Home Social Landscape Featured Articles An Education for "Character" in Alberta Schools, 1905-45

An Education for "Character" in Alberta Schools, 1905-45

 by Amy von Heyking

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Educational writers of the period warned that students, if left to their own devices, would turn to unhealthy idleness or deviant behaviour. Teachers could prevent this unfortunate consequence by teaching children games and sports. Writers concerned about the increased mechanization in industry stressed that organized and supervised play would ensure that young people would be strong and physically fit. Organized sports also taught important moral lessons, such as a sense of justice and honesty. Sporting activities were described as "the most perfect democracy" because participation depended entirely on the ability and commitment of the student, rather than on the amount of money his or her family had. The importance of sports and games in the curriculum and outside school hours demonstrates the extent to which good citizenship was identified with the virtues of good sportsmanship and good character.

Increasingly, however, encouraging students to play by the rules was seen as an inadequate response to the opening political and economic crises of the 1930s and 1940s. In the period before WW II, schools were accused of indoctrinating students. Some people charged that teachers demanded intellectual servitude rather than critical reflection, an essential quality of good citizenship in the modern world. Schools had been guilty of encouraging a false confidence in traditional economic and political institutions which had caused a tremendous economic crisis, and ultimately, another world war. The public and educators demanded that schools provide solutions for the problems of the modern world. The public confidence in scientists' ability to effect technological improvements was transferred to social scientists' and educators' ability to effect social improvements. A teacher writing in A.T.A. Magazine argued that schools should take on the task of restructuring society: "the accomplishment of that end will be a feat of educational engineering, comparable in social importance to those great feats of mechanical engineering of which the present age is justly so proud."⁶

What did these demands for new training in citizenship — as preparation for the modern world — mean for traditional citizenship training, which had always emphasized the virtues of the present system and the importance of fitting in? History teaching which stressed the virtues of the past was seen as completely inadequate to the needs of modern society. A teacher writing in A.T.A. Magazine argued: "industry has been disturbed for three years by the clouds of Depression, and so far, no historian has supplied one practical suggestion for the alleviation of unemployment, or one single thought to dispel the aura of despair."⁷ Modern preparation for citizenship was centred, not on the teaching of history, but on the teaching of the new social sciences which could provide answers to the political, economic, and social issues plaguing society.

The social sciences and the new understanding of citizenship were part of the educational  reforms known as "progressive education" introduced in Alberta in the 1930s. The best statement of the aims of progressive education came from Donalda Dickie, a teacher in all three of Alberta's Normal schools and author of The Enterprise in Theory in Practice (1941). While traditional educators had accepted the acquisition of knowledge as the primary aim of schooling, Dickie insisted: "education, when all is said and done, has just one purpose: to help people to learn how to live happily together in the world." Education no longer referred to the development of an individual's intellectual abilities. Rather, progressive education emphasized the social development of children. Progressive education transformed the understanding of the learning process. There was a new emphasis on learning by doing. Educators insisted that students must actively participate in learning exercises led, but not controlled, by a teacher. Progressive education therefore was characterized by group work and activity-based, interdisciplinary projects intended to spark students' interest and develop their academic and social skills.

Social studies was central to the philosophy of progressive education because it allowed students to work in groups to solve contemporary social problems or learn about foreign countries. Students in Alberta schools in the 1940s remember projects on "China" or "Transportation," which consisted of taking notes from books, drawing maps and pictures, and presenting what they learned to the class. Because learning was understood as an active process, in 1935 the program of studies abandoned topics in favour of a series of problems that formed the basis of each social studies course. What problems did the curriculum direct pupils to solve? Grade 8 social studies primarily addressed the problem of Canada's relationship with the United States and the remainder of the British Empire. The Grade 9 course took a much broader approach in asking students to inquire into the problem of the impact of technology on the modern world. High school students concentrated on contemporary politics, particularly in Europe.

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