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A Letter from Quesnel: The Teacher in History, and Other Fables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

John Calam
John Calam*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

Late in May, 1808, a quarter century before Hardy Ivy built his settler's cabin hereabouts, Simon Fraser and his North West Company voyageurs discovered the Quesnel River, a Fraser River tributary of central B.C., named after the explorer-clerk Jules Maurice Quesnel. But unlike Atlanta whose founding dates (Terminus, 1837, Marthasville, 1843, Atlanta, 1845) roughly parallel Quesnel's discovery, gold strike, and early settlement phases, the latter town is taking its time to grow—population, say, 6,000 as compared with Greater Atlanta's one and one half-million. Just the same, it enjoys a good school system, administered at the time of writing by an aggressive board and a persuasive superintendent.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Summer 1975 , pp. 131 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Board of School Trustees, District No. 28 (Quesnel), Open Letter to all Faculties of Education in the Province of British Columbia (Quesnel: Board of School Trustees, July 29, 1974), p. 1 ff.Google Scholar

2. Gallup, George H., Sixth Annual Gallup Poll of Public Attitudes Toward Education , in Phi Delta Kappan (September, 1974): 21.Google Scholar

3. Freeman, Kenneth J., Schools of Hellas (New York, 1969), p. 92.Google Scholar

4. Marrou, H. I., A History of Education in Antiquity, translated by Lamb, George (London, 1956), p. 49.Google Scholar

5. Hofstadter, Richard, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York, 1955, 1961), p. 12.Google Scholar

6. Some exceptions would be Whittemore, Richard, “Nicholas Murray Butler and the Teaching Profession,” September, 1961; McMahon, Clara P., “Pedagogical Techniques: Augustine and Hugo of St. Victor,” March, 1963; Power, Edward J., “Plato's Academy: A Halting Step Toward Higher Learning,” December 1963; Kersey, Harry A., “Michigan's Teachers' Institutes in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” March, 1965; Robins, Gerald, “William F. Allen: Classical Scholar Among the Slaves,” December, 1965; Carrell, William D., “American College Professors: 1750–1800,” Fall, 1968; Essays on education in antiquity, and tradition and change in the ivy league by Wellman, Robert R., Power, Edward J., Cohen, Sheldon S., Lazerson, Marvin, and Brickman, William, Winter, 1966.Google Scholar

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8. Calam, John, Parsons and Pedagogues (New York, 1971), p. vii.Google Scholar

9. Woolverton, John F., Virginia Seminary Journal (Fall, 1972): 12.Google Scholar

10. In the most Bailynesque chapter of all (a splendid one, by the way) Allison Prentice gets around to mentioning schools in paragraph two. As a whole, moreover, the book has a great deal to say about elementary schools, high schools, rural schools, city schools, free schools, separate schools, monitorial schools, private schools, common schools, grammar schools, progressive schools, traditional schools, and écoles de fabrique to mention but a few examples of a supposedly doomed subject.Google Scholar

11. See The Journal of Educational Thought, v. 5, no. 1 (April, 1971): 59.Google Scholar

12. Castle, E. B., The Teacher (London, 1970).Google Scholar

13. Jonçich, Geraldine, The Sane Positivist (Middletown, Connecticut, 1968); McClintock, Robert, Man and his Circumstances (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

14. Archibald Hall to Simeon Baldwin, Sept. 26, 1785, cited in Middlekauff, Robert, Ancients and Axioms (New Haven, 1963), p. 175.Google Scholar

15. Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience 1607–1783 (New York, 1970), p. xiii.Google Scholar

16. Mather, Cotton, A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue … (Boston, 1709); Mather, , Corderius Americanus cited in Cremin, , American Education, p. 191.Google Scholar

17. Jennings, Frank, “For the Record,” in Teachers College Record, v. 76, No. 1 (September, 1974): 1.Google Scholar

18. This criticism is too complex to deal with here. In brief, Michael Zuckerman observed that having cleared the decks of Cubberley-type school history, Cremin has created another Cubberley-type book, but with the focus on books instead of on schools. “In the end,” says Zuckerman, , “Cremin's is not so much a history of education in America as it is a panegyric to the educated men in America and the books they might have read. The focus is always on the corpus of literature more than on education of the colonists…. Cremin simply doesn't seem to see anything so very problematic in the relation of books to behavior.” See the AAUP Bulletin (Spring/March, 1971): 20. Others have rejected Cremin's “tendency to substitute a history of ideas, the record of proposals and philosophies, for actual school history,” [Greer, Colin, The Great School Legend (New York, 1972), p. 51], or “his inability to relate theory to action, to connect politics with educational reform, [ Katz, Michael, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools (New York, 1971), p. 117]. Cremin's rejoinder is that ideas do make a difference—that every view we express and action we take in the name of education is steeped in certain ideological givens which, whether consciously or not, have been systematically made part of our thinking and govern our active lives.Google Scholar

19. Calam, John and Patenaude, John, “The Schools Ain't What they Used to Be—And Probably Never Were,” in Saturday Review (April 29, 1972): 52–53. My contribution was a review of Michael Katz's Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools and Colin Greer's The Great School Legend .Google Scholar

20. Professor Cremin's phrase.Google Scholar

21. Greene, Maxine, The Public School and the Private Vision (New York, 1965), p. 14.Google Scholar

22. Greene, Maxine, Existential Encounters for Teachers (New York, 1967), p. 3.Google Scholar

23. Greene, Maxine, Teacher as Stranger (Belmont, California, 1973), p. 269.Google Scholar

24. “Miss Read,” Village School (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1955, 1960), p. 89.Google Scholar

25. Fuchs, Estelle, Teachers Talk (Garden City, New York, 1969), p. 144.Google Scholar

26. Neill, A. S., Summerhill (New York, 1960), p. 200.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 190.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., p. 205.Google Scholar

29. Ibid, p. 6.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., p. 6.Google Scholar

30. Ashton-Warner, Sylva, Teacher (New York, 1963, 1964, 1971).Google Scholar

31. Ashton-Warner, Sylvia, Myself (New York, 1967), p. 6.Google Scholar

32. Kaestle, Carl F., The Evolution of an Urban School System (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 6.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., pp. 41, 72.Google Scholar

34. See Violas, Paul C., “Academic Freedom and the Public School Teacher, 1930–1960,” in Karier, Clarence J., Violas, Paul and Spring, Joel, Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1973), p. 176.Google Scholar

35. Tyack, David B., From Village School to Urban System: A Political and Social History (Stanford University, School of Education, 1972).Google Scholar

36. Ibid., p. xii.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., p. 4.Google Scholar

38. Tyack, David B., The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 59–65.Google Scholar

39. See History of Education Quarterly, 14 (Summer, 1974): 293–300.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., p. 293.Google Scholar

41. See “Plan for a Long-Term Investigation, entitled ‘Education in 19th Century America: The Participants Speak Out!”’ Google Scholar

42. Ibid., p. 4.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

45. I am grateful to Lazerson, Marvin, Sutherland, Neil J., Bruneau, William A., Henry Johnson, F., Dahlie, Jörgen, Ungerleider, Charles, and Rothwell, Ron for their many helpful suggestions.Google Scholar

46. Hockliffe, E. (ed.), The Diary of the Rev. Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683 (London, 1908), p. 18.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., p. 3.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., p. 15.Google Scholar

49. Ibid., pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

50. Ibid., p. 84.Google Scholar

51. Ibid.Google Scholar

52. Macfarlane, Alan, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman (Cambridge, 1970), p. 3.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., p. 4, citing Redfield, Robert, The Little Community (Chicago, 1960), p. 59.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., p. 11.Google Scholar

55. As material for such studies could be considered such items as Edith and Kelly, Thomas (eds.), A Schoolmaster's Notebook, being an Account of a Nineteenth-Century Experiment in Social Welfare, by David Winstanley of Manchester, Schoolmaster (Manchester, 1957).Google Scholar

56. Andrews, John H. M. to Hirst, B. G., Secretary-Treasurer, School District No. 21 (Quesnel), August 14, 1974, p. 1.Google Scholar

57. Andrews, B. A., Williams Lake Human Rights Conference, January, 1971: Evaluation Report.Google Scholar

58. Board of School Trustees, School District No. 28 (Quesnel) to Andrews, John H. M., Dean, Faculty of Education, U.B.C., September 3, 1974, p. 1.Google Scholar

59. See, for example, Williams, Dave et al., Interim Report of the Committee on Overlap and Omissions in Undergraduate Teacher Training Programs (Vancouver: Faculty of Education, U.B.C., 1974), mimeographed. Note also Professor L. A. Cremin's recent observation that professional “schools of education have wrestled insistently with the arts of education—with the problems of practice—throughout this century. So far as I am aware, no professional school of education has worked out a reliable way of solving them in a systematic and scientific manner and then teaching the solutions.” T.C. Today, v. 3, No. 1 (October, 1974): 2.Google Scholar