, 12.

⁸⁹Ibid.

⁹⁰ Annual Report, 1921, Appendix A, 5.

⁹¹ Annual Report, 1922, 116–35.

⁹² Annual Report, 1922, viii.

⁹³ Annual Report, 1930, 27.

⁹⁴Department of Education, Courses of Study Public and Separate Schools, 1924.

⁹⁵ Annual Report, 1923, xi.

⁹⁶ Annual Report, 1923, 8.

⁹⁷Brehony, “Transforming Theories of Childhood and Early Childhood Education: Child Study and the Empirical Assault on Froebelian Rationalism,” Paedagogcia Historica 45 (2009): 585–604.

⁹⁸Kelvin’s dictum as restated by Hacking, Taming, 60.

⁹⁹See Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 119.

¹⁰⁰David Labaree, “Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education: An American Romance,” Paedagogica Historica 41 (2005): 281–2.

¹⁰¹Comacchio, Dominion of Youth, 3.

¹⁰²Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 217.

¹⁰³Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 138–41.

¹⁰⁴Hacking, Taming, 119.