Idealism Transformed: The Making of a Progressive Educator 9780773585386

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
1 Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver
2 A Creed of Practical Idealism
3 A School for Higher English and Applied Arts
4 "Tainting with a Big Brush"
5 American Models
6 An Efficient School System
7 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction
8 Putman-Weir Survey
9 Progressive School Reformer
Epilogue
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

MeGILL-QUEEN'S PRESS QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY

Idealism Transformed: The Making of a Progressive Educator

John Harold Putman, inspector of Ottawa public schools between 1910 and 1937, was a leading progressive educator. At that time the progressive education movement in Canada was composed of two major intellectual strands, neo-Hegelian idealism and new liberalism. By tracing the thought and practices of this eminent educator, Wood shows how the neo-Hegelian philosophy of the late nineteenth century was transformed by its own logic and social imperatives into what seems to be its opposite. Idealism, ironically, ultimately comes to resemble pragmatism. Elected to the Ottawa City Council in 1905, Putman allied himself with progressive urban reformers seeking solutions to urban chaos, ward patronage, and inefficient city government. As inspector of public schools, he brought his reformist outlook to bear on providing for the discontented adolescent in the school and on implementing an efficient school system. Two schools established by Putman provided a diversified program for the adolescent; they led, however, not to the self-realization of the individual but to social unification and streaming for vocational roles. At the end of World War i the Ottawa public schools under Putman were judged the most efficient and progressive of any in Canada. But following the tenets of new liberalism and of urban school reformers in the United States, Putman achieved this goal by creating more bureaucratic practices and more formalized procedures, which again contradicted the idealist's moral, humanistic intent. In the postwar period Putman extended the efficiency principle to his survey of schools in British Columbia and his campaigns for junior high schools and county boards in Ontario. By the end of the 19308, the author contends, the progressive educator had effectively transformed the use of schooling for life adjustment, not for intellectual purposes. B. Anne Wood is a member of the Department of Education, Dalhousie University.

This page intentionally left blank

Idealism Transformed The Making of a Progressive Educator B. ANNE WOOD

McGill-Queen's University Press Kingston and Montreal

> McGill-Queen's University Press 1985 ISBN 0-7735-0441-9 Legal deposit 3d quarter 1985 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Wood, B. Anne (Beatrice Anne), 1937Idealism transformed Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-0441-9 1. Putman, J. Harold (John Harold), 1866-1940. 2. Educators - Canada - Biography. 3. Educatipn Canada - History. 4. Education - Canada Philosophy - History. I. Title. LA2325.P87W661985 37o'.92'4 085-098612-5

To Dad and to the memory of his sister, Jean

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Preface

ix

1

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

2

A Creed of Practical Idealism

3

A School for Higher English and Applied Arts 44

4 "Tainting with a Big Brush"

3

20

61

5

American Models

6

An Efficient School System

7

Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

8

Putman-Weir Survey 148

9

Progressive School Reformer Epilogue

192

Abbreviations Notes

197

Index

221

196

86 106

169

128

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

As early as 1848 North Americans were introduced to a new type of pedagogy which allied freedom, in the form of play activities, with ideals of classical liberalism. Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten practices were brought to the United States by disappointed German liberals fleeing from their abortive revolution. Although the first kindergartens were privately run and selfactivity was limited to elementary schooling, after the Civil War Froebelian ideas of instruction began to influence the public schools, largely under the direction of William T. Harris, superintendent of the St Louis public schools and later United States commissioner of education (1889-1906). Harris and John Watson, professor of philosophy at Queen's University, were the foremost neo-Hegelian philosophers in North America. Both men became leading spirits in the reconciliation of Protestant Christianity with the methods and findings of modern science. Their major concern was to conserve society's traditional values and sense of community and yet to accept and help North Americans adapt to the developing industrial world. Hegel's rationalistic philosophy allowed them to retain their religious beliefs, which grounded their morality, and to participate actively in the liberal campaigns for social reform. Through the common school movement, neo-Hegelian idealism promised a potent instrument whereby all classes of people could participate in a civilized life of order, self-discipline, civic loyalty, and respect for private property. Faced with thousands of immigrant children of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds all demanding an education, Harris organized the graded school, moved the pupils along with periodic examinations, and sought constantly to improve the system with diligent economic measures and standardized procedures. He broadened the curriculum to include the fine arts and an evolutionary view of history, attempting thereby to lead students into higher stages of consciousness as well as to indoctrinate them with a respect for social institutions and rational forms of change. As a Hegelian, he believed that only by conformity to the laws of

x

Preface

reason could children acquire the means to be truly free. Only in response to order could they relate significantly to others and, hence, define themselves. Only through orderly institutions could they become part of the community which extended from the local village to the world scene. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, Harris's rational common school system was considered by New Education reformers both in Canada and in the United States to be overly bookish, exam-bound, and elitist. A number of innovative curricular proposals were advocated by leading idealists, including Colonel Francis Parker, Liberty Hyde Bailey, and G. Stanley Hall, who listened to the insistent demands of industry, agriculture, and commerce that the common schools undertake vocational training and the teaching of practical science, especially to children in the higher grades. Manual training, domestic science, handwork, and scientific agriculture were added to existing programs of study. It was hoped that these practical subjects would attract the interest of the more concrete-minded students and allow them to participate actively in their own learning, thereby providing them with motivation to remain in school longer until they had acquired a skill and had become socialized. They would then be able to contribute to the orderly transformation of institutional life and improve the standard of living of the society around them. By this time Hegelian notions of learning and philosophy as process, the importance of social conscience, and a sense of collective individualism were more widely accepted by New Education reformers. Their chief spokesman, John Dewey, retained these basic ideas from his earlier idealist period and incorporated them in his new philosophy of instrumentalism. Like the Hegelians, Dewey believed the pragmatic individual was defined by his participation in the community, which consisted of ever-enlarging groups from the family to the school, the city, the political party, and eventually the nation. As William Goetzmann writes, Hegelianism was a philosophy of unbounded optimism ... it thrived on clashes and confrontations - the fierce contradictions of teeming, ever-changing life. Indeed, the primary mode of Hegelian thinking was first to locate the contradictions inherent in any situation and then to set about to resolve them. This meant translating them into the dialectic of thesis and antithesis and then looking for a larger, more inclusive resolution of the contradiction in a synthesis of the two. Such a thoughtprocess came naturally to Americans, who, from the time of the formulation of the Constitution onward, had habitually resorted to compromise by combination the incorporation of as many divergent views as possible in a broad consensus - as the solution to most problems. By making a problem bigger, enlarging its scope or parameters, it could usually be resolved. This way of thinking was a kind of Manifest Destiny of the mind, aiming always towards the formation of the greater community.1

xi

Preface

A similar ideology prevailed in English-speaking Protestant Canada. By the late nineteenth century Watson's idealism had become allied to a form of British imperial mission, as voiced by such Anglo-Saxon leaders as Principal George Grant of Queen's College, or Education Minister, and later Ontario Premier, George Ross. Their creed of practical idealism called on dedicated heroic leaders to commit themselves to public service and lead the nation towards a wider loyalty to the British Empire. The organic moral community, held together by common institutions of parliamentary government and commitment to a common ethic of unselfishness, would provide Canadians with a greater hope of being able to rise above their regional, sectarian, and racial differences and achieve consensus or a higher political will. There were dangers, however, in this Hegelian thrust towards higher order principles, whether of imperial, scientific, or efficiency stamp. In schooling the increasing bureaucracy necessitated by more efficient services worked at cross-purposes to the Hegelians' equally avowed aim of developing the child's ego and creativity. City boosters, intent on improving their urban environment, used corporate management styles of government (boards of control, city-at-large elections) to clean up civic politics and ended up with another form of tyranny - a highly regulated state with apathetic constituents. Following the maxims of new liberalism as enunciated by such British writers as T.H. Green, young Canadian Liberals, including Mackenzie King, promoted a fresh view of their party that would transcend class and would assign leadership to expert professionals. New standards of excellence and efficiency would counter the evil effects of bureaucracy and would lead to a greater degree of moderation. This new liberal shift from an earlier voluntaristic ethic based on shared interests to a more public and more scientific ideology seemed to subvert the original, optimistic creed of practical idealism. It appeared to be more coercive and threatened to affect seriously not only the nature of liberalism in the English-speaking world, but the forms of government it advocated and the style of management adopted by institutions. Its rhetoric seemed to mask serious racial tensions and gloss over local discontent. Neo-Hegelian ideology also was used now as a rationale for new business and professional groups to seize power, especially at the level of municipal government. The present study concentrates on one representative figure who lived during this transitional period between the laissez-faire nineteenth century and the more regulated twentieth century. Although John Harold Putman was known primarily as a leading Canadian progressive educator, he was also a strong supporter of the Liberal party, he participated actively in progressive municipal politics as well as the proportional representation movement, and he kept abreast of the latest developments in scientific management. While acquiring his Bachelor of Arts, Master and Doctor of Pedagogy degrees from Queen's, he studied for many years under John Watson; his thought and

xii

Preface

educational practice integrated Watson's idealism with Dewey's instrumentalism, Hall's functional psychology, and later Edward Thorndike's behavioural psychology. Throughout his life he subscribed to a creed of practical idealism, thus providing an interesting focal point to study the creed in practice. The complex interaction of ideas, institutional practices, and social forces surrounding Putman will be delineated to highlight the way in which these factors tempered his thought and affected the evolution of his progressive school practices. Chapter I allies the New Education movement to the urban reform and social gospel movements. Selected for his progressive municipal ideas, Putman first comes into prominence as a rising, young politician who is searching for new solutions to problems of urban chaos, ward patronage, and inefficient city government. At the same time the rural model used by the New Educators to create a moral community in the urban environment provided a strong conservative antidote to their notions of reform. This conservatism was also reflected in their imperialistic sympathies and in Putman's attraction to Watson's idealist philosophy (outlined in chapter 2). By the time Putman was appointed inspector of the Ottawa public schools in 1910, the earlier voluntaristic ethic of classical liberalism had changed. Influenced strongly by prevailing American practices, his progressive school policies, as described in chapters 3, 4, and 5, were supposed to provide students with a more wide-ranging program to suit their individual differences, but in fact streaming practices increasingly determined their future vocational roles. As a logical outcome of his Hegelian ideology, Putman stressed not only the need for individual self-realization but also the necessity of a collectivist ethic. In using moral reasons for his reform measures, Putman argued, for instance, that with a more efficient school system children would be motivated to behave harmoniously, would be encouraged to participate in the transformation of their organic school society, and, with the addition of a sound English foundations course, would become worthwhile citizens. To achieve this moral goal he believed that he, the educational expert, should be given far more control of the school system, thereby displacing ward interest groups on the school board. Being an astute politician, he successfully used Ottawa's divisive local politics (the bilingual school crisis and the conflicting relationship among the three school boards) to win strong ratepayer support for his progressive policies. Partly because of Ottawa's unique school situation and partly because of Putman's expert leadership, by the end of World War I the Ottawa public schools had been judged the most efficient and progressive in Canada (chapter 6). They represented the kind of school advocated by the later progressive education movement, which became widely accepted as an ideal for the Dominion during the 19305. Progressive educators were able to convince the public that the school was the principal agent which could stem the tide of the

xiii Preface

Jazz Age and an increasingly utilitarian view of life. Ironically the effect of their idealization of the school (chapter 7) was to isolate it from the rest of society and to increase its formalized procedures. But in popular opinion the myth prevailed that the school's main task was to provide character training for its students and produce socially harmonious citizens. During the 19208 progressive educators were schooled in the new science of sociology. Chapter 8 illustrates how Putman and G.M. Weir joined their Hegelian rationale to the new sciences of public opinion polling and scientific testing in Canada's first provincial survey of education. Their report on schools in British Columbia, Survey of the School System, effectively promoted the cause of progressive educational reform. By the 19305, however, the utilitarianism implicit in the creed of practical idealism had become very pronounced. Chapter 9, which depicts the course of campaigns for junior high schools and county boards in Ontario, demonstrates that at this time progressive educators blatantly advocated the use of schooling primarily for life adjustment, not for intellectual purposes. But this did not hinder the advancement of their careers. Putman, for instance, was considered of such stature that he was offered, but declined, the position of deputy minister of education for British Columbia. Later, in an effort to implement his progressive urban and rural policies across Ontario, he resigned from the Ottawa Public School Board and ran as a provincial Liberal candidate with Premier Mitchell Hepburn's promise that he would become minister of education for Ontario. Putman's defeat and his brief years of service as controller on Ottawa's Board of Control brought his progressive stance into a new perspective. The Depression and the coming wartime climate cast a more realistic light on his ideas. His flaws as well as his achievements, the assumptions implicit in his neo-Hegelian philosophy, and his now outdated views on the problem of social order became apparent in this final period of Putman's life. In the course of my research I was generously assisted by the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario, who granted me the Helen Keefer Scholarship and later their Writers' Award, and by the Canada Council. Further research costs were met through a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The staff of many archives across Canada were very helpful in locating important primary source materials. I am especially grateful to Dorothy Kealey at the Archives of Ontario. A number of retired teachers and educational administrators, notably Robert Westwater, Harry Pullen, Robert Sharp, H.G. Young, Robert Holmes, Frances Iveson, Margie Rattray, Nan Slinn, Kathleen Weingard, Girlie Headrick, Dorothea Graham, Mildred Minter, and Lois Stephenson, provided me with excellent oral history accounts of their teaching and administrative practices. I am extremely grateful to Harley Cummings, who loaned me his valuable scrapbooks and the

xiv

Preface

notes which he used for his own book, The City of Ottawa Public Schools: A Brief History. Morris Carroll of Vancouver kindly loaned me his copy of the 1925 BC Survey of the School System. James Gibson and members of Dr Putman's immediate family, Cecil Putman, Merritt Putman, and his sister Isabel Hope, but particularly Irene Putman, gave me valuable insights into Putman's personality and family life. In the course of preparing the manuscript for publication a number of people assisted me. I am grateful for the constructive comments from my colleagues William Hare and Robert Berard, as well as from Brian McKillop at the University of Manitoba. I received critical editorial advice from Marjory Whitelaw and expert copyediting of the manuscript from Audrey Hlady of McGill-Queen's University Press. Typing services were provided by the staff of the Department of Education at Dalhousie University and the final draft was completed by Carol Denton and Eileen Dale. Several people helped in the proofreading, including my mother, Helene Tolmie, my husband, Connla Wood, Ann MacCormack, Ivona Zwicker, and Lise de Villiers. Earlier versions of several sections of this book appeared in Vitae Scholasticae 2 (Spring 1983); The Dalhousie Review 62, no. 2 (Summer 1982); and Journal of the Midwest History of Education Society 12. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for allowing me to draw upon these papers. Finally, I would like to thank Professor David Norton of McGillQueen's University Press for his worthwhile editorial guidance. This book is formally dedicated to my father, J. Ross Tolmie, and his late sister, Jean Odium, whose Scottish-Canadian intellects and taste for history, politics, and philosophy challenged me to explore these higher intellectual spheres. It is informally dedicated to my husband, Connla Wood, without whose realism, constant support, and encouragement I could not have completed the task.

Irony: ... use of language that has an inner meaning for a privileged audience & an outer meaning for the persons addressed or concerned. Concise Oxford Dictionary

This page intentionally left blank

Idealism Transformed

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER ONE

Urban Progressive/ Rural Conserver

The municipal elections of December 1905 were highly significant in the nation's capital. Mayor James A. Ellis fought the whole campaign on what was termed the "public principle,"1 a major plank of Canadian municipal reformers which particularly focused on the question of municipal ownership of utilities. Ottawa's Rideau Ward became the battleground for this principle. At the beginning of the year a number of progressive ratepayers, dissatisfied with the lacklustre performance of the three incumbent aldermen in Rideau Ward, formed a committee to bring out candidates to oppose them. They persuaded John Harold Putman, headmaster of the Ottawa Model School, to run as a candidate. At his nomination he clearly allied himself with these progressive urban reformers. He advocated the appointment of a commission of businessmen to manage the civic electric plant and, further, called for the improvement of civic sanitation, especially garbage collection, the paving of Byward Market, and more rigid inspection of meats and produce. In his campaign speeches Putman gave many facts and figures on the success of civic ownership in England and some Canadian cities. He was considered a knowledgeable "advocate of municipal ownership and economic but progressive administration of the city's business."2 During the previous decade Ottawa had experienced a period of astonishing growth. The population had risen from 44,154 in 1891 to 59,928 in 1901 and was to reach 87,062 by 1911. It had almost doubled in twenty years. These "Laurier boom years" saw the federal civil service increase sevenfold, and eleven new government buildings attested to the increasing impact the federal government was having on civic life. But the growth had been erratic and unplanned. The city was partly handicapped by its geography, laced as it was by a network of intersecting waterways: the Ottawa River, the Rideau River, and the Rideau Canal. These physical obstacles marked the boundaries which separated the Anglo-Saxon Upper Town, seat of the federal government and crowned by Parliament Hill,

4 Chapter One

from the industrial Lower Town, home of a number of minority groups. Seven major railways ran through Ottawa to four railway stations, snarling city streets, but demonstrating the city's central position as a flourishing industrial centre. Mayor Ellis predicted that Ottawa would soon be a great railway centre. He promoted the development of the very best railway facilities, but also advocated regulation which would preserve the interests of the city and the ratepayers. Following the precepts of the League of Canadian Municipalities, formed in 1901, Ellis and his fellow urban reformers represented a strong fraternity which tried to bring order into the urban chaos. They began their attack on the franchise powers of large utility companies. Between 1878 and 1905 Ottawa had become a key centre for the development of telephone, gas, and hydro-electricity. The urban reformers were particularly concerned in 1905-6 with the proposed merger of the Ottawa Electric Company with Ottawa Gas to form the Ottawa Heat and Power Company. Not only did they fear higher power rates, but they warned Ottawa voters that this larger company would dominate the city-sponsored rival company, Consumer's Electric, formed in 1905. The franchise of Bell Telephone was due to expire in 1906, and Mayor Ellis wanted the city's interests more strongly represented in the settlement with that company as well. Another outcome of Ottawa's rapid growth was its sprawling development. Large-scale land assemblages, such as the one hundred acres between Hull and Chelsea, Quebec, bought by Ottawa real estate agents Morisset and Morisset, were divided into lots and laid out in streets and sidewalks. Ottawa entrepreneurs had early capitalized on this suburban phenomenon by creating Canada's first electric streetcar railway company in 1891. By 1905 the Ottawa City Passenger Railway Company had connected the street railway with the expanding suburbs west and south of the city. Three major annexations had been completed since 1887. They had been promoted as means to attract industry to the city and to raise increased tax dollars.3 Sprawling development also created problems of its own. Land prices skyrocketed, demands for housing far exceeded the supply, and municipal services such as pure water, sanitation facilities, garbage collection, and fire protection had reached crisis conditions.4 But municipal politics tended to operate by crisis management. Major fires in 1900 and 1903, which wiped out Hull and LeBreton Flats, leaving eight thousand people homeless and resulting in the loss of over ten thousand dollars per week in lumber taxes, did arouse urban leaders to demand change. It was not, however, a concerted collective cry for reform. As John Taylor notes, geographic, ethnic, religious, and class groups were not sufficiently organized or powerful enough to demand council action against the threat of fire or disease.5 Nor were organized labour or social gospellers present in sufficient numbers to rally the populace. Progressive businessmen and politicians became the leaders in a

5

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

campaign for an economic transformation of municipal politics. In their judgment the election of good men with progressive ideas, who could bring a broader view to bear on city problems and who could rise above narrow ward politics, was the first step to a solution of the problem of urban chaos. The choice of thirty-nine-year-old Putman, father of eight children and substantial property-holder in Rideau Ward,6 was considered by the Ottawa press to be sound. As the Ottawa Evening Journal reported on 2 January 1906, The most decisive battle for public principles was fought and won in Rideau Ward. That ward, though comparatively small in population, is as thoroughly representative of the level-headed average of the ratepayers as any in the city. Dissatisfaction with the course of the ward's three representatives in 1904, Ask with, Culbert and Grant showed itself last January ... By the election of Slinn, Putman and Short, Rideau Ward has given a striking object lesson to the rest of the city in municipal intelligence and public spirit.

Putman represented the increasingly aggressive leadership of professionals in this new movement of municipal reform. Since his arrival in Ottawa in 1894 as second assistant at the Ottawa Model School, he had demonstrated his professional expertise and openness to new ideas in a number of ways. Within five years he had gained his specialist's standing in English and history, his inspector's certificate, his licence as a member of the Department of Education's Board of Examiners, and his Bachelor of Arts degree, obtained extramurally from Queen's College in 1899. He had served as vice-principal of the Ottawa Normal School in 1900 when the incumbent became ill, had moved a significant resolution on superannuation at the annual meeting of the Ontario Educational Association (OEA) in 1901, and that year had served also as president of the Ottawa Teachers' Association. In 1902 Putman was appointed headmaster of the Ottawa Model School, a practice-teaching elementary school adjacent to the Ottawa Normal School. He spent that year writing a history textbook, Britain and the Empire,1 which broke new ground in style and social approach to school history. The following year he served as secretary of the Superannuation Committee of the OEA and made himself known as a caustic critic of the department by writing several strong letters complaining about the low salaries paid to staff of the Ottawa Model School. This was reinforced in 1904 when, in an address to the OEA on the reorganization of professional schools,8 Putman lambasted the tired educational policies of the dying Liberal government under Premier George Ross. His progressive outlook was evident as well in his pedagogical practices, which were changing towards a more child-centred approach to teaching. He visited the famous Pestalozzian teacher-training school in Oswego, New

6 Chapter One York, in 1900, introduced a physical education program for girls and for children in the lower grades at the Ottawa Model School, and asked Principal J.F. White of the Ottawa Normal School if he could begin a model school garden similar to the experimental gardens operating in nearby Carleton County under the Macdonald-Robertson Rural School Plan.9 In 1905 he began a series of field trips with his students, which resulted in far more scientific observation, geographical laboratory work, and the correlation of language with these subjects. No doubt Putman's position as secretary-treasurer of the Queen's Society, an alumni association of Queen's University, and his membership in the Scottish Rite Masons enhanced his professional status. But his own incisive intellect, tremendous energy, and dominating personality attested to his leadership qualities. He was judged to be an excellent speaker during his election campaign. His stocky build, broad shoulders, and piercing brown eyes under shaggy brows commanded respect. His honesty and sincerity inspired confidence. He epitomized what Victorians called character. As the Ottawa Evening Journal reporter put it on 20 November 1905, Putman "is assured of hearty support by many residents of New Edinburgh and as he is a man of exceptional moral character and ability he would make a worthy alderman." In the following year Alderman Putman lived up to these expectations. He was appointed to the Finance Committee and became the city's representative on the Library Board, responsible for the building and management of the Carnegie Public Library. In all major policy decisions he sided with civic reformers who supported the civic electric plant, promoted the idea of a board of control, and sought the appointment of expert commissioners to manage civic organizations such as the water, electric, and library boards. Mayor Ellis and his progressive colleagues were thus separating the executive from the legislative branches of government, ensuring that the executive would be run more efficiently and that the legislative function would be removed from the corruption of ward politics. Power, therefore, was being placed much more firmly in executive hands. Along with this transfer of power the progressives urged that ratepayers be asked to approve a reduction in the number of aldermen, thereby lessening even more the weight of ward interests in City Council policy. Further efficiency measures promoted by this progressive 1906 council were the establishment of a city garbage collection system, the passage of standardization by-laws for bread, and the appointment of a meat inspector. A publicity bureau was created to attract industries to Ottawa. Putman argued the city's case for further annexation when a delegation from Hintonburg, worried about disenfranchisement, came to City Council. He reminded the delegates that their debt of $190 on $i ,000, against Ottawa's $140, would be reduced and that they would gain a trunk sewer system, better police

7 Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver protection, and more local improvements. They could take advantage of Ottawa's more efficient schools, her hospital and library facilities, and cheaper telephone and telegraph services.10 The progressive outlook was also reflected in the council's lobby against the Canadian Pacific Railway before the Board of Railway Commissioners. It managed to defeat CPR'S planned expansion on Nicholas Street. The council also won a five-year settlement from Bell Telephone to maintain the current franchise agreement. To its citizens this council appeared enlightened. Putman's motions to have band-shells and a swimming pool built gave them more facilities for their leisure-time activities. His defence of the Public Library and his strong campaign to raise more funds for its supply of books gave him the reputation of being a champion of the people. Although his motion to have collegiate fees reduced, thereby allowing more access to secondary education, was defeated, it further advanced his image. The council was not interested in encroaching on the territory of the Collegiate Institute Board and so referred the matter to this board. Similarly, it did not follow up Putman's motion to have a commission appointed to investigate pollution of city water by sewerage above the intake pipe.11 The 1911 and 1912 typhoid epidemics, resulting in 174 deaths, were later to prove Putman' s civic conscience to have been sound.12 In general, however, Putman and the 1906 council advocated municipal reforms which tied in to business interests. Expansion, efficiency, economy, and expertise were their watchwords. Public ownership of utilities was sought because it provided the most efficient method of getting immediate, cheap power. Home rule and control of franchise and monopoly powers gave more control to local businessmen. The corporate model inherent in the Board of Control was cited as the most efficient method of municipal management; ward politics interfered with the proper conduct of civic affairs. Library and leisure facilities for the urban dweller helped to build a healthy, moral, and intelligent community. As a leading alderman Putman had played an effective role in establishing this new efficiency norm. On his retirement from the council in December 1906 he was judged to have "shown a knowledge of municipal affairs and a willingness to study them, which has made him a valuable member of council."13 As an educator acting in a political capacity, however, Putman had deeper motives for allying himself with the urban reform movement. In February 1905 the Conservative government of James Whitney came into power in Ontario. One of Whitney's chief campaign planks had been the reform of the educational system to cater to the more practical needs of 95 per cent of the school population which, because of high school entrance examinations at grade eight and high secondary school fees, could go no further than the public school. A revised curriculum in 1904 allowed many more practical subjects in the high school program. But debate had raged since the turn of the century

8 Chapter One

over whether the traditional literary program of the past, which provided access to both university and normal schools, should be jeopardized by the introduction of scientific and technical subjects or weakened by dropping compulsory subjects such as Latin and a modern language. Ottawa's Collegiate Institute, with its high fee structure and its proud grammar school traditions, firmly represented the literary, "Latin" camp. Putman had equally firmly allied himself with the new policy of the Department of Education towards a more practical, industrial, and commercial role for the secondary school. During his first year's tenure on the Library Board in 1906, Putman's major contribution was to promote the library as an adult education centre. He persuaded City Council to grant five hundred dollars and the Library Board to offer free technical classes in freehand and architectural drawing and commercial arithmetic. He also urged the library to open its rooms in the evening for use by adult educational groups such as the Ottawa Art Students' League, and he persuaded the English subcommittee on which he served to purchase practical textbooks and manuals useful to trade unions. Two reasons were cited for Putman's promotion of adult education at the library. One was the strong campaign he launched in 1906 against the Collegiate Institute Board for its high fee structure. In his motion at City Council, which had been referred to the appointed Collegiate Board, he claimed that secondary school fees in Ottawa were the highest in Ontario and that only 5 per cent of Ottawa public or separate school pupils went on to the collegiate. He insisted that his technical classes at the library should be free; these, therefore, were an attempt to provide a wider access to education for adolescents. They also were an attempt to keep young men off the streets on cold winter nights. The Public Library was seen by Putman and his newspaper supporters as having both an idealistic and an instrumental value for society. It would take up the slack not provided by collegiate institutes or other educational bodies to offer practical education for the less academically inclined. But, echoing Victorian self-help maxims, the library would provide the general populace with a means to a higher level of citizenry. As the editor of the Ottawa Evening Journal expressed it on 30 November 1906, "Public money could not be spent to better advantage than by providing every man, woman and child with the means of self-education." With the same mixed moralistic-utilitarian motives, Putman strongly promoted the expansion of secondary education to include technical students and French Canadians. In a series of three very frank letters to the Journal he suggested that the proposed two hundred thousand dollar expansion of the Ottawa Collegiate Institute building (now Lisgar Collegiate) was an "enormous expense and great waste." It was time, he thought, to open up a discussion of "the whole question of secondary education as it affects the future of our city."14 His first attack used the principle of justice as its main plank. Although all

9

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

Ottawa property owners would be asked to pay five on every thousand dollars of assessed value, the "great majority of the Ottawa tax-payers are humble people against whose children the Collegiate doors are barred and doublebarred by the exorbitant fees."15 The thirty thousand French-speaking citizens of Ottawa also made little use of the collegiate and yet were taxed to educate the English students. Nonacademic students in Ottawa were deprived of secondary education because there were no public technical or commercial schools in the city. Putman made three radical proposals to move the Collegiate Institute away from the traditions of the 1843 grammar school and into the twentieth century. Using the current collegiate building, which had a good central location, he proposed an expenditure of $20,000 to turn it into a technical and commercial school. This would satisfy the needs of a great number of boys attending the collegiate "who are a constant source of trouble to both parents and teachers, wholly because they are forced into courses of study for which they have neither aptitude nor inclination. Nature decreed that their wits should be sharpened by 'doing things' and 'making things.' "16 For the estimated seven or eight hundred students that would still desire a general cultural course leading to matriculation, another building should be constructed for $150,000. Putman reiterated his previous plea to the Library Board that the secondary schools should be free and supported by a general tax. In fairness, therefore, to the French-speaking people of Ottawa, a French secondary school should be built in an area convenient to the centre of the French population. Continuing the principle of justice (but ignoring separate school claims for religious instruction and clerical participation), Putman argued that there should be a bilingual staff, at least half of whom would be French and would teach only in that language, and who should have the same high standard of scholarship as teachers in corresponding classes in the English schools. Putman frankly admitted that Ottawa had a race problem. Echoing the new liberalism of the British idealist philosopher T.H. Green,17 Putman believed that a reform of the school system could bring together dangerously estranged groups. Like Green, he assumed that the community had evolved from a lower level of rule-and-custom morality learned in the family and in each ethnic group. It had now reached a sphere of rational activity in which a "general will" would prevail and in which common moral interests of the citizenry of Ottawa would rise above special ethnic interests. As he wrote, "Every public-spirited citizen wishes that the two races should be brought closer together, not by coercing the minority and forcing them to lose their own language and tradition, but by meeting on common ground."18 Positive government intervention, then, in the form of specialized and free secondary schools, Putman and the new liberals believed, would lead to voluntary co-operation among the masses. They would be largely streamed

io Chapter One

off into technical and commercial schools or the middle and upper classes. French- and English-speaking students, having attained positions of equality, would voluntarily choose to learn the language of the other culture by attending courses in the second-language school. Putman's final positive hope was that "by a constant interchange of pupils, French and English will come together without either sacrificing their self-respect, and both will have opportunities to perfect themselves in a second language."19 On a number of counts Putman's idealistic liberalism, applied to Ottawa's secondary school problem, was unrealistic and naive, as a number of letters to the editor indicated. The English-French separate school controversy in Ottawa, which had been raging for many years, had been temporarily doused by the ruling of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in November 1906 that the teaching certificates of the French-speaking Christian Brothers were invalid. A collegiate supporter wrote to the editor, therefore, that it would be impossible to find even one fully qualified French teacher to man Putman's French secondary school.20 The cost of the building alone, the collegiate supporter estimated, would be at least $150,000. Even John Watson, Putman's philosophy professor at Queen's, considered that although it "would be well if all the pupils in our Public Schools should know something of French, the mother tongue of a large number of our fellow-citizens ... I am not optimistic enough to believe that the public mind is prepared for so radical a change."21 The collegiate supporter also pointed out that Putman had grossly underestimated the cost of renovating the collegiate as a technical school; at least $100,000 would be required to strengthen the floors and ceilings before machinery could be installed and the cost of a new collegiate would be at least another $250,000. This spate of letters in 1907 launched a thirty-year political war which Putman was to wage on behalf of progressive secondary school reform against the entrenched grammar school interests. He argued that he was championing the rights of the masses and French-speaking Canadians against the selfish, elitist members of the Collegiate Board. But his mid-Victorian paternalistic assumption that 95 per cent of the population should not be taking a classical curriculum betrayed his own utilitarian bias in just the same way as did his assumption that French Canadians would automatically want to become bilingual. Putman, like the British idealistic liberals, assumed that rationalistic, city-wide efficiency norms as established by reformist, progressive municipal leaders would be accepted by the whole political community of the city. He assumed that all its citizens, educated by specialist teachers in a program especially suited to their needs, would willingly assent to the "gospel of duty" and create a harmonious community of moral citizens. And it was the lack of this moral community in the chaotic, materialistic urban-industrial environment that particularly disturbed Putman and his urban progressive confreres.

11

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

Twelve years earlier, at his inaugural address, entitled "Country Schools," at the Ontario Educational Association, Putman had outlined his conception of an idealistic moral community. It was to be found in the rural environment. Ironically, he himself had quickly escaped from his own rural birthplace for a more profitable urban school career. He admitted that most one-room rural schools were poor and that he had derived little educational benefit from his own. But there were still untold advantages to be found in a one-room rural school. An indication of why he concentrated on the advantage of the country school came from his comments on urban youth. In the city, "boys, especially, who have nothing to do outside of their studies are likely to become somewhat listless, and pass through a period varying from one to three years, when they are in a kind of comatose, stand-still, won't-beinterested-in-anything condition."22 In Putman's estimation the manualtraining campaign, which was being conducted by the child-centred New Educators, arose from this concern over adolescent urban youth. But for Putman the malaise went deeper. As he noted, both the public press and school journals over the past years referred to the prevalence of "machine-like work, and the want of individual teaching in graded schools, particularly in large cities." Forced into a mechanical role by the pressure of grades and examinations, the teacher of forty to sixty pupils, all of the same age, turned out machine-like children. What worried Putman and many of his contemporaries was the moral result of this urban school system on the child's values. Forgetting his own career, he wanted "to check the uneasy, restless spirit that has seemed of late years to possess the young people of America, and drive so many of them to towns and cities."23 His own country background and his six years of rural teaching led Putman towards an environmentalist solution to the problem. He believed that the healthful and invigorating surroundings found in the ideal country life established important virtues and good habits in the child. Through this natural milieu he acquired an incentive for work, learned habits of industry, and gained independence and a measure of originality in solving his own problems. His surroundings offered a wealth of lessons in natural history, botany, and zoology. Although Putman admitted that many rural teachers lacked sufficient education or qualifications, he considered the ideal rural teacher in an ungraded setting would present more spontaneous lessons and would illustrate them better with concrete examples from the material at hand. Above all the country teacher would avoid the spoon-feeding and overteaching inflicted on city children. As Putman found in his own experience, the country teacher had to read widely to keep up to the demands of all the grades. He also had to keep "in constant touch with child-nature" because of his dealings with children of such varying ages. Thus the rural teacher avoided the narrowing process which tended to afflict city teachers. Again, speaking

12 Chapter One

from his own perspective, Putman considered that the country teacher was in a much more advantageous position "to impress his individuality on the pupil." The pupil thus received a lasting impression, especially from the personality of a strong teacher. Much more opportunity was given in an ungraded school for individual instruction. As he concluded, 'The natural result of this is a class of pupils whose individuality has not been crushed."24 Putman's 1895 address was strongly influenced by the new child-centred psychology of G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, whose 1880 article, "The Contents of Children's Minds upon Entering School," had moved child study away from the idealistic speculations of its kindergarten founder, Friedrich Froebel, towards a more scientific base. Hall's thesis that children developed through characteristic stages, which should be scientifically studied before effective pedagogical practices were devised, had a major impact on the OEA convention in 1894 at which he had been the central speaker. A child-study section of the OEA had been formed the next year. From this beginning child-centred pedagogues, such as Putman, joined several other educational and social reform groups to form the New Education movement. These reformers wanted a transformed school to better equip youngsters for the modern world. They preached activity rather than traditional memory work. They advocated the correlation of subjects around the child's widening experience. They called for the increased use of concrete materials, field trips, and a closer relationship between the child's school experiences and his surrounding community. What particularly concerned Putman and his New Education colleagues was the breakdown of traditional modes of relationships and social duties in the face of the new urban environment. Since the days of the Conquest, Brian McKillop asserts, the moral imperative of Anglo-Canadian thought had been that one must assert one's will and discharge one's cultural obligations in order to continue the various conceptions of religious, political, and literary traditions inherited from Europe, especially from Great Britain. As McKillop notes, "throughout Canadian history the Anglo-Canadian moral imperative has found its most continuous expression in the field of education. In education, too, the Anglo-Canadian quest for cultural unity has been most pervasive."25 By looking carefully at the types of ideal relationships which they remembered from their rural youth, these New Educators hoped to find a model which they could use to establish a sense of community in the urban environment. Putman and his child-centred colleagues were fearful of the dehumanizing effect of "collectivism," whether of big business franchises or of overly regulated, graded public schools. They were expressing what Northrop Frye calls "the myth of concern,"26 whose function was to establish within a society a commonality of purpose or social unity. Putman first reflected this concern while attending Toronto Normal School in 1887. He recalled that the greatest influence on him at this time came, not

13

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

from educational circles, but from the pulpit. Although he had heard a wide selection of the best Methodist preachers while attending camp meetings at Grimsby Park near his home, they were relegated to a back shelf when he heard Ezra Stafford, pastor of Metropolitan Church. "Many times I went shortly after six o'clock to make certain I would get a good seat for the service at seven o'clock," he later wrote.27 At this time Metropolitan Church was the centre of the social gospel movement, which rested, as Richard Allen argues, "on the premise that Christianity was a social religion, concerned ... with the quality of human relations on this earth ... it was a call for men to find the meaning of their lives in seeking to realize the Kingdom of God in the very fabric of society ... the social gospel did not regard itself as primarily a theological movement... the gospel mandate required response to concrete human needs."28 For the first time in his life Putman must have been struck by the contradiction between the individualistic evangelicalism of his childhood Methodism and the social needs of Toronto in the i88os.29 This important provincial capital of 180,000 people revealed its central industrial position with belching smoke, chaotic railway tracks, and mazes of dingy slums. The wealthy congregation of Metropolitan Church began two conscience-salving, humanitarian endeavours at this time, the Fred Victor Mission and the Epworth League, both of which were founded on the reform Darwinian beliefs that the character of the poor could be changed through a manipulation of their environment. The sympathy of the Reverend Dr Stafford with the toiling masses and his conviction that the poor would change morally if their social conditions were alleviated forcefully and clearly were expressed to his parishioners through his sermons.30 In retrospect Putman thought Stafford's idealism was similar to John Watson's philosophy to which he was later exposed at Queen's. As Stafford wrote, "The great call of the Christian Church to-day is to enter upon a higher spiritual plane. There is need of a nobler conception of the Christian vocation, of a more perfect consecration to it, and of entering fully into the spiritual meaning and aims of everything in this worldly life." But the young Putman probably was more influenced by the conviction in his manner, described in these terms: "Dr. Stafford's religious life was not an emotional one, as his nature was not emotional, yet it was a pre-eminently experimental one. His hearers will recall his frequent references to his personal experiences, to his life lessons, his boyhood's convictions, and manhood's struggles. He talked without art, but got a grip on the conscience by these glimpses into his own heart."31 In similar fashion, but many years later, Putman tried to get a grip on the heart of his demoralized readers in the depths of the Depression to persuade them about the worth of the rural community life that he had experienced as a boy. The pastoral landscape he painted would, he hoped, show them that there

14 Chapter One were indeed community values to be found there that would overcome the anomie arising from their collective urban society. The setting of his retrospective vision was Ontario's Niagara Peninsula in the last half of the nineteenth century, "a transition period from a primitive, almost self-contained pioneer life, to the modern machine-driven industrial age."32 This was an era before the evil railway age and transportation revolution. The fifty-acre Putman family farm was situated in a neighbourhood three and a half miles from the nearby village of Smithville. Putman stressed its economic independence: "Besides our laundry soap we produced all our fuel, some clothing, nearly all our food and our bedding. My father's generation made much of their furniture. We slept on feather-beds over home-made straw mattresses."33 From the produce of the farm - milk, poultry, sheep, eggs, pork products, clover and timothy seed, grain, honey, beeswax, potatoes, woollen knitwear, and sometimes cordwood-the farmers bartered for their shoes, English woollen cloth, cotton sheets, and black silks for their wives' Sunday dresses. They used the tannery, the sawmill, the potash factory, and the grist mill in the village and sometimes availed themselves of the services of the doctor and the blacksmith. Lacking large-scale machinery, the farmers organized community bees to raise barns, clear stumps from the land, and quilt the family blankets. Putman described his own boyhood experiences with the threshing bee, the climax of the farmer's grain-planting season. The average farm in southwestern Ontario consisted of "one-third pasture, one-third meadow and one-third grain. Seldom did the farmer have more than 600 to 800 bushels of grain to thresh. And until 1880 or 1881, when wheat went as low as 75 cents, he would have at least 200 bushels of winter wheat."34 On threshing day work began at seven in the morning and continued, with only two rests, until five-thirty, or if not finished, the work went on after supper from six-thirty to eight o'clock. Putman can remember "working from 1.30 until eight o'clock without a break in order to clean up the job and allow the machine to be in a neighbour's barn at seven o'clock the next morning. This meant supper by candle-light and work until midnight for the threshing operator to move his outfit."35 The threshing machine was driven by five horse-drawn teams. They travelled in a circle while the arm-like levers threshed the grain. The dust, either from the threshing of the grain or from the scything of barley and peas, kept him coughing for days afterwards. But despite the unpleasantness, no one would have dreamt of refusing help when it was needed. "If we required seven hands for threshing we assisted seven neighbors and they assisted us. Now I can see that no other way was possible and for two reasons. We could not afford to pay cash for help and if we had been able to pay for it no help at that time of the year would have been available."36

15

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

There were rewards for this hard rural life which "city-bred folk," living in their industrial time schedule, never experienced. For one thing they have never once in their lives been really hungry ... The city man has never risen at 5 a.m., done chores until 6 a.m., taken a hasty breakfast and then walked a mile to a threshing-bee to work like all possessed from 7 a.m. to 12 o'clock, pitching heavy sheaves of wheat from the back-end of a mow toward the threshing-machine and then, with the pit of his stomach just touching his backbone, sat down with twelve other hungry men to a table groaning with home-produced and home-prepared food.

The family honour was at stake in this once-a-year event. For days in advance the women of the family prepared pies, puddings, sauces, pickles, pyramids of bread, and plats of butter. A sheep or lamb was killed. The farmer's home-cured hams were boiled or roasted. Every vegetable and fruit grown on the farm was served. After an initial period of silent eating, the conversation, described by Putman as largely personal and practical, commenced. There was no malicious gossip but the dinner and supper did become "a clearing-house for the exchange of neighbourhood news." A community neighbourliness was established, in contrast with the business basis of threshing in the twentieth century, whose progress "robs us of our traditions and our pioneer customs."37 The march of progress also killed the aesthetic and picturesque, in Putman's estimation. He described "the touch of romance that still clings to the smithy that stood at the cross-roads near my boyhood home." The smithy's forge was the centre of country gossip, and "a boy sent to the shop with a team to be shod was not bitterly disappointed to find one or two teams ahead of him. It gave an hour or two to watch the smith and gossip with cronies."38 In the same vein, berry-picking and fishing were nostalgically recalled by Putman. As he wrote, in berry-picking you get more than just berries. You get sweet smells, fresh air, a sun-burn and always come home dead tired. You have heard the note of a new bird, seen its nest and peeped at its young, or avoided a queer little animal with a white stripe up its back. You started a partridge or nearly stepped on a snake. You saw a plant you never saw before or a brilliantly-colored moth that you had hoped to see again. You spill some of your berries getting over a rail fence and you scratch your arm on a brier when reaching out for a plump raspberry.39

These psychological rewards were worth pursuing even by business people today. A true fisherman, Putman believed, "goes fishing to have a visit with himself or a talk with a friend. He goes fishing to get away from the hum-drum of business or the routine of professional duties. He goes fishing to escape

16 Chapter One

someone or something - a nagging wife, a bill collector or cleaning-up the cellar or a visit from his mother-in-law."40 Putman's entire pastoral landscape served a metaphoric function. As Leo Marx writes of the American landscape, it gave "an image in the mind that represents aesthetic, moral, political, and even religious values." On the one hand, it was a romantic protest on behalf of the organic view of nature against the artificiality and materialism of urban society. On the other, "it implies that we can remain human, which is to say, fully integrated human beings, only when we follow some such course, back and forth, between our social and natural (animal) selves."41 The psychic dilemma presented by the contrast between city and country was described by Putman in an article entitled "Hoeing Corn." Despite the ten hours of back-breaking labour involved, there were compensations for aching arms and shoulders. A drink of cold water at the end of each round, the wholesome smell of mother earth, the distant hum of bees, the cawing of crows in the adjacent wood, the restful green of the young corn and the hope of the dinner-horn - all these made for contentment if not for happiness. There were two other rewards. You had abundant time for contemplation and for cultivating acquaintance with yourself. I wonder if modern life with its rush, its bustle and its jazz allows a youth time to know himself! And especially I wonder whether the environment of modern cities encourages youth to think about the simple and fundamental - and therefore the really important things of life!42

The psychological and moral conflict between Putman's own aggressive drive towards educational leadership and the spiritual and communal norms of his moral philosophy, he hoped, could be resolved in this Jeffersonian "middle landscape,"43 as Marx called it. The self-sufficient nineteenthcentury farm became a type of ideal model for economic, social, and moral behaviour towards which modern man should strive. He should attempt to become economically self-sufficient and at the same time establish a private form of community. In a secularized twentieth century the previous religious restraints to Hobbesian anarchy were removed and a concept of community now had to be established to contribute social stability and a normative system of moral values. But the static world of the rural community, even Putman realized, was not realistic in the face of Darwinian change. Other forms of community more suited to scientific urban life had to be found, especially by the modern educator. As Hall's scientific surveys of schoolchildren had revealed, many urban youngsters were so ignorant of even basic farming practices such as milking or butter-making that they were losing what both Hall and Putman considered to be the roots of their morality. As a result selfish individualism and rampant materialism prevailed in urban environments, which Hall claimed led to

17

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

premature mental and physical decay. In his 1904 book, Adolescence, Hall had painted the extreme danger of this environment on the teenage child. He was likely to suffer from dementia praecox, withdrawal from society, and moral self-consciousness. Thus society was faced with "the cruel choice between uncontrolled individual avarice and service to the collective needs of the community," in the words of Raymond Jackson Wilson.44 Hall's evolutionary theory of recapitulation, influenced in large part by German idealist philosophers, by Herbert Spencer, and by his own version of Darwinian evolution, assisted him to devise what Wilson has termed the "genetic community."45 Repeating an idea prevalent among Darwinianinfluenced psychologists, Hall believed that each individual passed through the evolutionary stages traversed by the species. Because of this, as well as his individual differences, each human being shared psychologically in the collective race of humanity. Hall's evolutionary psychology was an attempt to bridge the alarming gap between the private man of the city and the communal "mansoul" that rural man experienced in his natural "yeoman's" society. It was primarily a vehicle for ethics, now expressed in more naturalistic terms and encompassing the organicist-process ideas of idealism and Darwinism. Hall's recapitulation theory provided child-study enthusiasts with an anthropological rationale for new methods of education. Through natural observation, educators discovered that play was very important for young children, for as Putman later wrote in his 1925 Survey of British Columbia schools, Left to themselves children of seven to twelve will in their play-activities recapitulate the history of the race. They will in turn live in make-believe caves, tents, and houses. They will be Eskimos today, wandering Arabs tomorrow, and something else next week ... in fine weather they would, if allowed, go almost naked and dress in skins when it is cold ... They love to trade and barter. They will spend days in building a store and stocking it with make-believe goods. They are intensely dramatic and will make elaborate preparations to stage a show.

Play also illustrated Hall's "new psychology," which allied nature and mind. As Putman expressed it, "His mental development goes hand in hand with his physical. Action and interpretation are inseparable. Every experience is a challenge to his understanding. Every new and strange thing about him must be examined and properly related to his growing mental content."46 The child-study psychologists held that children unfolded genetically, or developed through different stages, each one with specific characteristics, which Putman summarized in his BC Survey as "(i) infancy from birth to six years, (2) early and late childhood from six to twelve years, (3) early adolescence from thirteen to fifteen years, and (4) late adolescence from sixteen to eighteen years." Hall had particularly emphasized the traumatic

18 Chapter One stage of adolescence. This was a time, he believed, when youth's emotional and mental viewpoint greatly changed. As Putman described it, this was a stage in which idealism is born. The outlook becomes more social and altruistic. While functional changes are taking place that mark physical maturity, emotional and spiritual changes are taking place that fit the individual to use his maturing bodily powers. But the interval between the beginning and the end of this new birth which may be four or five years or even longer, is for all a time of strain and for many a period of real danger. Some become too introspective and moody. Some become despondent. The boys and girls when together lose their feeling of comradeship and become shy and awkward. Their interest in one another assumes a new form. For both sexes many of the interests of childhood have lost their grip.47 Under these circumstances, Hall proclaimed, the school had to become a microcosmic community suited to the developmental needs of the children and reproducing the communal atmosphere of the family in the countryside. Its primary purpose must be social. Putman wrote that the child first is a member of a family and gets his language and first ideas of social relationships from that group. Outside of that group, where he has been protected and perhaps is a privileged member, he begins to receive a social discipline from his fellows. He is now a member of a real world in miniature where he must stand upon merit and "play the game" as genuinely as he will later play it on the work-level and as an adult member of society. The ideal school for this childhood period is one that supplements these informal out-of-school experiences by planning a series of controlled and directed experiences not wholly different in kind from the informal [ones], growing out of them, closely linked to them, and using them as apperceptive centres for the interpretation of a wider and ever wider world. In this ideal school teachers and pupils will live together a natural and happy life.48 Since the urban child lacked the naturalistic experiences and acquisition of skills learned in the countryside, Hall advocated a new curriculum stressing especially manual training, or as Putman called it, handwork skills, and gardening. Following Hall, he considered handwork invaluable in building character. The history of civilization, Putman believed, forced one "to the conclusion that progress in skill with the hand has ever gone step by step with any advance in human intelligence."49 Activity guided to some useful purpose avoided any unsocial means of expression. Through handwork activities, as well, the early adolescent gained an understanding of basic processes and problems associated with food, clothing, and shelter of the race.50

19

Urban Progressive/Rural Conserver

In the same vein, Hall stressed the supreme importance of civics, which would teach the adolescent the importance of service to mankind. Wilson concludes his description of Hall's idealism by writing, Only training for service could cut through the dense and threatening growth of urban ignorance, "hoodlumism", corrupt politics, corporate greed and industrial oppression, and the "vampires who pander to lust and debauch youth with drink ... and prey on the virtue of young girls" ... The schools were little more to Hall than institutional instruments for his moral philosophy. They were his best hope that preindustrial virtue and the needs of Mansoul might outlast and conquer the vices and sophistication of urban, industrial capitalism.51

Putman and his New Education colleagues shared Hall's conservative and communal instincts. Many had come from similar Protestant rural backgrounds. Canadians, however, were more loath to relinquish their British or religious roots and to adopt completely Hall's naturalistic, genetic community model. Some, such as Putman and many of his Queen's colleagues, were influenced by the preachings of John Watson, whose speculative idealism sought to reconcile the individualistic, materialistic everyday world within a spiritual moral community. In an effort to understand this broader philosophy and at the same time to advance his own professional career, Putman resigned as alderman in 1906 and registered in the first Bachelor of Pedagogy class established by Queen's University in 1907. His journey was to lead to his doctoral degree and to a more sophisticated expression of the Protestant idealism grounding his New Education beliefs.

CHAPTER TWO

A Creed of Practical Idealism

From the moment he arrived in Ottawa to take up his position as second assistant in the Ottawa Model School in 1894, Putman took advantage of the new Senate regulations of Queen's College allowing degree programs to be followed extramurally.1 By 1897 he had completed the requirements for the junior and senior French course, and by 1899 those for junior philosophy, junior Latin, animal biology, annd senior philosophy. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree in April i899.2 The two courses in which he strove to excel were French and philosophy, the latter under Professor John Watson.3 In its most visible form Watson's philosophy was a reflection of what Terry Cook has called the creed of Britannic idealism, which permeated AngloSaxon thought before the outbreak of World War I.4 During the i88os and 18905, in the face of a rising new imperialism in the United States, Canadians became increasingly aware of the need to maintain a separate identity. As Principal George Grant of Queen's expressed it, to be Canadian one had to be British. Two organizations were formed which embodied these sentiments, the Imperial Federation League, which Grant helped to found in 1884, and its successor, the British Empire League, started in 1896. Prime Minister Laurier's imperial preference tariffs of 1897 demonstrated the influence of imperialism on Canada's commercial policy. Militarily, imperialism overcame Laurier's French-Canadian isolationism and was responsible for the dispatch of Canadian troops to the Boer War of 1899. There were strong religious motives for this renewed British imperialism. As Carl Berger notes, the mind of Grant united the spirit and the flesh: Just as the union of the churches was the precondition for the Christianization of social order, so too the unity of the Empire was necessary to maintain a political power making for righteousness on earth. Both Christianity and imperialism called men to self-sacrifice and service; both required the allegiance to ideals and the denigration of the material and the flesh.5

21

A Creed of Practical Idealism

Influenced by Thomas Carlyle, Grant urged his Queen's students to study history, become leaders of public opinion, and, by means of these lessons from the past, direct the course of events. George Ross, Ontario's minister of education between 1883 and 1899 and subsequently premier of the province, not only listened to these imperialist sentiments but gave strong leadership to the cause. In 1893 he prepared a pamphlet, Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises, for use in the schools. Using a suggestion from a member of the Wentworth Historical Society, he promoted the idea of Empire Day, which the Dominion Educational Association adopted for schools in 1899. Buoyed by the euphoria of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897, numerous provinces set aside Empire Day, the school day before the Victoria Day holiday on 24 May, for patriotic decorations, musical tributes, and, after the Boer War, cadet parades. Although Ross's motives included political and ideological factors, as Robert Stamp notes,6 his stated aims were idealistic. Public schools, Ross declared, were to promote the highest type of citizenship, and this implied loyalty both to the Canadian nation and to the British Empire, thus leading children to a conception of civic duty, a willingness to offer their personal service and to help promote social improvement. A new textbook policy adopted in 1902 by Richard Harcourt, Ross's successor as minister of education, assisted this imperialist movement to become more popularized in schools. He requested that a new history book be written on the topic for Ontario students. Because of a textbook scandal during the Ross regime, however, instead of one authorized text, the writing and publishing of school textbooks were henceforth to be open to competition. Putman decided to join this well-worn path to professional and pecuniary advancement. Between 1902 and 1903 he spent most of his free time in the Parliamentary Library writing Britain and the Empire, which he submitted to the Toronto firm of Morang and Company for consideration. The minister sent the book to six readers for approval. They commended the simplicity of style, the inclusion of social history, and the wise handling of religious movements. Finally, H.H. Burgess noted the features which lifted the book well beyond the austere authorized textbook, W.J. Robertson's Public School History of England and Canada: Mr. Putman has kept in view the growth and the extension of the Imperial idea, while the two appendices contain much valuable information not always within the reach of the rural teacher ... On the whole the book should do as it claims, provide school children with an elementary knowledge, and create a desire for wider knowledge of the subject. The book is certainly attractive and finely printed and the illustrations add very much to its value as a book for school purposes. I have not seen any other school history so abundantly illustrated.7

As well as the "Imperial idea," Putman's book revealed a new approach to

22 Chapter Two

textbook writing, which differed considerably from the examination-oriented history books of the past. Using new child-centred pedagogical theory, as well as the resources of the rapidly expanding publishing industry, Putman attempted to arouse the interest of the reader. Over 168 illustrations, eleven maps and charts, and inserts of dialogue and poetry tried to capture the child's immediate attention. A Carlylean biographical approach, a grouping of events about great men,8 aimed to draw his interest towards history in general and the building of the Empire in particular. Finally, from this experience Putman, like Grant, believed that history could teach the child direct and explicit lessons on the duties of citizenship and give training in character. Instead of dealing with political history only, therefore, large portions of the book were concerned with social, religious, and economic events. In Hegelian style the book attempted to lead the reader, through his own active efforts, to appropriate new concepts and values, thereby helping him achieve a higher level of understanding. Putman outlined this idealistic journey of self-realization when describing the effect of the translation of the Bible on the common people of Elizabethan England. "Thousands of these poor people never saw or heard any other book. They thought over it, tried to understand it, and, as a result, it became very real to them, and entered into their everyday lives. Its language became their language and its characters their heroes."9 As well as attempting to arouse the reader's self-consciousness, throughout the book Putman appealed to the reader on three levels. He supplied numerous concrete details to "flesh out" his subject. Charles i, for instance, Putman described as "a man who shuddered at a drawn sword, wore a quilted jacket to protect himself from being stabbed, and publicly fondled the Duke of Buckingham" (203-4). Putman implied through this example and numerous others that the contrasting ascetic virtues of the Puritans guaranteed a more altruistic citizenry. On a second level, then, Putman used his characters as heroes to depict certain general principles. In his portrayal of Oliver Cromwell, for example, he promoted the idea that merit as practised by the Puritans produced a more efficient and law-abiding army than the traditional practice of purchasing commissions. "With Cromwell, to see the right was to act, and he immediately set about raising a company of men made up of independent farmers and tradesmen, who fought not for money but for love of country ... Cromwell never hesitated to give commands to men of mean rank, if the promotion was deserved" (217). These two levels, that of concrete detail with supporting statistical data and that of the general moral principle (yeoman virtues and efficiency arising from them), Putman then synthesized into his overriding theme, the evolution of liberty in the British people. He traced this evolution largely in moral terms. The "rude and fierce" Britons were exposed first to the civilizing influence of the Romans and then to that of the early Christians. Using the language and concepts of idealistic

23

A Creed of Practical Idealism

Victorians, Putman described how Christianity "taught humility, selfsacrifice, and brotherly love. The Saxon paganism aroused the fiercest passions, but the Roman Christians taught that man's highest work is to control these passions" (13). Through the successive waves of Norman and French kings, Lancastrians, and Yorkists, the saga unfolds of a slowly awakening people. With the Tudors and the colonial discoveries of Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher, the true essence of the people emerged. "But strong as the nation was in men, money, and other material resources, its greatest strength was the bold, confident, and loyal spirit of the people. They had differences over religion, but they were united in a love for home and country" (180). In the remaining two-thirds of Britain and the Empire, Putman traced the evolution of this spirit, aided by general principles such as private enterprise, free trade, sea supremacy, gradual religious toleration, and control of monarchical power, to the creation of an increasingly just society. With the evolution of the Cabinet, consisting of members chosen from the majority party in the House of Commons, "the power of the people has been so firmly established that only by usurping their rights could a sovereign exercise any extended power" (256). At the same time social progress was taking place. Although Putman described the peasants at the end of the seventeenth century as "ignorant and often vicious," enjoying only "coarse but hearty" pleasures, the middle classes lived in "rude plenty" with comfortable, even luxurious, homes. Significantly, they "received some education and made steady progress" (267). He highlighted the importance of peace with the advent of the House of Brunswick and the growth of commerce under Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister. These conditions, in turn, led to the development of resources, improved farming methods, and the growth of large "manufactories" in towns. Because Walpole was especially shrewd in money matters, he was able to put Britain's finances in better shape. Putman, like Grant, regarded money in Gladstonian terms as a sacred trust and included both the national debt of Britain and six typical budgets of the nineteenth century in an appendix to his textbook, to serve as object lessons against waste. Putman then described how the British people evolved from this materialistic foundation onto a higher spiritual plane. Humanitarianism entered their consciousness. During the eighteenth century the Dissenters cared for the poor and outcast and rejected the worldliness and materialism of the established church. Putman portrayed the moral decadence in these terms: "The labouring poor were quite neglected, especially in the rapidly growing towns and mining districts. Thousands of them never went to church and were under the care of no regular clergyman. They were treated scarcely as human beings. Ignorant, dirty, ragged, and poorly housed, their lives were a cheerless, hopeless grind. Drunkenness was a common vice of the people"

24 Chapter Two

(278-9). Instead of dealing with the causes of their poverty, however, Putman concentrated on the Wesleys' "aim to arouse every individual to a sense of his personal need of salvation" (279). Through their efforts the clergy of the established church were inspired to care more sincerely for the poor and afflicted. Gradually a moral evolution took place in the English people as a whole. By the mid-nineteenth century, with the debate over the Corn Laws, little by little, "fair-minded men came to see how selfish it was to starve the working millions in order that a few thousand landowners and farmers might become rich. It became only a question of time when the Corn Laws would be repealed" (340). While this material progress and moral evolution were taking place within Britain, the British Empire just kept on growing like a giant oak. Putman claimed Britain never actually planned an empire but from the colonies of British merchants and sailors gradually acquired one to protect its subjects. Despite the setback of the American Revolution, United Empire Loyalists provided the "nucleus of a younger Britain ... The Loyalists formed the advance guard of a people who, without sacrificing their allegiance to the Empire, have won a freedom quite as perfect as that enjoyed by the descendants of those who broke away from British rule in 1776" (296). Selfgovernment and liberty for the common people evolved irresistibly under the British Empire, particularly under the leadership of William Ewart Gladstone, Putman's ideal of a Liberal statesman: As a statesman, his work was wholly intended to raise the masses and break down class privileges. For this reason he earned the cordial dislike of three-quarters of the British nobility and landed gentry. No British statesman stands higher in the estimation of foreign nations. He never hesitated when he believed himself in the right. His efforts to make reforms at home, and his desire to keep peace abroad, together with his simple Christian life, earned him the title of "Britain's Grand Old Man." (351)

With the Golden Jubilee in 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, Britain's unity, power, and greatness were displayed to the world. Putman's appendices give statistical evidence of the size and population of this mighty Empire, but what he emphasized most were "the justice of British rule" (352), acknowledged by the tribute-bearing subjects; the institution of Parliament, whose "rules of procedure have been substantially adopted by every colonial legislature in the Empire" (374); and the moral worth of the British leaders. "In no country in the world is it as certain as it is in Great Britain that the nation's wisest and most virtuous men will be its rulers" (377). As Cook claims of Canada's arch-imperialist George Parkin,10 Putman was using his concept of British imperialism predominantly as an expression of his Christian idealism. The Empire was looked on as a moral community of organically related peoples, held together primarily by their common

25

A Creed of Practical Idealism

institutions of parliamentary government, but as well by their commitment to a common ethic of unselfishness. In Britain and the Empire Putman frequently described the influence of Christianity. Quoting from Robert Burns's "Cotter's Saturday Night," where the father reads the Bible to his family, Putman used the home described there as an example of "homes that have made the Scottish people a power in the British Empire" (326). Glowing with this spiritual mission, Putman uncritically pictured the colonies in neo-mercantilist terms: "Canada is now recognized as Britain's granary, and her five and a half million people are happier, more prosperous, and more intelligent than any other five and a half millions in the world" (355). At the same time he rationalized British power in utilitarian terms. The conquest of Alexandria in 1882 demonstrated that "British protection is absolutely necessary for the peace of Egypt. So much British capital is now invested there that the British dare not recede" (361). As Joseph Schull notes, by 1900 the moral claims of imperial mission following the Boer War had given way "to the claims of preservation, for world-wide strength and unity to confront the arming powers. Yet even the efficacy of that came to be doubted. The love and lust of empire would last out another war, but they would not rise from the ashes."11 It was no wonder Laurier remained noncommittal about contributing to imperial defence and refused representation in an imperial parliament. In the face of Canada's political realities a moral concept of imperialism was safer to uphold. Meanwhile Putman's attempt to win recognition by having his book authorized by the Department of Education was circumvented by departmental delays and a fire which destroyed almost the entire edition at the publishers. After extensive revisions, the manuscript was resubmitted to the department.12 The department, however, had unfortunately lost the original contract of the authorized Public School History with Copp Clark Company,13 and so could not cancel this publication until 1910. The textbook situation was further complicated by a freeze on all schoolbook contracts while the new Conservative government fulfilled its election promises and established a textbook commission to investigate the price and monopolistic practices in school textbooks. When Putman realized that departmental authorization of his book was impossible, he arranged for its publication himself. Later, when he discovered that large segments of it had been plagarized in the Public School History of England and Canada, submitted by Morang in 1909 and authorized by order-in-council in 1910,14 he decided that it would involve too much litigation to sue the publisher and so refused to comment when questioned about this by the press.15 He was also too busy with his graduate work at Queen's by this time. Wishing to further his career, as early as 1903 Putman had enrolled in a special course for teachers established under the Faculty of Arts for extramural students. By April 1907, six months before Queen's Faculty of

26 Chapter Two

Education was formally opened, Putman had completed all three sections and was in the first graduating class of the Bachelor of Pedagogy degree program that year. His salary at the Model School increased to $i ,880. But he was still intent on advancement. He again applied and was re-accepted onto the staff of the Ottawa Normal School. Since his brief stint there in 1900, attendance had increased, the teaching staff had doubled, and a wholly new organization was in effect, thanks to the reforms of Ontario's teacher-training program under Premier James Whitney.16 Beginning in September 1908 Putman taught English literature, English history, and the science of education. He found the next two years, during which he also completed the course work for his doctoral degree, a stimulating period of consolidation and preparation for the future. As he later wrote, "I can conceive of no other teaching experience that could have helped me as much with the problems which I had to solve during the succeeding quarter-century. I had more leisure for professional reading than ever before."17 His philosophy of education, formulated over the sixteen years he spent at the Ottawa Model and Normal schools, and honed under the expert guidance of Watson at Queen's, was maturing into its final sophisticated expression. As early as 1894 Putman had realized his philosophical deficiency. Every Thursday he was required to assess the students assigned to his school, all of whom were experienced teachers. He admitted that the traditional empiricism which had served him in the past poorly equipped him for this work. As he analysed it, he recognized that he needed to search for "laws which had universal application."18 His work at Queen's in 1899 under John Watson, and his readings of developmental psychologist G. Stanley Hall and pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, helped him relate the school to the needs of the pupils and to the outside community. He began to expand the program of his pupils at the Model School to include physical education, gardening, handwork, nature study, and art, out of which naturally grew an enriched program of reading, writing, composition, and number work. Hall and Dewey especially helped Putman "to rationalize my educational practice and give student-teachers criticism based on principles. Their pragmatic philosophy was doubtless very different from that of Froebel, Spencer and Kant, but their educational theories were the logical American expression and application of much that was implicit in Pestalozzi, Froebel and Spencer."19 But it was the community atmosphere prevalent at Queen's and Watson's underlying philosophy of speculative idealism that helped Putman realize the essence of his own rational beliefs. According to Watson, writing in 1898, a university should strive, not to teach facts, but to develop the whole man and assist him to grasp "the principles which underlie and give meaning to life - taking the term 'life' in its widest sense." Man was a being who lived pre-eminently with ideas and was in a constant process of acting, comprehending, and thereby moving from a

27

A Creed of Practical Idealism

lower to a higher plane of consciousness. The task of the university was to teach its students the principles underlying this history of mankind and to correct the one-sided point of view of the natural sciences. Since the distinctive characteristic of man was to be guided by his own reason, he had to learn to make self-conscious moral choices and to grasp the living spirit of God inherent in the world of particulars. "True education is therefore no mere external ornament; it is a new birth, which results in spiritual as well as intellectual elevation. The university, then, has to keep before it, as its main end, the education of its students in the principles which give meaning to existence in all its forms."20 The texts that Watson had his extramural students read were primarily in Greek philosophy - Plato, Aristotle, the philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism - and Berkeley's idealist philosophy. In the senior class Watson exposed them to the liberal empiricism of J.S. Mill and the positivism of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, which he critically attacked from his Hegelian perspective. With this background the thirty-three-year-old Putman no doubt absorbed the idealist spirit which infused Queen's at that time. It was a spirit characterized by a strong sense of commitment to the community and dedication to service for the public good. Watson believed that Canadians lacked a thorough self-consciousness and an understanding of the true nature of freedom. In his judgment, "freedom ... does not consist in doing what one pleases, but in the voluntary, and I may add, the joyous doing of what one ought. But what ought one to do? We ought to aim at making ourselves and others perfect citizens, i.e., citizens who share in all that tends to make the life of a man a perfect whole."21 The task of the university and the government was to produce complete citizens, through exposing the individual student to the best thought of all time so that he could achieve a universal point of view. Watson's thrust, therefore, was in direct opposition to the individualistic social Darwinists, who were emerging in reformist circles in North America. Reflecting his Protestant religion and German idealist background, he stressed the obligation of duty, from which man obtained his highest form of liberty. His political philosophy, which prevailed so much at Queen's at the turn of the century, was, therefore, highly moralistic. He believed that "only by the sacrifice of all petty vanity and other baser forms of egotism - can a nation be truly great." And in this "slow process of raising our citizens to this wider view of politics, the universities of Canada ought to play a great part. "22 Two other leading Queen's professors broadcast Watson's gospel of good citizenship and service to the general public. Principal George Grant, a Nova Scotia Presbyterian who, like Watson, was educated in Scotland, made the reform of national affairs his life's work.23 He established Queen's as the "nursery" of the Canadian civil and foreign services. But, as well, he urged his students to focus their attention on political institutions and identify with

28 Chapter Two

a national-imperial ideal in order to save the country as well as their own individual souls. Adam Shortt, an assistant of Watson's before he assumed the first chair of political and economic science at Queen's in 1899, mirrored Watson's and Grant's moralistic and Hegelian social philosophy. In "Legislation and Morality," written for Queen's Quarterly in 1901, he defined the distinctive characteristic of a moral people as "the steady manifestation, on the part of individuals, of self-control, self-respect and a strong sense of personal responsibility ... the central feature in this development is the growing personality, or self, which in its more or less clear consciousness of a rational freedom, spontaneously recognizes its responsibility for conduct." Assuming, as did Watson, that only the rational was acknowledged as the principle of reality, therefore, the individual facing a situation demanding moral choice would choose the reasonable as "the unquestioned basis of his standard of conduct, and hence of responsibility." Shortt set this rational individual acting in an atmosphere of conscious moral freedom, then, in his social context and, in Hegelian style, described the constant interaction between the two, optimistically synthesizing them into "a common standard of practical morality," which gradually becomes diffused from class to class in the community. A good home and a pure social atmosphere, themselves related to past moral forces and present moral living, tended to insure that the individual would act correctly. "Thus the ordinary individual is the child of society, alike in his moral and social relations," he concluded.24 In essence, though, Shortt considered that morality, concerned with motives, could not be promoted directly through legislation, which concerned men's actions. Echoing the new liberal philosophy of T.H. Green,25 Shortt considered that the "great work of positively fostering morality must be left to the subtle, miscellaneous forces which operate through the contact of spirit with spirit in the daily intercourse of family and social life."26 Thus he and his idealist colleagues at Queen's recognized the importance of the organic community on man's personal judgment and the moral standards by which his conduct was judged. Queen's professors consciously strove to develop this strong sense of community among themselves and their students and it became a distinctive characteristic of Queen's.27 Both Watson and Grant pioneered extramural lectures so that Queen's could better serve the outside community. These lectures also provided a model of service for future Queen's graduates, whose major duty, they considered, should be to direct public opinion on important social issues. In this way the lectures would educate people so that they could make intelligent decisions and generate popular pressure for specific measures. These extramural lectures were also designed to arouse public sympathy for Queen's College, desperately short of operating capital because of its denominational status. In 1899, for instance, from her 337 arts students and 112 extramurals

29

A Creed of Practical Idealism

(including Putman), the revenue was only forty-two thousand dollars.28 Grant and his successor, Daniel Miner Gordon, were constantly involved in fund-raising campaigns to recuperate the deficit of the college. Active alumni associations were formed, which perpetuated the sense of community fostered at Queen's. Putman became involved in the 1905-7 campaign, serving as secretary-treasurer of the Queen's Society in Ottawa and spearheading the raising of fifty-four thousand dollars for the endowment fund. He also benefited from the personal associations formed by "Queen's men" within their alumni organizations. Soon after Shortt, a friend of Putman's, was appointed one of two members of the Civil Service Commission in 1908, Clarence Putman, the eldest of Putman's children, secured a position with the commission and in time became chief of the Organization Branch. Queen's graduates were appointed in disproportionate numbers to the many openings in the burgeoning civil service during these first two decades.29 Human social relationships were therefore the basic educational means of developing a moral citizenry. These relationships were first cultivated in the family, the core unit from which so much spiritual growth was to emanate. They were developed particularly in the private suburban environment, a landscape protected from the evils of the city. Putman's own home on Rideau Terrace epitomized this suburban, "country life" ideal. One of its primary advantages was the opportunity it gave him to cultivate his quarter-acre garden. Aside from the produce and horticultural prizes which he soon began to win from the Ottawa Horticultural Society, his garden provided him with an ever-deepening spiritual sustenance. He described the journey in selfconsciousness derived from his garden many years later in Fifty Years at School. Beginning at the concrete level of man's experience, the garden demanded physical exertion and industry from its cultivator. Man began his moral and spiritual journey by becoming actively involved with the concrete world. Next, the garden "demands skill in planning and teaches us to wait patiently for results. Its success depends almost wholly upon our understanding of Nature's laws. We must select good seed or by the laws of heredity we cannot have a good plant." Knowledge, then, of objective scientific laws of chemistry lifted the gardener out of his previous egocentric and merely utilitarian world view. He learned about the relationships of insects, worms, and birds, thereby gaining appreciation of the organic community making up his garden. Finally, as a mature human being he entered into a higher aesthetic plane. The gardener "learns that a pretty garden requires careful planning, that certain combinations of foliage and colour produce more artistic effects than others and that there are aesthetic laws as well as chemical and physical laws." The gardener, as transcendentalist philosopher, thus gained a moral plane, expressed by Putman in mythological terms:

3O Chapter Two Antaeus was invincible while his foot touched Mother Earth and to-day among all the sons of Adam those who make the earth smile and bring forth vegetables, grains, grasses, trees and flowers are freer yet more stable, gentler yet stronger, simpler yet more profound, and however poor in material things, richer in spirit than any other class of people.30

In Putman's mind the family also assumed almost mythological stature as a repository of moral virtues. Influenced strongly by Thomas Carlyle, Putman wrote a paean, "Hero Worship," in which the strengths of his father were painted. In Putman's estimation, every "small boy must have a hero to worship ... Throughout my boyhood to me my father stood on a pedestal high above all other men ... It was the natural trust that every normal boy has or should have in a father." Although his father was not a learned man, "he had a strong body, a skilful hand, a great fund of common sense and independence of character."31 Putman described the variety of handwork skills which his father possessed, and, like Carlyle,32 used these concrete facts to draw out higher moral and political judgments: When I recall the important things that he could do well and compare them with the less important things that I do badly, or indifferently well, I feel that I have the key to the decadence of our moral and physical fiber ... Over-industrialization, a worship of machines and a contempt for hand-labor and skilled handicrafts with their inevitable results, threaten our national solvency.33

Putman described his relations with his father as "ideal," particularly when, as the eldest son, he was treated as his equal in understanding. But this did not imply that they were equal in status. Like Carlyle, Putman acknowledged that authority had to be respected to maintain a moral community. To illustrate this he recounted the one occasion when he lapsed into utilitarian mores. A neighbour asked him to help with the wheat harvest on the following day. His father, however, stated that their own work was pressing. Regretting the dollar which he would lose, the fifteen-year-old Putman told the neighbour when he came in that he could not help him "because the Old Man needed me. The moment the words were out of my mouth I realized what an awful thing I had said. I could have bitten off my tongue. Never before and never after did I see my mother angry."34 Within the family, then, ideal relationships and roles were learned by the growing young person. In the case of women, these roles assumed almost archetypal proportions. Putman explained in "Secondary Education for Girls" why he disagreed with the extreme suffragettes and assigned a complementary but different role for women. His primary assumption was idealistic: "woman most completely realizes and expresses her womanhood as a wife and mother in the management of the home and in the care of her children."

31

A Creed of Practical Idealism

But this was because he attached supreme importance to the institution of the family as the starting point of mankind's moral growth: A home is not merely a place where the family is comfortably housed, decently clad and properly fed. The flower of home-life, that which really distinguishes one home from another, is the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere. The creation of this atmosphere depends more upon the wife and mother than upon any other member of the family. Music, literature, language and other forms of art embody the emotional and spiritual experiences of the human race, and are therefore the supremely important studies for the development of the higher life. They must form the backbone of a secondary course for girls.35

According to the creed of practical idealism correct living and proper morality, in both personal and public ethics, began with the individual first freeing his ego from the natural world of the senses by recognizing the universal relations inherent in his concrete world of experience. Within his family he discovered a deeper community of spirit. The family institution thus helped the individual transcend his finite existence and realize the universal of which he was a member. One major reason for the rise of this creed of practical idealism was that the previous static view of the universe promulgated by Scottish common sense philosophers and Protestant theologians in Canada was under attack by evolutionary scientists.36 Great fear arose that the views of the evolutionists would lead to a belief in the relativity of knowledge and ethics. Moral philosophers also feared that the new physiological psychology, wed to the British tradition of empiricism, would lead to sensationalism and a rejection of traditional metaphysics. These were the two fundamental problems which the young Watson, armed with the Hegelian gospel of Edward Caird and T.H. Green, was confronted with when he arrived at Queen's College in 1872. Watson's speculative idealism, significantly termed a creed in his definition,37 gave a new conception of design and purpose in the universe, which encompassed evolutionary science. It offered a trenchant critique of empiricism and revealed the limitations of the scientific method. It encouraged intellectual inquiry in students while at the same time cultivating a pious disposition in them. Above all, it proclaimed the rationality of the universe and re-interpreted the Christian experience in this more modern direction. Essentially Watson's speculative idealism was a religious philosophy. It continued the speculative movement begun by English romantic poets and writers such as Carlyle and then given philosophical expression in 1865 with the publication of J. Hutchison Stirling's Secret of Hegel. In Watson's estimation English idealism did not merely blindly accept the Hegelian philosophy. He admitted that its representatives were "powerfully influenced by Hegel's conception of the rationality of the actual, by his doctrine that the

32 Chapter Two

antagonism of ideas and theories is not absolute, but admits of solution by a union of the elements of truth involved in competing conceptions, and by his fundamental idea that the Absolute is actually knowable, and is not forever excluded from the realm of human experience."38 But the English philosophers differed from Hegel and from one another in their practical application of these ideas. Instead of a transcendent God, English idealists affirmed that God was immanent in everyday life, "that the world which falls within the region of our experience is essentially spiritual, and is comprehensible by man, who is in his essence spiritual."39 Through the historical process this spiritual principle unfolded. It was revealed fully only in the self-conscious intellect. Thus human reason, trained through idealist philosophy, was the pre-eminent tool employed to reveal the universal spiritual principle unfolding in the concrete experiences of everyday life, social and political institutions, artistic expressions, and finally religious beliefs. It drew out and synthesized the dialectical conflict between man's concrete life, with its potential for higher levels of self-consciousness, and the demands of the Divine. The a priori assumption behind all idealist philosophy was that man was essentially a moral being. Primary emphasis was placed on man's mind and its self-activity as the source of his freedom. Putman drew an analogy between the concept of mind under the old faculty theory of psychology and the newer idealistic concept. Contradicting the former view, he affirmed, "Our minds are not like putty. They choose and select... It would be more correct... to compare the mind at birth to marble."40 But minds needed objects to choose from and select. Man also was constituted as a social being in the world, idealist philosophers acknowledged. As an animal organism, man was subject to the natural laws of science. His social and political institutions also were governed by general norms. In this objective world man appeared to be completely determined and incapable of freedom. The problem of ethics that Hegel posed was the relationship between the subjective world of thought, reason, and man's mind on the one hand and, on the other, the objective world of nature in which man is seen as a creature of nature, subject to instincts, appetites, passions, and desires and with a strong propensity towards unreflective action. His answer was that because reason ruled the world, man's intellect could be used to discover these relationships, which constituted reality. Through reason man could find the universal norms, interpreted by Watson as the will of God within the concrete experiences of his everyday life, and rise to higher levels of self-realization, thus achieving freedom. Individuals, freely developing themselves as rational beings, would then co-operate to form an "invisible Church," which would seek to realize the Divine Ideal in everyday life. They would discover that the fundamental values of human life were to be found in this rational faith, that social and political reform was based not only on their

33

A Creed of Practical Idealism

own self-discipline but in service to their fellow man, and finally that Christianity served as the ideal of conduct which could direct man's will towards a universal understanding of himself as an ethical being in society. The school had an extremely important role to play in this process of self-realization. As Putman wrote, "If education be a never ending progress in grasping relations, if every step forward in seeing relations reveals relations not previously recognized, if everything in creation has some relation to every other thing, if nature including God and man is a unity, then the social and business life of the community is a starting point for the social life of my school." Putman's ultimate goal was, in fact, a form of Christian indoctrination. "The aim of education is to enable the individual to discover his relation to the universe and fit himself to live in harmony with her laws. From this standpoint all education resolves itself into a study of relations and an attempt by each individual to harmonize his life with these relationships." Putman's eventual aim was what he called "the formation of a good character."41 He defined character in terms of a person's ideals and will. Although expressed by behaviour, it was a concomitant of his inherited nature modified by the experiences of life. These experiences could be controlled to a certain extent within the school environment by the teacher and the program of studies. In Putman's estimation the teacher was crucial in helping the student realize his higher spiritual nature, which humanized him and formed his character. Like that of the preachers, the teacher's inspiration and encouragement had to appeal to this higher nature. Both workers "make him feel that he has never realized his true self. They make him feel that he can do better, and that he will do better. They try to lodge in his mind the idea that he is better and stronger than he really is, hoping that a man who thinks well of himself and has an ideal of a higher self unrealized will make some progress towards virtue."42 Both teacher and preacher were attempting to stir the child towards self-activity. Behind their Protestant idealistic psychology lay the belief that "the grasping of a truth, even such a simple relation as that two and two make four, is personal and individual. The most the teacher can do is to bring about conditions which make it easy for the child to grasp the truth. All education is really self-education ... the one all-important condition upon which its realization depends is belief on the part of the individual that he can educate himself ... or a realization on his part that growth must depend on his own efforts." Quoting Aristotle, Putman affirmed his belief that "if we follow our ideals, these ideals always tend to realize themselves."43 Although attaching extreme importance to volition and belief, very much in the style of William James, whose Principles of Psychology he studied at Queen's, Putman defined inspiration in terms of lodging ideas in the mind of the child. When the child realizes or understands them, he will grow morally. But reverting again to James, and perhaps also to G. Stanley Hall's

34 Chapter Two

naturalism, Putman depicts this growth not in rational but in behavioural terms: A boy is naturally weak and indolent. His teacher makes him think himself strong and ambitious. He is thereby strengthened and puts forth efforts which give real strength. A boy is untruthful. His teacher trusts him and makes him feel morally stronger. A boy is untidy in his work. His teacher encourages him by making him feel that neat work is expected and that he can do neat work.

The road to moral improvement, as Andrew Carnegie believed, lay in a boy's "belief in his own worth and his power to be somebody."44 This statement also revealed the idealist's underlying intolerance of a pluralistic universe of human beings with diverse moral codes. He assumed that his view of the direction of moral growth was the correct one and that the child who fulfilled his expectations was developing a proper moral character. Through years of study this charismatic teacher, similar to such missionary school administrators as Egerton Ryerson, not only masters "the knowledge which he wishes the child through his inspiration to acquire, but also knows the child who is to acquire this knowledge. This view of a teacher's function magnifies the office of the teacher. It restores him where he was placed by Socrates to the position of an intellectual midwife. He is to prepare human souls for the birth of ideas." Significantly he is to be the professional expert who can bridge the gap and establish the relationship between the child's mind and the "whole world of nature including mankind with his achievements." Only a teacher "with some real power of leadership to win the child's admiration and confidence" can help the child identify with these universal moral norms.45 Since the "ultimate purpose of education is a spiritual purpose and all real education is a spiritual work," the role of the teacher, like the role of the family, assumed archetypal proportions. The teaching function was magnified many times beyond its previous limited domain of keeping order, hearing recitations, and preparing pupils for examination. Putman concluded that the "work is one of the most difficult that men and women can be asked to perform."46 Only expert professionals with outstanding personalities could hope to survive in this higher idealistic plane. The content of the curriculum also had to be revised. Like the child-study advocates, Putman grouped the subjects of the curriculum in a naturalistic order corresponding to the developmental needs of the child. These were, first, the need to communicate and master oral and written speech.47 Related to this need were reading, writing, spelling, literature, composition, and grammar, all of which he termed English. Secondly, Putman considered that between the ages of six and thirteen, pupils had a strong need "to find themselves in relation to the world as a whole"; thus, nature study and

35

A Creed of Practical Idealism

geography should have an important place. Mechanical arithmetic, manual arts, history, and civics, as well as hygiene, physical education, and playground experiences, would impress on pupils the necessity of the physical and social laws under which there were constrained. 'These subjects are pre-eminently fitted to impress upon my pupils that they live in a world of law and order, that man is ever striving to adapt himself more perfectly to his environment and that they themselves are an insignificant part of the whole human race. These subjects tend to make my pupils logical and enlightened."48 Finally, as a synthesis between the child's right to freedom of expression,49 and the logical necessity of the objective world of scientific relations, Putman placed the aesthetic subjects, literature, art, music, and eurhythmies, at the pinnacle. They were valued for their spiritual ideals; "the very essence of our civilization and our Christian ethics is crystallized in countless concrete situations in English literature and its story told in English history."50 These subjects provided ideals of beauty towards which teachers and children should strive in their everyday lives. Watson and Putman stressed the importance of the arts because they believed, as did the romantic poets, that their special function was to open up a larger structure of reality, including that given in experience, to a vision of a better world.51 Against this ideal, moral judgments could be made which either contrasted the visionary with the real world or normatively expressed what these ideals were. Romantic poets also epitomized a new vision of man. Whereas in the traditional belief systems, values were promulgated by a transcendent God, a doctrinal code, or a rational ethic, all of which were closed, now man was recognized as a myth-making animal with power to create what could be true. The pastoral myth, for instance, could be used by man to synthesize his innocent pre-industrial with his industrial state and to reshape his life's experiences more imaginatively. Truth, therefore, was not only recognized in man's everyday experiences but could also be created by him. The romantic myth pictured man as fallen from an identity with nature into a state of individual and subjective consciousness. Two sorts of identity were possibilities. As Northrop Frye points out, he could either identify himself as in hostile relation to his surroundings, aggressively confronting the world as set out against him,52 or he could identify with and enter into sympathetic relation with his surroundings, and use his creative imagination and willpower to create a more moral universe. In the first choice, Watson and Frye point out, man will become trapped in a positivistic universe and will lose his freedom. With the second option, a recovery of what formerly was projected in God is possible. As Frye states, "Creative power, the desire for liberty, and the capacity to make myths and to design the structures of civilization are increasingly regarded as originating in the human mind."53 The inspirational power of the teacher, the examples of heroic leaders, the

36 Chapter Two

increased emphases on imaginative powers evoked by literature, handwork, music, eurhythmic dancing - all were lauded by New Educators as worthwhile, creative endeavours of the human mind which would help Canadians rise above American industrial values.54 New Educators were also turning to American functional psychology for guidance. At this time, as well, English association psychology became allied increasingly with physiological psychology. These trends were thrusting the emphasis of educational psychology more towards the natural sciences. Activity was considered the primary psychophysical fact. Both traditional metaphysics and Lockean epistemology were abandoned for a new psychophysical science of feeling, knowing, and willing, which stressed volition because it could direct spontaneous movements and feelings towards purposeful movements and ideas. Knowing was the result of experiences consequent upon doing. Learning was allied with motion (doing), and the interest of educators was concentrated on behaviour itself and the adaptation of the organism (man) to the environment.55 Mind could now be examined empirically, according to biological methods. In numerous articles Watson valiantly defended the traditional alliance of psychology with philosophy, which kept the mind distinct from the body, thus freeing it from the necessary determinisms of biological science. His Hegelian empirical thrust recognized "that no satisfactory psychology can be constructed which does not recognize that its object is the process by which the individual mind gradually rises into the region where the spiritual principle ... is explicitly disclosed to it... There is, however, still much to be done, before the results of psycho-physical investigation and of analytical psychology have been incorporated in a spiritual psychology."56 Putman's course work at Queen's included readings in the new psychology, such as Wilhelm Wundt's Outline of Psychology and Physiological Psychology, William James's Principles of Psychology, and C.E. Seashore's Laboratory Course in Psychology. In his behaviouristic conception of morality Putman was betraying the influence not only of Watson, with his insistence on the creative role given the mind, but also of both the romantic and the biological revolutions whereby man was placed in the forefront and his mind was given the power to choose and determine his own actions. But Putman was not alert to the dangers of this new psychology and the limitations it would set on the activities of man's mind. Watson warned his readers about these dangers in several articles written while Putman was at Queen's. As in previous years, Watson was particularly concerned about man's descent into naturalism and the resulting scepticism that this produced. In his article "Humanism," he pinpointed the root of the problem in Kant's philosophy. By trying to combine the point of view of modern science with a defence of morality and religion, Kant had drawn a line between theoretical and practical philosophy. From the latter came a science of ethics which led to

37

A Creed of Practical Idealism

man's only possibility of freedom: man could will to act in a certain way, thereby rising above his mere reactions to impulse. But this led to the exaltation of practical over theoretical reason and to the problem of dualism. From this problem two philosophies arose - naturalism, which denied the knowledge of anything beyond man's sense experience, and Hegelianism and British idealism. With the former, Watson pointed out that "the sole knowable forms of being are those that can be brought within the mechanical system of nature."57 Watson proceeded to demonstrate the significance of humanism, particularly the radical empiricism and pragmatism of William James. Because only the will, rather than the intellect, could discover the true meaning of the world, truth became a matter of turning nature to man's own ends. Schiller, for instance, claimed that man could construct truth and nature and thereby transform them by his purposeful action. Reason had no other use than to enable man to adapt to his environment. Common sense traditions and theoretical principles by which we governed our lives were merely postulates to help us better understand the chaos of our sense experience. Reality, then, arose from the immediate sensible world and could develop only when self-conscious beings appeared. The humanist, by opposing faith and knowledge, and restricting truth to what was "useful," reduced mind to the level of other things. Not only did this produce moral scepticism, but it severely limited the scope of man's development and made conduct the whole of his life, even giving truth its only meaning. Against this mechanical view of the universe, Watson's and Caird's psychological view of man opened out his possibilities to develop to the highest form of his knowledge, will, and emotional capacities, finally knowing Reality as it actually was immanent in the universe.58 This Ideological point of view alone could explain the whole sphere of life, man's expanding consciousness, and the system of nature itself, Watson claimed.59 He promised, therefore, a higher degree of self-actualization and a deeper understanding of Reality for mankind if the teleological viewpoint of idealism were to be espoused. But Watson's idealism itself contained ambiguities and irreconcilable tensions. In his article "The University and the Schools," for instance, he revealed an implicit utilitarianism, which underlay his major thrust towards organic development. He argued that there should be a variety of schools, offering opportunity and "open careers" to all classes of society and helping each individual develop his natural talents to the full. But the individual was to be developed only "until he has been proven incompetent" for a particular vocational level,60 and each level was to be devoted to the "production" of peak efficiency. High standards would thereby lead to the commercial and industrial success of the country. In fact his chief concern was for a national system of education which would create intelligent and patriotic citizens.

38 Chapter Two

As a result Watson insisted on a general cultural education for all, modelled on the ideal general education for the higher professions. By cultivating the taste for literature through the study of languages, the imagination and intellect would be developed, co-operation would be fostered, and higher ideals leading to national unity would be implanted. Like Putman, he argued strongly for a broad education to counter prejudice and sectarian views in the community. Technical education would follow this broad cultural education and should be given only after senior matriculation. As he stated, the improvement of industry and commerce in Germany was due to training given men in university and to technical courses, which were not to be introduced until a boy was twelve. Watson's organicism, therefore, implied a deep conservatism - he admitted that he would probably be labelled "unprogressive and reactionary."61 For him the modern trend towards mobility of the mind and a decreased sense of individual responsibility was a danger to the high life of the community. Instead of his teleological approach expanding the individual's consciousness, therefore, it severely determined his academic direction. Options, termed "hazardous experiments" leading to narrow-mindedness and the decline of scholarship from which the whole community suffered, Watson thought, should be dropped. He warned of the danger of increased specialization, particularly its effect on teacher training. Differing from Putman and the American pragmatists, he advocated a compulsory curriculum, stringent examinations, and an elitist system designed to produce enlightened leaders. Structurally, however, his proposals for increased professionalism among teachers, a ladder system of promotion, and increased salaries matched those of the efficiency-oriented new liberals. He advocated close co-operation between the various levels of the school system, as well as among all teachers. A sense of duty and loyalty would thereby be implanted. He believed that if organic co-operation was fostered first in the school system, more moderate behaviour and less disruptive, prejudicial social forces would result. Despite his idealist principles, therefore, Watson's school philosophy was basically conservative, highly restricting the development of most pupils and reducing them to functional organisms who were to be trained according to the productive needs of society. In 1910 Putman was awarded the Doctor of Pedagogy degree at Queen's University, and again he was in the first graduating class. His thesis was later published as Egerton Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada and became for many years a standard reference on this period of educational history in Ontario. It proved valuable, as well, in revealing Putman's thought at this mid-point in his life. His creed of practical idealism with its conserving as well as its reforming elements was amply demonstrated through his historiography. As he looked back over this beginning period of educational history in

39

A Creed of Practical Idealism

Upper Canada, Putman made it quite clear that he agreed with the major features of the common school movement. When speaking of Ryerson's 1847 Report on a System of Public Elementary Instruction for Upper Canada, for instance, he considered Ryerson's definition of education, although not psychologically scientific, to be essentially correct. Education was not to consist merely in the acquisition of knowledge but was primarily a social institution with instrumental value. It was to provide "that instruction and discipline which qualify and dispose the subjects of it for their appropriate duties and employments of life, as Christians, as persons of business, and also as members of the civil community in which they live."62 Like all social institutions, education was subject to evolutionary development. It was tied as well to the development of government, in this period to the growth of responsible government in Upper Canada. Following his mentors at Queen's and his own reading of Carlyle, Putman also believed that a galvanizing individual, in this case Ryerson, was needed to lead public opinion towards the great liberal, democratic, and free-school principles on which a Christian moral citizenship is based. Useful and industrious students, he believed, would emerge from efficient, nonsectarian common schools. Although Putman claimed that Ryerson's biography in the first chapter was not central, that his thesis was dealing only with the historical development of institutions and laws and that it was designed to help teachers understand their own educational institutions, the overall effect is one of a "Whiggish" approach to history, common among historians at that time.63 His story tends to be reduced to heroes (Ryerson) and villains (John Strachan) and creates a myth of a common school movement motivated by democratic and humanitarian impulses which evolved in a progressive direction.64 Bishop Strachan, for example, although labouring for over a generation to provide Upper Canadians with a system of schools available to all children,65 was painted by Putman as a man whose reports show "his zeal for higher education, his belief in the efficacy of a religious establishment, his narrow bigotry and intolerance of all outside of an establishment, his old-world belief that the clergy should control education, his loyal attachment to British institutions, and above all, to those who read between the lines, his lack of real interest in elementary education" (54). Certain elements both of Ryerson's biography and of Upper Canada's school history were assumed by Putman to be correct because they were based on what he considered to be fundamental principles of democratic education. These principles were reiterated throughout the book and formed the foundation of Putman's own educational policies and his creed of practical idealism. Putman agreed with Ryerson, first, that public schools were preferable to voluntary institutions. The trend of state encroachment into the lives of the people of Upper Canada from the School Act of 1841 to the centralized,

4O Chapter Two

tightly controlled provincial system in place by 1871 was, in his estimation, a worthwhile and necessary evolutionary process. He endorsed it because this system proved to be the most efficient way of producing higher standards of schooling. Although Putman railed against Ontario's excessively controlled system many times in his career, he did believe, with Ryerson, that "gradual executive strength ... makes our educational machinery so effective" (131). Through the legislative grant and the power of the district superintendent to withhold it if standards were not up to departmental requirements, he recognized that "a lever of wonderful power" was put in Ryerson's hands, which enabled him to force local districts and school sections to conform. Putman admitted that Ryerson tended to act autocratically under this system and criticized his appointed position for not being "subject to any check except the nominal one of the Governor-General, and later of the Governor-General-in-Council" (265-6). But the autocratic means justified the democratic end and Putman rationalized that responsible government at this time was only imperfectly developed. Under Ryerson's "conservative, but truly progressive policy" (135), schools expanded rapidly. Efficiency norms, therefore, were justified because they led to increased educational opportunity for more of the population. Putman himself would apply these norms in administering the Ottawa public schools. Separate schools were judged inefficient by both Ryerson and Putman and both made efforts to eliminate or phase them out. The reasons cited by Ryerson and Putman for their drive to centralization and increased efficiency were political and moral. Loyalism would be developed in the population. They shared a Grit liberalist faith in the power of education to create a rational and good society.66 This "idealist's faith in humanity" (139), as Putman called it, served to buttress Ryerson in the face of numerous attacks from his critics. It accounted for his administrative virtues of hard work, energy, and attention to the details of actual conditions. Ryerson's "lofty ideals of the meaning and purpose of life, and ... abiding faith in the power of popular education in a realization of these ideals" (268), were important reasons why he was able to lead public opinion so effectively in support of public schooling. For in Putman's judgment, "The real forces that move human beings are always moral forces. Many a man has unwillingly sent his children to school because of public opinion, but few because of fear of the law" (258). Because both Putman and Ryerson believed in the importance of government as a promoter of morality, they attached enormous importance to the office of the administrator as a moral arbiter. Even the school system provided a training medium for local selfgovernment. It taught habits of punctuality, accuracy, and method in carrying out the business of the school, which could be transferred to other spheres of life, such as the home and the community. When there was a conflict in their minds between the advantages of local

4i

A Creed of Practical Idealism

control for learning responsible behaviour and patriotism and the greater efficiency in provincial administration gained by centralized control, Ryerson and Putman preferred centralization. In both cases, then, they chose a nonpartisan style of leadership which represented government authority and benevolence and which directed public opinion by gathering and dispensing "correct" information. This provided maximum stability to government and social harmony in the community. A common moral code would rise above corrupt oligarchies, vested interests, and sectarian differences, and there would be "mutual forbearance among a people of diverse religious creeds" (74), as Lord Goderich had counselled in 1831. By polarizing the forces of good and evil, the free schoolers versus the elitists, Putman created the impression that the battle was between only two classes, the educated middle class dominating the Assembly and the established, wealthier oligarchy controlling the Council. The masses are mentioned only once in his thesis. He commended practical programs designed to cater to their needs. In his chapter on Ryerson and the grammar schools, Putman laid down the tenets which he was to champion over many years for a more practical curriculum "very closely related to the real needs of the people" (220) at the secondary level. But it was an urban middle-class population that he now was thinking of. Contradicting his earlier promotion of country life, Putman now encouraged boys with initiative to move to the city. As he put it, "Then, as now, there were croakers who thought that a boy born on a farm naturally belonged there, and that any enlightenment which tended to make him dissatisfied with his surroundings was an evil" (247). High schools should cater to the utilitarian needs of the people, should be manned by qualified specialist teachers, and should have the latest technical equipment related to the industries of the area in which they were situated, his thesis stated. Advocating an increasingly graded school system, centralized consolidated schools with the resultant larger bureaucracy manned by experts, Putman inherited Ryerson's assumptions that class tensions would be reduced, middle-class values would be inculcated, and these more efficient institutions would eliminate social problems.67 These expectations for schooling brought about, on the one hand, a particular style of educational leadership that emphasized charisma and Protestant ideology and, on the other, a press for bureaucratic structure arising above and neutralizing the actions of individuals in the system. Both Putman and Ryerson embodied these mixed missionary-superintendent roles,68 which gave conviction and correctness to their cause. In Ryerson's day it was the district superintendent upon whose "learning, zeal, integrity and tact must have depended much of the success or failure of the schools of this period" (125). Besides his Christian conviction, in 1910 Putman could give the extra clout of academic expertise as his own qualification for leadership. It was taken for granted that this complex bureaucracy, now evident at the urban and

42

Chapter Two

county levels, should be guided by educational experts. The middle-class views of Ryerson and Putman about the direction that progressive educational reform should take tended to prevail in a public which had been educated for years in the value system of practical idealism. According to R.D. Gidney and D. A. Lawr, there was already a consensus in the 18305 and 18405 among public men in Upper Canada that government intervention in education was desirable and that a system had to be established.69 The centralized system that Ryerson had developed by 1850 was remarkable for its coherence and consistency; he "imposed a degree of order, uniformity, and effectiveness in administration unknown before."70 Gidney and Lawr warn about attaching too much importance to the coercive power of the central administration. Like Putman, they agree that most of the time Ryerson used his powers cautiously and was able to move no faster than public opinion would allow. The central authority created an administrative and legal framework for progress and established the basic minimum standards. Ryerson's Methodist style of exhortation, and the outlines of an effective public bureaucracy, would prevail on the public school system well into Putman's generation. Harley Cummings, a teacher in the Ottawa schools during Putman's regime, gives this account of Putman: Undoubtedly Dr. Putman saw himself as another Ryerson and consciously to some extent at least, followed Ryerson's methods. Both men were born on farms. Both were essentially optimistic and laboured like giants to build a better school system. Ryerson's "Journal of Education" had its modern counterpart in Dr. Putman's annual reports which informed the public and persuaded acceptance of changes which he deemed desirable.71

As well as consciously preserving Ryerson's common school heritage in his system of values, by 1910 Putman was expressing a decided shift in the orientation of his thought. Whereas in 1895 he had extolled the worth of ungraded country schools in the cultivation of originality, independence, and self-discipline in the pupil,72 now, under the influence of Watson's idealist philosophy, Putman believed that the "thing that counts most is the expression of self in some action that has social meaning and therefore moral value."73 He espoused a more group-orientated ideal. He was also becoming more concrete in his assessment of the circumstances affecting rural schools. In an OEA address of 1912, "How to Provide Adequate Supply of Teachers for Rural Schools," Putman painted a more realistic picture of the rural school. He admitted that rural Ontario was "passing through a crisis which began nearly twenty years ago and shows no immediate signs of abatement." The school population had decreased 23 per cent because thousands of people had left their farms to go to Western Canada or to adjacent towns and cities.

43

A Creed of Practical Idealism

Added to the decrease in the number of pupils per teacher was the average increase in teachers' salaries between 1891 and 1911, which made the cost per pupil increase by 84 per cent. Meanwhile the rural schools, unable to meet the cost of these higher salary demands, became, in Putman's estimation, the repository for all unqualified teachers and as a result were more poorly supplied than twenty years earlier. Putman advocated two centralizing administrative solutions which he had commended in Ryerson's day, consolidation of rural schools and management by county boards. Expert management and better salary schedules, facilities, and teachers would result. Above all children would be prevented from growing up "ignorant, idle and vicious" because their attendance in rural schools would improve.74 Putman's concern was over the effects of poor quality schooling on the moral nature of the students and, like Ryerson, he affirmed a strong faith in the socializing power of the modernized public school to correct this weakness. By 1910, then, the forty-four-year-old Putman had developed a strong sense that reform of the public educational system was necessary for both moral and utilitarian reasons. He was well read in the latest psychological, philosophical, and administrative theories about the direction this reform should take. At the same time his Canadian sense of community and his Hegelian beliefs in the importance of institutions, such as the family and the school, to instil moral values tempered any radical thrust that these reformist tendencies might have towards materialism or a disruptive break from traditions of the past. He had reached a level of maturity in keeping with Grant's conception of the intellectual leader, ready to serve his community in a broader capacity.

CHAPTER THREE

A School for Higher English and Applied Arts

On 6 October 1910 the public school trustees of Ottawa elected by secret ballot John Harold Putman as inspector of the Ottawa Public School Board. It was a significant choice. Putman, the only nominee with a Doctor of Pedagogy degree, defeated by a six-vote lead two Ottawa principals, thereby establishing the reformers' principle of merit over local favouritism. The onus was now on him to carry forward this progressive mandate. Putman chose the establishment of a school, fittingly, to inaugurate his reform platform. A School for Higher English and Applied Arts epitomized his New Education philosophy and became an object lesson for his succeeding school policies. It also proved to be the battleground between the progressive forces of urban reform, espousing tenets of new liberalism, and conservative forces, either of traditionalist or utilitarian colour. The conservatives early feared the professional aura of this new breed of school manager emerging from graduate school, represented by Putman. They were afraid his efficiency principles of centralization and specialization would defeat their local power base. The conservative forces, aptly led in the Ottawa board by three colonels, would not give up without a strong counterattack, which, significantly, revealed some of the weaknesses of Putman's liberal and New Education position. For a number of years Ottawa had been a leader in the campaign for technical education, which had been growing in force as Canada experienced its greatest population and industrial growth in this first decade of the century. Ottawa schools had been chosen by the Macdonald-Robertson movement to be object lessons for its first pilot project, manual-training classes. It was thought that a capital city would more strongly influence rural technological reform, a preoccupation of the first phase of the New Education movement; therefore manual-training classes were established in Ottawa rather than in the countryside. In 1909 thirteen classes were operating in Ottawa, and Albert Leake, Ontario's manual-training and technical inspector, judged them to be

45

A School for Higher English

the best in the province. But Leake was not so pleased with the lack of progress of handwork in the lower grades, with the absence of household science classes for girls, and with the dangerous situation of the disaffected adolescent boy, fourteen to sixteen years old. "On leaving school such boys are too young to enter any trade or industry, and these two years are generally wasted as far as the life of the boy is concerned."1 He suggested that household science classes be established. Although numerous groups had drawn up petitions and special committees had studied the question, the Ottawa board, before committing itself to any programs to correct the inadequacies pinpointed by Leake, decided to await developments from the provincial and federal governments, both of which were engaged in special studies of technical education - John Seath's study and report leading to Ontario's Industrial Education Act in 1911 and James W. Robertson's Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education begun in 1910. The extra cost of household science classes worried the trustees, who recommended it be put to the ratepayers at the next election. Five two-year commercial courses, started in 1905 and leading to a commercial diploma, continued to operate, as did practical classes in sewing and music. But the lack of action by the Ottawa Collegiate Board in establishing a central technical school prompted a special committee of the Public School Board to memorialize the minister of education. The committee wanted a well-equipped technical school under the control of the Public School Board to be established "for the instruction of pupils who have passed the standard of the Eighth Grade (the Senior Fourth Class) in our Public Schools, in Manual Training, Domestic Science, Commercial Knowledge and Business Transactions, Practical Studies in the Various Processes of the local manufactories, with a view to preparation for skilled service therein, and such other special courses as may, from time to time, be suggested by investigation of the requirements of local industries."2 On 5 January 1911, three months after Putman had assumed office, the Department of Education assured the Ottawa Public School Board that it would receive $3,068 from the Treasury Department to finance its plan for a centralized technical school in Ottawa.3 This measure was probably based on the regulation which allocated special grants to fifth classes (grades nine and ten) since their separation from continuation schools established in rural communities in 1908. Fortunately it was authorized shortly before the Industrial Education Act was passed in 1911, after which all technical education was to be under the jurisdiction of a local industrial advisory committee, a subcommittee of a collegiate board. Considering the reluctance of the Ottawa Collegiate Board to bend from its august pedestal, the Department of Education must have decided to give the initiative to Putman, who had campaigned strongly in this direction for many years. On 18 May 1911 Putman was ready. In the style of what David Tyack

46 Chapter Three terms the new, urban "administrative progressive,"4 he presented the school board with a report on commercial classes, replete with enrolment and attendance statistics and current cost.5 From this survey he concluded that although there was a demand for the commercial classes, the attendance rate had not kept up to the growth rate of the city. This he attributed to student "drifters" and to those who left for unskilled employment. The average cost per pupil (sixty-eight dollars) he estimated as high compared with that of the other classes, but the 148 graduates since 1908 were found mostly in the civil service, banks, railway offices, and private business firms and earned on an average twenty-two to twenty-five dollars a month. Putman characterized Ottawa's population as being composed largely of "a great middle class made up of those who lack the inclination, the talent, or the resources necessary for a profession, but who shrink from unskilled manual labour ... If Ottawa is not an industrial city, it is rapidly becoming a great commercial city. The Dominion Government, the banks, the railways, the lumber mills and other commercial enterprises annually require hundreds of trained clerks."6 Under these circumstances Putman agreed with previous board policy to support commercial classes. But he agreed neither with the decentralization of the existing classes nor with their program of study. Their cost, a result of their being taught largely by five highly paid principals and their dispersal in five centres, he judged to be too high. Putman's major proposal was that the commercial classes should be centralized in a school to be called A School for Higher English and Applied Arts. The existing Kent Street School should be re-equipped to accommodate three hundred students and a staff of highly qualified specialists. Because he believed that commercial work was "special work and partly technical,"7 one principal would be in charge of his staff of specialists (one each in shorthand, typewriting, and English). With the concentration of all commercial students in one school, proper grading and the cultivation of a healthy class spirit would be possible. Anticipating what would prove to be the main criticism of his school, Putman prefaced his second proposal, the course of study, with a plea for understanding his criticism of the narrow, utilitarian nature of the previous program of study. Using a biological metaphor in the style of John Dewey and his concept of continuity, Putman wrote, "Schools, like all other things which have to do with life, must grow. What is today would be impossible but for what has gone before, and what will be ten years hence depends largely on what is now. I hardly see how our commercial classes could have developed along other lines than they have. We had little to guide us in the way of tradition, and had to learn by our own experiments."8 Putman's proposed course of study, like the name of the new school, reflected his Hegelian organic thrust towards the unification of the arts and the applied sciences. Both were based on his belief in establishing a foundation of

47

A School for Higher English

a good, sound English education, particularly by means of a thorough mastery of the mother tongue, before students were to embark on the commercial superstructure. As he argued, A good commercial school for boys and girls of fourteen to seventeen years must be more than a commercial school. It must have a course so liberal and of such cultural value that it will make intelligent and thoughtful men and women. In my opinion English literature, composition, history and geography must receive quite as prominent a place as typewriting, shorthand and book-keeping. The latter are of no value without the former, and boys and girls who enter upon the course at fourteen have only just reached an age when they can really master the English language, appreciate its literature and understand the history of their race. I think, too, that some science, say an hour, or one hour and a half a week, ought to form a part of this course.9

In the junior year 15 V4 hours a week were proposed for foundation subjects, such as arithmetic, English, history, and geography. For practical courses, such as natural science, physical training, art, and either manual training or household science, 53/4 hours were suggested. Finally only $1A hours in the first year and 83/4 hours in the senior year were to be set aside for commercial subjects. Typewriting was to be learned only in the second year. By the senior year the time allocated for commercial and practical subjects (i33/4 hours) outweighed by il/2 hours that for foundation courses (I21A hours).10 Finally, maintaining his idealistic view about the role of women, Putman argued that commercial courses were hardly suitable for the female students, who made up 60 per cent of the student body. Since the years between fourteen and sixteen were the most critical and formative in their lives, and since nine out often would become homemakers, he considered it necessary that the school program play a redeeming role. "I would like that we should do something to keep up that interest in home making and give the girl something by way of compensation for the artificial interest she is taking in commercial pursuits."11 With a good foundation in English literature, geography, and history, as well as art work and household economy, Putman considered that the girls' time at school would not be wasted. He hoped to expand their needlework course and to establish a cooking centre. Thus the school would set up a pilot program for a new curriculum for girls. Its facilities could also be used by girls in other entrance classes, thereby cutting the costs of the program. Two other provisions, physical training and art work, he believed would benefit the girls as well as pupils across the system. His proposal for a supervisor of art and writing, however, was to become the bete noire of the three colonels on the board and was to make apparent the contrasting views of the idealistic liberal and the utilitarian conservative. The name chosen by Putman, A School for Higher English and Applied Arts, was significant for two other reasons. On the one hand, he hoped that his

48 Chapter Three

ideal of a commercial school would give such a broad and sound cultural education that the students, who would include those who could not pass the grade eight entrance examination of the collegiate board, would not feel that "they have ... sacrificed any of the essential advantages to be derived from a Collegiate course."12 Thus he hoped to match the collegiate's standards and status while at the same time offering a more democratic schooling. He used socially prominent people, such as the chairman of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, James W. Robertson, to open the school on 8 December, amidst a great deal of promotional publicity,13 to gain this prestige. Higher than average teachers' salaries were promised to entice good teachers onto the staff.14 One assumes these measures were also adopted to attract the disaffected middle-class adolescent and his parents and thereby raise the status of practical subjects in the Ottawa community. On the other hand, the school became a symbol of the liberal ideology which at that time in Canadian history was under serious attack. As Paul Craven has documented so ably in discussing the then minister of labour, W.L. Mackenzie King,15 dangerous uncontrolled forces were destroying citizens' belief in voluntarism and the ultimate common interests upon which the liberal theory of social order was founded. Utopian socialists and politically active working-class movements were arising at the same time as wider manhood suffrage was being granted. The disaffected adolescent engaged in blind-alley jobs, about whom Putman and Leake were concerned, might be inveigled by these critics of the traditional order to believe that liberal society fundamentally was a class society, with working-class people having nothing in common with their employers. To circumvent this dangerous alienating tendency, therefore, a new model of liberalism was proposed by King and his followers, who included progressive urban reformers such as Putman. They conceived of a liberal capitalist economy without classes. The School for Higher English, for instance, was an improvement on the Collegiate Institute because it neither charged fees nor restricted students by means of entrance examinations. King stressed the interdependence of the worker and employer in pre-industrial society. Robertson, Putman, and Canadian New Educators, advocating country life maxims or manual-training and household science courses, attempted to force an appreciation of manual toil on elitist traditionalists. At the opening of Ottawa schools in September 1911, for example, Putman's vocational reforms were explained this way: "Changes will be effected which are intended to destroy the remnants of the prejudice which considers industrial courses inferior to the general studies."16 Another move by new liberals to harmonize the classes was their humanitarian efforts to improve working-class conditions. The School for Higher English pioneered evening classes and lectures for adults, easier access to secondary schools, technical education, hot lunches, as well as

49

A School for Higher English

courses of study supposedly more suited to the needs of the lower middle and working class. The program of the school was designed, like King's labour legislation, to search for a commonality of interests. Now the professional educator and the state, instead of previous voluntary lay groups such as the Macdonald-Robertson movement, began to intervene in the relations between school and society, labour and capital. The reformers believed that a new moral order was needed to provide an identity of interests, which they thought would be an effective remedy against society's evils. Putman, mirroring the views of Dewey, whose strong influence he acknowledged,17 urged that his "laboratory school" include a course in history and civil government because he believed in man's ultimate perfectibility and rationality. Although the School for Higher English, as Putman explained, catered largely to middle-class children, they were deemed unmotivated and unskilled, thus needing a new ethical code to cure their anomie. The moralizing of earlier New Educators was not sufficient, however. The more rational, second-phase New Educator, following the techniques of new liberalism, brought sophisticated skills and policy goals to bear on this potential problem of social disorder. Putman recalled many years later that when he became responsible for Ottawa's elementary schools, he believed that "only education and the logic of bitter experience can correct our social ills. The schools ... can so re-construct their curricula that handwork and manual occupations will share with art, literature, music, mathematics and science in the education of the young. They can dignify manual toil of every kind by making it a part of the daily school life of every boy and girl... this view ... was the logical outcome of the philosophy of the educational reformers from Rousseau to Dewey."18 In order to convince others of his reform concepts, the new liberal applied methods of extensive empirical investigation to practical problems. Not only did Putman's survey of the five commercial classes provide him with ample technical data, applied to practical affairs, but it also projected the image of "a singularly clear and independent conception of administrative matters and the remedies to be applied to overcome these conditions."19 Since Putman was a professional speaking with expertise, the editor of the Ottawa Citizen predicted on 29 May 1911 that his report would "appeal to the business man and to those interested in the successful development and management of commercial enterprise in Ottawa." Putman thereby hoped to break down their penny-pinching attitude towards household science and art classes. Even traditionalists, such as the editor of the Free Press, were swayed to support Putman because he proved his case with statistics and detailed facts. Criticizing Trustee W.P. Anderson, who rightly objected to the encroachment of the School for Higher English on collegiate territory, the editor replied on 26 May: We don't take much stock in that argument. It does not seem to make very much

50 Chapter Three difference who does the work so long as it is done well. If the scheme meant the extension of that blight the teaching of fads and the ignoring of the essentials we would be with Mr. Anderson, but if the new school is to be carried on upon the lines laid down for it by Mr. Putman, it will be anything but a school for fads - it will be a practical and natural and needed complement to the work done in the general schools.

Wide publicity in all the Ottawa newspapers, of course, further disseminated the practical research and liberal measures of the new scientific reformer, intent on leading public opinion and improving the lot of the people. Another plank in the new liberal platform was the greater efficiency and cost-cutting effects of centralization and specialization. Large-scale organization in business, for instance, was claimed by Canadian new liberals to be necessary because the worker could enjoy improved status and be freer under the democratic contract basis. Similar arguments were used by Putman, following the lines also of urban school reformers in the United States, that his centralized school and more highly qualified staff would provide a more efficient education than currently offered by the overly bookish and unnecessarily restrictive collegiate program of study. In the centralized school pupils would find expert teachers and ample materials to carry out a more enriched curriculum, which would cater better to the needs of 75 per cent of the school population, who in Putman's estimation, were either too bright or too slow to gain much advantage from the eight-grade common school curriculum. He assumed, therefore, as did many new liberals, that standards of excellence and variety of program would mitigate any evil effects of, say, bureaucracy, and would lead to a greater degree of moderation. Once trained in a skill and past the dangerous age of adolescence, the sixteen to eighteen year old would settle down and become a responsible citizen. But first the adolescent had to be tempted to stay in school. Putman's primary criticism of the Ottawa curriculum in 1910 was that too "few of the total number of children enrolled were entering a secondary school. There was too little content to the subjects of study as presented to hold the interest of normal boys and girls up to the age of fourteen years."20 In letters written in 1907 criticizing the Collegiate Board, Putman had added psychological reasons to back up his liberal arguments for a more diversified program of study, claiming that the "Ottawa Collegiate Institute is partly filled today with boys who are a constant source of trouble to both parents and teachers, wholly because they are forced into courses of study for which they have neither aptitude nor inclination. Nature decreed that their wits should be sharpened by 'doing things' and 'making things'. Parents and teachers say they must be educated by studying books and the result is disappointing."21 To the earlier pleas made by the New Educators for centralization and specialization on moral and efficiency grounds, Putman had now added insights from social psychology, probably derived from Dewey.

51 A School for Higher English The goal of New Educators and liberals alike was to use ideas to change the attitude of society from one of cash nexus, which led to indifference or selfish values, to one of community interest, which in turn was amenable to social control. For Putman, King, and Dewey, the source of social conflict was bad ideas, which led to disorder, strife, and local self-interest. On the other hand, good ideas, derived from the cosmic world order preached by Watson and the idealists, led to a wholly rational and law-abiding social order. The new manager, whether school inspector or labour-management mediator, used his professional expertise and the establishment of neutral social institutions to lead conflicting interests towards this condition of social peace. Putman believed strongly that his role was to lead the Ottawa Public School Board and the Ottawa public through the example of his School for Higher English and Applied Arts into this state of social harmony. The means he used to achieve this goal, however, drew the ire of a number of interest groups and tended to change his previous community ideal into a strident public field for debate. The School for Higher English became the battleground for conflicting educational philosophies. In the midst of the fray the previously humane, voluntaristic ideology of the New Educator, who argued for community harmony, was metamorphized. A more scientific, bureaucratically coercive ideology emerged. The second-phase New Educator became increasingly concerned with the school system and the public interest as interpreted by the professional expert and was not averse to employing coercive tactics to create his more efficient system. As a result his rational goal of a large classless community, acting harmoniously with the wider public interest in view, ironically became perverted by his own political measures. Watson's ideal public servant turned out to have feet of clay. But the thrust of his own idealistic philosophy was also largely responsible for the demise of the earlier ethic. This was evident at the beginning of Putman's inspectorship in his dealings with critics of the School for Higher English and Applied Arts. In early May 1911 Putman wrote to the chairman and members of the School Management Committee, requesting the replacement of the incumbent supervisor of writing with a supervisor of art work and writing, A.F. Newlands, at an initial salary of $2,000, with annual increases of $100 until a maximum of $2,500 was reached.22 At a special meeting of the board to consider the approval of this recommendation by the School Management Committee, there were two dissenting votes. A week later two trustees called a second special meeting to pass the following motion in criticism both of Putman's nomination of Newlands and of his report on the School for Higher English. Moved by Trustee Anderson, seconded by Trustee Fairbarn, that the use of several schools throughout the City be granted to the mover for the purpose of holding public

52 Chapter Three meetings to discuss the principle of paying a higher salary to an Art and Writing teacher than is paid to any Principal in the employ of the Board as well as to discuss the right of the Board to so greatly increase the Public School expenditure on courses not usually considered requisite as part of a primary education, and that ought to be undertaken out of the Collegiate Institute tax.23 Colonel W.P. Anderson, retired chief engineer from the Department of Marine and Fisheries and chairman of the Ottawa Public School Board in 1906, during which time he began the commercial classes Putman was proposing to replace, joined forces with collegiate critics and several Ottawa principals who were miffed by Putman's hiring and promotional practices. Another colonel, William White, used the press to air his criticisms. In his view the School for Higher English would completely destroy the commercial classes and replace them with "an adjunct to the Collegiate institute."24 He resorted to anti-American imperialism to slur Newlands's reputation,25 even though he knew that Newlands had taught in the Ottawa Normal and Model schools for many years before with Putman and had been supervisor of writing in Kingston, Ontario, before transferring to a similar position in public schools in Buffalo, New York. White's underlying objection, however, was that the power of hiring and the opportunity for local patronage were slipping from the grasp of board members. As he wrote, "It is deeply regretted that the inspector has recommended the appointment of outsiders, one of whom is practically a foreigner, as teachers in the proposed school. There are twelve principals who have been for over twenty years in the service of the public schools in Ottawa, of these seven are university graduates, and there are four other teachers who have university degrees. And these are all passed over in favor of persons of whom we know nothing."26 White's next letter attacked the literary curriculum for girls, which he claimed was based on Putman's middle-class view of woman's role in society: "Now whilst it would no doubt be very nice for a girl to have the ability to discuss with a learned professor the Retreat of the Ten Thousand and to expatiate on the joy of the Greeks at once more beholding the blue waters of the Euxine ... still I think the commercial standpoint is far better for the great majority of public school pupils, who will, I am sure, have to be wage earners." He recommended that the whole idea of establishing "a kind of hybridized high school" be dropped until the next election.27 This politicization of administrative issues was exactly what Putman was seeking to avoid. In the style of the urban manager his structural reforms and policy decisions were to be based on the advice of experts, firing and promotional practices were to be controlled from the professional inspector's office rather than by ward-heeling local board members, and salaries were to be equated with merit and market demands. Putman was promising increased efficiency and higher standards. His reform package used the techniques of

53 A School for Higher English business efficiency and the language of professionals and businessmen. He hoped that this middle-class audience would be attracted to his progressive reform measures. Putman thus established his role as a mediator between the more progressive public school trustees and the apathetic middle class of Ottawa, who formed the majority of the population. He hoped to persuade them that his long-range, more efficient policies would more likely lead to better social and industrial development. If he won these allies, local interests would tend to become isolated and he could thereby neutralize critical board members. The colonels' attack suited his purposes very conveniently. As Craven writes about King, in this new liberal ideology management came to represent an amoral institution, capable of being turned to good or bad ends.28 A more overriding concept of community, or more precisely public, was emerging. For instance, in King's scheme classes and class interests were reduced to the level of "wrong attitudes" and "irrationality." Conflict and disorder were by definition local and contrary to the public interests. The implications of this more powerful ideological concept of public, Craven notes, is that the simple community notion of shared interests (preached in the earlier New Education movements, such as the MacdonaldRobertson object lessons and the country life plans) became transformed into a more encompassing idea of community in which capital and labour were seen to have common public interests. The immediate combatants, responsible for social disorder, were separated from the rest of the community. It was made clear that the public interest was in co-operation, and if this could not be achieved by persuasive means, measures of social control would be used to maintain order. The idealists' higher order principles now utilized efficiency norms to impose conformity. This transformed liberal ideology was so pervasive that even in Putman's educational philosophy and policies in art education it became strongly evident. Many years later Putman wrote,"! am more proud of what we are doing and have done in art than in any other single educational achievement." He defended Newlands's appointment and summarized the major educational advantages of the art program begun in the School for Higher English and then spread throughout the system. Quoting English idealists (William Morris, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle), he claimed that art reflected man's inner spirit and moral attitude to the world. It was immanent in a man's life, actions, and forms of expression from clothes to furniture and belongings. As a result it had great power to influence others, either tastefully and harmoniously or disruptingly. Continuing in a more functional vein, Putman claimed that art could therefore be an important vehicle for social change. Through expert supervision, quality materials, and more sophisticated organization, students could achieve a high level of attainment. Not only would the students experience joy and satisfaction "because they have created something and then believe that their lives will ... be changed because of this experience,"

54 Chapter Three

but rural ratepayers, if they were to see the improvement in their schools through centralized organization and more competent supervision of art, music, and manual training, "would rise up in a body and demand a change."29 High-quality art instruction, then, had the power to change community attitudes, Putman believed, and lead to significant social reform. Putman also claimed that his primary aim for including art in the curriculum was to have the pupil appreciate art and improve his taste. In 1912 he and Newlands decided that an even more effective route would be through the study of masterpieces. A mould was designed and thousands of feet of oak were fashioned into frames in the manual-training rooms. The school board borrowed paintings from the National Gallery of Canada and bought reproductions of masterpieces from leading galleries in Europe. These were used in classes for picture study by which means the pupils were given an outline of the evolution of European art. Hallways and classrooms were relieved of their previous "bare and unsightly" appearance by these masterpieces and at the cost of only a few thousand dollars. Putman believed that the "silent influence of these pictures on successive generations of boys and girls cannot be measured."30 But in the next breath he revealed the utilitarianism implicit in his idealism. He talked of two reports on the teaching of art, one in England and one in Scotland, which showed "that education authorities in Great Britain are keenly alive to the importance of this subject from the national standpoint of protecting their industrial supremacy." Consumer taste and good design are "related as cause and effect." Citing the industrial supremacy of Europe, Japan, and the United States, Putman asserted that if "we Canadians hope for any industrial development that will be distinctly Canadian we must begin by teaching art and we must start in the elementary school." The actual practice of art in the Ottawa classrooms appeared to be closer to this training model, although Putman claimed that the Ottawa schools made the rigid distinction between "practice exercises to give him control of his tools of expression and genuine creative effort where he attempts to express his own ideas." But these ideas were to promote future standards of excellence. Putman debunked the free expressionists with this paternalistic pronouncement: There is no royal road to skill in expression with a pencil, crayon or brush. Only honest hard work counts. There are no short cuts. All attempts by merely copying the idea of others to produce something for show end in disappointment and humiliation. Only when the pupil earnestly strives to draw or paint an object or scene as he sees it does he increase his power ... Originality - that which gives the author title to ownership must be in the idea, the lesson, the message which the creative effort produces.31

Even when discussing individual self-expression, then, Putman acknowledged only that form which promoted development, a social message, or a

55

A School for Higher English

rational idea. This, of course, fitted his liberal model of society in which development and change occurred when using practical materials for social rather than individual improvement. Canadian taste needed to be trained to recognize the difference between what was commonplace and what was beautiful. Only then would well-to-do people who currently were oblivious to the urban slum and "tumble-down rural home" realize that their "love of the beautiful is real but narrow and selfish. There is a love of beauty which demands beauty for all, beauty everywhere. It is in some measure to realize this aim that art instruction should be given in every elementary school."32 Although Putman's message continued to be directed to these selfish upper middle-class people, the practice of art in his school, ironically, suited their industrial and utilitarian goals. The major component of the art course was the drawing and colouring of leaves, branches, and flowers. He explained, "Partly this is because colour work is an essential part of art training. Chinese lanterns and coloured vases also furnish good practice in colour work, the latter being especially suitable for pastels. The adaptation of flowers, leaves and conventional geometric figures to make designs for all-over patterns naturally follows and receives special attention in the higher grades." The more talented pupils were directed towards even more blatantly commercial design work, block printing, in which designs were cut in linoleum. In the sixth grade all students were to model in clay. Putman cited the appreciation of form and the understanding of the principles of one of the world's earliest and greatest arts, but concluded that the "glazing and firing even on a small scale give him some understanding of the commercial manufacture of pottery."33 Even the crude expression of the average child was directed to utilitarian ends; "this attempt increases his appreciation of the more successful efforts of others." The logic of this hierarchy of "needs" inculcated in the students by means of the art program was that there should be closer co-ordination between the art department and every other school activity. Pushed to its limits, it could even assume totalitarian dimensions: the Director of Art in any school system ought also to have a final decision as to the form and decoration of every piece of handwork produced in the school; that all objects made of paper or cardboard in primary classes, all things made of wood, metal or leather in the shops and all designs and ornamentation of clothing or household goods produced in the home-making department should be submitted to him for approval. This would seem to be a logical outcome of the theory that art ought not to be divorced from the everyday life of ordinary people but should be a constant part of their environment. I have no doubt that the time will come in Ontario schools when the influence of the Art Director will be greatly extended.34

Well may Colonels Anderson and White have objected to the appointment of Newlands.

56 Chapter Three

Putman's philosophy and policy towards art education were very much a reflection of the conservation movement occurring in Canadian society during these years. In 1909 the federal government set up the Commission of Conservation as part of the more efficient, expert bureaucracy emerging from the newly industrialized society. It was a direct result of the American Conservation Conference called by President Theodore Roosevelt in the same year. Adhering to the norms of the new liberalism, the commission was to be a nonpartisan advisory body, financed by federal funds, with experts such as Thomas Adams, a British town-planning specialist, employed to carry out conservation projects. These experts studied such problems as rural life, water systems, and urban housing, all practical "evils" which concerned the businessmen and professionals on the commission, and advised them on possible solutions. Useful problems which impeded economic development were addressed therefore by these scientific experts. In 1914, for instance, under the guidance of Adams and his urban-planning campaign, the Civic Improvement League was formed, which campaigned for the establishment of a department of municipal affairs and a town planning board. As in Putman's progressive school battles, their public concern was to conflict with local authorities and vested interests. This led to the resignation of Chairman Clifford Sifton in 1918 and the move of Adams to the United States a year later. Before leaving, Adams planned a suburban housing development, Lindenlea, on the outskirts of Ottawa, which adjoined Putman's property on Rideau Terrace. Its middle-income housing units, winding streets, and remoteness from the core of the city reflected the rather artificial, middleclass assumptions implicit in the "Garden City" movement which Adams had led in Britain. Designed for returning soldiers, it deliberately emphasized the social direction the liberal reformers wished them to move towards - the upbringing of families in the sheltered environment of the suburbs. The tasteful environment was planned to cultivate a spirit of harmony and neighbourliness, as well as a respect for the natural environment - green strips, playgrounds, and parks - surrounding them. Despite the moral, idealistic goals and rhetoric expressed through the art program and the conservation movement, however, it was in the interests of middle-class businessmen and professionals that development, whether of school or society, should proceed with efficiency towards functional goals. As Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook conclude, during this period "the confident materialism of the age reigned supreme."35 Putman's defence of his School for Higher English revealed similar utilitarian bases. He described it as "an 'opportunity' school for hundreds of boys and girls whose parents could not afford to send them for a four-year course in the Collegiate Institute preparatory to one of the so-called learned professions." Its purpose was not to compete with the narrow, utilitarian aims

57

A School for Higher English

of a business college or a vocational school. Instead, its purpose was "quite as much to teach its pupils how to live as to teach them how to make a living."36 He claimed that Anglo-Saxon public opinion demanded that for the student up to the age of fifteen or sixteen "the school is to consider his needs as a human being as more important than his needs as a bread-winner." As previously described, however, Putman's conception of the adolescent's primary need was that of either the prospective homemaker or the prospective citizen and head of household. For this reason his curriculum was designed to give a broad foundation "of history, geography, English literature and elementary science [which] will in the long run be more valuable to them than the acquiring of a high degree of skill along a single line." The school was thus "a compromise between the utilitarian and the cultural with enough emphasis on the cultural to prepare for a high type of citizenship and enough emphasis on the utilitarian to enable the boy or girl to get a start in life."37 This compromise produced a dilemma. Since the school was open to all adolescents with a variety of mental aptitudes and vocational goals, it had to appeal both to its clients, including those who might be tempted to leave, and to the public school ratepayers in order to survive. It was at this point that Putman's idealistic goals became clouded by pragmatic practices. Although ostensibly teaching students how to live, its hidden curriculum was teaching them how to survive by means of utilitarian business practices. Household science will serve as an example. Within three days of taking office Putman had the board revive its previous campaign for domestic science.38 By 24 November 1910 statistics on cost had been gathered and a supervisor of sewing, Grace Calhoun, a graduate of the household science course at the Macdonald Institute at Guelph, had been appointed at an initial salary of $750 (one-third of Newlands's salary).39 The cost of supplies was said to be minimal ($345 per year), and in her teaching throughout the school system she was to receive assistance from kindergarten and regular school teachers. By the time the School for Higher English was opened in 1911, however, the scope of household science had broadened to include cooking classes, which required special rooms fitted with gas and coal ranges to accommodate the girls, many of whom travelled from other city schools to take the new course.40 Wide publicity was given the class and its "products" after only four weeks of operation. Putman deliberately exploited these results to lead public opinion to an acceptance of this practical curriculum for girls, and he used middle-class appeals to the values of cleanliness, economy, and co-operation, as well as the practical response of the 470 girls who were "simply crazy" over it, to push for future expansion. As the Ottawa Evening Journal reported on 21 October 1911, "If Dr. Putman gets his wish, and the Board of Education will satisfy it, no doubt, when ... the result of the experiment in domestic science [is seen], he will soon have a miniature home fitted up in the school so

58 Chapter Three

that the scholars can learn how to make their own home comfortable under the most adverse conditions. At present the quarters at Kent Street School are hardly large enough for the work." He got his wish within the year. During the following summer renovations totalling twenty thousand dollars took place. A third storey, four new classrooms, and accommodation for double the number of 90 boys and 180 girls attending the school were added. Extra facilities, such as a large gym, adequate for holding amateur concerts, were added, as was a piano to aid the development of the school's community spirit and public promotion. In December 1912 the domestic science classes were once again used to advertise the school's excellence. An exhibition was held, which was described as "of a highly educative nature and no one who attended it could go away and feel that domestic science was not necessary in the life of the school girl today."41 Apparently there was great competition and pride among the girls who tried to make one garment every three months. This competition and pride, necessary attributes in a value system which aimed towards excellence, were further fostered through examination and graduation certificates. Putman sought authorization from the Department of Education for the junior public school graduation examination for graduates of the first year.42 After a third-year program was added, the Civil Service Commission was asked to lower the minimum age of candidates for its examination by one year so that graduates could immediately enter the civil service.43 Examination results and scholarship winners were widely publicized in the newspapers,44 even though Putman was to avow in his elementary program that examinations and competition were detrimental to the child's development. The pragmatic intent, though, of this publicity was revealed in accounts of the motive for a seventy-five-dollar scholarship provided by the Local Council of Women. It was offered in order "to increase interest in Domestic Science study and to raise the dignity of the course to equal that of the Commercial course."45 Utilitarian reasons also were given for keeping the School for Higher English going. By 1915 six hundred graduates were said to be "a monument to the credit of the institution."46 In that year the first overtures to sell the school to the Collegiate Board were made. Unfortunately the Separate School Board, heavily in debt because of controversies surrounding regulation 17, which will be discussed in a later chapter, would not agree. The school, therefore, continued to push for high standards of efficiency and displayed its constantly expanding wares until it was acknowledged to be "the 'top notch' of the Ottawa Public school system."47 But its elitism and drive for prestige led, naturally, to jealousy among other teachers as well as to anger among politically aspiring members of the school board. This time Putman found it more difficult to outflank his enemies. Once

59

A School for Higher English

again the school became the focal point for much larger issues. In 1913, after a spirited discussion at a board meeting, Trustee Robert Hamilton complained that a serious problem of overcrowded schools existed in his district, By Ward.48 The next year he and a By Ward resident wrote open letters to the newspapers, claiming deliberate concealment of the condition because it was in "the eastern part of the city, where our native and foreign population is rapidly filling up the schools."49 In the more favoured districts of the city expensive additions, such as the one at the School for Higher English, were being constructed. Despite wartime conditions the trustees of By Ward tried unsuccessfully until 1917 to get the board to act. Finally Trustee Hamilton, joined by Trustee Harold Shipman, decided to go above Putman's head and petition the Department of Education to provide better educational facilities for By Ward. They wrote an open letter to the newspaper asking for an expose of conditions.50 After visiting the three schools concerned, Chief Inspector John Waugh and a number of reporters stated that although old, the schools were clean, mostly well lit, and not overcrowded.51 Putman's previous reports, the deputy minister assured him, had been carefully and accurately prepared.52 Not until the conclusion of the war did Putman and the board allow a new school, the York Street School, to be constructed. Unfortunately it ran into problems of declining enrolment, skyrocketing building costs, and continual politicking by the two By Ward trustees, with the result that when completed in 1921, it cost $520,000 more than originally estimated in 1917.53 The whole issue forced Putman into a much more political posture,54 which Shipman exploited. Shipman chose the School for Higher English as his battleground. In the midst of heated discussions on the York Street School, Shipman strongly criticized the "worthless fads" offered at the school.55 He used a series of articles in the Ottawa Journal, which criticized the policy of ordering only one make of typewriter, in order "to cast serious reflection on the School for Higher English."56 In 1925 the Journal again tried to expose the school by publishing test results which were compiled by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and which revealed that "many ... pupils who have spent from two to three years in the School for Higher English and Applied Arts made anything but a satisfactory showing."57 In one of three newspaper articles defending the school, Putman questioned the authority of his critics to make these educational judgments.58 His articles explained the educational philosophy and evolution of the school and refuted the validity of the Metropolitan statistics. Behind the scenes Putman mustered the formidable forces which by this time were at his disposal and put forward measures designed to thwart future local, disruptive ward-heelers. Shipman, now chairman of the board, attacked the personnel of the school, accusing them of not having proper commercial certificates,59 and he called on the School Management Commit-

60 Chapter Three

tee to request that the Department of Education inspect the school for its efficiency. The department found the procedure "most unusual, if not unprecedented. You have a Public School Inspector whose duty it is to deal with the very matters that you ask the Department to investigate. Has your inspector been asked to make such a report? If not, why not?"60 F.W. Merchant, Ontario director of industrial and technical education, affirmed the reply of the minister and stated that since the majority of the school board members agreed with their inspector, the department considered the matter closed.61 Thus the support of the department and progressive board members reduced Shipman's questions about the legitimacy of the school to the level of disruptive noise-making. By this time Putman's authority and the high standards of the school had become so well established that public opinion was firmly on his side. As one letter to the editor expressed it, "I do not believe that school trustees were elected for the purpose of usurping the prerogative of principals and inspectors."62 In 1923 Putman implemented another experiment at the School for Higher English, a rotary plan of organization,63 the long-term effects of which would further serve to emasculate future critics and to limit the choices of students, who would be streamed according to psychological test results into their "future life work." He also instigated a campaign for the election-at-large system, designed to get rid of any tendency on the part of "members to look upon a school as belonging to a particular ward."64 An Ottawa City plebiscite in 1926 halved the number of trustees. Needless to say, By Ward did not support the motion.65 But the smaller centralized board was more successful in countering ward lobbying.66 Shipman, though, had achieved the publicity he desired and resigned to run for City Council. In his resignation speech he was reported to have described Putman as the "best and most able inspector in the province."67

CHAPTER FOUR

"Painting with a Big Brush"

In his first year of office as inspector of the Ottawa Public School Board, one of Putman's major concerns was with the 40 to 50 per cent of pupils who had failed the provincial entrance examination to high school. His chief reason was psychological; most of these students were "concrete minded" and would develop their mental powers through some form of handwork rather than through the literary and mathematical, or "bookish," curriculum imposed by the entrance standard. At the end of his career he considered his most important reform to have been "a changed emphasis upon studies and activities which were a part of the school curriculum even forty years ago."1 In his 1913 annual report to the public school ratepayers, Putman explained the rationale behind his reform measures as follows: A modern city school is becoming a very complex piece of machinery. This increasing complexity is owing to an ever-widening conception of the function of a school and the meaning of education ... To-day, the school is expected ... to make good not only all the deficiencies of the home but, in addition, give the child a substitute for those experiences which are denied him because of his artificial environment. We have added to the school programme, nature study, hygiene, drawing, cardboard work, woodwork, basketry, clay modelling, printing, metal work, cooking, sewing, calisthenics, military drill, rifle-shooting, Kindergartens, music, stenography, typewriting, bookkeeping, and even some school gardening.

He went on to describe the playground facilities, medical and dental services, and special schools for "subnormal" and concrete-minded pupils which he had added to the system. The purpose of these reforms, he explained, was pragmatic. "These additional subjects of study and school activities have grown out of attempts to adapt the schools to the needs of society. These new activities are all attempts to train children to become good citizens."2 At this time Putman was giving full expression to what John Dewey had

62

Chapter Four

called New Education in his widely read book of 1899, The School and Society. Differing from its earlier manifestation in Toronto's Froebelian kindergartens or in the country life reforms advocated by the MacdonaldRobertson movement, the new pedagogy and Putman's school reforms were more geared to the realities of modern urban life. His impetus, like Dewey's, came from current findings on child psychology, from the political ideology of new liberalism, and from the social and economic demands of a transformed Canadian nation by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. What particularly concerned Putman as he came into office was the effect of the bookish curriculum and strict examination standards on the motivation of the concrete-minded pupil. Following the scientific management techniques applied to age-grade enrolments, which Leonard Ayres's Laggards in Our Schools had publicized in 1909, Putman discovered that far too many of the Ottawa public school pupils were held back, or "retarded," in the lower grades (36 per cent were in form one and 25 per cent in form two, the first four grades). These laggards were "one to four years behind their fellows, making little progress, losing all ambition to excel, the despair of their teachers, and a disappointment to their parents."3 Putman believed that more than anything else, the substitution of a broad curriculum of studies with varied and interesting activities, which appealed to the child's instincts and challenged him to put forth his best effort, would help to eliminate laggards from his schools. When he retired in 1936, he calculated that the percentage of retarded pupils in the lower grades had been substantially reduced. The number of pupils was more evenly distributed across the grades, and the percentage of pupils in the upper half of the school had increased from 39 to 56 per cent. In the process, however, a significant transformation occurred in Putman's idealistic attitude to the psychology of learning. From a concern for the development of the individual towards rational understanding and the expression of the universal consciousness through his unselfish acts in the community, Putman's psychological outlook, like that of the American pragmatists, became increasingly naturalized. Biological concepts and an emphasis on social behaviourism predominated. Contact with the material world became "the condition of all mental and moral growth."4 In part this was a route that even his mentor John Watson was exploring. As Watson wrote in a review article in Queen's Quarterly, the "real problem of philosophy at the present time is not to adjudicate between Pragmatism and Absolutism, but to find a comprehensive formula which will do justice to all aspects of experience."5 And the child's experience was to be the key to Putman's new approach to education. Reflecting his idealistic optimism, for instance, Putman extolled the progressive method of teaching reading. Instead of the traditional, analytical

63 "Painting with a Big Brush"

alphabet or phonics methods, children used what today would be described as an experience-centred, or whole-word, approach to reading, beginning with sentences or words which had meaning for the child. As a result of this synthesis-analysis-synthesis method, Putman claimed that all normal children learned to read in a year, and in the end all, "except imbeciles," could read anything they were capable of understanding, a great improvement upon the progress of children seventy-five years earlier. He attributed this success to the Aristotelian dictum that"' we get to be what we wish to become by already being - in some measure - what we wish to become'. The child wishes to read. The desire is power or a first step. We teach him to look at and repeat a sentence which he has given himself and which he understands. He reads. His future progress in reading is merely a fuller understanding of all the relations implicit in the first few sentences which he repeats."6 By twelve the child could rapidly interpret symbols because he had many years of practice. Meaning and understanding provided the motivation. To reinforce this initial power or desire of the pupil to read, Putman each year ordered a variety of supplementary books for the classroom - two thousand penny classics, forty-five copies of novels, such as King of the Golden River, narrative poetry, such as "Lady of the Lake" and "Evangeline," and books of knowledge.7 He urged other teachers in the province to follow his lead.8 Serving on the Carnegie Public Library Board until 1936, Putman was acknowledged, more than anyone else, as responsible for ordering a large supply of the best books and for ensuring that these circulated throughout the schools.9 In 1919 he led a campaign of teachers to request the provincial government to abolish all public school readers and to introduce the child directly to classical English literature.10 When suggestions were solicited for a memorial to honour a deceased alderman, Harold Fisher, Putman wrote a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen, urging that a branch library for children be established in the west end of Ottawa, which would help them "get the reading habit" and save them "from seeking questionable amusements."11 As a result Putman felt that Canadian public school children received a far superior literary training than their American counterparts.12 Arithmetic, grammar, and geography also proceeded by what Putman called the "big brush" method. At first whole ideas, meanings, the unity of the world, and complementary number relationships should be painted by the teacher to feed the intellectual strivings of the pupils with "generous mouthfuls."13 Thoroughness and detailed analysis or distinctions and deeper meaning would come after many experiences with concrete materials and opportunities to express ideas. The teacher would lead the child from this concrete stage of consciousness to ever-widening circles of relationships and abstract meanings. In this respect Putman clung to the Hegelian heritage he had learned from Watson. It was in an outline he gave for his theory of the psychology of learning that he betrayed the shift from an idealistic to a

64 Chapter Four

behaviouristic ethic and showed the incursion of biology and Darwinian naturalism, derived from Dewey, in his thinking. Growth, he wrote in 1915,' 'whether that of a plant or animal, or of moral or spiritual nature always means a struggle against some opposing force." Again, this time echoing Stanley Hall's evolutionary child-study concepts, he noted that the "instinct of activity or movement - the desire to do something is one of the most fundamental and this instinct taking the form of play has been the salvation of thousands of children whose natural desire for activity had no other outlet." Since the child totally inherits his native powers and develops them only through activity, all the educator can do, according to Putman, is to arrange the environment so that he can exercise these powers and provide concrete experiences (printed, written, and symbolic matter included) so that the child can give meaning to them. But, he warned, we "know that the child's mind can really attend only when it is attracted by interest. We know that a human being has social value largely in proportion to the development of his will and that any training or any environment which fails to provide for the proper exercise of this power is unnatural and defective." Finally, the new psychology taught that meaning was given to experience "only as he learns what concrete things the symbols stand for, and that if his past experience does not include these concrete things or others closely related to them he can never really master the language of the books."14 This was a clear expression of American functional psychology, which had its origin in William James's Principles of Psychology. It was a movement which emphasized the role of psychological processes in their service to the adaptive functions of the organism. It was a biological and evolutionary psychology, which took as its basic data behavioural processes in biological and social contexts. The Chicago group of writers, who included John Dewey and George Mead, had by this time developed what came to be known as social behaviourism. H.S. Thayer, in analysing the thought of Mead, remarks on his closeness to idealism in emphasizing the social situation as primary and his debt both to Darwin and Wilhelm Wundt in the shaping of his theory of mind and the social act.15 The starting point for social behaviourism, following in the Aristotelian tradition, is the social act. Mead, following also the Hegelian tradition, contended that the whole was prior to the part and the part was explained in terms of the whole, much like Putman's synthesisanalysis-synthesis method of teaching. The key to the child's progress was the type of experience he encountered in school. As Putman wrote, "If a child likes to go to school, if the life he lives at school is an active, happy, healthy, pleasant life, if those instinctive powers that will fit him for his social environment, are given daily opportunity for expression, then the child's progress will approach its possible maximum ... It therefore follows that a highly complex programme of studies, in harmony

65

"Painting with a Big Brush"

with the child's instincts, may be a means of accelerating his progress through the grades." With a more interesting and more humanizing curriculum, teachers developed a new meaning for education and a new purpose for schooling. Mirroring Mead and Dewey, Putman explained that when this greater variety of studies and exercises prevailed, teachers and pupils could "meet on a plane of common interests and sympathies. It is because a due alteration of appeal to the child's intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and physical nature has in an increasing degree enlisted his voluntary support and made him a willing ally in his own education."16 By appeals to the child's imagination and reason and by making the school environment and tone "sweet and sunny and wholesome and natural,"17 the child's will could thereby be adjusted towards social efficiency, the teleological goal of education as Putman and Dewey conceived it. New Education, as described by Michael Sadler, the eminent British educationist, was primarily a social phenomenon; by 1910 John Dewey was its chief spokesman in North America.18 The school became the central arena in which the idea of, and commitment to, community was forged. This community had to have a common moral purpose which would transcend class differences. Within the community social roles would be learned and meanings would be created in the interaction of members of the community with each other and with their environment, which would help define the self-consciousness and future calling of the student. The teacher, as Dewey wrote in "My Pedagogic Creed," would be a social servant, dedicated to "the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."19 Vocational education, manual training, gardening, or what he termed "occupations," were particularly suitable environments for helping the students acquire a sense of collective purpose and through their activities create social roles for themselves. According to Dewey, occupations determined the mode of activity and thus controlled the formation and use of habits. They directed the mental life of the participant and entered into his emotional and intellectual traits. They thus transformed the child. He would gain increasing ability to meet novel situations through habits of intelligent response and, at the same time, as a socialized individual, would find his happiness and well-being in harmonious association with others. The occupations that pre-eminently gave this ground of experience for the child were handwork activities, such as carpentry, weaving, cooking, sewing, and metal work. In School and Society, Dewey described how they were integrated with other studies and were used to open up effective instruction in the tools of learning - reading, writing, and arithmetic - which were related to the developmental stage of the child and to the demands of the activity the child was engaged in. Dewey's "genetic psychology," then, was designed to explain the formation of mental patterns in varied social occupations throughout history, and he further explained

66 Chapter Four

these pursuits as "reconstructions" or "transformations" of more primitive occupations. His psychology was also an expression of liberal social philosophy in which an ideal of growth towards self-realization was experienced by persons in society and through society. A new individualism was envisaged, which held the promise, as Thayer summarizes, of "working out the ways in which persons might engage in intelligent and imaginative occupations with a sense of purpose and value in a social order becoming increasingly organized, collectivistic, and economically deterministic."20 According to the tenets of functional psychology and social behaviourism, then, two major criteria, both based on evolutionary concepts, were established as curricular guides for New Educators. One was the needs of the pupil - for play, for activity, for self-expression. The other was the needs of society. Although Putman consistently urged that the former criterion was superior, the latter increasingly determined and limited the opportunity of the pupil to participate in the transformation of his experiences. That the needs of society were clearly important to Putman may be seen in the lengthy campaign he waged with the Ottawa public and Canadian youth in general in which he criticized their bias towards any kind of job that would soil their hands. He used "nature's laws" as well as socio-economic conditions, especially just after World War I, to argue that "man must sweat for his daily bread ... We are short on food and men to produce it, short on houses and men to build them, short on clothing and people to make it, short on everything fundamental to real prosperity and long on men young and old who want a soft job, preferably one with the Government where persistence and agitation may secure fairly good pay for a minimum of service." Both society and the school had set up false standards of measurement. "We have not sufficiently exalted the dignity and value to the state of the manual arts ... We have not created a social atmosphere where a man who bakes good bread or one who makes good coats and who thereby earns a comfortable living for his family while performing a first-rate service for society ranks socially higher than a third-rate clerk or a fourth-rate professional man, neither of whom earns a decent living and both of whom society can do without."21 Despite the two naturalistic constraints, Putman still affirmed the necessity in a democracy for a broad cultural education, a large measure of choice, local freedom to determine the program of studies, and a course in civil government to gain an understanding of the workings of the democratic system. He argued, therefore, that under the British constitutional tradition any effort by the central government to impose on an unwilling public Ontario's Adolescent School Attendance Act of 1919, which extended the age of compulsory schooling from fourteen to sixteen, was doomed to failure. "And public opinion will never approve of holding adolescents at school unless it can be shown that the school can do more toward preparing them for the duties of citizenship than the home, the shop, the office or the factory," he warned.22 The major avenues offered Ottawa public school students to learn to

67

"Painting with a Big Brush"

become democratic citizens were either in the forms of artistic or utilitarian self-expression - eurhythmies and folk-dancing, music, manual training, domestic science, and pottery - or in the forms of control of nature and the community - gardening, geography, and community projects. The student's freedom for self-determination, therefore, was limited to cultural or environmental fields. And, as will be shown later, such an emphasis was placed on counteracting the snobbery of the outside community to intellectual or "bookish" subjects that Putman's utilitarianism, emanating from the influence of Dewey's social behaviourism, tended to overcome his stated idealistic, moral, and spiritual aims. The schools became truly pragmatic, instrumentally preparing citizens to conform to the social needs of society. They became vehicles of social control rather than liberating agencies creating mature human persons. As noted earlier, even the forms of self-expression cultivated in the arts were tinged with a large dose of moral utilitarianism, although expressed in idealistic language. At the end of World War I, for example, Florence Jamieson offered a new course in eurhythmies and folk-dancing to the primary grades. As she explained in her supervisor's report, "By Eurhythmies we mean the art of expressing the rhythm of music through bodily motion - or a form of gymnastics which seeks to follow the Greek ideal of dancing and by training the sense of rhythm to develop and balance the mind ... The second part of our work is Folk Dancing, the free and joyous musical games which are characteristic of the different nations ... only the best classical music is used ... This is a point not to be overlooked when Jazz seems to reign supreme."23 During the summers of 1918 and 1919 the board paid Miss Jamieson's full salary and expenses while she completed a physical education training course in Toronto. Later she and several other teachers were sent to Columbia University, New York, and to Harvard to take courses in natural dance movement, folk-dancing, and physical education.24 Children performed these rhythmic movements and folk-dances in public at annual concerts. An article in the Ottawa Citizen outlined the rhythmic exercises of relaxation, step and point, flying, courtesy and bow, which took place at one concert. The reporter then described "A Song of the Robin," which two hundred primary pupils performed, as follows: "Children playing in garden hear robin singing. They find him in a tree. He flies away and they are disappointed, but they listen to his singing and then see him hopping on the ground." This expression of naturalism in dance form was supposed to have "great influence ... in the child's life to appreciate the beautiful."25 The idealistic rhetoric was later toned down, but the important contribution made by Miss Jamieson in developing rhythm, poise, and co-operation in schoolchildren and in stimulating their interest in music through the rhythmic movement classes was acknowledged by Putman in a speech to parents at one of the annual music concerts.26 Other members of the music department received accolades as well.

68

"Painting with a Big Brush"

"Jimmy" Smith, the ebullient supervisor of singing, was cited for his personal qualities of good humour and optimism. "When he enters a classroom whether it be a primary, intermediate or senior grade he is greeted with smiles of approval. No higher tribute can be paid to a teacher."27 As a result of the esprit de corps created by this dynamic Scottish leader, hearty rote singing took place for fifteen minutes daily in every classroom. Because of his competent supervision quality improved. Massed choirs sang to large audiences in Dey's Arena each year. Great choruses of "Ye Mariners of England," "Hearts of Oak," "A Song of Canada," "The Sea Is Britain's Glory," and "The Marseillaise" stoked the imperialist-nationalist sentiments of the audience during wartime."28 School choirs competed yearly before provincial supervisor A.T. Cringen. He was quoted as saying that "the singing he had just heard was not surpassed by any public school body in Canada and congratulated the Ottawa Public School Board for its forward attitude towards the teaching of music in the schools."29 In 1919 Ottawa pioneered the introduction of group violin classes under the direction of Donald Heins. In an address to the Ontario Educational Association four years later, he explained his group techniques, which he had brought to North America from England.30 His description reinforced Putman's conception of music as having an important disciplinary value for the corporate social life of the school as well as giving special training to those who had exceptional talent.31 Public school teachers with some musical background were coached on Saturday mornings for a year. After gaining a working knowledge of the instrument, they circulated around the classes where the children were "placed in Strathcona formation, about four feet apart."32 According to this militaristic Mitchell method (developed in Boston schools), children were ranked. The best students were placed in a master class and formed the nucleus of a school orchestra, which was established in 1923 with fifty-four violins, two clarinets, two cornets, flute, and drums. By this time 420 children were being instructed by Heins and his fifteen assistant teachers. In 1927 Lt W.B. Finlayson was engaged to give brass and woodwind instruction. His junior and senior bands competed regularly in festivals and exhibitions, and the young bandsmen were cited for their "prompt obedience, precision, alertness and close co-operation ... evidence of the genuine educational and disciplinary value of the training Lieut. Finlayson has been authorized by the school board to give."33 The following year group piano lessons were begun in two schools and by 1931 eighteen pupils were able to give creditable public performances.34 Aside from their refining influence and importance in building up corporate harmony in the schools, these music classes were used effectively as propaganda by Putman. He considered the school exhibitions and concerts to be important vehicles to acquaint parents with the new aims and activities of

69

"Painting with a Big Brush"

the school. The high quality of the performances helped win allies among school board members and ratepayers, who supported him in attacks made on the "school frills and fads."35 Other teachers and professionals across the province were urged to emulate Ottawa's music program when the orchestra or choir performed at teachers' institutes,36 or at the OEA convention in Toronto.37 As Putman explained, "Without a sympathetic board of trustees backed up by public opinion the teaching of music at the expense of the ratepayers would be a dismal failure. It is, however, very significant and very encouraging that the number of taxpayers who make even mild protests is less year by year."38 A high-quality consumer product had been successfully marketed, taste for jazz had been quashed, at least within the precincts of the school, and the public of Ottawa had been educated towards a higher standard of musical taste. But at the same time the musical expression of the public school pupils of Ottawa was severely programmed in the direction of elitist values and a group ethic. Woe betide the musical hopes of those music lovers whom Heins had classed in the lower third and fourth categories: "third, unmusical, but anxious to acquire - plodders; fourth, do not even remember the names of notes, their position on the staff and finger-boards, will not give their minds, desire to play as the rest of the class plays, but will not make the necessary effort ... There [also] are incorrigibles and these usually drop out of the classes as withered fruit is blown from the tree."39 In three other spheres, school gardening, nature study, and geography, the public school pupils of Ottawa were given exceptional opportunities for active experiences to develop their practical intelligence, albeit again in socially harmonious directions. Given his interest in gardening and the efforts he had made at the Ottawa Model School to establish a school garden, it is not surprising that Putman soon had pupils and teachers growing bulbs supplied by the board. He was not alone in this drive for school gardening. A number of groups and individuals in Ottawa had been actively campaigning in this direction, particularly a former president of the Ottawa Field Naturalists, R.B. White, who in 1908 recalled the successful gardening schools established by Macdonald in nearby Carleton County and urged parents of the First Avenue School to duplicate them in Ottawa.40 The gardens in Carleton County had been well advertised in a lengthy article written by Inspector R.H. Cowley in the Queen's Quarterly.41 Their supervisor, J.W. Gibson, who had been a student at Queen's and a colleague of Putman's at the Ottawa Normal School, later wrote two extensive and detailed articles on the gardens at the normal school.42 In the midst of the war the Ontario legislature understandably refused a petition of the city of Ottawa to spend twenty-five thousand dollars in purchasing and equipping a large community farm.43 Putman, instead, began public school gardens with a small plot loaned by St Andrew's Church. The

yo

"Painting with a Big Brush"

next year the board purchased a one-acre plot from the church for thirteen thousand dollars. In response to several vigorous critics Putman argued that it was "highly desirable that every Canadian child should learn to appreciate the importance of agriculture and horticulture and through actual contact with things that grow come into sympathetic relations with the basic industries of the country."44 He gave three more reasons for school gardening in a later article for the Agricultural Gazette. His recommendation to make this purchase was based on "(i) a conviction that many things which all city children ought to know can be taught only through an actual experience; (2) a belief in the same principle which has given us manual training rooms and domestic science rooms for the education of children through their motor activities; (3) the same principle that moves us to provide laboratory practice for students in physics, chemistry or biology." Significantly children now worked together as a class on one of the twenty-eight plots of vegetables and flowers instead of each child having responsibility for individual plots as under the Macdonald garden scheme. As Putman remarked, 'The plan has obvious advantages ... It encourages group work and insures that every plot will be properly looked after."45 This was the democratic ethic that Putman and Dewey were striving to instil in pupils. By 1921 Putman believed his goal was being achieved: Through the school garden we are aiming to educate the pupil by observation of natural facts and to develop a greater love for the beauty in nature, and thus to stimulate or create an interest in gardening. That we are, at least, reaching out toward the fulfilment of this aim is shown by the interest manifested on the part of the pupils, not only during regular lessons, but also during the vacation months when attendance is voluntary.46

Other communal measures were adopted by the Ottawa public schools, which encouraged the pupils to behave as responsible citizens in a scientific mode. A call for greater food production during wartime by the Dominion agricultural commissioner in 1916 led to the establishment of fourteen Home Garden Clubs by the school board. The clubs were assisted by the local Horticultural Society and later by teachers, nine of whom were provincially certified to teach agriculture by 1921. At this time Ottawa public schools were receiving $7,142.26 in grants for their gardening work.47 The Home Garden Clubs dwindled after the war, but by 1938 two school gardens were still running and fifteen hundred children from form three (grades five and six) were using them. In 1914 E.T. Slemon, a former colleague of Putman's at the Ottawa Normal School and a Queen's graduate, was appointed to the Ottawa Public School Board as a second inspector. His major curricular task was to encourage nature study in all classrooms. Within two years of his appointment he had written a twenty-page booklet on the subject, which was circulated

7i

"Painting with a Big Brush"

throughout the province.48 He distributed seeds, bulbs, and live animals in cages among the city schools, began the custom of borrowing stuffed specimens, particularly birds, from the Victoria Museum, and encouraged students to attend the lecture series at the museum.49 In the School for Higher English he started classes in botany, zoology, and physics, the beginnings of what was to become elementary general science, and appealed in 1918 for more experimental apparatus in this and other Ottawa public schools. His more socialized methods of instruction were illustrated by his remark that what was now needed in nature study was "not so much a collection of facts, as facts, though few, linked up through observation and class discussion with other facts already in the children's possession"50 - in other words, facts correlated to the children's experiences. For several years Ottawa pupils had participated in essay contests sponsored by the Humane Society. In an effort to halt the destructive tendencies of boys, the society in 1917 offered a competition in birdhouse construction. The manual-training department of the Ottawa public schools outdid previous individual essay efforts with a prize winner from Hopewell School winning the highest number of prizes for his twenty houses. All the houses were sold for the Red Cross Fund and seventy-five dollars was raised. The next year seventy dollars was donated to the Prisoners of War Fund from the sale of other birdhouses. These nature study and manual-training enterprises, as well as numerous kindergarten-primary practices, prepared the public school student for a novel curricular experience of the 19205, the community studies project. Although William Heard Kilpatrick's famous essay "The Project Method" was not published in the Teachers College Record until 1918, Kilpatrick acknowledged that as early as 1893, in the best Pestalozzian tradition, he was applying the method to his geography field trips,51 much as Putman several years later had done with his students from the Model School. Ontario teachers were also exposed to the idea in numerous issues of The School,52 which discussed the project as applied to mathematics, geography, history, agriculture, and elementary methods in general. The annual meetings of the OEA, especially in 1922, featured addresses on the subject.53 Ottawa parents first became aware of this new socialized teaching method in 1921 when they beheld "community work" for the first time. As a reporter for the Ottawa Journal wrote on 25 June, "The community spirit was in evidence everywhere." At Laurier Avenue School, for instance, there was "a miniature circus done by the girls in grade two. The tents, the animals, the ferns wheel, the big wagons, were all there making it look very real." At Slater Street School a "little Japanese village showing the Japanese mode of travel, their little tea-houses, and many other features proved very attractive." Miss Pettit, a grade five teacher at Wellington Street School, had her boys construct a circus parade, "complete from the animals to the horses and

72

Chapter Four

driver, and built in a realistic way from quarter-inch wood and wire."54 This was later displayed at the Central Canada Exhibition.55 The next year her boys built a model farm, which attracted considerable attention at the exhibition for "its originality and cleverness."56 The school's June exhibition that year featured models of an Indian village and an Egyptian desert scene. Mention of community projects first appeared in 1921 in the annual report of Caleb Metcalf, supervisor of manual training.57 Slemon discussed them under the heading "Supplied or Self-Help." The tendency is towards allowing pupils to play a more vigorous part in school life. The teachers stimulate and in a general way give direction to the heuristic efforts of their pupils. The modern "project method" just now so much in vogue in the schools in the United States, is but a new emphasis put upon the best practice of teachers of all time. It is but the selecting of an objective, generally suggested by the teacher, and such a division of labour between teacher and pupils as will make that objective or aim attainable. It is help and self-help. The teacher still has much to do.

In his ensuing description emphasis was placed on the need of the teacher to be thoroughly prepared concerning knowledge of the subject being investigated and the stage of development of the pupils. Both were the requirements of creating an environment where the students could be self-active, "for without it, there can be no real development; but the activity must be conserved, correlated, and directed to useful ends by the teachers."58 In this Canadian version of the project method, the teacher kept close reins on the direction of self-activity and the development of the pupils. The community project itself acted as another instrument of social unification. The community models were kept alive by individual teachers in ensuing years. They were described in newspaper reports of exhibitions in 1928, 1930, and I934.59 Perhaps they were spurred on by a visit from Kilpatrick to the Ottawa Teachers' Institute in 1929 and by an address on project teaching by F.E. Coombs of the University of Toronto.60 Although Kilpatrick's main address was entitled "Behaviour Problems," from an account in the Ottawa Morning Journal it seemed to be largely about the meaning of experience in the everyday life of the child. As the editor remarked, Kilpatrick's ideas by this time were "not so revolutionary, at any rate to the Ottawa teachers, as he anticipated." Quoting Putman on the purpose of the elementary school, which was "as far as possible, to all the children of all the people an understanding of the social and economic life about them, and to fit them later to play an honourable and useful part in that life," he noted that Kilpatrick's tilts at the exam-bound system of education in Ontario were successfully foiled by principals in the audience who could quote statistics and recent government policy showing that the personality of the teacher and the character development of the pupil were now considered much more important. The fact

73 "Painting with a Big Brush"

that average attendance in Ottawa public schools was by then well over 90 per cent attested to the fact that "the curriculum is of such interest to the children that they are 'living right now', and according to the best desires of the distinguished American educationist."61 The question could be asked, If the children were "living right now" in a socialized world in which they mainly "experienced" interesting activities, how could Putman continue to argue that a hierarchical moral rationale grounded his program of studies? Was not his pragmatism at variance with his idealism? In order to answer this, a diversion will be necessary into another expression of the New Education movement, the 1913 report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, chaired by James W. Robertson, New Education's leading exponent and a close personal friend of Putman's.62 Despite Robertson's reputation as an idealist, the missionary campaign he waged on behalf of New Education had had strong utilitarian overtones. As E.J. Pavey relates, Robertson believed that Canada's national progress depended on scientific education.63 His recommendations for educational reform therefore were directed towards stabilizing agricultural production and encouraging the development of industrialism. The goal of the MacdonaldRobertson pilot projects was the improvement of the quality of agriculture. The consolidation of rural schools, nature study, and school gardening served as object lessons in the modern scientific principles of agriculture; seed selection, crop rotation, and insect and weed repellents were promoted by the gardens in the rural schools. In 1905 James Cappon, a professor at Queen's, praised Macdonald's liberal contributions to education, particularly agricultural education, in Canada. Cappon recognized that owing to "the development of scientific methods in industry ... democratic changes in our social condition and ... the keen commercial competition into which the nations have entered with each other ... [the] traditional system [of education] has become inadequate and must be replaced or at any rate supported by something more scientific." He agreed with Robertson that the schools should be used to correct Canada's problem of rural depopulation. But he criticized the corollary of Robertson's practical education campaign, its anti-intellectualism. Robertson's general theory of education, he considered, did not seem to him "to be quite safe or sound as a whole ... he seems to be still under the influence of fallacies, some of which belong to the old theories of the Utilitarian school of Bain and Spencer about education, while others represent the new pedagogical tendency to set up 'concrete' methods and the object-lesson in opposition to literary and abstract methods in intellectual training." Agreeing with his colleague John Watson, Cappon pointed out that a number of social, ethical, and intellectual problems of our civilization could be solved only by students trained in logic, higher order values, and the more subtle forms of the communicative arts which a

74 Chapter Four

literary education could give. He warned that a "system of education which neglects this literary side however excellent otherwise, must have the effect of slowly but surely lowering the standard of citizenship."64 Robertson denied his anti-literary bias in a subsequent article,65 but his New Education magnum opus, the four-volumed report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, provided ample testimony for Cappon's charges. However, this was not surprising considering Canada's stage of development. As Robert Stamp and Neil Sutherland have shown,66 the pressure on the Laurier government to aid technical education had been intense in the first decade of the new century. Business organizations, such as the Ottawa and Toronto Boards of Trade and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association, had petitioned the federal government about the urgency of Canada's declining productivity and inablility to compete on world markets. In answer to Prime Minister Laurier's objections that education constitutionally was a provincial concern, they argued that under section 91 of the British North America Act technical education fell under the heading of general trade and commerce of the country.67 Fortunately Canada's new minister of labour, Mackenzie King, had been working behind the scenes on the reluctant Cabinet and the hesitant provincial premiers and was able to convince them that a survey was essential. On i June 1910 an order-in-council was passed establishing a royal commission to inquire into the needs and present equipment of Canada regarding industrial training and technical education and to survey the technical education systems of other countries. A distinguished group was appointed to serve under the chairman, Robertson, and immediately began its investigation. After travelling extensively in Canada, the United States, and Europe, visiting over 100 places, and holding more than 174 sessions, the commissioners submitted a preliminary statement to the minister in March 1911. It reflected the general discontent in Canada with the products of the schools and called for a more practical training which would fit students for their life's work. The commissioners concluded that Canada was falling behind in industrial efficiency and that it was necessary to make her adolescents more effective workmen. In 1913 and 1914 the final four-volume report was published. Sutherland concludes that "in a very real sense the royal commission was the climax of the ... [Macdonald-Robertson movement]. The ideas and demonstrations of the movement were a central theme of the evidence, of the brief, and of the commission's recommendations." As a result the report was far more than just a narrow study of vocational education. Rather, it gave a thorough survey of the state of Canadian education at that time. Sutherland termed it "a blue-print for the implementation in Canada of the 'new' education."68 An analysis of its rationale, then, would provide an insight into the Canadian intellectual foundations of the movement. The commissioners concluded that three major problems afflicted Canada's

75

"Painting with a Big Brush"

industrial efficiency: lack of industrial training and technical education, dissatisfied workers and disaffected youth, and laissez-faire development.69 The dual problems of how to bring about efficiency and achieve national unity at the same time, they concluded, had been solved in Germany. The commissioners judged that the causes of that country's national progress were idealistic, the result of the German character, spirit of unselfishness, and devotion to an idea.70 In Germany education "appeared to us to be regarded as a great national service whereby all the individuals are being trained towards ability for their respective occupations in the interest of the State. The personal power and well-being of the units of the community are looked after for the sake of the State."71 On the other hand, reflecting the concerns of Canada's Commission of Conservation of which Robertson was then a member, the commissioners stated that the "most important asset in any State is the value of the individual citizens themselves ... the conservation of life and ability in the individual workers is supreme" (1:17-18). The individual, finding self-fulfilment within his occupation, was the best safeguard against the "obtrusively commercial and industrial" (1:14) objectives which at that time prevailed in society. In the opinion of the commissioners, "the school becomes the only agency available to provide the supplementary training for the all-round equipment of young people for occupations and citizenship" (2:148). Echoing Dewey, the commissioners asserted that education had two chief functions, biological and social. The former led to the growth and development of the individual; the latter, to his adaptation to his environment.72 Again reflecting Dewey's humanism, the chief aim of education was not vocational training; instead, it was the development of the powers of the people for cultural purposes. This development was to be achieved through a general education, which meant "formal studies in reading, writing, drawing and arithmetic, together with the experiences got from association with others in work, in play and in social intercourse, which have developed the powers of mind and body and have furnished the knowledge possessed by the individual." Attention should be paid to the health, "harmonious growth," laws of learning, and social skills of the children. Significantly, the commissioners advised that it was "important that proper standards of conduct and character should be maintained and that high ideals should be followed" (1:9). They recommended that elementary education, therefore, should be enriched and extended to include a greater variety of practical and aesthetic subjects. Manual training, for instance, the commissioners believed, should have a recognized place in the course of study from kindergarten to the child's twelfth year. They pleaded its inclusion on both idealistic and biological grounds. It was important "for cultural or self-realization purposes." It also provided necessary hand-eye training, which "is a means of developing the

76 Chapter Four sense organs and of training faculties and powers to meet the things and forces of the outer world with intelligent discriminations" (1:10). Manual training had utilitarian value as well. Since most pupils left school at fourteen, the manual-training component of the program of studies would awaken their interest and give them a taste for constructive work. It would thereby capture and develop their voluntary will and co-operation in the cause of productive work.73 In short it would serve as a pre-vocational preparation for industrial life. For both social and economic reasons, then, they strongly recommended the incorporation of New Education subjects into the general education program. "The Commission is of the opinion that the teaching of drawing, manual training, nature study, experimental science and pre-vocational work including domestic or household science in elementary schools, is of great importance and value and should be provided for generally" (1:11). But, as noted with the programs of Dewey and Putman, those advocated by the commissioners were not meant for individual self-expression per se but for social unification. This was to be achieved by means of psychological and emotional adjustments carefully controlled by the schools. The education program needed to foster "joy" in young people for the "processes" of labour rather than for crass wage returns, "pleasure" in working co-operatively with others in the service of a common cause, "gladness" through creative, constructive occupations leading to aesthetic or utilitarian forms of expression, and a respect for the home as a "temple, a place of culture for the best in human life." Through "play" the child would joyfully acquire the arts of reading, writing, and "reckoning" (1:15). Teachers would then have more time to attend to the health, habits, and standards of efficiency of the pupils. Continuing in the same socio-economic vein, the commissioners envisaged the goal of industrial education as qualifying all individuals for a satisfactory, productive life of service to their fellow citizens. The problem, however, was to find an occupation suitable to the personality of each individual and to prepare him to follow it with satisfaction and to the benefit of the community. For, the "interest of the State, as such, is that the individuals who compose it should be healthy, intelligent, capable, animated by goodwill towards their fellows and that they should be able and willing to fill their places in the community, as citizens discharging their duties and preserving their rights, as individuals in the economy of life, and as earners contributing to the material prosperity of the State" (i: 16). Industrial training and technical education were considered to be chief means to this end. Aside from reasons of national unity and prosperity, these programs also served to prolong the "authoritative supervision" of adolescents until their eighteenth year, allowing the schools more time to train them towards a variety of paths. The commissioners acknowledged that different types of vocational training were needed for industrial and rural workers, for females and males. Differentiation of occupations and abilities needed a differentiated

77

"Painting with a Big Brush"

program of studies. To prevent disintegration of the social cohesion of the community under this potentially divisive stratification, even more emphasis was placed on socially acceptable behaviour. From the eight aims of industrial training and technical education cited in the report, seven could be termed behavioural modification towards the goal of social integration. Whereas earlier reformers had argued the advantages of manual-training classes for all pupils to help them appreciate the manufacturing processes and gain a broader view of life in the twentieth century, a new breed of reformers arose who, claims B. Edward McClellan, recast the whole question of vocation and schooling. Operating out of a radically new perspective on the place of vocation in the society, these twentieth-century theorists were increasingly less inclined to view specialization and occupational differentiations as inherently significant barriers to the development of character and the achievement of cohesion. Thus, they endorsed educational schemes that mirrored the new differentiation and taught men to find personal fulfillment by choosing a proper task and performing it well. And, instead of trying to mute vocational distinctions, they sought to legitimize them; their hopes for cohesion lay not in imposing a common set of values across vocational boundaries but rather in teaching a proper respect for the boundaries themselves.74

A new meaning was created for "equal opportunity," Robertson and his commissioners claimed. It meant serving all pupils, not with the same program, but with one that prepared them for the occupations they were to follow. Thus continuation classes would be based on similarity of interests or identity, not on age or academic attainment.75 Vocational guidance would be needed to help children find the kind of work for which they were best suited.76 Reflecting Edward Thorndike's concept of individual differences, the commissioners cited certain pioneer schools in the United States which varied even their methods of instruction, particularly to suit bright pupils whose time was often wasted in the regular classroom.77 At the other end of the scale those fourteen year olds who were "designed for the work world" should have a much heavier dose of manual training to give them broad motor training and insight into the laws of mechanics (2:100). Despite the extensive curricular reforms cited by the commissioners and their pleas for leaders to promote this cause of New Education and to awaken public support, their recommendations on the institution itself were most conservative. They advised retention of existing systems of education, institutions, and classes. They aimed for co-operation; opposition, they believed, led to loss of effectiveness. And they recommended keeping the initiative and control of education largely in local, rather than in centralized, departmental hands. Local interest would thus be retained, high standards of efficiency maintained, and stability assured. Yet their underlying objective

78 Chapter Four was coercive: keep the rural youth on the farm and women in the home.78 As Paul Craven has pointed out, the intellectual orientation of the rising generation of social scientists was to find a basis of harmony between worker and the liberal capitalist economy.79 The state was to take a positive leadership role promoting a new social order without classes. The state therefore allied itself, as noted earlier, with the public interest, which was to improve technical training to the benefit of the whole society. The most efficient way to effect this change was to let experts advise on the practical standards necessary and then condition youth to obey the gospel of duty and adapt themselves to the current needs of society. It was an organic yet pragmatic conception of society, wedding the idealism of Watson and Caird to the social behaviourism and functional psychology of Dewey and James. Its utilitarianism significantly determined the future paths of Canadian students. The Manual Arts School established by Putman provided a case in point. In 1912 he estimated that at least 200 out of every 725 who entered school were laggards and would drop out by grade eight. Aside from his system-wide curricular reforms, something was needed for those pupils who would be "most naturally and easily educated through some manual occupation ... What we need and what we must have are special classes for those pupils who can be most effectively trained through handwork. These special classes will give, not an hour and a half a week, but half of each day to some handwork."80 The classes were to be designed particularly for boys between eleven and fourteen whose interest in school work was flagging. The handwork that Putman suggested included both manual-training classes - using wood, cardboard, raffia, and clay as media - and vocationaltraining courses - using the media copper, tin, and leather and tools and equipment such as the bandsaw, the lathe, and the printing press. Strictly speaking, under Ontario's Industrial Education Act of 1911, these courses should have been taught in a special industrial school managed by a local industrial advisory committee. But, as related in the previous chapter, the Ottawa Collegiate Board had effectively prevented the establishment of this committee. In 1911, however, provincial measures were afoot to increase pressure on local municipalities to take up this initiative. F. W. Merchant was sent by the Ontario government in 1912-13 to study systems of industrial and technical education in Great Britain, the Continent, and the United States. On his return he was made director of industrial and technical education, replacing Albert Leake, the manual-training inspector. Leake was appointed director of manual training and domestic science, responsible for subjects classed only as "cultural" and practical, strictly pre-vocational, and under the control of existing school boards. In his report on manual-training classes in Ottawa in May 1913, Leake expressed surprise that printing equipment, a Gordon press purchased five

79

"Painting with a Big Brush"

months earlier, had been installed for the use of boys in the fifth form; "as far as I am aware," he wrote, "the regulations and acts make no provision for such a course under the Public School Board or for the expenditure of the fund for this purpose."81 Three weeks later the Ottawa Public School Board formally approved the recommendations of the School Management Committee to establish "a special school to be known as the Ottawa Manual Arts School [to] be opened in the Waller Street Building."82 It was to be equipped for special work in manual training and domestic science, and its pupils, with the consent of their parents, were to be drawn from forms three and four (grades five to eight), had to be twelve years old or more, and, in the judgment of their principals, were likely to benefit from a curriculum consisting mainly of handwork. Over the summer special rooms were fitted out in the Waller Street School; two sewing machines, twenty sets of pottery models, a pottery kiln, and copper work equipment were purchased. In June a delegation of teachers was sent to Rochester, New York, to see the arts school there on which the Waller Street School was to be modelled. Putman himself went on an extensive tour of cities in the United States and wrote a series of newspaper articles in 1913 outlining their special facilities in manual training, domestic science, and auxiliary education, which will be discussed in the next chapter. By September 1913 seventy pupils were enrolled, Miss A.G. Sutherland was appointed principal with Mr L. White her first assistant, Mr A. Crowson was put in charge of manual training, and Miss Helen Pews was to look after domestic science. It was advertised as a trade school for boys and girls "who do not expect to go beyond the public school... it is proposed to give fourteen or fifteen hours a week each, to handwork, and book work."83 After the school had operated for four months, Ottawa's supervisor of manual training, Caleb Metcalf, outlined the type of vocational training being given. It included printing - the setting of type and use of the printing press mechanical drawing, practical work in wood, sheet copper, and brass, and simple clay pottery. In his 1914 report Putman's enthusiastic description of the Waller Street School betrayed his own underlying motives for setting up the school, which were longer retention of pupils in school and social conditioning of concrete-minded boys and girls towards contentment with their allotted roles in life. We have there between 130 and 140 pupils and I am safe in saying that half of these pupils, who are 14 years of age or nearly so, would not be at school at all if they had been left in the regular grades. They are now contented and enthusiastic partly because they are making marked progress and also because they are with children of their own age with whom they have common interests. They are making marked progress partly because they are in small classes and receive much individual instruction, partly because the subject-matter of the lessons appeals to their interests and partly because

8o Chapter Four they are receiving much more instruction in handwork than is given in the ordinary school. For the girls the courses given here are, I think, almost ideal. No literary or book instruction given in other schools has been sacrificed but in addition the girls are learning how to manage a home. Instruction in cooking, sewing, and drawing occupies nearly half of each day. For boys the course, in my opinion, is less satisfactory. While the boy spends nearly half time on handwork he is too much restricted in his choice of this work.84

The next year Putman reiterated his long-term plans to have the school become a trade school for boys and a practical home-management school for girls. Because their roles were so different, he could see an advantage in separating the sexes, something the Management Committee recommended in 1916. The original segregation of concrete-minded pupils from the regular stream had now become even more specialized according to function. Overage girls in grades five, six, and seven were to be placed in special classes in three schools and a program of studies organized which gave them extra time for household science. The Manual Arts School was now solely for boys and a male principal, D.S. Kemp, was appointed. Over eight hundred dollars was requested in further equipment, manual-training benches and tools and a band saw, indicating Putman's hopes for future expansion. Public opinion, at least judged by newspaper accounts of exhibitions and crowds of spectators, appeared to support the Manual Arts School. It was termed a "remarkable success" in 1915. On 18 June the Ottawa Citizen described the comfortable, home-like rooms, the up-to-date equipment, the great interest taken by the pupils in their studies, and their amazing progress. The reporter believed that it "has been proved that backward pupils learn very quickly when they are taken from their classes in other schools and brought to this school." The next year on 8 May a reporter for the Citizen expressed great surprise about the quality of handwork the children were producing, especially the pottery. "Probably the most interesting branch of the exhibition was the pottery. There were on display vases, dishes, candlesticks and jars of all descriptions, which looked, in many cases, as if they had come from a china shop. When it is considered that the children, design, mold, bake and glaze the articles themselves it is doubly wonderful." Apparently this pottery class was the only one in Canada producing glazed pottery. Prizes were offered for the best work in pottery by Joseph Keele, head of the Ceramic Division of the federal Department of Mines. Aside from the quality of the pupils' wares and the wide range of their handicrafts, the Manual Arts School was praised for its largely practical curriculum, .by then considered the most appropriate for these concreteminded youngsters. By segregating them from the academic stream, by limiting the demands made on them, and by providing them with specially

81

"Painting with a Big Brush"

trained instructors, small classes, and specialized equipment, they were able to produce high-quality household products, which convinced their parents and the Ottawa public that they were at least able to fulfil the home-making functions of good citizenship. Despite its success the Manual Arts School had to be closed in 1918 for cost reasons. R.W. Hamilton, one of the most utilitarian trustees on the Ottawa Public School Board and chairman of the board in 1919-20, regretted its closure because it had filled "a long felt need" in the school community. After praising the high-quality work it had accomplished and the great regard the Ontario Department of Education had for it, he inadvertently revealed the major reasons behind the handwork program pioneered by the Manual Arts School. In almost every school, especially in Capital Ward [Ottawa's Lower Town], in middle grade classes children are found one, two, three, and more years behind in their studies ... these children in the regular classes must continue to be detrimental to the advancement of the normal pupil, a constant care and hindrance to the teacher in her work, and at the same time lead to the development of a sub-normal child.85

By this time the Public School Board had had several years of experience with auxiliary classes for subnormal children; intelligence tests were now being used to fortify the professional's arsenal against a parent's objections. The efficient management of Putman and his staff of supervisors and specialized teachers was sufficient to convince liberal-minded taxpayers that this was the correct direction for education in a world plagued by the stresses of war and the complexities of a modern industrial state. The school had to assume the major responsibility for fitting manual labourers to the occupational needs of the state. Since the fourteen year old who left school often had no parental control and led "a feverish, unnatural life which saps their physical vitability, dulls their finer instincts and unfits them for the more serious struggles and responsibilities of manhood and womanhood,"86 it behooved the school to provide a program of sufficiently high interest to entice them away from the amusements of the city. In 1923 Putman frankly admitted that manual toil and its discipline gave the average man opportunity for his "greatest moral and intellectual conquests."87 This vision of man as an active exerter and enjoyer of his own capacities and the view of democracy as predominantly a quality of life, C.B. Macpherson has termed developmental democracy.88 From the mid-nineteenth century when this belief was first enunciated by J. S. Mill, it had offered the possibility of the improvement of mankind through an increase in the amount of personal self-development, the promise of an equal society, and the moral valuation of the individual's worth by the extent to which he developed his human capacities. This was essentially the promise offered by AngloAmerican liberal-democratic theorists and practitioners such as L.T. Hob-

82

Chapter Four

house, Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey. It grounded the "cultural-moral" rhetoric of both Robertson and Putman. It also strongly influenced their political actions, especially on the municipal scene. This was illustrated by their campaign for proportional representation. Continuing the progressive reform measures in municipal politics with which he had allied himself in 1906, Putman addressed the Ottawa Literary and Philosophical Society on the merits of proportional representation on 14 December 1915, two weeks before there was to be a municipal plebiscite on the subject. A fortnight later the Ottawa newspapers advertised the crossCanada tour of John H. Humphreys, general secretary of the British Proportional Representation Society, who was addressing Canadian Clubs. Putman, a founding member of the Ottawa Canadian Club, introduced a letter by Humphreys on the topic which appealed both to Mill's principles of greater justice and liberty and to the municipal drive for increased efficiency and control.89 Several letters to newspapers and editorials brought out reasons for and against the movement just before the plebiscite was held.90 Significantly, as Humphreys and Putman had noted, proportional representation was deemed especially suitable for heterogeneous populations, such as the one in Ireland where the Home Rule Act was to be introduced at the end of the war. One Ottawa writer pointed out the advantage this method of representation would have for Ottawa's large minority (French and Irish Roman Catholics at that time fighting over control of the separate school system). The voting strength of the minorities, he claimed, might be one-third more that that of the rest of the population and they could therefore elect two members to City Council and even have one of their members as mayor. The results of Ottawa's "civic reform on plebiscite," however, demonstrated that most citizens supported the election of members to the Board of Control by the proportional representation method (by a majority of 1,230 votes), but by a majority of 264 they defeated the reduction of wards to only three, cramping somewhat the efficiency of the reform.91 A small majority of 16 voted for the enfranchisement of women in municipal elections, and a much larger majority of 2,802 voted to have all recommendations of the Board of Control sustained unless rejected by a two-thirds vote of the City Council. A majority of 3,139 also voted to have a city manager appointed by the Board of Control. Considering these results the "front line of progressive thought" in municipal affairs, the editor of the Ottawa Citizen on 5 January 1916 congratulated the president and members of the Board of Trade, especially Robertson, now president of the Ottawa branch of the Red Cross Society, who had first moved the resolution on its municipal committee, and P.M. Draper, secretary of the Dominion Trades and Labour Congress. These changes, he remarked, quoting the president of the Board of Trade, could make Ottawa "the best managed city in Canada - bar none."

83 "Painting with a Big Brush"

Two weeks later Humphreys was in Ottawa to address the Principals' Association and the People's Forum. The address to the forum was extensively quoted in the press and revealed the underlying motives behind the movement. Within democratic countries fears over lack of representation of minority groups were increasingly being expressed. For instance, in the recent election in British Columbia 37 per cent of the population voted for the Liberal party, but not one member was elected to the provincial legislature. Its provincial government, therefore, became "the exclusive possession of a party."92 Humphreys concluded that the electoral machinery was constructed on false principles; it did not provide for the election of representatives of all citizens, merely for the majority within each electoral district. This lack of representation, Humphreys claimed, led to a weakened sense of loyalty to Parliament and to the monopoly of representation by one political group, which therefore would be more interested in the preservation of power than in free public discussion and would be tempted to divert money into its party coffers. A more permanent expression for the spirit of unity which prevailed in the British Empire and a higher evolutionary form of the democratic ideal, on the other hand, would be provided by reform of the electoral system by proportional representation. He claimed that in Canada differences between Ontario and Quebec had often been exaggerated. To illustrate a common problem, he gave statistics from provincial elections in the two provinces showing that minority votes were not truly represented in legislative seats. Also citing difficulties with organized workers in Australia, Humphreys stated that in both cases "an amicable solution of those problems is a first condition of further ordered progress within the Empire. The exaggeration which springs from our present electoral machinery delays the achievement of a national unity; it may render more difficult a peaceful solution of social problems."93 Unfortunately the Ontario provincial legislature struck out the sections on the civic manager and proportional representation from the Ottawa bill on the grounds that they were not fit subjects for special legislation. This action became the major item of business of the first meeting of the newly formed Proportional Representation Society of Canada, which met in the Ottawa Public Library on 13 February 1917. James W. Robertson was appointed president, and the national council included such distinguished names as Mackenzie King and Professor H J. Laski, as well as Putman, who also sat on the executive committee. The committee decided to communicate with the Ontario legislature regarding the Ottawa bill, but Robertson admitted that the work of the society was largely educational. The effect of the movement, like that of the civic reforms cited earlier, the educational measures of Putman, the pilot projects of Macdonald and Robertson, and the technical education recommendations of Robertson, was to present what Macpherson terms a doubly unrealistic model of democracy.

84 Chapter Four The proportional representation movement had pointed out the major flaw of this model; the party system, especially as expressed in the Canadian parliamentary system which had only two parties representing a wide range of regional and sectional interests, failed to provide the effective degree of participation that its advocates claimed. As a result it was unable to promote that personal development and moral community which were the main rationale for liberal democracy. The discontented voice of the independent farmer, who supported private enterprise but not centralized control, as well as the increased extension of the franchise, tended to weaken the responsiveness of the party system to the diverse interests of the electorate. To bring order into the system, strong, well-organized national parties emerged, which required centrally controlled party machines, power largely in the hands of the prime minister and Cabinet, and a change of function of the political system from one of response to the needs of the shifting combinations of constituents to one of mediation between two classes, those with and those without 04 property. But even class differences of interest, based on the capitalist market economy, which continued to be advocated by liberal democrats, were concealed in their idealistic model. The problem, as painted by Putman, Robertson, and King, was the lack of a pluralistic voice in political affairs. But this was a serious case of "descriptive unrealism," for it badly distorted the way the political system worked. The centrally controlled, elitist management they advocated, like the emerging two-party national political system, diminished government responsibility to the electorate and induced widespread apathy in the political process. The plebiscite promoted by the Ottawa municipal reformers would have bypassed ward representation and would have blurred class, racial, and ethnic differences by dispersing the strength of strong minority segments of the population. A consensus would have been arrived at behind closed doors and the goal of efficiency kept uppermost by the managers. The effect of the 1920 Winnipeg civic election, for instance, won on proportional representation votes, was to give added strength to anti-labour parties, which were relatively weakened after the 1919 General Strike. Increasingly American theorists of liberal democracy, whether philosophical idealists or pragmatists, claims Macpherson, lost sight of the concepts of class and exploitation on which their capitalist market economy was based.95 The problems of private economic power and individualist ideology, they thought, could be solved by the regulatory state. Pluralistic social groups would replace class issues. Beginning with early schooling, then, adjustments would be made at the level of voluntary consultation, agreement, and co-operation. The task of democracy would be to express and enforce this general will by means of representative men or citizens rather than by particular interests. The broader attitude of citizenship promoted by Dewey,

85

"Painting with a Big Brush"

Robertson, and Putman would be developed through the party system. They ignored the extent to which the systems they advocated reduced the responsiveness of government to the electorate. They failed to see the difference between the actual democratic system, which operated much like a market, though not in a competitive sense, and their idealistic developmental hopes. In Putman's case, his system-wide efficiency policies contradicted his moral aims and humanistic curricular goal. The hidden curriculum of the progressive urban school system subverted his avowed liberal-democratic political beliefs in the worth of the individual.

CHAPTER FIVE

American Models

In March 1913 Dr Putman, accompanied by Building Inspector W.B. Garvock, toured the schools of eastern and mid-western cities in the United States to investigate their most progressive policies on school administration and accommodation. The seventeen articles which Putman wrote en route for the Ottawa Citizen were designed to educate the Ottawa public and to provide supporting evidence for the reform program he was implementing. His chief concern, as well as that of the Ontario Department of Education, was to establish a more efficient school system. As a result Putman concentrated on reforms which emphasized a corporate model of administration and a unified school system, which embraced the previously separate kindergarten and secondary vocational sections. Within this unified structure he offered a much more varied program to suit a differentiated school population to be trained for a diversity of occupations. John Seath, Ontario's new superintendent of education in 1905, had realized the profound change in the province from a rural to an urban society. After numerous tours to the United States, followed by voluminous reports on his findings, he had steered departmental policy and the Whitney government towards a practical program of studies designed for the 95 per cent of the school population who would not go on to high school but would become the future workers in industry, commerce, and agriculture. By 1910 he had become increasingly committed to this vocational goal in contrast with James W. Robertson and members of his Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, who had tended to emphasize the value of cultural as well as industrial education. In passing the Industrial Education Act of 1911 and in appointing F.W. Merchant director of industrial and technical education for the province, as outlined earlier, the Ontario government had supported Seath's more utilitarian stance. As a result, by the end of 1913 twenty-nine technical and industrial classes had been established across the province, and six technical and industrial day schools had been set up in five cities.

87 American Models

But the leadership did not come merely from the Department of Education. As noted in the previous chapter, strong societal influences promoted the technical education campaign, especially during a period of substantial growth both in urban population and in manufacturing industries in Ontario. Increasing pressure had been applied on the federal and provincial governments by middle-class volunteer groups, such as the National Council of Women, the Macdonald-Robertson education movement, and the Young Women's/Men's Christian Associations, to have manual training, domestic science, and evening technical classes become part of the public school program of studies. Boards of Trade demanded a more skilled work force. The Canadian Manufacturers' Association and the Trades and Labour Congress complained to provincial governments about the lack of municipal action on this front. Departmental officials touring the United States and Europe reported at length in the annual reports of the minister of education about Ontario's backwardness in technical education. From 1905 onwards Seath and Albeit Leake, manual-training and technical inspector, shifted their thrust from the elementary to the secondary level of schooling. They advocated separate vocational schools, either industrial or commercial, to interest the large number of unskilled school drop-outs who were in blind-alley jobs. Putman's initiatives in establishing A School for Higher English and Applied Arts and the Manual Arts School were therefore supported by the department, even though, because of the recalcitrance of the Ottawa Collegiate Board, neither of them was under the aegis of a local industrial advisory committee as stipulated by the Industrial Education Act. Because industry tended to be concentrated in a few key locations and the population was increasingly centred in urban areas, Seath's policies emphasized the establishment of superior technical schools in those centres and increased the grants available for vocational and technical training and for other specialized classes. To retain the high quality and efficiency of the system, the department expanded its supervisory and regulatory functions, especially during the Conservative ministry of R.A. Pyne (1905-18). Local initiative of progressive reformers such as Putman, therefore, was constrained by increasing checks by department supervisors and inspectors, further control of textbooks, courses of study, and training and certification of teachers, and greater use of legislative grants, school laws, and regulations to force local boards to conform to departmental standards. For local reform administration, though, many of the incentive grants of the Department of Education could be used to advantage. At the time of Putman's tour of the United States, the province was firmly launched on a policy of technical education. The wealth of her strong industrial and manufacturing base supplied Ontario with both tax revenue and political strength to overcome the strong agrarian vote, which allowed the technical education promoters in the department full rein to develop a provincial technical and industrial educational system by 1914. It also gave Superinten-

88 Chapter Five

dent Seath more power over the schools than the deputy minister of education had, and it made Ontario's system one of the most centralized in Canada. Putman's observations and later administrative reforms need to be viewed against this backdrop. He and Seath reflected the preoccupation of many municipal progressives in North America with the problems of administrative efficiency, the longer retention of the adolescent in school, improved school attendance, and a more specialized and unified school system. The school was becoming more adapted to the economic needs of society. According to David Tyack, division of labour and centralized control characterized the measures of the American administrative progressive at this time.1 The new school managers amassed a great quantity of "scientific" statistical data to support their "expert" reform measures. They also established networks with middle-class urban progressives, as Putman had through his membership in the Scottish Rite Masons, Rotary Club, and Canadian Club, to build up a consensus of public opinion about the merits of their programs. With the increased rail, road, business, and professional links being forged between Canada and the United States at this time, as well as the widespread distribution of leading American newspapers, periodicals, annual reports of urban school boards, and professional journals, these progressive ideas were quickly disseminated to Canadian school reformers. Even their wives helped spread the message. The Ottawa Local Council of Women, the Young Women's Christian Association, and other church and denominational volunteer organizations promulgated the message of centralization of control and specialization of function. Widely advertised surveys of school systems, for example, one conducted in New York City in 1913, categorized the elements of these progressive administrative changes, all of which Putman had implemented within five years of attaining office, despite Toronto's centralized control. The question might be asked, How was this accomplished? One main instrument used by progressive school boards to effect these reform measures was the hiring of a chief superintendent, such as the one in Boston who, Putman wrote, "is supposed to be an expert of high standing and great administrative ability."2 He was hired from outside, thus assuring Boston citizens that they would get the best possible service. Putman approved of the wide powers given these American school superintendents and obviously modelled his own strongly paternalistic role as well as his later recommendation for a school superintendent for Vancouver on the American ideal. As he wrote about the superintendent of the city of Indianapolis, In this city the superintendent, who is appointed for a four year term, is practically a school Caesar during his term of office. He appoints not only his own assistants and his supervisors, but every teacher employed, and the board can override his nominations only with an 80 per cent. vote. He determines the course of study and the methods of

89 American Models instruction. As might be expected, he is held strictly responsible for the efficiency of the work done, and, if he were to abuse his trust, would stand no chance of re-election.

Putman recognized that such a system worked well with "capable, honest and fearless men" but was open to political opportunism in the hands of mediocre administrators.3 Reflecting both his neo-Hegelian bent and the corporate model of efficiency which he admired, Putman commended the unified school system of Boston. One school committee administered services to schools in the elementary, secondary, technical, special, evening, and even Roman Catholic sectors. With this more unified system, there was "no division of authority, no overlapping, and no unnecessary duplication of classes." In another observation, which mirrored the Protestant bias of the Ontario Department of Education (it had just passed the infamous regulation 17 forcing English-language instruction and public school regulations and courses on all French separate schools in Ontario), Putman wrote that Catholic laymen in Boston, like the Irish-Catholic population of Ottawa who had begun their battle for a more efficient separate school system, were "well satisfied with the present plan and would offer a determined opposition to sectarian schools."4 Putman's lifelong campaign for one board of education for Ottawa and his opposition to separate schools were based on this more efficient American modeL Putman did not, however, object to differentiation within this unified structure. In Washington, DC, he saw examples of segregated schools, which were separate by custom rather than by law. He was impressed with the number of educated black high school teachers, who had a higher proportion of college degrees than those in the white schools, and concluded in liberal fashion, "It seems quite certain that Washington while rigidly adhering to a colour line, is prepared to give the negro children every opportunity offered to white children."5 He did note, however, that if Washington's hundred thousand blacks were to steal away in the night, they would probably cause acute embarrassment to Washington society as they formed the total population of servants. Tying in with notions of expertise was another corporate idea, managerial power and salary commensurate with responsibility and merit. Putman noted the great variety of salaries offered in Boston schools. Men held all the responsible positions, even heading the Girls' High School, and drew the largest salaries. Salaries for women teachers in the elementary schools began at $600 and could go as high as $i, 176. In high schools and industrial schools they received more. Principals of elementary schools received $3,420 and of high schools, $3,780. Assistant superintendents of whom there were six in Boston (including one woman) received $5,400, and the chief superintendent, $10,000.6 He noted that principals and supervisors in St Louis,

9O Chapter Five

Missouri, were paid much higher salaries than those in Ottawa, but teachers who did equivalent work were paid about the same. They had no pension system; however, if they were ill, they received half-pay only for five weeks.7 In his administrative policies and salary recommendations with his own board, Putman implemented these ideas of high pay for executive responsibility, thereby winning increased status for supervisory roles, and an adequate pension plan to ensure retention, especially of male teachers and supervisors. In the school system of suburban Newton, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, Putman described the first instance he saw of merit pay, which he was to use to retain high-quality teachers, especially in the School for Higher English. There was no salary schedule in Newton. As he wrote, "The teachers receive what the school committee think they are worth. Some get $600 a year and some get $2,500. A teacher with two years' service may get $i ,000 while one having ten years' service in the same grade may get only $800. The system or lack of system is the result of a determined effort to pay for services given. It places an enormous responsibility upon superintendents and principals and would certainly fail if these officials were not above the average."8 It is also significant that Newton was a wealthy, middle-class, village community in which the people demanded the best possible educational advantages for their children and had doubled their annual outlay on their schools in the previous ten years. Putman with his Canadian conservatism, however, could not condone the most lavish of American "palaces," the elite Horace Mann School affiliated with Teachers' College at Columbia University, New York. Despite a cadre of hand-picked teachers, an enrolment of gifted students from wealthy homes, and programs of study designed by Columbia professors, he considered the results above average but not better than that in Ottawa schools in terms of reading, language, art work, number work, English literature, elementary manual training, and writing.9 At the same time he admired the greater diversity found in the American school system because more authority was given to local boards. In their more decentralized system, which he was to promote strongly in Ontario and in British Columbia, the "individuality of superintendents and principals is allowed more scope. The result probably is that they have a few better schools than we have, and a great many which are worse. Their best men, having much freedom, develop institutions of a high type; their weaker men, left largely to themselves, have poor schools."10 The scientific management model which Putman admired in American schools and was to emulate in his own school practice involved a number of basic tenets which Canadian businessmen were adopting. These included the separation of planning and control functions from productive tasks. Principals in the United States were not expected to teach but were held responsible for the teachers' performance. In Putman's practice in Ottawa, supervisory per-

9i

American Models

sonnel, often having had specialized training in American institutions, planned the programs and taught the techniques to the classroom teacher. The principal and the supervisor were responsible for the quality of the product. Cost-accounting techniques, as pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, were widely studied by Canadian businessmen, who were then adjusting their ideology to scientific management.11 These techniques also became part of Putman's more efficient school management. A central supply depot was established in the main offices of the board, and James Thorne, a neighbour of Putman's who retired as principal of Glashan School, was made secretary to Putman and chief clerk for the supply depot.12 In this way Putman was able to cut costs by buying textbooks, stationery, and general supplies in bulk, and at the same time he was able to control the quality of school handwork activities by purchasing a wide variety of good materials. Even more critical was the separation of the planning and the scheduling of equipment and materials from the process of work. The inspector and supervisory personnel now assumed responsibility for and control of the direction of the program of studies towards more handwork. The teachers, who in the past had interpreted the common school program of Ontario mainly to suit provincial examination exigencies, now were to have their students produce quality handwork products as specified by their supervisors. The hiring of Thorne and later E.T. Slemon, as well as more and more supervisory and clerical personnel, reflected the demands of this more efficient bureaucratic organization, which relied also on statistical record keeping and expert supervision. As Superintendent Seath demanded minutiae of statistical data to testify to the efficiency of the Ontario system,13 Putman responded with requests for increased divisions of labour. In a letter to the deputy minister of education, he noted that although the department demanded that he as inspector spend a minimum of one-third of a day supervising classes, he was unable in 1913 to spend more than one-quarter of a day supervising some regular classes and was not able to visit all the kindergarten, manual-training, and domestic science teachers.14 As well he could not adequately supervise two auxiliary classes, distribute supplies, and administer the pension fund. The deputy minister in reply told the board either to relieve Putman of office work or to hire an assistant inspector. In the process another efficiency maxim was employed, detailed spelling out of the duties of each inspector.15 Putman, of course, retained the senior role and title. In time a junior clerk of supplies, an assistant secretary, and a pension clerk were hired to increase the efficiency of the central office. Putman's visit to the United States coincided with, in Tyack's opinion, a change in the rhetoric of American educational superintendents.16 They now invoked the language of science and business to justify educational leadership. But they did not consider science or efficiency to be antithetical to idealism. As Tyack comments, "Faith in progress had undergirded the notion

92 Chapter Five of America as a redeemer nation; now the notion of evolution seemed to give the authority of science to that optimism. The progressive era was enamoured with a form of efficiency that nicely complemented evangelical earnestness."17 The previous evangelical style of leadership, for instance, of Toronto's ageing inspector, James L. Hughes, by the second decade of the twentieth century could not gloss over the serious problems of accommodation, lack of adequate supervision, and widely expanding functions required of the school. These requirements, as Ontario's chief inspector, R.H. Cowley, reported after his survey of Toronto public schools in 1912, fell "perceptibly short of the standard that should be realized in a progressive modern city."18 Tyack argues that these increased responsibilities, as well as the lack of an agreed-upon canon of expertise in practice, made the role of the inspector especially vulnerable. Many turned to two sources for help; one was adaptation of new patterns of management in business, a high-status sector of society that might reflect some of its glory back on educational leaders ... A similar route to expertise was to follow the dictates of "science" in education, to put into practice the new discoveries of the intelligence testers, the exponents of "social efficiency" in curriculum construction, and the endless new studies which sought to quantify wisdom about ventilation, evaluation of teachers, or methods of teaching reading.19 Whether this use of business-efficiency models was a result of fear of attack from the public or was an extension of the heroic leadership role envisaged by the new breed of municipal reformer or was merely, in the face of increasingly complex problems of management, a pragmatic adoption of techniques prevalent in the business community with which the school reformers were in contact, no definitive answer can be given. Slemon, just before his appointment with the Ottawa board, wrote that Ontario's authoritarian system made the inspector a key figure in the provincial educational system. If the older style inspector was not in sympathy with the latest educational "fads and frills," if he epitomized the "inertia of an established order," or if he advised students trained at normal schools to forget their scientific "heresies,"20 the system should demand that he be given much more adequate training as well as departmental standards to overcome his lack of effective leadership. To be efficient, then, the inspector had to have an ability to measure the progressive gains in cost-benefit terms, "the power fully to report conditions" and to lead public opinion and the teaching profession in this new direction, as well as the expertise "to teach and to inspire"21 Neither this demand for efficiency, however, nor the paternalistic leadership role was new. What gave it a new dimension was the use of utilitarian arguments and the citation of pragmatic, materialistic aims by these progressive school

93

American Models

reformers. In Putman's descriptions of vocational schools in the United States, for instance, he dropped his earlier idealistic rationale for manual training and domestic science. His concern became less and less with general cultural training for all students and much more with the slotting of the majority of sixteen year olds into a skilled occupation. The first barrier to this goal, in Putman's view, was Ontario's infamous entrance examination, which in Ottawa, whose population numbered nearly 100,000, allowed only 1,000, or i per cent of the population, into high school. Boston, on the other hand, with a population of 725,000 had 12,500 pupils, or nearly 2 per cent of her population, in high schools.22 Within his own public school system in Ottawa, Putman had abolished promotional examinations in 1912 and planned to shorten the elementary grades to six years by contracting grades three and four and grades five and six to one year each. He noted in 1914 that half the failures in form four (grades seven and eight), who ranged in age from eleven to sixteen, had "been trying to do something for which nature or previous training or both these factors together had not fitted them."23 The School for Higher English and the Manual Arts School had been established by Putman specifically to cater to these students because he could not get the Collegiate Board to accommodate them. Not until Ontario passed the Adolescent School Attendance Act could Putman perceive any relief for them. In 1919 he warned that the "Entrance Examination has dwarfed the legitimate aims of Ontario's Public Schools for nearly half a century. The handwriting is on the wall. The whole question of examinations in elementary schools is being weighed by public opinion. The outcome is no longer in doubt."24 The Ontario entrance examinations, however, retained their stranglehold. Finally in 1923 at the School for Higher English Putman instituted the intermediate or junior high school concept, which again was borrowed from the United States and which was designed for these entrance failures, barred from a collegiate or technical secondary education. In 1913 Putman noted that Boston had at least seventeen high schools, some of which were highly specialized and designed to suit a variety of individual needs. His particular interest was in the industrial and trade schools, which he described at great length. Massachusetts had been a leader in the vocational education movement in the United States. Charles A. Prosser, secretary of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education (NSPIE), had organized in 1912 a new division of vocational education for the state. His campaign on behalf of vocational education for the NSPIE between 1912 and 1915 resulted in congressional support and passage of the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917, which provided for federal funds for vocational education. The war in Europe was to assist greatly the vocational education campaign in both the United States and Canada. Technological advance resulting from World War I also supported the utilitarian thrust of the

94 Chapter Five Ontario education program and made redundant Robertson's craft-oriented, cultural proposals for the elementary program. The Canadian Technical Education Act of 1919 appropriated $10 million in support of any form of technical, vocational, or industrial education at the secondary level but omitted the extensive proposals for change in the direction of a handwork curriculum at the elementary level that Robertson's royal commission had proposed. This change in attitude from a cultural approach to manual training to a much more utilitarian acceptance of the economic need for vocational education and an implied acceptance of industrialism, which prevailed in the United States by 1910,25 was evident in Putman's description of the Boston Industrial School. It was probably the blueprint for his Manual Arts School. Both schools admitted any boy over fourteen. Their program was practical; the specific trades mentioned in Boston were those Putman attempted to institute both at the Manual Arts School and later at the School for Higher English (using the facilities of the Ottawa Technical School). Although the program was presented in problem-solving pedagogical terms, as John Dewey would have advocated, the overriding concern was for "cash value": Every boy must have made a definite choice of a trade. He may choose woodwork, iron lathe work, electricity or printing. His course is two years. He spends half time on shop work, quarter time on drawing, and quarter time on English spelling, geography and arithmetic. His school-room problems grow out of and are suggested by his shop work. The whole work is real work. Everything has a commercial value and is solid. Boys' time cards are kept as in a factory. Every problem is a real problem. Every boy draws his own plans, makes his own blue prints, and solves his own problems. The instructors are practical men taken from shops.26 Girls, on the other hand, although acknowledged to need vocational training to protect them against "the sweating evil," still were trained primarily for female occupations - millinery, plain sewing, dressmaking, machine operation, or cooking - which centred as much as possible on homemaking. Middle-class mores were instilled, such as the development of consumer taste, by giving the girls lessons on how to dress appropriately and how to behave when serving customers. In Putman's judgment the work at the Boston Trade School for Girls was "intensely practical, and is giving hundreds of poor girls a better chance to maintain their self-respect and become virtuous members of society."27 The school was also beginning vocational guidance and even job placement for its lower-class clients. The school's guidance counsellor, reported Putman, spent her whole time consulting with employers and visiting school graduates, all of whom were ensured a position. Vocational training for females, then, differed in intent from that for

95

American Models

males. As Marvin Lazerson explains, dressmaking was chosen as an acceptable occupation in the Boston Trade School for Girls because it provided a suitable work environment for them and trained them in economic habits of thrift for their own household.28 In 1914 two thousand girls were enrolled in the state's three female trade schools and 62 per cent of them were taking the dressmaking course. But the female-dominated garment industry was then undergoing rapid mechanization and division of labour. Graduates of the Girls' Trade School in Worcester found their skills almost worthless. Machine-driven clothing factories employing male immigrants were rapidly replacing the small dressmakers' shops. Within ten years the demand for skilled garment workers would drop by 50 per cent. Putman showed no awareness of this trend. In fact his idealism with respect to female education was matched by his idealism towards teaching in general. This could be seen in his praise of the instrumentalist "heresies" promulgated by Washington Irving High School for Girls in New York City, the largest institution of its kind in the world. He was impressed with its lavish facilities: 250 rooms, a roof garden with play yards and a greenhouse, an opera-sized assembly hall, four elevators, dining facilities, and four large gymnasiums. But his greatest commendation was for the teachers' concept of school efficiency. It embodied all the ideas of the earlier child-centred education movement, transplanted now to the secondary school level, which were that schools are for children and not for teachers; that a teacher should do something for every child, and if he does not he has failed; that if he sets a standard of work which only two-thirds of his class can reach he is a failure; that every child who enters a high school has a right to demand that work be given him which he can do and will enjoy doing; that the great work of a teacher is to fire his pupils with enthusiasm and make them believe in themselves; that the public who support the schools have a right to demand 100 cents on the dollar measured in pupils' progress.29

These ideals, essentially that the high school should adapt to the individual differences of the masses rather than provide traditional professional training for the elite, formed part of the progressive educators' arguments for vocational education. As Lazerson and Norton Grubb point out, between 1890 and 1920 the fourteen-to-seventeen-year-old population attending secondary school in the United States rose from 4 to 28 per cent.30 New questions had to be asked about the program of studies. By 1920 it was believed that without formal schooling individuals, expecially those from the working class, would suffer in their race to success. Putman laid the blame squarely on the teacher for those students who left school, especially at the end of the first year of high school, which he considered critical; "a teacher is employed and paid to educate just such children as are sent him ... their successes are to his credit and their failures at his door."31

96 Chapter Five

The result of these new beliefs was that essential differences between boys and girls, academic and vocational pupils, had to be recognized. As Lazerson and Grubb conclude, "In essence, curricula differentiation, categorization of students by future economic roles, and the adjustment of the curriculum to the economic demands of the market place became the defining characteristics of public education."32 This redefinition of the equality of educational opportunity was to lead to the growth of vocational guidance, which Putman had already observed in the Boston Trade School for Girls, the adoption of educational testing, and the institution of the junior high school. The comprehensive high school arose ostensibly to meet the democratic rights of all to have an opportunity to succeed, but in effect it differentiated pupils by their future vocational role and their social class. By 1920 the American high school differed fundamentally from its traditional counterpart of 1890. Progressive Canadians were watching these developments with great interest. Their own high schools were to experience similar increases in enrolment in the 19208. As early as 1913 Putman wrote about a unique platoon system of school organization in Gary, Indiana, which used school space much more efficiently.33 Each child spent half the day in a regular classroom and half in handwork, drill, play, or gymnasium periods. As a result the regular classroom could seat twice the number of children registered. In 1917 Putman, in his capacity as secretary-treasurer of the Dominion Educational Association, invited William Wirt, superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana, to the Ottawa convention of the association. Wirt gave more details of the Gary plan in his address, "Progress in Education through School Administration." The analogy he used to describe his reorganization was that of a hydro-electric power plant: "The school administrator must eliminate the peak of the load ... and balance the load upon all his facilities."34 The Gary plan arose as Wirt's solution to a serious problem of accommodation caused when thirty to fifty thousand people had been housed on a site near the Illinois Steel Company, thirty miles from Chicago. As Putman described it after visiting Gary in December 1917, "With a limited revenue and twice as many children as would be provided with seats, the school board was in trouble."35 Wirt used Dewey's child-centred principles of varying book and handwork to plan his curriculum. His rotational organization of classes, Putman estimated, saved 17 per cent of the expenditure for teachers and 33 per cent of the cost of the school building. But Putman was very critical of the pedagogical results, as were Abraham Flexner and Frank Bachman, who carried out a survey of Wirt's system in 1918. Putman considered three hours totally inadequate for academic work for the normal ten to twelve year old. Because of the school's organization more emphasis was placed on the subject of instruction than on the child. Under the plan one teacher was in charge of 80 to 120 children for half a year, not nearly long enough for her to know the

97

American Models

individual child, provide an ideal of conduct for him, and help him to correlate and integrate his studies "into a connected body of truth."36 The large number of pupils of varying ages made the auditorium class deteriorate into mere entertainment, and the shop and domestic classes became superficial and very limited in scope. Although Putman criticized the poor quality of instruction he found in Gary, he did not object to the rotary plan per se or to Wilt's attempt to cater to individual differences. By this time Edward Thorndike's stimulus-response behavioural psychology was seriously changing the more open-ended functional psychology,37 which had earlier influenced Putman and other New Educators in Canada. Putman now defined the ideal teacher as someone who not only stimulated the pupils' interest in the world but assisted them to form correct and useful habits. At the adolescent level these were best taught through courses that appealed to their individual needs. Putman judged that the junior high school in the United States, with its three streams of academic, commercial, and industrial programs, was "so exactly suited to [the pupils'] individual needs that nearly all of them will complete it." Like students at his Manual Arts School, for example, the industrial student spent half his day in shops; he "begins his life in the industrial world with his eyes wide open, with his intelligence quickened through some technical knowledge of his own . »»^8 occupation. By 1917, then, Putman had altered his earlier Deweyan approach to "industrial intelligence." He was guided in his administrative policies much more by the American social efficiency proponents, such as Prosser or David Sneddon, Massachusetts commissioner of education. Putman fully endorsed their Darwinist proposals to make "each child a better socius," or a more fit member of a complex society, by means of more utilitarian training leading to increased individual efficiency in the world of work. Beginning in 1917 he carried on an active campaign to implement junior high schools in Ottawa, despite difficulties of a multiplicity of school authorities and rigid departmental regulations governing the powers and duties of each one. Both James W. Robertson and Putman agreed with Dewey, though, that trade education should not be separated from general education for the average student. But Putman also clung to the elitist overtones of his Hegelian background, which Dewey, in his New Republic debate in 1915 over vocational education with Sneddon, rejected for democratic and philosophical reasons. As a result, when Putman in 1913 looked at vocational education specifically designed for girls, orphan boys, misfits,39 and "handwork" children, he commended its functional curriculum and organizational segregation; he noted that the absence of these "different" children allowed those in the grade classes to make more rapid progress. Even a special half-day handwork program in an Italian district of Chicago he praised as meeting "special conditions."40 His mind was already made up about the merits of differentiation and segregation.

98 Chapter Five Putman's position was not surprising considering the extraordinary political campaign that had been carried on in Ontario over the segregation from society of the feeble-minded. In 1906 the Ontario government, following the recommendations of a provincial survey, appointed Helen MacMurchy as inspector of the feeble-minded, with the major aim "to incarcerate the mentally unfit to stop them propagating."41 Her yearly reports warned of the immoral propensities of the feeble-minded. The city of Toronto was alarmed enough to have two special classes set up for these children in 1910, and in 1912, after a survey of the school system, expanded these auxiliary classes to twenty-one schools, serving over eight hundred retarded children. MacMurchy's propaganda campaign resulted in a "Great Conference of the Cities, Towns and Municipalities of Ontario," which took place in May 1912 at the University of Toronto, with Superintendent E.R. Johnstone of the Vineland Training School as the major speaker. A resolution coming from this conference resulted in the formation in November of the Ontario Provincial Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded. Meanwhile in July 1912 Putman travelled with MacMurchy to the Imperial Conference on Education in London. When the Ottawa branch of the provincial association was formed, Putman was one of its founding members. In 1917 he was appointed president of the Ottawa Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded. His active role, therefore, as well as his lengthy comments about the auxiliary classes and institutions for the feeble-minded which he had visited on his 1913 trip to the United States, indicated that he agreed with the propaganda bombarding the Canadian public at this time on the hereditary basis of mental retardation. In the Ottawa press alone the number of stories on defective children reached a crescendo in December 1912 with a muckraking expose of the Kallikak family who, as proven by a "scientific" study by Henry Goddard, had been responsible for 480 feeble-minded or immoral descendants.42 By 26 February 1913 the Canadian public had become so aroused that a mass deputation descended on Parliament to protest the lack of government action. Ontario's Superintendent Seath and Deputy Minister A.H.U. Colquhoun were concerned enough to take a special trip in that year to investigate special classes and institutions for defective children in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. As a result the Act respecting Special Classes of 1911 was substantially revised and was replaced by the Auxiliary Classes Act in 1914, which permitted local boards to establish classes for physically handicapped, slow, and mentally defective children. Putman's trip, therefore, anticipated this revision and the grants which he expected to accrue from it. One of the first institutions Putman visited was the famous Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded at Waverley. Fifteen hundred patients were housed in twenty or more buildings, which were surrounded by 160 acres of land. The aim of its director, Dr Fernald, was that of all eugenicists, "to

99

American Models

protect society from the mischievous and costly effects of allowing defectives to reproduce another generation of defectives." Their societal paranoia was also reflected in the definition of feeble-minded, which, as Putman continued, "includes all those who have too little intelligence or too little willpower to take a successful part in the struggle for life."43 Putman found many boys and girls who appeared close to normal and he wondered why they were there. Apparently patients could be admitted at the request of parents or relatives or they could be committed by a judge or magistrate after medical examination. Commitment by judge or magistrate was usually initiated by school superintendents or philanthropic organizations, a practice Putman, the Ottawa Children's Aid, and the Local Council of Women were to employ. At the school Putman noted an array of blocks, toys, and insets, designed by Fernald's predecessor, Edward Seguin, who had been imitated by Maria Montessori. The up-to-date sense-training apparatus was used "to awaken any germ of intelligence which may possibly be dormant."44 This germ theory was based on the notion, widely popularized by Thorndike, that man's original nature was governed by "germ cells," which determined the neurological response of the organism to environmental stimuli. Thorndike's view was that inherited characteristics of intelligence correlated highly with morality and that if low intelligence was too widespread within the population, it would lead to the permanent destruction of civilization.45 The American Eugenics Record Office, established at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, in 1910, collected statistics to identify persons who carried defective germ plasm and disseminated propaganda that sterilization was necessary for them. The first sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907; fifteen other states quickly followed. Lacking sterilization laws, the remaining states had to choose compulsory segregation. Productive industrial training within the institution became essential for the comfort and happiness of the feeble-minded child. Putman reported that boys made boxes, baskets, brushes, and brooms, repaired boots, wove towels, cleared land, and cared for animals and vegetable crops. Girls carried out the domestic chores of the institution. The total cost of the institution was thereby materially reduced. He recommended this organization for Ontario, which had only one large hospital at Orillia for the worst cases of imbeciles and idiots. Henry Goddard, director of the Training School in Vineland, New Jersey, also "completely met a public social need," in Putman's estimation.46 Here a staff of "scientists" was engaged in a study of feeble-minded children and ran a summer training school for teachers to which Putman sent two prospective teachers for auxiliary classes in Ottawa. In his summary of Goddard's findings Putman revealed the eugenic belief current at that time that had "proved conclusively" that 65 per cent of feeble-minded children were born of feeble-minded parents; that 2 per cent of the school population could be classed a feeble-minded; that the Binet intelligence test could determine the

ioo Chapter Five extent to which a child carried this defect; that, despite the industrial training they received, the safety of society demanded their permanent incarceration and sterilization; and that they made few gains through the study of ordinary school subjects. The feeble-minded needed manual and industrial activities to achieve any progress. The same conclusion was reached after Putman had viewed special classes for backward children in Newton, Chicago, St Louis, and Cleveland. It was clear, wrote Putman, "that the Atlantic states are a generation ahead of Ontario in dealing with this problem. We in Ontario will never solve our problem by shutting our eyes and protesting that there is no such problem among us. We have the problem even in Ottawa and we must grapple with it."47 Tied in with the problem of identifying and isolating these defective children was the need to have a medical inspection system implemented throughout the public schools. Putman particularly praised the system in effect at Girard College in Philadelphia, which had a resident physician and two nurses. The medical inspection systems of Boston and Chicago were claimed to result in improved attendance. They provided ammunition, too, for the variety of special classes, which in Cleveland had reached the ultimate in terms of progressive facilities, considered necessary for the needs of a metropolitan city; schools for the blind, the mentally defective, the crippled, the deaf, the epileptic, and the tubercular were all part of the system.48 Putman's beliefs concerning heredity influenced his attitude to parental schools, or home-like reformatories which Americans were pioneering. Chicago's major school problem was truancy, considered a social menace in a large city because it meant "consorting with a gang in dark alleys, committing petty thefts, smoking cigarettes and a general training for criminal life."49 This problem Putman allied with another American deficiency, the lack of male teachers in the elementary and secondary schools. Not that he had any criticism of Chicago's woman superintendent, Ella Flagg Young. Her salary of ten thousand dollars a year and responsibility for over seventy-five hundred teachers would in any case have impressed Putman. And he "did not meet a single Chicago teacher, man or woman, who questioned the fitness or wisdom of her appointment... If she can solve the Chicago school problems she will have proved to the world that no executive position is beyond a woman's grasp."50 It was not an objection to the intellectual or administrative capability of women, therefore, but a concern with the absence of men with strong masculine personalities who would develop "the virile and manly side of the boys' natures," particularly at the adolescent level.51 Urban adolescent truants, in Putman's judgment, were not likely to be reformed by a schoolmistress. Legislation had been passed which allowed the juvenile court to commit these boys to a parental school, replacing the boys' parents with male supervisors. Not surprisingly each instructor in the cottage-like setting of the school was "a steady, responsible, fatherly man,"

ioi

American Models

who cared for about forty boys. Their school program included manual training and care of agricultural animals and their own garden. Despite this corrective treatment, however, Putman's hereditarian cast of mind pessimistically concluded, "These boys, almost without exception, are truants, because there is somewhere a kink in the home life. Many of them have inherited criminal tendencies. Many of them are in some way mentally defective ... I am of the opinion that fifty per cent, of them will leave the school only to lead vicous [sic] and criminal lives, and that Chicago would save millions if the worst of them could be placed permanently under supervision and prevented from propagating another generation of the same type."52 The earlier, meliorist social philosophy of Putman had shifted in a decidedly positivistic direction, mirroring the trend of social scientists in the United States. His Hegelian view of the leader as a promoter of advanced public opinion had become that of the expert supervisor who redefined cultural and political issues in technical and scientific terms. Instead of being corrected through a voluntary consensus of public opinion, social problems were to be allocated to the realm of science. Genetic differences were the cause of social difficulties: so they should be isolated by a variety of assessment devices and institutional techniques. As North Americans became preoccupied with the measurement of individual differences, they sought the advice of specialists rather than trusting their own thinking and trying to solve social problems themselves. Barry Franklin concludes that schooling became the vehicle for institutionalizing this social vision of the rule of expertise. The school was to serve two functions: the preparation of the most intelligent for social leadership and the education of the others for following. This was Thorndike's solution to the problem of the "half-educated" man. The school's function, writes Franklin, "was to get everybody, but particularly those he [Thorndike] thought to be the great average mass of the population, to submit themselves to the leadership of the expert by teaching them whom to trust and what to believe outside their own narrow areas of competence. Such an education seemed to require a certain degree of external imposition and manipulation."53 The transition in New Education and progressive school thought from its idealistic beginnings to this social engineering phase is graphically illustrated by the transformation of the kindergarten. Putman was a leader in Ontario in this reform movement and was strongly influenced by developments in the United States even before his 1913 trip. The child-study leaders, particularly G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey, had criticized the Froebelian kindergartens as far back as the 18905. Their biological view of the child emphasized that at the kindergarten age the child was an active, not a reflective, creature. He learned his moral ideals, they claimed, as he developed his motor skills and adapted to urban life. These reconstructionists, as the progressive kindergartners were called, put more emphasis on the development of the child's social

102

Chapter Five

morality, which they stated was promoted through vigorous play, outdoor exercise, and team games. Dewey objected to the Froebelians' concern for individualism and their assumption that ideals could be extracted intuitively from the sense impressions of external objects. It was action on objects, instead, that led to their comprehension. The classroom should represent a miniature community within which the children interacted, thereby reflecting the problems and complexities of modern society. Moral lessons were learned through this social milieu; peer group pressure would control individual desires and the child would learn social co-operation. In 1903 such a schism developed between the reconstructionists and the Froebelians that the International Kindergarten Union appointed a Committee of Nineteen, whose report led to the virtual abandonment of the Froebelian program. As Barbara Corbett notes, "Froebel's small equipment was replaced by larger objects and larger materials were introduced. Both were added to and used in ways very different from Froebel's original purposes. Free play was accepted in place of Froebel's guided plays. The ideal kindergarten became a miniature society where each activity served a useful purpose, and where each child learned self-control through social co-operation."54 But efficiency norms were also affecting the urban kindergarten. In his review of these classes in 1911 Putman considered the costs too high. Far too many were in small schools and many classes had two teachers and less than thirty pupils. Their equipment was costly and elaborate, and too many young children attended irregularly, thereby causing a burden to the taxpayer. These cost-benefit assessments were joined to arguments from functional psychology: We have paid too much attention to the mere appearance of many things made by the children, and have lost sight of the fact that the training received by the child is directly proportional to his self-activity and has little to do with the beauty or smoothness of things he makes. We are, in some cases, buying machine-made things in the United States at exorbitant prices, when we ought to purchase plain and coloured papers, cardboard, and raffia, and have children, from the raw material, fashion such forms and designs as suit their stage of development. Through crude and imperfect attempts they would gradually attain more precision and greater perfection.55

Putman was concerned, as well, about the lack of cohesion between teachers in the kindergarten and those in the rest of the school system. The kindergarten teachers looked upon Froebel as their patron saint and clung to a rigid and artificial system. Grade teachers were jealous of their short hours, their freedom from school duties, and public attention over their special closing exercises at Christmas, Easter, and in June. Putman decided to use the kindergarten teachers as progressive leaders in his handwork program. He increased their hours and salary to those of a full-day grade teacher, and

IO3

American Models

beginning in 1912, he devised three programs for them. Some were to give handwork lessons to grades one and two; others, beginning at the grade three level, instructed boys in strip-wood techniques for the manual-training classes; some taught dance or music classes; and still others taught senior girls sewing, while their male counterparts attended manual-training classes. In some schools full-day kindergartens were attempted "in areas where the children had little opportunity for play at home and where the mother's household cares make it difficult for her to give her children proper guidance."56 As Lazerson remarks, the original aim of the kindergarten was changed to suit social efficiency educators such as Massachusetts State Commissioner Sneddon, who by 1915 stated that the chief value of the kindergarten was to compensate for deficiencies in the child's home environment. Implicit in Sneddon's argument, Lazerson writes, "was a sense that the essential failure of kindergartners has been their attempt to establish their institutions distinct from the primary grades, the unwillingness of kindergarten advocates to see their programs as simply the beginning of the regular school process."57 During his trip to the United States in 1913 Putman noted the rapid changes in kindergartens as they adapted to the industrial environment. He remarked on the large number of children (fifty to sixty per class) in the kindergartens of St Paul and Minneapolis, which kept the cost per child under twenty dollars a year. The kindergartens in Kansas City averaged forty-five children per class and attendance never fell below 90 per cent of registration. Kindergarten classes in St Louis were held in the morning and in the afternoon, as they were in most cities in the United States, and were organized in a manner similar to those in Ottawa. These ideas from the United States played an important part in the deliberations of a special committee appointed by the Ontario government in 1912 to investigate kindergarten regulations and courses of study. Its specific task was to advise the minister of education how the kindergarten course could be modified to meet changing conditions. Fears about the attrition rate of kindergarten teachers-in-training necessitated the inquiry. The members of the committee included H.T. J. Coleman, chairman and associate professor of education at the University of Toronto; J.H. Putman; S.A. Morgan, principal of the Hamilton Normal School; Mary E. Maclntyre, kindergarten director and strong Froebelian advocate; Eliza Bolton, kindergarten director at the Ottawa Normal School; and L.W. Currie, a supervisor of a Toronto kindergarten class. Among their recommendations was a proposal to institute for students at normal schools a kindergarten-primary course designed to bring a closer correlation between the kindergartens and the lower grades. The certificate would qualify the holder to teach in the primary grades, thereby making this course more attractive to normal school students. Three types of specialization were recommended for the kindergarten,

IO4 Chapter Five

which was to be modified to the social environment. In certain circumstances "where the home environment is not good it would be highly desirable to have a preliminary Kindergarten course for children from four to five years of age. Such classes, if established, might be largely along the lines of a Montessori school. They should extend over the whole school day, with a mid-day lunch provided by the school authorities." As well as the regular kindergarten, the committee recommended the establishment of "primary or transition classes which would take, at the age of six or six and one-half years, pupils who have completed the regular Kindergarten year. In this transition class the pupils' school time should be equally divided between hand occupations and the elements of reading, writing, and number work. Every occupation and every lesson should be used as a basis for other lessons in oral language."58 The committee adopted Putman's recommendations for a six-year elementary school course above this transition class, and incorporated his use of kindergarten teachers for a variety of handwork programs throughout the school so that they would attain equality of salary with other teachers and become more integrated with the regular school. Incentive grants and a special departmental officer were urged to promote the kindergarten across the province. Significantly the committee rejected the Montessori method as being overly individualistic and asocial. In 1913 Morgan published a study he had made for the committee on that method. His criticisms were based on his own social efficiency concept of education. Man was viewed as a member of a social community, which gave him his meaning and significance. Man, therefore, had to learn to adjust himself to all phases of his environment and must sooner or later join society "as a corporate member, in mutual or co-operative effort. For the development of such a corporate life tendency, nothing can be more beneficial that the corporate life of the school, for much of the value of a school will be found in the character of its orderly corporate life."59 Using idealistic arguments in support of institutions such as the family and the school, which would lead to an understanding by the child of his social environment, Morgan criticized Montessori's method as leading, instead, to individual efficiency and a development of the intellect at the expense of the senses. The transition between the earlier idealistic concepts of John Watson and the social efficiency business norms that later prevailed in education can be clearly seen in Morgan's description of a person's educational journey: The real cause of the development of the intellectual and spiritual life of the individual is his conquest of an environment which is laden with a moral and spiritual meaning, and which is the inheritance from the past experiences of the race. Man's true relation to his physical environment is, therefore, no mere question of physical adjustment, but rather an intellectual and spiritual one, in which the social tendencies

105

American Models

of the individual find their satisfaction in interpreting his physical environment as an embodiment of social ideas and ideals.60

It was to be a short journey from this Hegelian philosophy to the scientific "laws of learning" which Thorndike was beginning to promulgate. The progressive kindergartners in the United States were strongly influenced by his stimulus-response psychology, which emphasized the "stamping in" of socially desirable habits through the "laws of exercise" and the use of peer disapprobation to extinguish undesirable responses and habits - the "law of effect." They spearheaded a drive to transform the curriculum and moraltraining techniques in this direction. They hoped through the project method to instil in the children an interest in their environment, enrich their experience by means of everyday life problems, and cultivate desirable habits and attitudes. As Dom Cavallo points out, Progressives like Patty Smith Hill of Teachers College believed that the conduct curriculum method of moral training was more appropriate in a democratic society than Froebelian symbolic education ... Hill stated explicitly what was implicit in Hall and Dewey and at the core of the S-R approach to moral training. In her view the solution to the moral dilemma of urban-industrial society - how to resolve the tension between the individual process of moral decision-making and the need for social order and cooperation mandated by social and economic interdependence - resided not in human nature as idealists claimed, but in the nature of the modern social encounter.61

By the outbreak of World War I, progressive schoolmen in North America had turned from a child-centred to a societal focus. The emerging bureaucratic school structures mirrored the corporate organizational patterns these middleclass professionals admired in their new urban society. In turn they were increasingly "schooled" in their moral and curricular thinking by the institutional structures they had created. Morality was meaningless outside of the shared group experience. The project curriculum they devised concentrated on observable, verifiable facts of the social process and ignored inner states of consciousness. Forms of inner privacy and individual self-expression were drastically curtailed. In the process of merging ethics with rational forms of adaptation to the environment, the child's moral faculty, as Cavallo concludes, "was rendered indistinct from the rules, adjustments, and procedures governing social interaction, adaptation and problem solving."62 He was socialized to become the organization man.

CHAPTER SIX

An Efficient School System

A key preoccupation of progressive educational reformers was that of waste in education, the subject of an address by Putman to the Ontario Educational Association in 1916. Deplored by scientific management experts and leading American schoolmen such as Franklin Bobbitt at the University of Chicago, whose article on the same topic came out in the Elementary School Teacher of 1912, waste was equated with inefficiency. Putman's own Methodism, which had deeply ingrained in it the idea of accountability and decentralized organizational structure,1 strongly influenced his attitude to waste. The Ontario Department of Education, of course, was renowned for its centralizing inspection tendencies, its belief in the ladder system of schools, which tied the elementary school to high school domination and the high school to the university, and its use of incentive grants to stimulate higher standards. Waste and inefficiency became levers used by muckraking journalists, progressive educational reformers, and scientific measurement proponents to aid their campaign for changes in the school system. As Putman wrote, "Waste in education means inefficiency, and a discussion on efficiency brings under criticism every factor that has to do with education."2 As such it included changes affecting the course of study, the statutes and regulations, accommodation and school facilities, the teachers and their qualifications, as well as an examination of the home and society from which the child came. In his address Putman concentrated on rural consolidation and urban measures to give 75 per cent of adolescents some vocational training before they left school at sixteen. But he and other progressive reformers applied the efficiency principle liberally to a range of school malpractices in order to attract public attention to them and to gather ammunition for their reform campaign. One of the most common devices used to highlight waste and inefficiency in school systems was the survey. Using comparative statistical data, the surveyor drew up his business-efficiency categories, usually derived from

107

An Efficient School System

American advocates of scientific management such as Leonard Ayres, Frank Spaulding, William Wirt, or Ell wood P. Cubberley, and applied them to the school system he wanted either to extol or to change. At the end of World War I public schools were studied by W.L. Richardson and C.E. Mark, two students of the Faculty of Education, University of Toronto, both under the direction of Peter Sandiford. Both freely acknowledged their American models. They intended to criticize the schools from the perspective of scientific management. They offer, therefore, both a foil and a ground against which Putman's rhetoric and school practices can be tested. Putman and his two critics, however, had the same ideology of practical idealism, thus sharing similar basic assumptions. Pitting one survey against the other, though, does reveal many ambivalences within this doctrine and allows the reader a closer understanding of the effects it had on the children, the teachers, and the school system as a whole. W.L. Richardson applied the concept of scientific management to a number of urban school boards in his 1921 book, Administration of Schools in the Cities of the Dominion of Canada. "There is no good reason," he wrote, "why schools should not be managed with a view to increased dividends in the form of the highest grade of efficient citizens. A contribution toward increase in economy, in ease of administration, in smooth working and in productive efficiency will be made by any school board which proceeds steadily in working out a policy of administraton of its schools similar to that found to be so effective in the business world."3 Citing a 1918 survey of rural schools in Saskatchewan and a survey of schools in St Louis by C.H. Judd of the University of Chicago, Richardson justified his undertaking as analogous to business "stock-taking"; the shareholders needed to be given a complete and impartial statement of "the human profit and human loss and further as to future policies" (295). He employed many of the new techniques of the social scientist in approaching his task. For instance, he spelled out the role of the administrator, both in his public capacity as a mediator between the taxpayer and the professional teaching corps and in his administrative function in standardizing procedures, creating a bureaucracy of specialists, and communicating his intended goals to his staff and the public. Richardson used numerous statistical tables to demonstrate his expert cost-accounting techniques, which would save the taxpayer money by telling him the retardation rate in the school system, or the per capita cost of auxiliary classes, or the increase in building expenditure. Standardized norms, bureaucratic procedures, and cost-benefit analyses were the tools of the scientific management advocates. Under these criteria the Ottawa Public School Board appeared to be in the forefront of progressive urban school reform. At a very basic level the Ottawa board was one of the few in Canada which issued pamphlets informing ratepayers and the general public of necessary changes, thereby building up confidence in the educational administration.

io8 Chapter Six Putman's very complete annual reports revealed a high degree of professional proficiency as well as a facility to explain progressive reforms in clear language. According to Richardson, "Ottawa members, parents and teachers are doubtless glad to read the non-technical accounts of The Gary Schools' and the 'Junior High School'" (144). And he warned, "The school superintendent who is too busy or who neglects for any reason to supply the people who pay his salary with such information is missing a grand opportunity and will eventually come to grief" (144).4 The dual role of the inspector as a representative of the minister of education and an expert manager of the school system demanded, Richardson stated, "an administrator of cabinet rank" with supreme power and control to maintain a system of high quality (132). He did not mention that this argument as well as American precedents enabled the Toronto and Ottawa chief and senior inspectors to exact six-thousand-dollar salaries from their boards, equivalent to that of judges on the Supreme Court of Canada and several thousand dollars in excess of that of leading departmental officials. The duties of the inspector should be clearly spelled out in special by-laws, which would reflect local needs as well as stipulate the extensive powers of this more expert administrator. Richardson quoted excerpts from the by-laws of both Toronto and Ottawa and commented that those of Ottawa included "duties not evident in the formulation of duties for the Chief Inspector of Toronto" (116). They included control of supplies and furnishings, assignment of nurses' duties, in-service training of teachers, and power to dismiss any teacher, supervisor, or school nurse for misconduct or insubordination. Further advisory powers granted the Ottawa senior inspector, which he commended, were on teachers' salaries and plans for new school buildings and accommodation. Only if the board relegated these powers to its superintendent and he, in turn, assigned duties to his supervisory staff could the increased efficiency of the school system be obtained. The bureaucracy increased commensurately. In a table Richardson compared the support staff in major Canadian cities, thereby emphasizing his bureaucratic ideal.5 Ottawa equalled Vancouver, a city with twice the number of teachers, in having the highest number of supervisors of special subjects, a total of six in art, music, manual training, household science, physical culture, and writing. Along with Ottawa, nine other urban boards had assistants to the superintendent and eight others had clerical assistants who handled supplies. With the supervisory personnel guaranteeing quality production, Richardson depicted a new role for the superintendent. Instead of being an "inspector," whose object was to visit classrooms and nothing else, he should be more of a supervisor helping teachers and pupils attain higher levels of work. In fact he should strive for the role of "inspirational force," working through teachers' conferences, public addresses, and classrooms to achieve more refined results; small "details of help which the superintendent

109

An Efficient School System

can give toward the application of advanced educational theories assume gigantic proportions because they constitute just the necessary addition to the teacher's plan which make the theory as a whole workable" (135). The superintendent was to be the team captain, with assistants, supervisors, and principals acting as his lieutenants. Future legislation adopted by the board should be based on the advice and reports of the superintendent, who was expected to keep in touch with "expert ideas" by attendance at annual meetings and by visits to schools in other cities. Once again Richardson presented material in measurable terms. Another table listed educational meetings attended and schools visited, and it revealed the enlightenment of progressive boards by listing those which paid the officials' travelling expenses.6 In 1917 Putman attended educational meetings in New York and Toronto and visited schools in Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, and Rochester. The board paid all his expenses. Most of the other urban boards across Canada listed one or two meetings attended by their officials as well as a great number of schools visited in the United States. Ottawa schools were visited in 1917 by inspectors from Calgary, Peterborough, and St Thomas. One further example of scientific business techniques applied to schools was the cost-accounting procedure of keeping separate account books. Richardson considered that only Ottawa and Vancouver treated per capita costs adequately in their annual reports. Further, in Ottawa, annual costs per pupil are given in separate sums for (i) Grades 1-8; (2) Kindergarten; (3) All supplies; (4) Stationery, supplies and textbooks; (5) Manual Training supplies; (6) Sewing supplies; (7) Cooking supplies; (8) Cooking supplies per lesson. These facts comprise a body of interesting, instructive information for the board members and citizens of Ottawa and are immediately comparable with corresponding facts (if obtainable) for other cities. (94)

Not only did this procedure convey the impression that the executive officer was concerned about cutting back waste, but it also enabled him to control the quality of materials, which in turn would be reflected in the quality of product manufactured by the pupil and put on display for exhibitions. In the case of the kindergarten classes, as mentioned earlier, cost-accounting arguments were used to force kindergartens to become a more integral part of the system and to persuade kindergarten teachers to work half-days as manual-training, dance, and music teachers, thereby improving the quality of the regular classroom work. None of this was pointed out by Richardson, but he would have approved of these efficiency measures. Continuing his analogy between the "perfect" management of a school and that of "a large modern manufacturing plant or a transcontinental railroad system," Richardson stressed that the goal was to be an "increase in economy, in ease of administration, in smooth working and in productive efficiency"

no Chapter Six (146, 147). Age-grade tables were being used in five Canadian cities to indicate a serious problem of "retardation," or blockage, in the smooth progress of pupils through the system. Progressive reformers, too, were concerned about the rapid drop-off in school attendance in grades six to eight. In Richardson's judgment, Ottawa's system showed "pupils of ordinary ability experiencing no untoward check" in their year-by-year grade promotion (226). An opposing judgment about Ottawa's retardation problem had been meted out by C.E. Mark in his Public Schools of Ottawa: A Survey, published in 1918. Using even more extensive tables, he considered Ottawa's rate of retardation "rather startling. 30.4 per cent of the pupils are in grades lower than they should be according to their age; 3.3 per cent are 15 years of age or over; 4.6 per cent had reached the age of 14 before entering the eighth grade. Outside of mental defectives, who will not constitute more than 0.5 per cent ... and certain cases of illness, this retardation is due to causes that should yield to remedial measures."7 In comparison he considered the retardation rate of pupils in London, Ontario, a manageable 15.5 per cent, to be "hardly as acute as in Ottawa" (61). Mirroring the campaigns being conducted by the Ontario Department of Education and by Putman after his visit to the United States in 1917 to investigate junior high schools, Mark recommended that the major measures to correct this serious retardation problem should be more strictly enforced attendance legislation. Average attendance of 84 per cent in Ottawa schools for the past ten years was not high enough to get maximum benefit from the public schools, he claimed. Compulsory adolescent attendance should be increased to eighteen years to force the eight hundred fourteen year olds who left public and separate schools to learn a trade and not fall into blind-alley occupations. A junior high school should be established with course content to attract the interest of these pupils. Mark commended the "plan already initiated in Ottawa for the school year of 1918-1919 of classifying the pupils into seven grades" (67). Putman, in a Queen's Quarterly article, "Shortening the Elementary School Course," described the eight-grade system as responsible "more than any other one thing connected with school administration to deaden and make mechanical the work of elementary education in the urban schools of America." He considered this form of organization responsible for the "habits of dawdling, inattention and downright laziness" of thousands of good students, and for allowing the bottom quarter of pupils to drag down the performance of the half who were average and the quarter who had superior talent. In other words it was largely responsible for a serious slowdown in production. As well, "it has added untold millions to the cost of elementary education; and it has spoiled thousands of teachers making them parts of an ineffective, slow-moving machine daily grinding a small grist and grinding it very fine."8

in

An Efficient School System

Both Putman and Mark believed, in Hegelian fashion, that the "hope of democracy is in its leaders." High schools therefore should not be allowed to charge fees, which in Ottawa were the highest in the province, and restrict access only to the wealthy. As Putman wrote, "It is of prime importance that children of marked talent, whether poor or rich, should have the best training the state can afford. It should be a part of the work of the elementary school to discover this talent and to discover it before the child is fourteen years of age. "9 This type of child should be able to complete his elementary school in six or seven years, leaving at twelve and a half for secondary school. Mark, using a table to demonstrate his point, claimed that 6.2 per cent of the public school pupils in Ottawa were accelerated from one to three years. Brighter pupils were allowed to skip a grade. He suggested further measures to develop these gifted students. "Provision of ungraded classes for exceptionally bright children, placed under the most capable teacher available, limited to 25 pupils, would allow for more rapid progress. The increased annual cost of the smaller classes would be balanced by the shorter term of years, which these pupils would spend in the elementary school" (68). At the other end of the classification scale, Mark urged that the work of the Manual Arts School be continued and expanded to make these occupations classes accessible to students in all parts of the city. If there were ten or twelve classes, they could act as feeders to the Industrial Junior High School or the Technical High School. He warned the board about the cost of $55.92 per repeater. Mark also warned that unless proper segregated institutions were set up by the city for the mentally defective who had completed the auxiliary class, the efforts to provide them with supervision and direction would be nullified. They would be "turned loose on society" to its detriment (68). Ottawa was among twelve cities in Canada providing these special auxiliary classes, but in keeping with Putman's high standards, the two set up in Ottawa cost the Public School Board $140 per capita annually, by far the highest in Canada. Richardson remarked on the "expert scientific examinations ... made of alleged subnormal children" during 1917 in six cities in Canada, including Ottawa (238). These examinations had been conducted by Helen MacMurchy, using Binet-Simon identification procedures, which had the inspector first survey the system and identify these children through their academic retardation levels. As well as obtaining expert psychological support from his friend MacMurchy, then inspector of the feeble-minded for Ontario, Putman made sure that he was given full power to enforce these efficiency measures. He wrote to the deputy minister of education, requesting permission to compel the attendance of all children identified as feeble-minded.10 In 1916 Sandiford, writing in The School, popularized these classification procedures. He allied the subnormal with the eugenics theory of that time and suggested functional tasks which teachers could try out on their pupils to

112

Chapter Six

diagnose them.11 By 1919 Sandiford had added Terman's intelligence quotient scores to identify six categories of students' mental capacities. That year the ministry assumed much more control of auxiliary classes with more stringent regulations and specific grants to ensure high quality. In 1920 S.B. Sinclair, Putman's former colleague at the Ottawa Normal School, was called out of retirement to succeed MacMurchy as inspector of auxiliary classes. From this time on special classes proliferated and the bureaucratic classification of pupils became accepted as a necessary adjunct of a more efficient school system. By this time, as well, the parallel public health campaign, waged by reformers and physicians since the i88os in Canada, had shifted its emphasis from premises to children. Mark noted the various features implemented in school buildings to satisfy the first phase. Careful attention had been paid in the Ottawa public schools to ventilation and heating because of the prevalence of tuberculosis - it was estimated that five hundred people a year contracted the disease. In sixteen school buildings ventilation was mechanically operated, while in seven, it was gravity operated. In schools constructed during Putman's era, fresh air intakes were built both at ground level and on the roof, with a fresh air chamber sometimes doubling as a storeroom. Air was washed on leaving this room by passing through a wall of coke into which water was constantly poured. An independent exhaust system drew air away from the basement so that it was changed every ten minutes. Humidity was regulated by jets of water spray or by steam injection. The temperature in each classroom was read four times daily by the janitor and recorded by the teacher on forms. One further anti-consumption feature was noted by Mark, the cloakroom, or wardrobe, of which there were several types in Ottawa schools. At Borden School the Chicago wardrobe was used, which required much less space (three feet) and saved eight thousand dollars. Damp clothing was therefore kept in hallways or enclosed cupboards away from the children. In sanitary facilities Ottawa public schools apparently had no equal in the province, according to the chief inspector for Ontario, despite the serious water problem of the city. All schools were equipped with the approved types of fountains, and at a number of schools the city had sunk artesian wells for use by the general public. Again, these measures arose from serious civic problems, in this case, typhoid epidemics which occurred in the city in 1911 and 1912.12 For a time the Ottawa Dairy Company supplied water to the public schools and children were warned against drinking tap water.13 Richardson illustrated the shift of concern from premises to child. He was interested in the fact that systematic medical examination of children in Ottawa schools took place at least three times a year and included "a close observation of throat, teeth, hair, eyelids, hands, ears and cervical glands" (239). The Ottawa Public School Board operated its medical services to pupils very economically, with only four nurses, each looking after 2,200 children.

H3 An Efficient School System

Richardson's efficiency thrust was evident in his recommendation that all cities in Canada should have medical inspection services for schoolchildren and psychological and psychopathic clinics. The aim of the clinics, he wrote, "is to remove the selection and segregation of subnormal and supernormal children from the realm of unscientific opinion and to recommend adequate provision as to the teaching of these children" (245). Their removal would result in improved grade attendance, less retardation of pupils in the upper grades, "and would be a notable contribution toward the policy of securing a maximum of efficient product from all the raw material offered" (245). During the war Canadians had been told that 40 to 70 per cent of the population was unfit. Mark approved highly of Ottawa's practical school program of hygiene and its correlation with physical education and the nurses' department. Nearly every Ottawa teacher qualified as a physical instructor. He noted that a health sheet was kept for every child in which both teacher and nurse entered their observations on the child's general health and special ailments. Using the standardized norms then strongly influencing both public health and mass production practices in industry, Ottawa professionals measured the child's height, chest expansion, and weight and recorded these regularly. But, reflecting Edward Thorndike's concern for individual differences which influenced Sandiford, Mark criticized them for not following up these medical examinations with proper developing exercises or corrective measures. "It is suspected ... that in many cases this opportunity is overlooked and that all are treated as a class regardless of individual needs. Low or round shoulders, contracted chest, crooked arms, bow-legs, torpid liver, and other common defects, all require treatment of a more specific character than is afforded by ordinary platoon drill" (9). No doubt the case load of each nurse and the high pupil-teacher ratio in classrooms accounted for the lack of follow-up work. Another reason for this unconcern for individual differences was the counterthrust of these Hegelian efficiency proponents for institutional perfection. Services such as dental clinics (established in Ottawa in 1915) were set up in answer to serious health problems related to social class. For example, the appalling condition of the teeth of poor children impeded their progress through the system. Medical surveys were urged for rural areas, chiefly for the purpose of identifying defectives who might hinder the progress of the average child. These surveys were designed to arouse public opinion, as illustrated by the campaign to provide segregated facilities for the feeble-minded. In 1920 the Ontario Department of Education appointed a chief school medical officer, a chief school dental officer, and a chief school nurse largely to extend school health surveys in the rural sections of the province. By 1919 Putman's school nurses were acting as propagandists and scouts for the city's medical officer of health. As Putman wrote at that time, they were welcomed in pupils' homes and regularly reported contagious

114 Chapter Six diseases to his department, thereby giving the medical officer of health ammunition for his long-standing vaccination campaign. The surveys were also preparing the public for future encroachments into the private lives of their children in the twenties and thirties in the form of thorough medical examinations by physicians, secret record cards, nutrition and posture classes, as well as even more rigorous toxoid and vaccination campaigns. The standardized efficiency procedures as well as the convincing force of the professionals' scientific diagnosis weakened public objections. But there was also a large public consensus for the high-quality product to be created by this more efficient system. This expectation affected the relationship between the board and its teachers, exacerbated the discrepancy between the public and separate school boards (the latter in serious financial difficulties), and thrust the program of studies into a more formalized and increasingly "measurable" stance. Ottawa prided itself on the high quality of its public school teachers. Both Richardson and Mark identified the management techniques used to achieve this level of quality. Mark supported the decision to hire two educational experts to provide the board with direction. He also approved of the School Management Committee's policy to give Putman complete responsibility for the appointment, transfer, or dismissal of teachers. Once hired, teachers were kept on probation for two years, according to Richardson, the longest in Canada. In comparison Toronto's probationary period was only six months. A number of factors were weighed by the Ottawa chief inspector in his hiring decisions. Richardson reported that applicants had to be under thirty. Males were given preference. As a result, Mark noted that Ottawa had by far the largest number of male teachers of any urban board in Ontario: in 1917, forty-two, or 23 per cent of the total staff, in comparison with thirty-two, or 18 per cent, in London and seventeen, or 5 per cent, in Hamilton. Mark also commented that teachers in the Ottawa Public School Board were among the best qualified in the province. Ten per cent of its teachers were university graduates, and 24 per cent had first-class certificates. In Mark's survey an experience/age table dated 1918 showed that only forty of the two hundred and fifty teachers in Ottawa had had no experience outside of Ottawa before being hired by the board; most, eighty-eight, had had one to five years' experience outside. Not only were teachers carefully tried out before being approached by the Ottawa board, but also excellent starting salaries, higher than the average for Ontario cities, were used to attract good teachers. Older teachers were induced to retire early by the Ottawa Public School Board pension plan adopted in 1910, which allowed female teachers to retire at sixty and males at sixty-five, or both after thirty-five years of service. The average length of service in Ottawa was slightly higher than that for the rest of Ontario. As Mark concluded, in 1918 the "average length of service for all teachers in Ontario is 13.58 years, in Ottawa it is 13.8 years. For male

115 An Efficient School System

teachers in urban Ontario the average is 18.43 years, in Ottawa 20.86 years. For female teachers the city average is 12.88 years, in Ottawa it is 12.3 years" (43). Mark was not satisified with Ottawa's tenure figures, however, especially for males. The average tenure on the Ottawa board was only n years for males and 6.4 years for females. He gave interesting statistics revealing what had happened to the 9 men and 105 women who had left the board's employ since 1910. Two had died, 9 had been pensioned, 6 had obtained positions in the civil service, 15 in other schools (mostly in higher grades), 7 had been dismissed, 19 had not been traced, and 56 had resigned "to take charge of homes of their own" (40 per cent of these were lost after one year of experience).14 Aside from strict inspection by the six subject supervisors and by twice-yearly visits from the inspector, Richardson observed that teachers were guided by principals who were given half time off teaching responsibilities in medium-sized schools to attend to administrative duties and to the constant supervision of pupils and teachers in their schools. Only in two other Canadian cities was this time for supervision built into the principals' schedules. Mark described the inspection in Ottawa public schools as thorough. He outlined the method of mandatory submission of timetables to the inspector's office, thus forcing the teacher to submit to bureaucratic approval and to a strict time allotment for each subject. In 1917 teachers were required to submit a detailed outline of geography lessons for the year with the date of each lesson (geography was a new education subject then being strongly promoted). As he commented, "This is an excellent plan for ensuing [sic] a preview of the whole field by the teacher, but it reminds one, somewhat, of the centralized system of France in Napoleon's time" (71). Another task imposed on teachers with excessive supervisory zeal was the requirement for pupils to have a certain minimum amount written for each lesson in composition in special books for the inspector's perusal, reminding Mark "of the importance attached to entries in science note-books by certain High School Inspectors some years ago. To apply such a method consistently to all subjects would tend to reduce the teacher to more of an automaton. It strengthens the impression of being under constant inspection" (71). He gave an excerpt from the board regulations requiring each teacher to record fully the nature and amount of work covered daily in class, which served a similar purpose. In 1921 the recently formed men and women teachers' federations conducted a militant campaign for higher and more equitable salaries. Putman, continuing his Hegelian meritocracy thrust, counterattacked by instituting a teacher-grading system and merit pay based on the December grading of the teacher by the inspector. A board of appeal manned by the chief inspector and two members of the School Management Committee was

n6 Chapter Six condemned by women teachers and by Putman's chief critic, Harold Shipman, as being rigged in the inspector's favour. The effect of this grading system on the morale of the average female teacher was poignantly described in an anonymous letter to the editor of the Ottawa Morning Journal on 18 March 1926. The letter, written by a former teacher, explained that any Ottawa public school class could have from thirty-five to forty-eight pupils. The teacher's first task was to control them. Then she was expected to teach them the curriculum as well as important lessons in honour and uprightness, "thus laying the foundations of good Canadian citizenship," which the writer considered of more value in the child's training than any assessment of arithmetic or spelling. Hazards in her path were children with difficult behavioural problems and parents who objected to her picking on their Johnny to improve his performance or to teaching him lessons of cleanliness; "if Johnny be not as clean as he might be, if the perfume from his clothing fill the air of the classroom and the teacher tries to enforce the laws of cleanliness and of health, she again runs afoul of an irate parent and again a complaint comes in." If a teacher wanted to obtain a grade C category, she had to make her pupils fond of school, fond of their lessons, and fond of her. During her previous six years of probation, the writer was inspected by each of the six subject supervisors, "each one anxious that his or her subject be well taught specialists in their own line and ready to help - but her pupils must register a certain standard of fitness in each of these subjects or an adverse criticism is the result." She was also examined by the inspectors, who looked at all the subjects taught her pupils, and was judged by her principal "in her tact in dealing with parents, her agreeableness to get along, to supervise corridors, stairways, basements and playgrounds, when required." No matter how faithful or painstaking she was, she could not get a B grade unless she had "experience, plus force of character, good appearance, voice, speech, manner, dress, skill to impart instruction, capacity for leadership, power to organize and industry." After eight years, if she possessed above average qualities to a degree which makes her "conspicuous in her profession," she may advance to the highest salary ranges. Very few people attained this A grading. Any teacher, on the other hand, who approached a trustee to complain directly or indirectly of her grading was guilty of a serious offence and liable to be dismissed immediately. Mark commented on the attractive personality and kind disposition which he considered valuable assets for a teacher and which were given a place of due prominence in the selection of teachers in Ottawa. Many visits to different class-rooms but strengthened the impression that there was, with a few exceptions, a splendid spirit of co-operation between teachers and pupils. Investigations were carried out in a manner suggesting partnership. The frank candour and

iiy

An Efficient School System

freedom of expression on the part of pupils, both in and out of the class-room, betokened a confidence in the teacher that was very commendable. There was very little sign of the martinet among the teachers. (53)

As a mark of this kindliness he noted that only 407 corporal punishments had been administered in 1917, approximately two per classroom. On the other hand, Mark was not impressed by the lack of ambition shown by teachers. After administering a questionnaire to 150 teachers in Ottawa public schools to test "their ambition, breadth of interest, and professional spirit generally" (50), he found out from his sixty-four returns, representing "the more progressive and professionally alert element among the teachers" (51), that 49 had not completed any course of study while teaching and that only 15 others had obtained higher professional certificates or degrees, while ii were in pursuit of higher certificates. He deplored the small number of teachers, only 34, who subscribed to professional journals, the few, 21, who attended outside lectures, the limited number, 33, who pursued outside activities, and the paucity of outside organizations joined. In his judgment, "It is a matter greatly to be deplored when teachers become so much a part of a system that all individuality and power of initiative is lost" (53). But in Hegelian fashion, although attaching much importance to institutional progress!vism, Mark expected the teacher's personality to rise above and conquer roadblocks set in his path by the system. With respect to the attainment of higher teaching certificates he commented, "The significant fact ... is that the teacher with the ambition and the application necessary to thus forge ahead under difficult conditions, is the type of person to exert a beneficial influence upon a class" (51). He therefore approved of Putman's salary schedule based on merit pay and the laws of supply and demand, and promotion based on quality of service rendered. "It should be understood by all teachers that only meritorious work can obtain the highest material reward" (55). He did not see a discrepancy between his meritocratic assumptions, such as those implicit in his questionnaire in the section on activities outside of the classroom, "designed to test the teachers' fearless independence and constructiveness of thought" (53), and the effect of this on the majority of teachers who "evinced no interest in professional or other literature ... had no special leisure occupations ... took no part in community activities or social service" (55). As a result, although he recognized the strenuous demands on their time and energy, he considered their general influence outside of the classroom to be minimal and liable to discredit the standing of the profession as a whole. Neither Mark nor Putman fully appreciated the conflict between their efficiency ideology and their liberal beliefs in individual opportunity. The effect of the former, like the citywide and appointive policies of urban reformers, tended to produce apathy in the average teacher and citizen. The individual ceased to strive for ex-

ii8 Chapter Six cellence when he realized he had no hope of reaching the top rung of the ladder. The teacher also realized that individual initiative was now evaluated according to group norms. Just as the child was classified and judged in relation to his standing in the system as a whole, so the teacher was valued according to his market potential to promote those features considered progressive for the school system. Ottawa teachers were acknowledged to be paid salaries higher than average for the province and for urban boards across Canada. By the use of bonuses, salaries attached to grade levels (only three other cities in Canada practised this), fixed maximum salaries with the longest period of time (eleven years) in Canada to reach them, merit considerations, and the upgrading of classification particularly to retain male manual-training teachers, Ottawa's progressive system offered a cost benefit to the ratepayer, which was commended by Mark and Richardson. They noted in passing the difficulty of teaching large numbers of pupils in a class - Mark recommended a reduction from forty-five to thirty students, the maximum per class, but made no comment on the effects of this on school costs. They also noted the need for salary increases for females (whose salaries were less than half that of males), the lack of any form of tenure or contract, the effect of special provincial grants, as well as the draining off of about half the school population in the lower classes to the separate schools. But neither of them considered that these measures were any detriment to the progressivism of the public school system of Ottawa. Some guilt, however, was felt by Mark on the comparison of the public with the separate school system in Ottawa. In 1911 Ottawa's taxable assessment amounted to $i 11,322,235 (in Ontario nearly 90 per cent of educational costs were raised locally). Only $18,620,479 was available for separate school expenditure even though more than half the elementary school population attended separate schools. By 1917 the discrepancy between the facilities of each board had become so great that Mark felt compelled to comment on it. While the Public School Board had 8,867 pupils, twenty-three buildings, 250 teachers and supervisors being paid a total of $265,957.37, the Roman Catholic Separate School Board had 9,416 pupils, thirty-three buildings, nine annexes, and 191 teachers who were paid only a total of $96,937- The separate schools had no kindergartens, manual-training or domestic science classes, and no supervisors of art, writing, music, or physical education. Very few separate school students received instruction beyond the eighth grade. The mill rate of 10 set by the Separate School Board was nearly double that of the Public School Board (5% mills), and it was applied to property assessed at one-fifth the value ($18,620,479 versus $92,701,756). To complicate matters further, 5,558 separate school pupils were classified as bilingual or French speaking. Their level of attainment in English was

119 An Efficient School System

deemed of such a low standard that the Department of Education issued "Circular no. 17, "the infamous regulation 17, in June 1912, which resulted in a series of court cases, the withholding of provincial grants to Ottawa English-French separate schools for noncompliance of the regulations, and the take-over of the Ottawa separate schools by a commission appointed by the minister of education in 1915-16. For Putman and Mark the solution lay in the formation of one board of education in the interests of efficiency and economy. In a plan outlined in a confidential letter to Deputy Minister A.H.U. Colquhoun in January I9i8,15 Putman would have allowed sectarian religious instruction after school hours and instruction in French to any child whose parents desired it. He also recommended the establishment of a professional training school for French-speaking teachers. A superintendent of schools would exercise general supervision for all schools under the board of education. In marshalling his arguments, however, Putman largely ignored the central concern of French-speaking Ottawans, namely, the loss of control over the language of instruction in their schools. He posited cost-benefit reasons to get their support of his proposal. For instance, because of the great discrepancy in tax revenue, the Ottawa separate schools had no hope of ever becoming efficient. He believed that this consideration, just as much as the question of giving instruction in the French language, was at the root of their present litigation. If the Public School Board took over the property of the Separate School Board, assessed at about $400,000, as well as its liabilities, and if the separate school ratepayers became public school supporters, the Separate School Board could become solvent, according to Putman. If the separate school supporters were not satisfied with the education given their children in five or ten years, they would have the constitutional right to establish their own schools (he did not mention whether or not he would give them back their property). In liberal fashion Putman believed that if French-speaking children in Ontario were properly educated in both English and French, they could improve their "backward condition." He would do away with bilingual teachers and man the schools with well-trained French and English teachers. Half the day would be devoted to the teaching of subjects in either language. In Putman's plan clerical teachers would be phased out over five years and only duly qualified teachers employed by the Ottawa Public School Board would be retained. He believed that through letters to the newspapers progressive leaders could convince fair-minded people in the community to rally to his support for one board of education. Thus efficiency and high-quality education would smooth over troubled racial waters and would overpower sectarian control of education. In 1921 the deficit of the Ottawa Separate School Board amounted to a

120 Chapter Six

huge $71,000 in principal and $89,000 in accumulated interest. But the Conservative and United Farmers governments remained unchanged in their enforcement of regulation 17. Behind the scenes, however, 1'Association canadienne franchise d'education d'Ontario, under the leadership of Senator Napoleon A. Belcourt, whom Putman was to persuade to head the Ottawa branch of the National Council of Education, brought pressure to bear on business leaders and French-Canadian activists for a moderate policy. The Unity League, in large part a front for the French-Canadian Educational Association, lobbied the United Farmers government. English-language instruction in the bilingual schools had steadily improved. In 1920 the Ottawa Separate School Board divided into English and French sections, thereby isolating the two major litigants in the previous court battles. A teachers' college for French-speaking students was established at the University of Ottawa when the Conservatives returned to power in 1923, and authority was given the university in 1925 to issue its own entrance examinations. In that year also the Ontario Legislative Assembly appointed a commission of inquiry, headed by F.W. Merchant, Louis Cote, and Judge J.H. Scott, to examine the Ontario bilingual schools. As a result of their conclusions that there was a continuing low level of oral English and unsatisfactory conditions in the 330 bilingual schools they visited, a departmental committee was formed and directors of English and of French instruction were appointed who reported directly to the minister of education. The teacher-training school at the University of Ottawa was accepted into the provincial system, and the controversy over regulation 17 was largely resolved. The separate board, however, remained distinct from the public board. A number of Ottawa public school trustees with Orange Lodge affiliation did not object to this separation. After all, it left much more scope for the Ottawa Public School Board to increase greatly its own expenditure for school property. From Putman's 1917 annual report Richardson compiled a table which gave statistics on school property in three five-year periods. As he pointed out, the expenditure for new buildings between 1910 and 1914 was 570.3 per cent greater than that between 1900 and 1904 and 33.5 per cent greater than that between 1905 and 1909. Expenditures for school sites increased 575.1 per cent (1910-14) and 120.8 per cent (1905-9), while the total expenditure for buildings, land, and furniture in 1910-14 increased 531.4 per cent over the 1900-4 period. He believed that it could "be demonstrated that each of these enormously increased expenditures is justifiable on the ground of increased educational facility and efficiency" (249)One major reason for the increased school costs was the board's policy of erecting fireproof buildings with wide corridors, safety doors, and fire alarms. In 1915 Ontario's chief inspector, John Waugh, commended five Ottawa schools which had been either built or renovated at a cost of

121

An Efficient School System

$451,509.16 As well as being more sanitary and safe than in previous years, Mark found that Ottawa schools included new facilities. Assemblies were added in three schools, special kindergarten classes in nineteen, manualtraining facilities in thirteen, and household science rooms in five centres. Playrooms were built in all school basements with separate areas for boys and girls to play in wet weather. Mark judged them to by "airy, well-lighted, and provided with seats around the walls. The floors in most cases are of cement, but several have been made quieter and less dusty by a layer of asphalt" (36). He also praised the landscaping around the schools. Most schools had grass plots in front, several had ornamental shrubs and flowerbeds, and most of the older schools had large shade trees. Because he believed that environment "has much to do with the formation of ideas and standards of judgment" (40), the "permanent influence of these touches of beauty on pupils' aesthetic tastes and upon their attitude to school associations is most important" (31). Ottawa schools had accomplished much in this direction, he thought. In the same vein Mark approved of the number of "very good sepia prints, copies of famous masterpieces or photographs of famous buildings. These have been purchased with the proceeds of 'Art Exhibitions' which have been held by these schools, pictures having been loaned or rented for the purpose" (38). In all classrooms he noted the general soft colour schemes, woodwork in natural colours and walls and ceilings a greenish grey in sunny rooms and a light buff in darker rooms. The decoration of the walls was left to the ingenuity of the teacher under the direction of the art supervisor. He commended the picture of the King and Queen and the Union Jack hanging in almost every room. As well as depicting cultural ideas, Richardson remarked, the school should promote the new scientific and community norms, in effect, attempt to change standards of judgment towards their acceptance. As he explained, the changes in school buildings, equipment, and playground policy had been vast in the previous two decades: School architecture, heating, ventilation, and sanitation have become specialized sciences. The ideals of the taxpayer have changed and his children are reaping the benefit. Economy in building is still urged, but... health and safety are demanded, the happiness of the children is consciously striven for, and the convenience and comfort of the teaching staff are now considered to be worthwhile. In many cities, the newer public school buildings both in exterior appearance and interior appointments and furnishings rank with the city hall and public library among the show places to which visitors are taken with pardonable pride. (277)

To achieve this high standard of physical excellence, Richardson drew attention to the necessity of appointing a specialized official as superintendent of buildings, whose twenty-two functions in the Ottawa public schools were

122 Chapter Six

minutely listed in a two-page brochure. As well the Property Committee had eighteen functions for which it was responsible. In Richardson's estimation no other item was more important than that the pupils should breathe pure air, at the proper temperature, and sit in desks of the right form and correct height. Mark observed that all Ottawa pupils had single desks, "chiefly of the shelf type though box desks are supplied to grade 8 classes" (37). Ten per cent only were adjustable, and he criticized the lack of overlap between some desks and the seat. He noted that in primary grades, however, movable desks were being substituted for the older stationary ones. To secure even more improvement, Richardson urged school officials to make a scientific evaluation of their school buildings and grounds and to attend conferences so that they could set up "the highest possible standards of efficiency and the changing of modes and procedures in the direction of new standards" (277). Ottawa officials were constantly visiting the United States to catch up on the latest trends. In 1919 W.C. Beattie, Ottawa's superintendent of buildings, travelled extensively in that country with R.W. Hamilton, board chairman, and reported on their visit. Increased development of physical facilities, such as gymnasiums and swimming pools, more extensive use of lockers for cloakrooms, thermostatically controlled heating, and the beginning of standardized architectural plans were evident in major Canadian and American cities.17 Beattie concluded by remarking that "they could all come to Ottawa for lessons on domestic science equipment and heating and ventilation." Ottawa public school buildings, in Hamilton's estimation, were the best of their kind "and a standing monument to the efficiency and true devotion to duty of our late deceased Superintendent of Buildings, W.B. Garvock."18 Mark was not in total agreement. In his judgment Ottawa classrooms were unnecessarily large with too high ceilings (fourteen feet). Lighting often came from two sources, or in newer schools window lighting was insufficient to meet the minimum standards. In Glashan School he criticized the large number (forty-eight) of seats per room. Playgrounds were covered with gravel or cinders, or in the newer schools, clay or sand, making extremely dusty or muddy conditions, which were not healthy for children's play. Ottawa was heading in the right direction, however, in terms of the size of play-space per pupil. Other criticisms were that a number of classes were accommodated in places not originally designed for classrooms, such as the third-storey facilities in Elgin, Osgoode, and First Avenue schools. Postponement of better school accommodation in Lower Town would mean much more costly construction. As he commented, "Coming from a district in which there is a large foreign element, these children are sadly in need of the influences of more sanitary and more aesthetic surroundings at school" (39). Mark thought that more assembly halls should be constructed and situated on the first floor so that there could be increased community use of the school, "an

123 An Efficient School System

indispensable feature of a modern school" (39). His more detailed case study approach, therefore, revealed some of the flaws within Ottawa's ideally efficient public school system. Mark's examination of the program of studies and his observation of its implementation in numerous classrooms revealed a number of unpleasant effects of this emphasis on efficiency on the children in the schools. He first praised the program at the School for Higher English, which he described as "instruction of an exceptionally high character" (63), and which aroused the ambition and sustained the interest of adolescents who would otherwise have dropped out of school. Also commended were a new nature study program initiated by Inspector Slemon in which lessons were "of a high order" (88), and the Glebe and Home Gardens Clubs under a specially qualified teacher. Aside from these programs, formal recitation methods, he considered, generally prevailed. He acknowledged that the Department of Education heavily prescribed the curricular content and even suggested percentages of time which should be spent in each area. Mark compared the latter with the average of that from schools in fifty progressive cities in the United States. He also applied standardized achievement tests, newly developed in the United States, to pupils in grades four, six, and eight in two schools in spelling, writing, silent reading, and arithmetic to measure the efficiency of pupils' learning. Ottawa pupils were found to spend 2 per cent more time on spelling than that prescribed by the department and measured in the American cities. Although excellent results were obtained, Mark suggested that less time should be spent on formal spelling lessons - "greater proficiency belongs to the field of specialized or vocational training" (79). Greater use should be made of the dictionaries already supplied to pupils in grades seven and eight, and lapsing into formal disciplinarianism himself, he advocated "strict insistence on the correct spelling of words in all written work" (93), with the requirement that all exercises containing careless spelling should be rewritten and formal lessons given for chronically weak spellers. Writing lessons, conducted under the zealous supervision of A.F. Newlands, were deemed to take up too much of the pupils' time, especially in the higher grade levels. Undue emphasis was placed on correct body, arm, and hand positions to obtain good freedom of movement and on a commendable series of exercises devised by the supervisor which allowed for individual progress. But this was at the expense of quality and attention to habits such as concern for spacing and slant. Mark urged teachers to become familiar with the new standardized tests and to apply them frequently to measure class progress in speed and quality of writing. He believed that the use of a more permanent form of notebook for all written work would lead to higher quality work. According to Mark the most important tool subject, reading, did not receive nearly the amount of time necessary to fulfil its prescribed aim, "to

124 Chapter Six

train the pupil so that he may be able to find for himself the thoughts and feelings conveyed by the written or printed words and may be able to communicate them to the listener so that he may appreciate them" (81). Silent reading was particularly significant for fulfilling this aim. He recommended an adequate supply of books in correlated subjects, such as history, geography, or hygiene, and enough so that each pupil could have a copy from each set. (Putman, on the other hand, would have recommended a variety of books rather than a set.) After remarking on the "unduly large proportion of time spent on Oral Reading" (82), Mark concluded from his silent reading and comprehension tests that there was insufficient training in silent reading, a wide range of performance in speed, and generally low scores in comprehension. Applying Franklin Bobbitt's curricular norms as well as the Courtis tests in arithmetic, Mark judged that although Ottawa pupils spent 5 per cent more school time on the subject than was spent in American cities, they suffered from "a lamentable general deficiency in accuracy" (85). There could be a great saving of time if pupils were given printed copies of questions, thereby leaving more time for drill. Teachers should accent a variety of solutions to problems instead of requiring "the mechanical simplification" (93). Since 25 per cent of the pupils' time was taken up with spelling (8 per cent) and arithmetic (17.3 per cent), and 150 minutes per week was spent in composition in the first five grades, Mark strongly condemned the "unduly large amount of reproduction work ... given in the junior grades" (94). He recommended more application of concrete situations, such as the use of stuffed specimens of birds and animals loaned by the museum for nature study lessons, which definitely broadened and deepened the pupils' interest in and understanding of nature. On the other hand, manual training in the junior grades devoted an undue amount of time to formal models. He commented that "opposition to any work which has a practical bearing seems to die a slow death" (89). More to the point, though, was Mark's observation that only recently had normal schools changed their training methods sufficiently to correct their former Herbartian, formalized tendencies. "As a result many of the older teachers need the additional help and guidance which only an expert can give. The urgent need for this is evidenced by the small amount of field work undertaken" (94). He recommended that an additional supervisor be appointed for geography, who could help teachers and pupils understand man's relationship to his environment through concrete observations in field, factory, and market. "Such an approach to the study of geography is essential for the earlier grades" (94). In the teaching of history Ottawa teachers fared better. Mark observed several lessons in which the pupil's interest in historical characters and events was roused. The pupil was given a knowledge of his rights and duties, an

125

An Efficient School System

appreciation of high ideals of conduct, and an awareness of the logical sequence of events. But more attempts, he thought, could be made to create a historical atmosphere so that the pupils could sense the socio-economic conditions surrounding events. He admitted that this would "entail a very widely read staff and a wealth of reference materials for teachers and of visual aids for pupils" (94). Unfortunately there was a lamentable dearth of books on historical subjects in the upper grades. Mark hoped that the restoration of history in the high school entrance examinations would "not stampede Ottawa teachers into again teaching the subject rather than the pupil" (87). More use should be made of the wealth of historical sites in Ottawa and her position across the Interprovincial Bridge from Quebec. If there was more correlation between history and other subjects such as geography, writing, spelling, reading, and grammar, a unitary concept of knowledge would develop and greater prominence in the upper grades could be given to foreign languages, algebra, or geometry. Mark commended the more practical type of manual-training work being conducted at the higher grade levels in which the boys were allowed to make articles of their own choice for their own use, such as birdhouses, or for use by others, such as numeral frames for the primary grades. In the School for Higher English and the Manual Arts School even more advanced work was being conducted in which lathes and band saws, pottery, and metal work drew much interest. He praised highly the school exhibits and displays in the Central Canada Exhibition as a means to gain the attention and interest of the community. He recommended an extension of this alliance with the community as well as an increased amount of practical work. For example, boys could undertake school repairs or build a skating hut for their school rink. Efforts by the Ottawa Public School Board to arouse a love of community singing through the teaching of choral music and good tone quality also were praised by Mark. Pupils could read from both the tonic sol-fa and staff notations and had a good understanding of elementary theory. Over the years a number of schools had performed cantatas in public. He recommended that these music skills be increased by making wider use of specially qualified teachers to bring all classes up to a higher standard and to develop a genuine "appreciation of the best and an enjoyment in the singing exercises. Pupils should be given frequent opportunity to hear some really good music either by artists locally available or from phonographic reproductions. Regular occasions should be found for bringing the school or groups of classes together for singing" (96). He commended the school board's policy of giving dispensation from compulsory attendance to pupils taking instrumental music lessons. Similarly Mark praised the school garden work which was directed by a specially qualified teacher who was on duty in school hours and during the

126 Chapter Six

vacation months to plan, supervise, and assist pupils, but he warned that this garden work could become firmly established only "when teachers themselves become enthusiastic gardeners. The questionnaire submitted to them revealed few who reported this as a special interest" (95). He urged the board to offer them salary incentives to become qualified for conducting garden work by attending, for example, summer courses at Guelph. Despite his adverse criticism of the state of the curriculum and overly formal teaching methods, Mark's overall assessment of the Ottawa public schools was that under Putman's leadership they had attained "a high state of efficiency and are in a healthy state of growth" (166). He quoted James W. Robertson, chairman of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education, who said that Ottawa public schools were the best conducted in Canada. Judged according to scientific efficiency norms and progressive management techniques, they were in the forefront. Practical difficulties such as large class size, lack of wide educational background of most of Ottawa's teachers, excessive supervision of teachers, paucity of supplementary reading and audio-visual materials, formalized teaching methods, and lack of experience with project work or correlation of subjects, it was assumed, would be overcome in time under Putman's expert leadership. In idealistic fashion these progressive reformers also assumed that practical school work (community projects, group singing, school gardens, geography excursions) would draw the interest of students and not only keep them in school longer, but encourage them to become socially harmonious, community-minded citizens, thereby promoting the goals of democratic government. They also assumed that their logical and evolutionary approach to subjects, particularly history and geography (social studies), would incline students towards a belief in rational development and the inherent humanitarian progressivism of capitalistic business. By reflecting on this as well as on the great heroes of the past, the individual would overcome obstacles in his life's journey, would bravely strive for high ideals, and would behave in accordance with them. Both from his correlated subjects at school and from the efficient working of institutional structures, the individual would acquire a rational, unitary concept of knowledge. His education, therefore, would "contribute to the fullest development of the head, the hand, and the heart, and ... aim to equip one for his vocational, social, civic, leisure, and health needs and responsibilities."19 What the reformers failed to take into account was the countervailing press of their bureaucratic structures and efficiency norms on the freedom and opportunity of the individual to achieve any truly democratic goals. Their drive for excellence, their strong socialization procedures, and their zealous control of teachers and programs had the effect of increasing the formalization of the schools so deplored by Mark. By subsuming class or racial differences

127 An Efficient School System

to cost-benefit norms, they cut short the true understanding of individual differences and the encouragement of biculturalism. By establishing extensive bureaucratic procedures and socializing the school population to accept expert professional guidance, they were not educating critically minded, dispassionate citizens. In actual practice, by the end of World War i progressive reformers had abandoned their idealistic philosophical roots and were overvaluing utilitarian efficiency and underplaying democratic freedom for the self-development of individuals. As previously mentioned, however, the utilitarianism and meritocracy inherent in neo-Hegelian idealism thrust these English-Canadian Protestants in this direction. The new elements added during the war were measurable techniques, in the form of achievement and intelligence tests, as well as more sophisticated management practices, which gave increased power to the professional leader to control his production system. His rhetoric, however, appealed to the idealistic beliefs of postwar Canadians in the possibility of a reconstructed society. It tended to conceal the evils of the more efficient system the progressive reformer was selling.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

Despite his visits to the United States and his adoption of many American management policies, Putman strongly tempered his reformist impulses with a conservatism derived from the Canadian sense of imperialism. During World War I this conservatism became apparent in three areas: the Strathcona Trust program of the Ottawa public schools in physical and military training, which included the cadet movement; the civics and history emphases in the program of studies; and the campaign for adult education. All three mirrored trends that had been developing in the province and across Canada from the turn of the century, but the war accelerated their development and brought into prominence the crucial role that educational reformers assigned to the school in moulding the postwar generation. The school was to assume ideal proportions as the principal agency to stem the tide of the Jazz Age and an increasingly neo-utilitarian view of life in society at large. Ironically the effect of this idealization was further isolation of the school from the rest of society and the development of more formalized procedures in the school program, particularly in physical education. In 1910 Putman found that the physical side of education in the Ottawa public schools was superior in two respects: "efficiency in military drill and organized inter-school contests in football and hockey." In his judgment the former was the result of pressure from the three colonels on the board; the latter was produced by enthusiastic school principals and their male assistants. Many years later Putman admitted that his own opinion on the desirability of a system of military training for the youth under the auspices of the school had "changed very much since 1914."! But at the outbreak of the war Putman still reflected the imperialistic sentiments voiced in his 1904 textbook, Britain and the Empire. While English master at the Ottawa Normal School in 1909, for instance, Putman had won fourth prize of seventy-five dollars in an essay contest sponsored by the Strathcona Trust on the subject of the encouragement of physical and military training in public schools.

129 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

Across Canada at this time concern was growing over the physical condition of schoolchildren, as Neil Sutherland has documented.2 The roots of the campaign for physical education in the schools, he claims, came from public health workers, who urged the regular teaching of hygiene and fitness exercises as a form of preventive medicine; from military men, who were convinced that drill and calisthenics would develop easy carriage and effective discipline and prepare male students for war; from the public, whose interest in physical fitness, games, and other sports was growing even to the point of attaching a mystical aura to team games, which was associated with contemporary attitudes to sex; and from YMCA and YWCA promoters, who claimed that physical exercise was important in developing Canadian character. In 1909 Lord Strathcona, advised by Sir Frederick Borden, Canada's minister of militia under the Laurier government, announced a contribution of $250,000 to create a fund, the Strathcona Trust, to encourage physical and military training in schools across Canada. The general principles of the trust were that the training should inculcate habits of alertness, prompt obedience, and patriotism in all pupils and should include military drill and rifle shooting for all boys. Both sexes, though, were to share in the rewards and allotment of money, which was to be offered to them and to teachers as incentives "to perfect themselves in the training specified."3 The money was to be allocated to the provinces in proportion to their school age population and was to be divided 50 per cent for physical training, 35 per cent for military training, and 15 per cent for rifle shooting. The system of physical training adopted was the British syllabus for elementary schools, in turn an adaptation of Swedish gymnastics. Education departments were to set up training courses so that eventually all teachers would be certified to teach this new program. The Ottawa Public School Board in 1909 hired E.J. Collins as a drill instructor. When Putman arrived the next year, he found that Collins devoted most of his time to senior boys. In 1911, therefore, Putman proposed several fundamental changes in the program. Calisthenics were to be extended to all children; regular classroom teachers were to be encouraged to take the special Strathcona training course and then to teach the program under Collins's supervision. Senior boys were to continue their squad drill and rifle practice under Collins's direction, but Putman hoped that more extended gymnastics programs, rather than military drill, would develop in the future. As he wrote, "Prompt obedience to a command, orderly mass movements, rapid changes in forming ranks, and graceful marching to music are as essentially a part of any good system of gymnastics as they are a part of military drill, and in these lie the great educational advantages of both military drill and gymnastics."4 Ottawa teachers followed Strathcona physical-training courses in May and October 1912 and March 1913 under the Militia Department. As Putman explained to parents, teacher training was one section of the four-part program

130 Chapter Seven offered by the trust. Another was the calisthenic exercises given to the children by these teachers. The purpose of the exercises was "to strengthen and develop the lungs, the limbs, the muscles, or the carriage of the children."5 They were capable of being performed in the regular classroom, basement, or outdoors and could be undertaken in one thirty-minute lesson a week or each day for three to five minutes. Annual competitions were to be held under the terms of the trust as well, and that year the first one took place at Dey's Arena with ten thousand children and their parents present. Four schools competed and Glashan School was the proud winner of the Strathcona Competition Shield, presented by Canada's new minister of the militia, the Honourable Colonel Sam Hughes. In 1912 this highly militaristic minister, following the thrust of the Strathcona program, organized the first cadet camp at Barriefield, Ontario, which was attended by thirty-five Ottawa public school boys, accompanied by Sergeant Collins and two Ottawa principals. They reported that the camp was clean and the food wholesome. No mention was made of "the dilatoriness and neglect of the military authorities," who were strongly criticized by the Ottawa Citizen on 17 July 1912. In the newspaper's opinion the organization was so poor that of the nearly one thousand boys who had originally been interested, a mere thirty-five attended the camp, and the opening had been delayed by a month. Putman, like many others, played down Hughes's militaristic viewpoint and depicted the cadet camps as moral-training centres for the nation.6 Both men, although coming from two different political traditions, advocated military training for adolescents from the same idealistic base. As Putman expressed it, I am one of the last persons who wish to glorify war or to aid in the cultivation of a jingo spirit among our youth. I cannot see, however, that a sane military training should make a boy bloodthirsty or quarrelsome, or that it should lessen his feeling of brotherhood for all mankind. On the contrary, we are more likely to meet strangers frankly, courteously, and kindly when we are so disciplined and under such perfect self-control that we are sure of ourselves. The dangerous man is the undisciplined man.7 The next summer 500 Ottawa cadets, under the direct charge of Putman, rallied at the Byward Market and set off for their summer camp.8 The Strathcona program bolstered the cadet movement by sponsoring teachertraining programs. Sergeant Collins reported that in 1914 twenty Ottawa teachers became certified to teach physical training and Strathcona competitions and that military training and musketry practice had been held regularly during the year in Ottawa public schools. Out of the eight school companies in the cadet corps, 151 Ottawa public school boys had attended the Barriefield

131

Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

camp. The military inspector rated these companies as "good" and "well up with their work,"9 and they received a grant of $350, the highest grant next to Toronto's in that year. Just before the outbreak of war, Ottawa children trained under the Strathcona Trust program gave a demonstration of physical exercises on Parliament Hill, which was described as "one of the finest exhibitions of physical work by children ... ever witnessed in Ottawa."10 The exercises included breathing, head turning, arm stretching, body bending, and other drills and were performed to show parents this new program. Desmond Morton writes that by the eve of the war "the cadet movement appeared to be growing to new heights of organization, participation and enthusiasm. Under the federal-provincial agreements, almost nine thousand male and female teachers had qualified under military auspices as physical training instructors."11 This had a considerable impact on Canadian interest in physical education, according to Ethel Cartwright, the physical director of the Royal Victoria College of McGill University. Writing in The School in 1915, she stated that the initial purpose of the Strathcona Trust had been fulfilled but it was necessary to go further. She believed that the Militia Department would agree with her "when I state emphatically and unreservedly that the military teacher, be he ever so good, is not the right person to teach physical exercises to women. Nor is his training the best preparation for one who has to instruct men teachers in the methods of physical education adapted to schools."12 She urged that a recognized college of physical education, which would produce trained experts, be established in Canada. These experts were needed for the supervision of games, especially necessary for the ever-increasing foreign population. But these considerations had to await the end of the war. In 1916 Collins stated that since every man between eighteen and forty-five was likely to be drafted, he recommended a compulsory military drill course for all boys until they reached fifteen. At the same time he commented on the excellent spirit being fostered between teachers and pupils through the Strathcona Trust competition, which he believed, in idealistic fashion, showed "the ethical value of physical training when placed in efficient hands."13 In the next year he allied this with what had become a major theme of most imperialists, namely, the efficacy of physical training and military drill in cultivating character. The Strathcona program was justified, Collins wrote, because as the "Honourable Alfred Lyttleton, M.P., declared ... all who know a Britisher's character would say that a considerable portion of school life should be spent in development of physical training, games, and athletics which fostered courage, patience, tenacity, discipline, and spirit."14 At the conclusion of the war in 1918, this idealistic aspect of the Strathcona program flourished in Ottawa with the introduction of eurhythmies and folk-dancing, as mentioned in an earlier chapter, under the direction of Florence Jamieson. The specific forms of eurhythmies were described earlier;

132 Chapter Seven

however, its underlying organicist intent with militaristic overtones was expressed in 1921 when Jamieson wrote, "The aim of this work is to combat weakness of will, to inspire confidence, and to train the children by every possible means to fight for self-mastery and the power to place themselves, fully equipped, at the service of others."15 Putman used a similar justification for the value of team games. He cited the advantages British educators attributed to games, which were regarded by them "as equal if not superior to book studies for teaching patience, self-control, love of fair play, unity of effort, courtesy to an opponent, magnanimity in victory and frank, ungrudging admission of defeat." Unfortunately these qualities were not apparent in the football and hockey leagues of 1910. The "minor evils of semi-professional sport" infected these team games,16 with school pitted against school, heavy involvement of the local press, and the coaxing of hockey "ringers" from separate schools onto public school teams.17 The physical development of the boys was thus forgotten, and rinks were wholly given over to hockey practice. Fortunately a majority of school principals and their male assistants, no doubt instigated by Putman, decided on reforms. In 1915 they formed the Public School Athletic Association and, with Putman's approval, gradually gave up the league games. Each school largely became responsible for the games of its own pupils. Only informal matches were held. Soccer was introduced in 1915 and baseball and basketball in 1916, resulting in a much larger participation of students in team games. The newspaper publicity was stopped. Rinks were opened in the evenings for family use, thus "making the school a social centre," Putman explained.18 Competition and school rivalry continued to some extent, however, because as Putman judged, they created "a healthy interest in sport" and did no harm provided they were carried on in the proper spirit. By 1921 a representative of the athletic association considered this spirit to be in evidence at the Strathcona field day of sports, where he was pleased by "the fine spirit of sportsmanship displayed and the absence of rough or ungentlemanly conduct ... [owing to] the fine discipline of the majority."19 Unfortunately Putman's plea for the importance of physical education and playground activities for girls, "who will be the mothers of a new generation,"20 was not wholeheartedly accepted by many senior girls. The supervisor of physical training regretted that so many of them were allowed to stand out and watch these competitions. Despite his admonition that "the secret of fine, clear, healthy complexions, gracefulness of form and quickness of movement" was acquired only by running, jumping, and romping,21 and that the new physical-training standard of 1922 required at least ten minutes of calisthenics per day or thirty minutes in the gymnasium, female teachers and their female students still failed to participate. The war had made apparent the general lack of physical fitness of Canada's

133 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

youth, Putman warned the Urban School Trustees' Association in I920.22 Continuing a theme he had promoted since 1913 when he had joined the Ottawa Playgrounds Association, he pleaded with the trustees to campaign for increased grants for open-air playgrounds in Ontario schools. The Ottawa Public School Board, for example, had built and equipped four playgrounds on school property.23 Putman's own sons were winning a number of awards for their prowess in swimming, diving, and skiing.24 Merritt Putman was on Canada's first ski team in the 1928 Olympics and participated in the jumping and cross-country skiing events.25 Outdoor play, in Putman's estimation, was the only way to make the rising generation physically and intellectually fit. In all these programs, however, there remained a decidedly militaristic stamp, which Morton broadly defines as "a state of mind or a set of values which supported patriotism, discipline, subordination, order and a brutally competitive view of human nature."26 A common theme among military enthusiasts was a suspicion of democracy. Cadet training was considered a good remedy against socialism, hooliganism in towns, and loutishness in the country. Don Morrow concludes that although the Strathcona Trust was designed as a pilot project, much like the Macdonald-Robertson movement, "the Ontario Department of Education was content to rely upon the Strathcona system as the mainstay of physical education programmes in the elementary schools ... for some thirty years."27 Sutherland describes how the "drybiscuits" physical education program implanted a "military-style calisthenics" in Canadian schools until after World War n.28 In Putman's later assessment of the program, an insight into the central thrust of the physical education enthusiasts was given. Putman judged that "to-day we spend vast sums for gymnasia and provide liberally for equipment. The health and physique of the child are considered to be of first importance and health education, physical exercise and games are recognized as a closely co-ordinated unit of instruction."29 Following his philosophical norms, he believed that a more healthy, more co-operative citizen had been produced in large part because the individual was part of an efficient, organic school society, which now served as an ideal model for the public domain. As Joel Spring commented about the American Playground and Recreation Association, play and athletics were to provide the means by which a democracy would adjust to the demands of a modern urban-industrial society. They would cultivate what its president, Luther Gulick, called "mutual-consent control,"30 a wider loyalty and a greater devotion to larger national ideals. Carl Berger concurs; in his estimation cadet "drill and physical exercises were ... commended for national, industrial, ethical, social, as well as military, reasons."31 Putman used many of the same reasons when he advocated the teaching of history, which, he told the Carleton East Teachers' Association in September 1910, had been sadly neglected in Ontario.32 As illustrated in his book Britain and the Empire, he claimed that history extended a person's thinking powers,

134 Chapter Seven

trained pupils in citizenship, taught them their "relationship to the whole" and thus clarified their patriotism, and provided a good background for literature. Two years later he stated that students of the Ottawa public schools were taught lessons in civics as part of their history classes from the primary grades up. Object lessons were drawn from local conditions and the classes were made as practical as possible to retain the pupils' interest. Putman was convinced that the lessons led to good citizenship and a greater interest in civic affairs and government generally.33 An example of this concrete approach was reported in the Ottawa Free Press on 18 June 1914. At the June exhibition of the First Avenue School, "one young lady has settled Ottawa's water problem quite conclusively in a well-written essay ... Writing before the elections, she declared that the Thirty-one Mile lake scheme was the only scheme that would settle Ottawa's water difficulties in a very conclusive sentence: 'Oh, the almighty dollar!' She concludes with an impassioned prayer for intervention from the Legislature."34 Part of the reason for Putman's earnest defence of the teaching of civics was that a committee of Ottawa citizens, called the Advance Committee, had been formed, which criticized history teaching in the public schools. The objective of this committee was to inculcate local patriotism in schoolchildren. It suggested that a suitable banner inscribed with "Ottawa" should be donated to each school and the children taught to salute it. One hour a week or month should be used by the teacher for talks on the city and its history. A song of Ottawa should be written and taught to pupils. The committee promised to award a handsome cup to the school conducting the best march past, singing, and saluting of the flag on Empire Day when also local ministers would preach a sermon of loyalty to the King and the city. The committee, as reported in the Evening Journal, concluded, "These memories will naturally be very pleasant, and, above all, will be lasting, and we feel that this will accomplish our object in uniting all minds in the fact that our 'Home City' is worthy of our best efforts to make it the 'Ideal'."35 But the criticism that history was not properly taught in the public schools continued, even from the pulpit;36 therefore Putman sent a circular to all his teachers instructing them that a certain amount of time had to be spent each week, in junior as well as in senior classes, in the teaching of history. Because final examinations had been dropped in Ottawa public schools, one of their principals, Frank Perney, defended Putman by claiming that history has become one of the most interesting subjects to the majority of children. The pupils leave the Public School ... with a vital interest in the whole subject, and with some consciousness of the part they are to play in the life of the community, and the country to which they belong. The true purpose of the study of history, which no uniform written examination can test, that of inspiring sentiments of devotion to country, love of rational liberty,

135 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction appreciation of courage, unselfishness, manliness and honesty, and a dislike of treachery, meanness and cowardice can now be kept in view. This purpose is kept in view by hundreds of teachers of Ottawa in dealing with the subject of history.37

Putman clarified his attitude to patriotism in another address to the Carleton East Teachers' Association in October 1913. He did not mean the "noisy kind of patriotism which is based on race prejudice." "I want our children to know what it is to be Canadians and British subjects/' he was reported to have told the teachers.38 History should prepare citizens as well for life in a democracy, he thought, and it should sway the child's moral judgment, put him in full possession of his heritage, and fire his imagination. In an effort to fulfil the latter aim, Putman ordered over one thousand lantern slides and several lanterns (projectors) to illustrate both history and geography lessons.39 The Department of Education summarized the practical advantages of visual aids in a pamphlet for teachers written at this time.40 Advantages included their power to attract the attention and arouse the interest of the students, to correct and reinforce impressions derived from hearing and reading, and to project clearer and more detailed impressions in less time. With the onset of World War I the pressure on the schools to improve history teaching increased. The courses should be rewritten, urged the editor of the Ottawa Citizen, so that unbiased accounts, featuring the celebration of one hundred years of peace between Canada and the United States, would remove prejudices from the minds of most students who leave school at the end of grade eight.41 There should be more teaching of Canadian history, urged Sir George Foster, minister of trade and commerce. In response to these pressures Education Minister R. A. Pyne issued a pamphlet, "The War and the School," in which schoolchildren were encouraged to write essays on the various phases of the war being waged, something the editor of the Citizen thought was "a radical step in teaching school history" and which would prove an immense stride forward for Christianity and civilization, leading as it would to the elimination of war in one generation.42 The Ontario government also issued copies to teachers of Britain's White Papers so that the children would learn about the actual causes of the war and the reason why Great Britain had entered it.43 Anglo-Saxon racism had been reflected for a number of years in the authorized geography and history textbooks and in the Ontario readers.44 During the war, however, the propaganda campaign by the provincial Department of Education increased. When the contract for the authorized history textbook was nearing its expiry date in 1918, the department asked Putman and five others to review four new publications by competing publishing houses and the two texts in use at that time. Its injunction to the readers to judge whether the "quality of rousing the interest of the pupil and of stimulating lofty ideals" had been displayed and whether there was "tact in

136

Chapter Seven

dealing with political and religious topics" reflected wartime worries that history was not being used instrumentally to promote British-Canadian unity.45 In Putman's very thorough analyses of the six texts he demonstrated his own excellent grasp of British and Canadian history and his liberal view of imperialism. He rather shocked departmental officials, judging by the exclamation mark and underlinings added in the margin, with this terse comment on the authorized British history textbook, "I do not feel free to report upon the English section of the present Ontario Public School History because nearly half this work is taken from a book which I prepared myself for the Morang Company."46 He went on to analyse the other five manuscripts, sparing no criticism of those he considered weak. In his extensive criticism of Dent's history text, for instance, Putman concluded, "I need waste no more time on this book. Imagine the perspective of a historian of Canada who makes no mention of Baldwin and LaFontaine, Lord Elgin and the Rebellion Losses Bill and who takes five pages to extol the work of the successful adventurer, Donald Smith, who, would he have lived another century, would have owned everything in Canada."47 His liberal bias was also reflected in his review of Nelson's submission in which loyalist Tories were described as composing the best elements in the colonies because they were men of influence and education. Putman considered this imperialistic myth pretty strong and historically inaccurate. Surely we in Canada now recognize that the American Revolution was a fight for human freedom and that the men who engaged in that fight on behalf of the Colonies were not less able, patriotic, and well educated than their Tory opponents. My ancestors left the United States after the peace of 1783 and came to Canada to live under the British flag, but I would be ashamed to claim that they were more worthy than the patriots who, under Washington, fought and vanquished the stubborn tyrant, George in.48

In the same liberal vein Putman objected to the author's use of the term "imperialism." "I doubt the wisdom of heading a chapter 'Imperial Canada' and saying that Canada is 'a member of an Empire'. Canada is a colony of Great Britain enjoying almost complete self-government, but as this writer properly says on page 457, There is no British Empire'." Putman elaborated on his objections to the imperialistic overtones of this author in a further diatribe in connection with page 459. "Though we cannot point to any date as the time at which Canada passed from the national to the imperial level of thought." This is sentimental twaddle. Canada is not even a nation. We cannot negotiate a foreign treaty. We cannot even interpret our own legislation. The Judical Committee of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom of

137

Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

Great Britain and Ireland determines whether the Toronto Street Railway Company shall or shall not do certain things. If we are not yet a nation it is silly to talk about our passing from national to imperial levels of thought.49

Although Putman objected to the rhetoric of Canadian imperialists, he shared their underlying organicist intent. In his discussion of the differences between Upper and Lower Canada, for instance, he claimed there was no difference in final aim. The French of the Lower Canadian Assembly from 1791 to 1837 were fighting a snobbish British caste system of government. They were fighting for the right of the common people to govern themselves. This was exactly what the best element among the British wanted. More than this the two sections (French and English) did afterwards join hands under Baldwin and Lafontaine and work for a common purpose.50

The psychological effect of the war, however, on Putman's organicism was to douse his previously imperialistic ardour with the cold waters of realism. Although he never lost his attachment to Britain and in fact, as will be shown shortly, appeared to increase his imperialistic propaganda in connection with adult education, Putman became increasingly pragmatic in the education of children in civics. His small textbook City Government Ottawa illustrated this shift in his thought. The object of the book was "to give teachers, older children in our schools and others who may be interested a fair grasp of our municipal or city government." Since the three levels of government, parliamentary, provincial, and municipal, affected "our liberty of thought, our freedom of action and expression, our property rights, our education, our health, our means of transportation, our payment of taxes, and our whole round of human welfare and effort," it was important that good and wise men be elected to office.51 An indication of what may have triggered Putman's renewed interest in municipal affairs and in civics education was revealed in a speech he gave to Rotarians several years later.52 Because of an amendment to Ontario's Municipal Act which extended the franchise, Ottawa's electorate doubled in two years and included many adults who had left elementary school at grade eight. It became especially important, therefore, to instil in them ideals of citizenship. The historian is struck by the number of appointed public boards which controlled the destinies of Ottawa's citizens at this time. Significantly, despite Putman's avowal of freedom of thought, he emphasized the value of these neutral boards in the progressive development of the city. It continued his earlier urban reform and administrative school policies to remove government from local politics and place it in the hands of expert administrators. Now their value to the community was being "explained" to the children.

138 Chapter Seven As an example, the Ottawa Board of Health, consisting of the mayor, the medical officer of health (appointed by City Council), and three appointed ratepayers, had been given extensive powers, especially in the control of contagious diseases.53 It could erect and manage special hospitals, such as Hopewell Hospital on Porter's Island for smallpox patients or the Isolation Hospital on the Rideau River for those with scarlet fever or diptheria. It could also close schools, churches, and places of business to prevent the spread of disease. It could force children and adults with these diseases to go into the hospital and it had the power to placard their homes to warn visitors away. In this way it could quarantine any citizen exposed to contagious diseases. Except for garbage collection, since 1917 under direct control of the Board of Control, the Board of Health was also responsible for the sanitation of the city and the appointment of a plumbing inspector. He was in charge of sanitary inspectors, who in turn visited every home in the city at least once a year. Orders for fumigation of homes deemed contagious could be given by the medical officer. He also received reports from the city bateriologist on the condition of the water and could test water in private or city wells and order men to chlorinate city water. Inspectors were hired to check for cleanliness in livery stables, laundries, restaurants, butcher shops, bakeries, fruit stores, and other places of business. A qualified veterinary surgeon was appointed to visit dairy farms which supplied milk to the city to make sure that the cows were healthy. Mothers were assisted with baby health services offered by city nurses and specially prepared milk was sold to them at cost. The state had indeed encroached far more into the private lives of Ottawa citizens since the days of Putman's progressive injunctions in 1906. In the midst of such state munificence, child and citizen were enjoined to "govern themselves. If only each would govern himself then the government of a city or province or a nation would be very easy." But, of course, it was to be in a specific organic direction, one imbued with "the Christian spirit," exhibiting in the public schools, for example, "a healthy moral atmosphere."54 As Berger notes, the chief advantage that Canada was deemed to have derived from the British connection was a stable Christian government, which was considered part and parcel of the British constitution. The Americans, on the other hand, deliberately left out acknowledgment of a Supreme Being in their constitution, with the result that they lacked any restraining influences of government to repress the abuses of free thought in social and religious matters.55 Teachers were to implant deliberately civic responsibility and the cultivation of this public ethic in their pupils. A circular by Putman in 1922 advised them pointedly: Will you plan some brief talks on the subject making them as specific and concrete as possible? Will you endeavor first to impress upon your pupils their individual

139 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction responsibility for a clean and beautiful city through assisting in making beautiful their own home surroundings, and second their collective responsibility in constituting themselves guardians for the security of all public property, especially trees, shrubs and flowers. This of course can best be done through specific instruction which brings home to the child the value of these things.56

This utilitarian slant towards civics was apparent from the war years onwards. Ottawa teachers themselves were instructed in a more sophisticated sociological stance towards ideals embodied in public figures and their effect on children's thinking. Professor Earl Barnes of Philadelphia told the Ottawa Teachers'Association about a study he had conducted in Britain and the United States, which began with the question, "What person whom you know, or have heard or read about, do you wish most to be like, and why?"57 Because he believed, in biological fashion, that these dominating ideals became an active centre of force that tended to govern the children's lives, he wanted the ideals to be analysed "scientifically" in their sociological setting. Using percentages, he concluded that at seven years both boys and girls began with some acquaintance as an ideal (Putman's inspiring teacher), but by around thirteen or fourteen they favoured a public or historical character, such as George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. In another address Barnes warned of the great dangers of efficiency experts swamping education, and he advised teachers to humanize their work to look after the minds and souls of children, something which, he flattered his listeners, was being done more in Ontario than elsewhere. A new type of democracy demanded this ideal to heal the wounds of war. Professor Barnes recognized that Ontario had been promoting idealism in the cause of unification for a number of years and on a variety of fronts. Empire Day, for instance, had been used to indoctrinate European immigrant children, as well as native-born Canadians, with appropriate national and imperial ideals. English classes continued this indoctrination at the adult level. It was estimated that at least one foreign family a day was added to Ottawa's population during 1914.58 The Ottawa Public School Board, therefore, offered these classes to the city's adult foreigners, who included Russian Jews, French, Danes, Poles, and Germans. By 1921 classes at the George Street School had 120 adults enrolled and the next year classes were opened in York Street School. This attempt to assimilate foreign immigrants was considered essential "if we are to have a united country," advised the editor of the Ottawa Citizen on 21 April I920.59 Another attempt to indoctrinate adults, particularly those from the lower classes, with common ideals was the free lecture series sponsored by the Ottawa Public School Board at Putman's request in 1911.60 Based on American ideas of the social centre and parents' association, the lecture series was judged by the editor of the Citizen to have phrased these ideals "in terms

140 Chapter Seven that shall be understood by the majority of minds."61 The underlying moralistic motives of the Ottawa social reformers was highlighted in the editor's call to the Ottawa Public School Board to become true social centres: Not least important in the list of civic improvements is advocated the movement to organize social centres in Ottawa. The closing of the saloon bars has made the need for popular clubrooms and places where people can meet in a social way more than ever apparent. Every constructive temperance reformer should be attracted to the idea of organizing social centres and promoting debating societies and branch libraries and entertainments for the coming winter evenings. It should be possible to enlist the support and assistance of the progressive school trustees and the public school inspector and masters and teachers. The Civic Improvement League has appointed a committee to look into the possibilities of social centres. The work of the league is evidence of an awakening civic consciousness in Ottawa, and it should tend to make this city a model in many ways to the rest of Canada.62 By this time Putman and the school board were having to defend their use of the schools for a variety of civic purposes - vacation classes for Settlement House, physical-training classes for teachers, meetings of the temperance society, church Sunday school, YMCA, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and Rotary Club, rehearsals of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra and the Orpheus Glee Club, and as public libraries.63 Permission for the use of schools had only been denied to the Boy Scouts for shooting practice and to T.L. Henderson for using the assembly for a debate on free trade.64 By 1922 a special committee had drawn up detailed regulations for the use of public schools by philanthropic, patriotic, or civic improvement organizations.65 The Ottawa Teachers' Association sponsored as well a very popular lecture series beginning in 1911, with Putman as an active organizer. The lectures had the same moralistic aims as Putman's public school series but attracted a much wider audience. Over eight hundred people attended a lecture on Socrates given by Edward Howard Griggs, a popular professor of literature from Indiana University, at the Collegiate Institute auditorium.66 His series on heroes in 1912, on education and progress in 1913, on human progress in 1914, on the poetry and philosophy of Robert Browning in 1915, and on Tennyson's ethical philosophy in 1916 popularized the idealistic and liberal-progressivist beliefs in social reconstruction, moral leadership, and ethical regeneration promoted by the social gospellers and many Protestant urban reformers. Similar motives underlay a lecture series sponsored by the Queen's Alumni Association in March 1915 and January 1916.67 But these efforts were only local. Progressive reformers recognized the need for a stronger moral thrust. As World War I ended, Canadians became increasingly anxious about the deep and growing divisions in their society. The conscription crisis, the

141

Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

widening disparity between the cost of living and wages, labour unrest, culminating in 1919 with the Winnipeg General Strike, the problems of the returning soldier, and Canada's economic rehabilitation after the war prompted a number of leaders of public opinion to suggest solutions to these social problems. They were particularly concerned that with universal suffrage in effect after 1918, a concerted reform policy be promulgated. As Richard Allen suggests, two key problems, the status of the farmer in the national structure and the industrial conflict in Canada, had led to the divisions.68 These questions were discussed at length at meetings of the Methodist General Conference in Hamilton and the Social Service Council and the Canadian Education Association (CEA) in Ottawa. At the inaugural meeting of the CEA (formerly the Dominion Educational Association) in 1918, W.S. Carter, the in-coming president, emphasized the importance attached by all reform leaders to the new role envisaged for the public schools. It would not be an easy task to indicate any year in recent history, he said, during which so much had been done to search out the foundations of education and to propose large plans for the reconstruction of school systems. The first element in industrial and civic progress was co-operation. President Wilson had urged an increase in the time and attention devoted to the instruction bearing directly upon the problems of community and national life.69 Continuing as secretary-treasurer of the organization, Putman addressed the problem of the farmer and reiterated his New Education solution: consolidation of rural school administrations.70 In two letters to the editor of the Citizen on n and 27 December 1918, he elaborated his viewpoint and drew the ire of rural teachers over his suggestion that the provincial government should demand higher certification standards for them. Putman further revealed the management bias of the new liberal when he agreed in 1919 to act as the chairman of a conciliation board appointed by the Department of Labour to settle the wages of printers in Ottawa.71 The pressmen had twice threatened strike action, which appeared to be a stall tactic while the government set up an investigative commission. It recommended massive layoffs in 1920 to cure the inefficiency of the Printing Bureau.72 Aside from these specific efficiency policies and mediation activities, Putman reflected the moral rhetoric at the heart of the social reconstructionists in his address to the Ottawa Arts and Letters Club on the merits of the newly emerging British Labour party.73 He considered it had the most unselfish platform of any party in the English-speaking world. All its demands could be attained by constitutional means; therefore, it was not to be feared as a violent revolutionary party. Putman approved of the Labour party's policy of increased government intervention in the distribution and allocation of resources. The major cornerstones he cited as characteristics of the British Labour party were a minimum wage; nationalization of mines, railways,

142

Chapter Seven

banks, and insurance corporations; radical income taxes; lowering of the tariff barriers; and the use of surplus wealth for social welfare work. His only reservations were whether or not these proposals could work in economic practice. Archdeacon H.J. Cody, Ontario's minister of education, explained why the term "reconstruction" took on a deeper meaning at the conclusion of the war. As he wrote, Men sought for more than a simple return to pre-war conditions. There grew the ideal of a better world after the war ... The basis of reconstruction is the conservation and development of our human resources. All plans for commerce, industry, agriculture - all plans for the general utilization of our material wealth, depend upon the intelligence and character of the people. Reconstruction is thus inextricably bound up with the broad subject of education.74

By the end of the war Protestant idealism had been transformed. The stress by Watson and other Protestant leaders on the intellectual spirit of Greek philosophy had helped to clear the path towards the application of an essentially secular rationalism to Christian revelation. But at the same time the war brought home to educators the dangers of excessive rationalism for moral education. Cody noted the resurgence of a postwar spirit of idealism and defined it in liberal-utilitarian terms as follows: We construe education to mean more than the impartation of knowledge and and the training of the mind. Its broad scope covers bodily health and fitness, mental culture, devotion of spirit and social efficiency. The German educationalists thought of civilization in terms of intellect; the British in terms of character... The proper place of efficiency is as the servant of a moral ideal. Apart from such an ideal, efficiency may be an evil and wicked instrument which in the end works woeful disaster.75

Significantly, at the same time as Peter Sandiford was leading his graduate students in education into increasingly efficiency-oriented directions, the provincial government had entrusted the leadership of education to a strong Christian leader and champion of imperialism, Archdeacon Cody. As Robert Stamp writes, "Cody was determined to build a post-war society on the traditional foundations of Protestant Christianity, political conservatism, and Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. Schooling could play a crucial role in checking rampant libertarianism by instilling habits of respect and discipline in young minds."76 Teachers, therefore, were to be key agents in the dissemination of this social reconstruction gospel. As Cody explained in an address entitled "How Far Has the War Created New Educational Problems?" to the Ottawa

143 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

Teachers' Association, "Personality is the essential and basic principle and we measure the progress of a nation by its output of 'civil' persons. It is the person that counts in running the organization."77 Toronto School Inspector A.E. Marty explained to trustees at the 1921 convention of the Ontario Educational Association that the school was now recognized as a miniature world in which children were developed for citizenship.78 D. Bruce Macdonald, in an address entitled "Character Development: The Objective of All Education" to the Ottawa Canadian Club in 1923, related these two elements to the wider sphere. If children were reared with unselfish attitudes towards all social questions in a democratic community, "correct thinking" would be developed.79 The teacher's role was to establish behavioural norms in her class. Putman and his progressive educational colleagues increasingly turned their attention to the task of indoctrinating the teacher and other adult workers with these correct democratic ideals. Although these themes had been preached for years by Putman and other Canadian New Educators, as well as by progressive urban reformers, the war had made them more strident and provided them with ammunition to sway the population in their direction. As Paul Rutherford writes, the drive for social reconstruction in the 19208 provided them with "cultural baggage," moral humanitarian, political, and economic values defined in a Christian context, which enabled them to institutionalize their reforms at three levels of government, "thereby creating a bureaucracy which systematically carried forward their work."80 Only the very perceptive Canadian, such as Duncan Campbell Scott in his presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada, was alert to the evils of idealism. As Scott warned, "Canadian idealism teaches us to respect the opinions and beliefs of others, but it has sometimes sought to limit those opinions and beliefs."81 For a humanitarian reformer like Putman, who had promoted adult education and university extension work for years, the formation of the Ottawa Workers' Educational Association (WEA) in December 1920 presented only positive democratic opportunity for the working class. Lectures in political science and economics, Canadian and British history, and English literature, given by such distinguished academics as his friend Professor Adam Shortt or Oxford graduate S.A. Cudmore, could only "strengthen the control of government by the whole people. Steady progress towards democracy and freedom is assured when the workers are able to avail themselves of university extension opportunities," proclaimed the editor of the Ottawa Citizen on 26 November 1920. Putman was elected president of the Ottawa WEA and W.T. McDowell, chairman of the Independent party and one of the founders of the movement, was elected secretary.82 Two hundred and eight students registered for the three university extension courses in 1922. Putman and McDowell were again elected as officers and only regretted that there were not more trade unionists in

144 Chapter Seven attendance.83 Most of the students continued to be school teachers, civil servants, and businessmen. The editor of the Ottawa Citizen claimed on 20 December 1922 that Canadian labour wanted to participate in the WEA work, which was designed to increase the knowledge and understanding of working-class people in the "belief that from an educated democracy the highest national character is drawn." He even claimed on 31 October 1927 that "the W.E.A. is a workers' organization controlled by workers, and aims to serve the educational interests of the workers. As such it should appeal strongly to trade unionists, whose various unions have given moral and financial aid to it." But local trade unionists must have seen through the underlying intent to draw them into a harmonious industrial relationship with management and, through these appeals, to higher order cultural rationality, for they continued to stay away. The number of members in Ottawa dropped to sixty in 1924 compared with more than two hundred in Hamilton, a city of comparable size.84 Putman by this time had shifted his allegiance to more promising organizations. Before leaving the field of labour and university extension work, however, Putman revealed his own underlying moral intent in an address to the City of Ottawa Teachers' Institute at its annual banquet.85 He urged teachers not to become intellectually fossilized. Putman was promoting an idea suggested by several professors of the University of Toronto to have junior colleges established in academically superior collegiate institutes which would teach first-year university courses. The University of Toronto organized extension classes during the summer in Ottawa public schools. Putman urged his teachers to attend them, instead of spending two nights a week at the movies, two at the dance garden, and two at the card table, with their sole intellectual stimulus being the perusal of popular journals. He also suggested that they try to persuade the Collegiate Board to offer them as academic night classes in the winter. By the postwar period Putman had achieved considerable stature as a leading Canadian educator. As mentioned earlier, he was secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Education Association. He was recognized as a pioneering leader of the Ontario Educational Association in establishing the Teachers' Superannuation Commission. His network of Ottawa connections in the Rotary Club, the Canadian Club, Scottish Rite Masons, Queen's Alumni Association, Proportional Representation Society of Canada, and the National War Savings Committee gave him considerable extra-educational prominence.86 He was invited, therefore, to be on the Organization Committee of the 1919 Winnipeg Educational Conference on Character Education, along with Sir Robert Falconer, president of the University of Toronto.87 Two major fund-raisers for the conference visited Ottawa in early January. One, the Reverend E. Leslie Pidgeon, immediate past president of the Rotary Clubs of America, spoke to Ottawa Rotarians (who donated two thousand dollars to the

145 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

conference) about the need to introduce a more definite form of teaching Christian ethics and character and to examine principles which underlay the structure of the state.88 The other, W.F. Osborne of the University of Manitoba, spoke to the Ottawa Canadian Club on national ideals in education in February.89 As Putman wrote in his annual report for that year, he found it difficult to discover what the organizers hoped the over one thousand delegates at the Winnipeg conference were trying to accomplish other than a blanket condemnation of the schools.90 There was general agreement that the New Testament contained the fundamental principles on which character training and education for citizenship should be built, but, in Putman's estimation, morality could not be taught. It had to be exemplified in the life of a good citizen. The same principle applied to patriotism; it could only be "revealed bit by bit throughout the life of a good and intelligent man who loves his country."91 In Putman's judgment the chief cause of the fault of the schools to develop moral character and a well-developed citizenship lay with the number of inexperienced teachers of "unformed character" and "vague ideas of citizenship." In his more pragmatic fashion he concluded, "If this analysis be correct, the big problem that faces us is to secure a larger proportion of teachers who will make of teaching a life work. It naturally follows that this can never be done while 80 per cent or more of the teachers are women."92 Not only could men continue teaching after they had married, but in Putman's eyes, they could present adolescent boys with a more virile character to emulate, since the major moral problems occurred with these boys. Despite his negative criticisms of the conference, perhaps emanating from his antipathy to the business interests which had initiated it, Putman cooperated with a number of endeavours launched by Major Fred Ney, secretary of the National Council of Education, which was formed at the conclusion of the conference. Major Ney was known to Ottawa teachers as the main organizer of "Hands across the Seas," an extension of the Imperial League of the Empire formed in 1901 to foster the exchange of children's art work, booklets, and teachers in an effort to promote imperial unity. In 1908 nine Ottawa teachers accompanied by Dr Glashan had participated in the league's Moseley trip to Britain.93 By 1911 these trips were being organized by Ney from his Winnipeg office.94 He was conducting 170 Canadian teachers around London when war broke out in I9I4.95 After the war Ney continued the work, now under the auspices of the National Council of Education, which had provincial representatives on its board. The Ontario government gave the council a grant of one thousand dollars in I920,96 and four Ottawa teachers sailed for England that year.97 In exchange Miss Ellis, a London teacher, came to work in the Ottawa public schools.98 These exchange visits increased over the next twenty years. They included a tour across Canada by large numbers of British educational

146 Chapter Seven

representatives in 1925 under the auspices of the Overseas Education League," the visit of twelve British directors of education in 1935,10° and a tour of Ontario by one hundred English schoolboys in 1930.101 V.K. Greer, Ontario's chief inspector of public and separate schools, estimated that in 1935 alone forty-three Ontario teachers were on exchange in the Empire.102 In 1923 the National Council of Education decided to organize the National Extension University, which would foster a co-operative spirit and lead to one vision and one ideal for Canada.103 Local committees were formed to publicize the eight lectures planned and welcome the distinguished speakers. They were sponsored by a variety of organizations, such as the Rotary and Canadian Clubs, Kiwanis, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and the Canadian Manufacturers' Association. Putman chaired the first meeting of the Ottawa Committee, which chose as its president Senator N. A. Belcourt, who was also president of 1'Association canadienne frangaise d'education d'Ontario, and reassured him that there would be no conflict between his beliefs in bilingualism and the objects of the National Council.104 His election was hailed as "a symbol of the underlying ideal of unity of purpose in Canadian education and citizenship which is the mainspring of the new movement ... He is one of those who, while recognizing the claims of the French-Canadian section of the people, has risen above the level of sectarian confusion and is able to discern clearly and as a whole the phenomena that animate the national scene."105 Fortunately, or perhaps wisely, Belcourt was absent through illness on 27 February when Sir Henry Newbolt began the lecture series in Ottawa. His brilliant and scholarly lecture was based on the premise that "the same faith, morals, artistic sense, and belief in courage and behavior operated and actuated the impulses of both this country and the Mother Country - that these things sprung from a common heritage of lofty tradition and cultural achievement." His peroration appealed "to all that moral power and spirit which has been responsible for that which represents the transcendental glory and genius of the Anglo-Saxon breed." English literature embodied this spirit and from its great spiritual force spread throughout the British Empire would come a "profound reserve of belief and faith ... the one fellowship which will move the world and affect it for good. When that Empire falls apart then the darkest night of history will have fallen upon the world."106 In April 1923 at both the annual meeting of the Ontario Educational Association and the second convention of the National Council, Putman and fifteen hundred other delegates heard Sir Michael Sadler, vice-chancellor of Leeds University, H.J. Cody, and H.M. Tory, president of the University of Alberta, reiterate the themes of the necessity of developing personality through education to ensure the progress of Christian civilization, to cure ill will, to promote social regeneration, and to bring industry under the control of trained minds.107 The Ottawa Canadian Club heard Sadler several days later

147 Imperialism and Postwar Reconstruction

in a speech entitled "The Outlook of Education," and he gave an evening public lecture at the Victoria Museum.108 For the first time the editor of the Citizen, commenting on 16 April on Sadler's two addresses, became alert to the dangers of completely espousing the policies of the British Labour party. Canadian conservatives were beginning to view "any experiment in social reconstruction, even against the study of possible steps towards a better social order," as having repressive tendencies. He advised that education provided the safest path for the expansion of this progressive thought and would lead to social stability without dangerous political outcomes. At the Montreal conference three years later, the editor of the Citizen termed the National Council a "Fifth Column" in Canada, which had exercised a widespread influence on public opinion by fostering "the doctrine that education is a national problem, and ... that education should concern itself with the development of character and should provide a full preparation for life."109 That year, 1926, Putman was elected to the National Council, along with Ontario's other superannuation commissioner, R.A. Gray.110 Alf Chaiton notes that from 1929 on the lectureship continued, in that year on the theme education and leisure, but declined in quality. Ney became increasingly preoccupied with the idea that leisure activities and recreation would determine the moral worth of a nation. His autocratic manner and the underlying anti-socialistic ideals of the Canadian Industrial Reconstruction Association, a business interest group which had first organized the National Council, were revealed in 1933 when a Canadian correspondent, Carl J. Ketchum, had his National Council speaking tour on the Soviet Union abruptly cancelled because he recommended increased trade opportunities between the two countries.111 The National Council remained elitist in nature, failed to override the increasingly powerful provincial premiers who resented any federal encroachment in educational matters, and lacked clear realistic goals, which Chaiton attributes to the disparate vested interests within the council.112 Its schemes for a national bureau of education, its formulation of a national consensus for social action, and its efforts to stem the allurement of the Jazz Age and American culture all failed. As a result, its financial supporters, particularly the Rotary Clubs of Canada and Vincent Massey, curtailed their support. As Canadians faced the reality of the Depression and the continuing regional and racial differences which underlay their federal system of government, the unifying efforts of Anglo-Saxon imperialists were increasingly viewed as idealistic anachronisms. The myth of the schools as agents of social harmonization through British character training, however, persisted in popular opinion. People looked back nostalgically to their childhood when a stable community ethos prevailed, and they believed the public schools should reconstruct this ethic.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Putman-Weir Survey

On 23 April 1924 SJ. Willis, superintendent of education for the province of British Columbia, announced to the BC Teachers' Federation that a provincial education survey was to be conducted to inquire into a broad range of financial, curricular, and administrative questions. Reform-minded schoolmen were elated. Two years earlier the federation had passed several resolutions calling for an educational survey by experts, but no action had resulted. A delegation headed by F.J. Nicholson, chairman of the Vancouver School Board, and supported by such diverse groups as the Parent-Teachers' Federation of British Columbia, the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, the Property-Owners' Association of Vancouver, and numerous service clubs had marched on the Victoria legislature in November 1923 again urging the government to hold a scientific inquiry. But Minister of Education J.D. MacLean had dismissed their plea, stating that the movement largely emanated from Vancouver. Not only did their demands imply unnecessary experimentation, but they would probably cost forty thousand dollars, based on similar surveys in the United States, he judged. MacLean's reservations reflected those of the Union of British Columbia Municipalities, whose brief to the Speaker in 1921 had recommended that an income tax be levied on all individuals and companies in the province to offset the greatly increased costs on municipalities of the ever-expanding curriculum. By November 1923, however, the union had supported the call for an educational survey, but it had urged that financial matters be investigated and had recommended the adoption of "every possible measure which will prevent duplication of services by School Boards and Councils, and which will decrease the burden on the ratepayers of the Municipalities."1 Premier John Oliver waited until June 1924 before announcing, in the midst of an important election campaign, the names of the two commissioners of the survey. The chairman was to be J.H. Putman, whose name had been

149 Putman-Weir Survey suggested to the department by J.W. Gibson, his former colleague at the Ottawa Normal School and now director of elementary agricultural instruction for British Columbia. MacLean was quoted as affirming that Putman was "known all over Canada as a man of exceptional ability and scholarly attainments. As senior inspector of schools for Ottawa he has been in close touch with educational development."2 In MacLean's judgment both in training and in experience there was no other man in Canada better qualified to undertake the important duties that this provincial survey would entail. Putman was to be ably assisted by G.M. Weir, a newly appointed professor of education at the University of British Columbia. Twenty years Putman's junior, Weir had received his doctorate from Queen' s in 1918. He represented the newer generation of Canadian progressive educator who had more extensive sociological training, in his case from the University of Chicago where he had also undertaken part of his postgraduate work.3 Before his arrival at UBC he had been principal of the Normal School in Saskatoon and had published his doctoral thesis as The Separate School Question in Canada,4 which became the standard reference on the subject for many years. MacLean considered him an excellent speaker and eminently fitted for his present task. The two appointments made by the Liberal premier were hailed as enlightened by progressive urban reformers who were becoming disenchanted with a Liberal government tainted by charges of selling out to the liquor interests. The newly formed Provincial party had attracted to its ranks many middle-class Liberals and Conservatives, as well as members of the Soldier's party and the United Farmers. Because of this loss of Liberal support, MacLean's stalling tactic on November 1923 had been designed to maintain the Liberals' slim majority of four in the provincial legislature and to avoid raising the contentious issue of education in provincial political discussions. By emphasizing the expected costs of the survey, he had countered the ire of right-wing property owners who were scandalized by the huge provincial debt, which was $54 million in 1921, amassed from the province's railway guarantees and highway expansion. The government had been caught in a squeeze between the demands of progressive municipal and education reformers and the complaints of local municipalities whose burden of local taxation for education had doubled and yet whose influence was nil in such matters as fixing school district boundaries, appointing central officials stationed in school districts, changing the curriculum, and revising the statutes and administrative regulations.5 By the end of 1923 Premier Oliver had realized that the resource products of the BC Interior were getting good prices in an expanding world market and that the city of Vancouver was showing signs of a coming economic boom. At the same time there were disquieting signals that the major class and regional divisions which marked EC'S political community might retard the

150 Chapter Eight development of the resource industries and hinder the cultivation of a common group consciousness. Labour groups were particularly incensed at the large Oriental immigration which affected wage rates and unemployment. Businessmen wanted a stable government, a favourable investment climate, and reasonable property taxes. The collectivist philosophy, found particularly in the coal- and metal-mining towns of the Interior, appeared to be headed towards a clash with the laissez-faire ideology of the business elite. Oliver looked to the middle-class urban reformers and the English gentlemen farmers of the Okanagan Valley and Vancouver Island for support. He had not, however, fully appreciated the bitterness of the antagonisms. All three provincial leaders were defeated in the election of June 1924, and the protest vote exceeded 35 per cent of the total ballots cast. The spoils system and machine politics were shown to be in disrepute. It was on this protest tide that the Putman-Weir survey was launched. Since the turn of the century school reformers had made significant changes in the school system of British Columbia in a more regulatory direction. Professional administrators had increasingly taken over management and had improved their qualifications. Teachers were better trained and had become certified in specialized subject areas. Programs of study had become differentiated and included most new educational and vocational courses as well as specialized opportunity classes for retarded pupils. But since 1918 Vancouver students had suffered from overcrowded accommodation. All money bills had been defeated by popular plebiscite. There were thirty-four part-time classes and a great variety of temporary wooden school structures in use. Class size increased to fifty pupils and in some cases sixty. Reformers warned that these conditions bred social unrest, particularly at the high school level where the population had increased by 90 per cent since 1917. The extreme populist tendencies which prevailed in civic politics had to be curtailed by means of major structural changes (in 1929 an amalgamation of Point Grey and South Vancouver with the city of Vancouver took place and opposition to the ward system became widespread), and voters had to be convinced that reform measures needed to be supported. To guide the two commissioners the Department of Education framed nineteen questions.6 Reflecting both reformist concerns and scientific pedagogical theories current in North America at that time, it asked that the commissioners look at such matters as the allocation of control and school costs between provincial and local authorities and the administrative advantages of control by municipal councils. The department showed its concern for the new science of efficiency by asking how costs could be cut but efficiency improved and how, at the same time, the taxation load could be more equitably distributed in municipalities and in rural districts. Its bias towards new educational improvements was shown in its request that the commissioners examine not only the program of studies for elementary

151 Putman-Weir Survey schools generally but, more specifically, manual training and domestic science. At the high school level they were charged with the task of examining the unit method and the junior high school system then in vogue in high schools in the United States. The value and use of achievement and intelligence tests over departmental examinations were to be looked at. The problems of a dearth of male teachers and lack of experienced teachers in rural schools, and the need for more efficient normal schools as well as more effective inspection and supervision of teachers, were to be addressed. The department asked the commissioners to examine its own administration and make suggestions for improvement. Finally, it asked for guidelines on the development of character in public school pupils and consideration of any other important matters brought to the commission's notice by public bodies in the course of the survey. The survey was by this time well established as a social science technique to concentrate "public attention on educational needs and conditions and [to strengthen] ... the hands of progressive leaders in general in their perennial battle for the increased efficiency of the people's schools," in the words of Norman Black, a leading New Educator.7 School systems were pictured as evolving; thus North American precedents should be looked at and the opinion of specialists sought on the highest degree of "alert progressivism" consonant with economic realities.8 The primary task of these educational experts was to discover and interpret the facts and marshal them in such an effective manner that "they might become comprehensible and undeniable."9 To aid them in this research and propaganda mission, Putman and Weir assembled a team of experts, who reported on specialized topics. Making up the panel were J.L. Paton, retired headmaster of Manchester Grammar School; H.F. Angus, economist at the University of British Columbia; S.E. Beckett, also from UBC, who added a financial report to the Survey; Peter Sandiford, behavioural psychologist from the University of Toronto, who conducted the testing program; F.C. Ayer, authority on educational administration from the University of Washington; and A.W. Cocks, statistical expert. Protests were mounted against this phalanx of educational experts,10 but progressive reformers, such as Nicholson, argued that because of the complexity of society and the need "to assist every unit of society to a higher level," experts were needed to interpret public opinion correctly and to strengthen the hand of the department in its endeavour to define and raise the standards of education.11 In the opinion of Vancouver Municipal Inspector J.S. Gordon, "One of the chief benefits of this Survey will be to give the quietus for years to come to the grumblers against our educational system. Even if no action is taken by the legislature, it will start people thinking along better lines, as the financial situation in connection with education is the critical situation today, and the Survey will surely put forward some remedy."12

152

Chapter Eight

Efficiency, therefore, provided the justification and overriding goal of the survey according to progressive school reformers in British Columbia. Science provided them with their rationale. The tone was set by Putman, who arrived from Ottawa on 16 June 1924 armed with standardized achievement tests that he had used in his city's system. He and Weir spent two weeks in classroom observation before the children left school for the summer. During July and August the technical experts were appointed, and Sandiford prepared the testing materials to be used across the province. In mid-July the commission began its public hearings; invitations were sent to a variety of public interest groups to submit briefs. The views of "every class" in the community were solicited, especially those of city councils which had agitated for years for reforms in the educational system.13 The major function of the survey process was also revealed in the opening hearings. As reported in the Daily Colonist on 17 July, which gave ample coverage to the Victoria sessions, strongly contrasting educational views were drawn out. "It was the case for retrenchment and economy at all costs on the one hand, and that for the preservation and development of high standards of education on the other, and the one case was presented in the morning by Mr. John Dean, while the Local Council of Women presented the other in the afternoon." The bias of the commissioners was also revealed in these early sessions. Putman's retort to Dean was that educational costs had increased no more than those of other services or of commodities generally.14 He revealed as well his good grasp of the local scene by stating that the increase of taxation in Victoria was due to the fact that the city was provided with water, lighting, and boulevard services worthy of a city four times its size rather than to the increased costs of education. Another "kicker," Herbert Carmichael, was equally discredited by Putman. Carmichael had objected to families moving into the city, especially to his neighbourhood of Oak Bay, paying rent, and then expecting their children to be educated at the expense of the municipality. Putman, by then father of nine children, was quoted as replying, "You would then wish to penalize the man with a family ... If you follow your argument to its ultimate conclusion, you would hang crepe on the door every time a child was born."15 As the 215 hearings proceeded through the summer and fall in the Island, Vancouver, and the Interior, the views of volunteer organizations, private citizens, municipal councils, school boards, property owners' associations, parent-teacher organizations, and religious leaders were aired in public and amply reported in the newspapers. A wide divergence of public opinion on the direction that educational policy should take became apparent.16 But this opinion was being subtly shaped by the commissioners, whose tactics were remarked on by the editor of the Colonist on 19 December at the end of the hearings. "We are afraid from the tenor of the questions put to witnesses by the commissioners, and, indeed, from the attitude throughout the inquiry up

153 Putman-Weir Survey to date, that they embarked on the task with preconceived notions and not with an open mind." In effect they were mobilizing middle-class, family-oriented voters to support the cause of the progressive school reform movement. In the first four chapters of the commissioners' report, which Weir with his sociological training probably wrote,17 this mobilization process was given the stamp of "scientific" validity. The briefs they had received were categorized and ranked. Sixty per cent were judged to reflect the moderate school of thought, 15 per cent the conservative, and 12 per cent the progressive.18 Five per cent could be labelled reactionary and only a handful were radical. In the opinion of the commissioners, two groups endangered democracy and the stability of the social system in British Columbia, reactionary materialists, who attempted to cut costs and control the schools through ward politics at the level of municipal councils, and socialistic groups.19 As the commissioners intoned, society "recognizes that the best form of state insurance against anarchy and bolshevism is an efficient system of public education."20 The more serious danger came from the former group. Putman estimated that there was a substantial number of people in British Columbia with very conservative ideas who believed that individual parents should pay for the education of their children.21 Unless, their "petty foibles and intrigues of ward politics" were curtailed, the commissioners warned, the status of education would be so weakened that it "would ultimately result in the collapse of our social system" (33). The hearings and the report were designed to support the 60 per cent of the population whom the commissioners judged to be of the moderate class of public opinion, that is, those who believed that the curriculum was old-fashioned and needed expert revision, supported the concepts of middle or junior high schools and vocational education, and advised caution and close scrutiny of educational expenditure, even to the point of "pay-as-you-go doctrines" (28). The commissioners stated that when "the case for a forward step in education is thus objectively proven to the leaders of this class, they are prepared to advance as rapidly as material circumstances will permit" (28). In the same vein they argued that children of average ability should be encouraged to continue on in high school without having to pay fees because they "form the stabilizing factor in the majority of high schools, and in later life they will probably exert the great steadying influence in our political and social organization" (67). As well as supporting this moderate class, the commissioners considered that people should be educated towards an understanding of higher level scientific principles which they thought should govern educational policy decisions. Mirroring Putman's Hegelian epistemology outlined in earlier chapters, the commissioners graded public opinion: on the bottom level was opinion based on prejudice or local self-interest; next was that based on "an

154 Chapter Eight intelligent knowledge of the factors involved in our educational problems and an appreciation of their social implications"; and at the top, the opinion of experts, which they claimed even the courts accepted under certain conditions (iii). Since the business of education was largely a "social enterprise," the great diversity of educational viewpoints, exacerbated by geographic, economic, and financial problems, had to be crystallized before reform could take place (3). On an ideal plane, which they hoped would soon be achieved, was an exact science of education which would be based on conclusions emanating from the Canadian Bureau of Statistical Measurement. The commissioners urged that this bureau be established so that "a new era would dawn in the history of Canadian education" (8); provincial systems of school inspection would be put on a more scientific basis, accurate knowledge would supplant mere opinion, and more efficient administrative policies would accrue with a commensurate reduction of wastage and overlapping of effort. Educational systems could then be "moulded in accordance with scientifically determined educational objectives" (9). But the new era in Canadian education had not yet arrived; in fact the commissioners admitted in the covering letter to their report, "The very nature of some of its problems precludes a wholly scientific treatment. Therefore a number of our conclusions are matters of opinion and proper subjects for educational discussion" (iii). Throughout the hearings and later in their report, however, they made it clear that their expert opinion should guide the moderate class of public opinion as well as the Department of Education. To retain the ongoing support for education of the moderate group, the commissioners condemned centralized control, espoused by Prussian rather than British forms of government or by socialists.22 Such control tended to weaken the powers of local self-government, resulting in the loss of local initiative towards progressive school reforms. It also led to political manipulation and partisanship in educational appointments, pork-barrel administrations, and large educational bureaucracies which would waste capital expenditures. Tying public opinion to financial policies, they laid down their fundamental principles that moderate local support for education had to be cultivated and to do this property taxes had to be kept in line. Their dilemma was that in order to make the schools more efficient and progressive a great deal of extra money was required. Both Putman and MacLean acknowledged that school finance was the root of the problem in Be.23 The report outlined the reasons municipal finance, including school finance, was approaching a crisis. Despite wartime inflation, teachers' salaries and school costs generally had increased very little.24 With the postwar reconstruction, however, and the high expectations that schools would be the chief instruments to remodel society, teachers realized they were in demand and became more militant in their requests for improved salaries. School accommodation became tight as thousands of adolescents found that job

155 Putman-Weir Survey opportunities for unskilled labour had decreased and so returned to secondary schools. Operating costs also were affected by higher fuel and school supply costs and janitorial fees. As the commissioners commented, "We had not been at work twenty-four hours in British Columbia before we realized that this problem of school costs was among the most serious presented for our consideration" (271). The commissioners concluded that "the school taxation problem in British Columbia is acute and can be permanently settled only through a radical change, first in the method of distributing provincial aid, and second by finding additional sources of income" (271). The problem of inequity in the method of distribution, they believed, was not well understood by the average taxpayer. Property taxes provided the major source of school funds, but tax rates varied widely across the province. For instance, the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway belt was granted a low tax rate of only one-half cent an acre under its original charter. In 1901 the area was classified as an "assisted school" district, outside of organized municipalities, thereby having its teachers' salaries, amounting to $i 11,000, paid for by the provincial Treasury as well as receiving additional grants in aid of school buildings. But the taxable real property for the 61 assisted schools in the belt amounted to the "tidy sum of $12,750,000," and ratepayers paid only 2.6 mills on their total assessment for the upkeep of buildings (276). Textbooks were supplied free by the government, which also paid for free secondary education in some places. The commissioners warned, "They have been 'spoon-fed' so long and so bountifully from the Treasury that they now feel they have vested rights and will probably make a desperate effort to maintain their special privilege. They can maintain it only at the expense of the overburdened taxpayers outside the Belt who are now supporting these 'assisted schools'" (276). Although there were 494 assisted schools in the province, property assessments in these sections varied so widely that many schools needed to be reclassified. One section, for example, had taxable property over $i million, while 417 had assessments below $100,000. Mill rates in regularly organized "rural" schools ranged from I mill to 36.6 mills and their section assessments ranged from $59,140 to $3,958,340. To solve these inequities the commissioners recommended that all rural schools having an assessment under $150,000 a teacher revert to the status of assisted school,25 and that all assisted schools outside the belt over this amount be raised to the status of rural school. A rate of 4 mills, they recommended, should be applied to all assisted school areas, as well as to all schools in the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway belt and all company towns exempt from property taxes. One further inequity created "the most anomalous school taxation problem in British Columbia" (277). This was the 99.5 per cent of the land in the province that was not assessed for school tax because it was Crown land, Canadian National Railways and Canadian Pacific Railway property, or

156 Chapter Eight timber, mining, and grazing land which was privately owned. The commissioners estimated that the total real property assessment for purposes of taxation was approximately $90 million. In their judgment a 4-mill rate on this land should be immediately levied for school purposes, which would yield $360,000 to the Treasury. Arguing that the basic theory of taxation in North America assumed that education was a primary function of the state and that wealth must bear the cost, the commissioners warned that under a democratic form of government the state would not be properly governed and wealth would be insecure without education.26 Even though schools were not available on these lands, the government already paid $525,000 to maintain schools in remote areas of the province, and thousands of children of resource industry workers were attending schools in various parts of the province which were supported largely by the property owners of that area. For several reasons property owners in British Columbia were feeling the burden of carrying the whole load of taxation and were demanding relief in the form of a broader base for school support. Not only had school costs risen enormously, but farmers were not receiving any greater returns in 1925 than ten years earlier. It took a larger share of their produce to pay their taxes than in 1914. Although land had not risen in value since then, replacement value of improvements had greatly increased. Therefore municipalities which exempted improvements on land in whole or in part from taxation were throwing an extra burden on the land of other property holders. The commissioners proposed that an equalization fund be established which would relieve the burden on real property. They calculated that an increased amount of $3,692,304 would be raised by means of their 4-mill rate and reallocation of assisted and rural school grants. Using a simple formula, they estimated the amount of taxable property necessary to support one teacher, and with this standard they recommended that those with taxable real property below $231,000 would claim provincial grants from the equalization fund. This would be a more equitable system than the previous flat-rate grants to teachers. Places with high mill rates, such as Cranbrook (25-mill rate) and South Vancouver, would be given extra relief in the support of their teachers. The remainder of $3,064,618 increased total would be distributed for educational purposes much as before. To account for regional discrepancies in cost of living, however, teachers' grants were to be a percentage of actual salaries. But the commissioners admitted that even this more equitable distribution would do little to relieve the burden on real property at that time. To solve this problem the commissioners recommended the most radical of their proposals, the imposition of a universal income tax for education. Arguing that a number of socialistic tax measures were in effect among AngloSaxon peoples, they believed that of all the socialized services for which people would be willing to pay, education and hospitals, which benefited everyone at some point in his life, should be the least begrudged. After all,

157

Putman-Weir Survey

"expenditure in Canada for such items as candy, chewing-gum, cosmetics, picture-shows, silk stockings, tobacco, and other luxuries amounts to tens of millions and a large part of it is made by wage-earners and people with moderate incomes who now escape a direct income tax. Why not divert a small part of this huge total to the support of education?" (281). Redistribution then was to be based primarily on a i per cent tax on those with modest incomes, a measure which the government had avoided, despite repeated recommendations from the Union of BC Municipalities and from the Trustees' Association, because of its political implications.27 But the commissioners argued that this was the only feasible way to reduce the crisis in property taxes and at the same time "place the burden of school support where it belongs - on the shoulders of all who directly or indirectly profit from education" (291). They estimated that an added revenue of $i million which would accrue from this income tax would cut in half the local levy for teachers' salaries, unprovided for after the province had paid grants for the equalization fund and teachers' salaries. To provide incentives for improvement, the commissioners also recommended a special grant fund of $50,000 from which the government could stimulate local initiative in the direction, for instance, of higher average attendance of pupils, longer retention of experienced rural school teachers, or supplementary reading books. On the other hand, they condemned the large amount ($3,664,000) paid from consolidated revenue between 1911 and 1924 to aid in the erection and furnishing of schools, particularly those which were elaborately decorated. In their scheme grants for school buildings would be reduced to $100,000 from the 1923-4 level of $190,405.28 To discourage areas such as Point Grey and Powell River, which could well afford increased local expenditure, from incurring a dangerously high debenture debt and then requesting the maximum of provincial aid, the commissioners recommended that they be forced to tax improvements on land and levy a tax on real property to the limit allowed by law. As they pointed out, "Point Grey is economically, socially, and geographically a part of the City of Vancouver. It is unjust that it should have fireproof school buildings partly at the expense of the Province, while thousands of children in the City of Vancouver are housed in inferior buildings, costing much less per class-room to construct than the government aid per class-room given to Point Grey" (296-7). An even more radical recommendation, which proved to be equally unpopular, was their recommendation that in those inflationary times, the pay-as-you-go basis of financing new school buildings should increasingly become the norm.29 Schools differed from other public buildings and civic services which were expected to last for two or three generations, the commissioners argued. In growing urban centres with constant shifts of population schools would last only one or two decades. In their estimation it was an extravagance and an illusion "to secure relief for today by promising to

158 Chapter Eight carry a heavier load tomorrow" (298). The bankrupt state of at least eight Canadian cities provided a vivid example of this folly. They recommended an amendment to the act which would allow municipal councils to issue debentures with five-year terms for capital expenditure on schools, allowing extension only in rare cases to ten years. The significance of these financial policies, wed to the attitude of the commissioners towards public opinion, was that instead of the Legislative Assembly being the forum for taxation issues and financial regulations with regard to educational costs, now the Department of Education, manned by expert educators, was to redistribute educational benefits on a much more regulatory basis. In so doing progressive, urban school measures would be more easily implemented and conflict defused by means of decision-making at the level of the bureaucratic hierarchy, and legitimacy would be established by means of a common "progressive education" rhetoric.30 Two interest groups immediately sensed the implications of these financial proposals. The farmers of the province marched on the legislature on November 1925, demanding no legislative action on the educational survey during that session because they feared the 4-mill rate on all property not then being taxed would create great hardship.31 MacLean responded before the Agriculture Committee that the taxation question was still under consideration by the government. The president of the Property-Owners' Association of Vancouver in a lengthy letter to the Vancouver School Board regretted the absence on the commission "of an Executive Official, possessing business knowledge and attainments, other than those of an academic nature."32 The interplay of power and the financial proposals of the cost-cutting versus the progressive interest groups dominant on the Vancouver School Board could be seen in his criticisms of the survey proposals. The president rejected the recommendation that a professional superintendent or director be appointed chief administrative officer of the board; he would lack practical business experience. He urged that the system current at that time, which split the duties of the municipal inspector (he would allow a name change to "superintendent") from those of the secretary and business manager, should be retained. By this means other "experiments," such as the establishment of parental schools and a bureau of measurement, the appointment of a vocational guidance officer, and the adoption of the 6-3-3 pattern of organization, which implied the widespread introduction of junior high schools, all recommended by the survey, should be rigorously scrutinized and in his judgment stopped before costs got out of hand. Financing of future school building in Vancouver on a pay-as-you-go principle should also be curtailed: "The prerogative of recognized British traditions, vesting the right in the Taxpayer to say what money should be expended for capital purposes must be maintained."33 Innovations in the curriculum or in the administration

159 Putman-Weir Survey

of Vancouver city schools should be introduced only if their costs were in a downward direction, the president maintained. The commissioners had anticipated this battle between the cost-cutting retrenchment forces on the board and the progressive elements by giving over seventy-one pages in the last chapter of their report to the Vancouver school problem. In October 1925 they submitted a "Supplementary Report to Vancouver School Trustees."34 They urged that Vancouver schools be immediately reorganized along the lines they had recommended, pointing out that the administration at that time resulted in unnecessary and costly overlapping, high overhead costs, loose management of the building department, the employment of inefficient teachers, and a wasteful system of management of subnormal classes. A better school system could be provided with the establishment of a thoroughly modern technical and vocational school, the organization of a system of middle or junior high schools, the lessening of examination restrictions, the institution of vocational guidance, the revision of the salary schedule with the inclusion of bonuses for merit and satisfactory service, the decentralization of administration making principals assume greater supervisory roles, and finally the appointment of a director of education. Using the heroic rhetoric employed by American administrative progressives such as Ell wood Cubberley, whose book Public School Administration they had often cited in their report, Putman and Weir pronounced to the board, "The choice of this official [director of education] is the most important single duty that will devolve upon you during your term of office. The work of directing the Vancouver Schools during the next ten years will be beyond question the most important, the most responsible, and the most exacting one-man job in your City. Your choice will directly affect the educational opportunities of every boy and every girl in Vancouver." They had strongly condemned Municipal Inspector Gordon's conciliatory policy decisions. "It seems to us that Mr. Gordon showed a measure of weakness in continuing to occupy a position as technical advisor to a Board which acted on his advice one day and disregarded it the next. Then too, we were frequently forced to the conclusion that some of Mr. Gordon's school plans and objectives rest on the shrewd judgment of a layman rather than on a bedrock knowledge of an educational expert."35 The commissioners questioned whether Gordon had enough solid support from either the school principals or the public to implement these reforms. Of course, if Gordon was passed over as director of education, a man of first-rate calibre could not be obtained from North America or Britain, they stated, unless he was paid a salary of at least ten to twelve thousand dollars a year. To circumvent rumours that lobbying was taking place for this position,36 they concluded by stipulating, "Needless to say, any man who applies for this position before he is asked to do so, or lobbies to secure it, or permits his

160 Chapter Eight friends to lobby for him, thereby proves his unfitness to fill it. The position in this case ought to seek the man whether he be in Vancouver or in some other part of the British Empire."37 To further push their cause the reformers organized a citizens' committee in March 1926 which pressured the school board towards action on the survey proposals. Inspector Gordon presented a detailed account of the progress taken by the Vancouver board by the end of March. The School of Decorative and Applied Arts had been set up; provision had been made in the estimates for supervision by a staff of experts and for the establishment of a bureau of measurement. Daily physical training, including games, was becoming more general in the schools. Negotiations were being held to consider amalgamation of all neighbouring school boards. The department had promised liberal financial aid for a technical school. The junior high school form of organization had been approved by the board, as had appointment of teachers by the municipal inspector. Four principals had been given time for supervisory duties in elementary schools. More clerical assistance had been given to one high school principal. Nursing had been increased and an open-air school provided for delicate children. Two proposals had been defeated by the Vancouver School Board: financing on pay-as-you-go principles and the appointment of a women's adviser for high schools. Nor was the junior high school as set up at that time, roundly condemned by the commissioners as being a hybrid form of the original concept, going to be abolished.38 In an accompanying letter Gordon commented on specific proposals of the survey and mounted a vigorous defence of his administration, claiming that many of these proposals had been made by him and his staff before the survey took place. He praised the board for its forward example in approving junior high schools, in getting expert opinion on ventilation and heating, and in relinquishing its authority to him as chief executive officer in the hiring of teachers.39 In June 1926 the Property-Owners' Association of Vancouver threatened an injunction against the building of three new schools, but the reformers prevailed and by late summer had won approval to have a technical school for Greater Vancouver built. A progressive principal was appointed to the new junior high school and a director, R. Straight, to the new Bureau of Measurement. In September a special committee of the board drew up clear definitions of the duties of the building superintendent and the director of education. In Vancouver, then, the progressive school reformers were winning power and control of the school system from the cost-cutting property owners. In the province at large, however, conservatism was gaining. Between 1928 and 1933 the Conservative government of S.F. Tolmie severely cut back educational and other social service expenditures. As the Depression deepened, the minister of education, Joshua Hinchliffe, gave in to retrench-

i6i

Putman-Weir Survey

ment critics and announced that he intended to give power to city and municipal councils to prohibit school boards from continuing or establishing courses in manual training, domestic science, technical education, and other new education "fads and frills."40 But the provincial debt soared to $144 million and unemployment relief to $2,393,600. In desperation the government appointed a committee of business executives to examine the financial affairs of the province. The Kidd Report, named after its chairman George Kidd, a prominent Vancouver businessman, recommended such severe cutbacks in social service spending, especially in the direction of costly progressive educational measures, that the public was stung into action. Weir and many other professors from the University of British Columbia labelled recommendations in the report for early school leaving and the charging of high school fees for fifteen year olds as reactionary, antidemocratic, and class-biased. The youth of British Columbia, shut off from higher education, would be condemned into "lives of idleness," leading to severe social problems. But as Jean Mann astutely points out, Weir's position was not so distant from Kidd's elitism.41 Throughout the 1925 survey both he and Putman had recommended an increased number of practical courses leading to vocations for the bulk of the population. The major difference between their proposals and those of Kidd was that this task would be accomplished within the precincts of the school. Kidd, on the other hand, suggested that students should acquire training on the job. In both cases only a small minority was envisaged as going on to higher education. For Putman and Weir, this elite group was to be chosen by means of intelligence and achievement testing, but for Kidd and his business colleagues, wealth and a system of scholarships would determine those privileged to enter the ranks of power and leadership. In 1924 Peter Sandiford was well known across Canada as a leading exponent of intelligence testing.42 Following the general thought of his mentor Edward Thorndike, he stated in a 1919 article in The School that it had "been proven experimentally that [intelligence tests] ... will give a diagnosis as accurate as that of teachers who have taught the children for many years ... Intelligence tests are not infallible; their value lies in the fact that they are rapidly replacing fallible estimates of ability based on crude personal observations."43 Two "facts" had been discovered in the administration of intelligence tests. Teachers were found to estimate the intelligence of their pupils towards the average. Sandiford, like Thorndike, was interested in individual differences and thus criticized the fact that teachers' judgments underestimated the ability of bright children and overestimated the intelligence of dull pupils. Further, teachers and all other untrained persons seldom recognized how significant an error caused by the slightest departure from standardized methodology of the test would be. It was absolutely crucial that scientific methodology and interpretation of results be employed.

162 Chapter Eight During September and October 1924, Sandiford spent his time carefully coaching inspectors on how to administer the standardized intelligence and achievement tests to be given to over seventeen thousand children in BC. The commissioners in their report explained why these standardized tests were used in Canada's first "scientific" measurement of educational progress.44 Traditional written examinations were considered unreliable instruments for measuring pupils' achievements in subjects of the curriculum.45 Standardized tests, on the other hand, being free of observer bias, were second to none in the accuracy of their measurement both of pupils' progress and of the quality of teaching in BC schools. They established norms, or median scores, against which pupils could gauge the scores they attained. The scientific findings or conclusions thus obtained, the commissioners stated, were more authentic than "the mere opinions of schoolmen and administrators and constitute the most reliable sources of information on classroom conditions available in British Columbia" (356). From these findings levels of efficiency could be determined and standards established. Not only were the commissioners deferring to the superior knowledge of the psychological expert, but they were condoning his technique of reducing diverse phenomena to statistically measurable terms. They pointed out the limitations of intelligence tests; the tests were not diagnosing moral actions or measuring "desire and willingness" to learn, rather "ability to learn" (357). But the commissioners themselves had not cleared their minds of bias. On the one hand they claimed that bright pupils lost interest in studies through weak teaching and clarification, not because of lack of moral qualities, thus showing their penchant towards environmental determinants. Yet they also claimed "that dullness and moral delinquency are related almost as closely as twin brothers. The investigation of numerous cases has proved this statement beyond all reasonable doubt. The converse also, with certain exceptions, appears true. Intelligent people usually have the greatest moral worth" (358). The commissioners thus shared the underlying eugenicism of both Thorndike and Sandiford. The significance of their assessment devices was not only that their conclusions were given added authority, but that the problems of deviance from the norm in society, a problem defined in descriptive normative terms by the idealists, was now supposedly objectified by science. Instead of learning being considered in a richly diversified environment, including both what was and what could be, it was now thought of strictly in empirical terms. Research measured what was, established norms by means of statistical procedures, and judged individual differences and the individual's place within his cohort by these norms. The subject of individual differences was especially concerned, as noted earlier and as the vast popular literature of the times demonstrated, with the segregation of the subnormal and the incorrigibles from the regular school stream, the differentiation of

163 Putman-Weir Survey

imbeciles from idiots, and the teaching of the blind, the deaf, and the dumb. There was some interest in differences among the gifted, but none with differences in interest or aptitude of normal children. As Robert Church concludes, these educational measurers were following the scientific tradition of learning about the normal by examining the pathological. They considered education's prime task as being remedial.46 It would seem that scientific measurement was creating a similar change in the attitude of the New Educator towards psychology as was seen in his use of sociology with public opinion. Considering Putman's Hegelian heritage, however, this espousal of scientific principles was not at all surprising. It represented the higher level of consciousness which carried far more authority than mere common sense. Feeding on the utilitarian ambivalence within Hegelianism, it had practical benefit in the everyday world, making greater efficiency, orderly change, and control by experts much more possible. Putman's Hegelianism blinded him to the many faults inherent in the testing movement; his biases were those of the test promoters, whose racism, sexism, and middle-class values were embedded in their test questions. Using a modified version of the u.s. Army Alpha Test on grades nine to twelve and on normal school students, for instance, Sandiford came up with racist conclusions similar to those of American measurers at the height of restrictive immigration laws against southern Italians in 1924. The Survey reported, "The low intelligence of pupils born in Continental Europe and the rest of the world is the outstanding feature of the investigation. These high school pupils, normal school and university students have a median intelligence quotient lower than 100; that is, lower than that of the community as a whole. Immigration from these areas lowers the average intelligence of the population" (459). A statistical device, the median showing the middle score of the middle person, was used to "prove" intellectual inferiority. It was also used to compare the IQ'S of various racial groups, as the u.s. Army tests had done. A simple line diagram comparing median scores of four racial groups and "the rest of the world" demonstrated conclusively, wrote Sandiford in the Survey, that "there is little difference in mentality among the English, Scotch and Irish pupils, although the claim of the Scotch to a superior mentality is sustained. The Scotch, however, are closely followed by the English and the Irish. The Scandinavians, namely Norwegians, make regrettably low scores. As the Norwegians were also slightly below average in the American Army Tests, the result, perhaps, was to be expected" (461). On the other hand, the mental capacity of Japanese and Chinese pupils, reported at the very end of Sandiford's appendix and not identified within his other racial comparisons of mental capacity, concluded that both Japanese and Chinese were greatly superior to the average white population, a fact he attributed to the forces of natural selection.47 At a time when both Vancouver

164 Chapter Eight and Victoria were experiencing racial tensions, there were strong societal pressures to establish segregated classes for Orientals. In answer to powerful lobbies by the Asiatic Exclusion League and other organizations, Canada had just passed a new Immigration Act, which was virtually an exclusion act.48 As Sandiford advised in the Survey, "From the political and economic standpoints the presence of an industrious, clever, and frugal alien group, capable so far as mentality is concerned, of competing successfully with the native whites in most of the occupations they mutually engage in, constitutes a problem which calls for the highest quality of statesmanship if it is to be solved satisfactorily" (508). To underscore his point, Sandiford compared the median scores of the whites (100) with those of the Chinese (107.9) and the Japanese (113). Three-quarters of the Japanese exceeded the white's median score. "These facts have very great importance for B.C. Here we have an alien group whose mental capacity is greatly superior to that of the native stock," he warned (508). Far from being "objective," therefore, Sandiford's findings, like those of the American testing exponents, were embedded with social and political meanings and reflected the fears prevalent in his society. In 1921 British Columbians were so fearful of the "Oriental menace" that they, for instance, denied these "aliens" municipal and provincial franchises, as well as related rights such as eligibility for provincial or municipal elective office or employment and the opportunity to participate in such professions as pharmacy and law. Orientals were barred from working on public works contracts and, in certain instances, on timberlands. This may have been because of their growing numbers. Seven per cent of BC'S population of 542,582 were Orientals.49 Oriental farmers had proved, as well, their competitive superiority in at least one area, the fresh vegetable industry. In 1921 the provincial Department of Agriculture reported that 90 per cent of Vancouver's fresh produce and 55 per cent of the province's potatoes were raised by Chinese farmers, despite the resolutions of farmers' institutes and the BC Fruit Growers' Association to try to restrict the ownership or leasing of land. Educational measurement, therefore, became a mechanism for social control. It redefined a problem in technical and scientific terms, reflecting thereby the positivistic orientation of social sciences in the United States at that time. It recommended a variety of technical solutions, for instance, an array of achievement tests which would measure differences and from which programs would be derived to solve or control the problem. Looking at the teaching profession, by then largely female, and the IQ scores of normal school and high school students, Sandiford found that in all cases males scored higher than corresponding females.50 Discounting test biases towards males (Sandiford stated that tests the world over show males and females to

165 Putman-Weir Survey have the same average intelligence), he believed that an economic factor in BC was draining the brighter girls away from school earlier than the brighter boys. The duller boys, on the other hand, left school early to get the unskilled jobs. Comparing students at the University of British Columbia with those at the normal school, Sandiford stated in the Survey that he found it "unfortunate that the normal schools do not get as good material to work upon as the University does" (449). He allied these findings with a comparison of IQ'S of normal school students in the United States and found them to be worse, leading to the conclusion that the quality of normal school students in BC needed to be raised substantially. This was a major recommendation of the commissioners in their chapter on the normal school, which also included recommendations for additional staff trained in modern educational psychology and greater emphasis given to that subject in the curriculum.51 In the same manner Sandiford demonstrated that regular high school students had higher intelligence scores than students taking special programs in commerce, technical subjects, and household science; therefore businessmen would be well advised to hire recruits from the former than from the latter group. Using a scale adapted from Haggerty and Nash of mental capacity and paternal occupation,52 Sandiford also found that BC students ranked themselves from bottom to top as unskilled, semi-skilled, farmers, skilled, business and clerical, and professional. He concluded, "In all cases the children of professional workers head the list by a wide margin. Intelligence sufficiently high to achieve success in a profession is handed down to children. This is a matter of deep social significance" (456). What Sandiford, Terman, and others were concerned about was the high birthrate of both Orientals and immigrants particularly from eastern and southern Europe. There was a danger that these groups would soon outnumber the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant homogeneous community, whose values, they believed, led to order, stability, and progress within North American society. As Sandiford explained in the Survey, "What is of far greater importance is that the children of professional people are, on the whole, more intelligent than others and, eugenically, this is the group in which large families should be encouraged" (458). The traditionalist attitude to the female role no doubt affected the test questions and findings on all the achievement tests designed by the survey team. In the BC test in geography, for instance, the median scores of students in regular as well as in special high school programs showed "the astounding disparity between the males and the females, the males being superior in every grade" (464). The same finding was noted in the BC test in history and in general science, although here Sandiford admitted that the true explanation for the pronounced sex differences "is probably one that recognizes a real sex difference in scientific ability which is fostered by the general attitude of the

166 Chapter Eight community in which pupils grow up. It is good form for all boys to be interested in science, while only the extraordinary girl is expected to revel in it" (470). Using the National Intelligence Tests on elementary pupils, on the other hand, which unfortunately showed that girls scored higher than boys at every grade, he cited the authors of the test who statistically juggled the sex norms and thereby eliminated "the apparent superiority of girls" (484). In what was termed the tool subjects, spelling, silent reading, arithmetic, and handwriting, in which elementary school girls excelled, Sandiford, like Mark in Ottawa's survey, asked if there was not too much time being devoted to these tool subjects. He concluded, "The Testing Programme reveals unmistakably that a totally unjustifiable amount of time and effort is being spent on mere 'tool' subjects in the schools of British Columbia" (509). There were two content subjects in which girls shone. Grade nine girls taking household science had higher IQ scores than regular students, and females showed a clear superiority over males in the Henmon French test. But when Sandiford compared the Canadian with American norms, BC students were found to be distinctly inferior, which led to the same question that Putman had asked earlier, "Is it possible that the superior scores of the u.s. pupils are due to the junior high school so prevalent there, in which foreign languages are begun at the age of twelve?" (478). Throughout his discussion of the achievement tests, Sandiford emphasized two points. Despite the lack of standardization of the BC tests, the scores still followed the same trend as the intelligence tests, leading him to conclude that "intelligence is predictive of achievement" (479). But despite this emphasis of nature over nurture, he deplored the lack of equal opportunity found in rural districts. His intelligence tests indicated that as far as mental capacity was concerned, rural pupils scored higher than urban pupils in all grades except the ninth. But this higher intelligence was not developed to the utmost. They were taught by poorer, inexperienced teachers, and their achievement scores in all elementary school subjects were much inferior to those either in the municipality or in the city. In silent reading, particularly, they were 10 per cent below normal, leading Sandiford to the conclusion that their standard was "very poor indeed. Without a solitary exception the school district results of Table nil are below 100. As the younger, less experienced, and poorer teachers are driven to rural areas, this result could have been prophesied. But it is useless talking about equality of opportunity for all children in the Province while such a state of affairs is allowed to persist" (493). Sandiford's findings, therefore, helped the commissioners "objectify" the following problems: aliens supposedly retarding the progress of whites in the schools; the poor quality of female teachers, especially in rural areas; the overemphasis on tool subjects, creating an overly formal learning environ-

167

Putman-Weir Survey

ment; and the relative authority of the psychological measurer over the professional teacher. The impetus of his measurement campaign, and the legacy of BC achievement tests that he had developed,53 were so powerful that the province shortly began to abandon the number of formal examinations required of its pupils and adopt promotion on the principal's recommendation. For Weir, intelligence testing was one of the foundation stones of progressive education. As Jean Mann notes about Weir's survey of nursing education in Canada in 1932, IQ scores were used to demand higher entrance qualifications for nurses.54 He defended the validity and applicability of these tests, and believed that a relationship existed between intelligence, morality, nationality, and socio-economic background. He also believed that there was a high degree of correlation between abstract or pure intelligence and social intelligence. Those people with professional responsibility, such as nurses, should be given a superior education, which would lead to greater open-mindedness, greater adaptability, and, like Watson's community of scholar-statesmen, a willingness to adopt a co-operative attitude of mind. They would be educated, as Thorndike advised, for leadership. Most of the population, Weir considered, needed to be protected against its own tendency to remain ignorant and a prey to anarchy and communism.55 The state, therefore, should compel the majority to attend school and force its citizens to pay for health insurance. As Thorndike had advocated, the masses needed to be trained for following. When Weir became minister of education and provincial secretary in a Liberal sweep in 1933, he raised the age limit for free schooling from fifteen to eighteen years, set up the Commission on School Finance,56 pushed forward rural consolidation, and substantially revised the curriculum in the direction of functional value and social utility. He thus brought the Putman-Weir recommendations, particularly as applied to the curriculum and attitude to measurement, into reality. The significance of these progressive reforms was more far-reaching than Weir, a strong liberal democrat, could have envisaged, blinkered as he was with his Protestant values. Instead of education being regarded as a reciprocal, complex relationship between the child and his environment, now, with the authority given to psychological measurement, the school sought to make the deficient as normal as possible and to diminish individual differences. Learning became a passive rather than an active process. Vocational training for the 90 per cent who were to be followers became a social adjustment process, psychologically formalized and administratively bureaucratized. The 10 per cent who were to be leaders were taught to believe in their ability to alter and control circumstances, to revere science and business-like methods, and to use their intelligence in a responsible manner for the good of the community. But in the process this elite group became committed to uniformity and

168 Chapter Eight

social homogeneity that supported existing power relationships within society. Intelligence testing, streaming in the junior high schools, and a greatly increased educational bureaucracy strongly reinforced the status quo. As Barry Franklin points out, "The question of the creation of a social system and its norms is ignored. The social system itself is viewed unproblematically as pre-given. The concern is with the most efficient and certain means of socializing the individual to a pre-established normative pattern. As such a behavioristic mechanism of conditioning, similar to the law of effect, and not the principle of reciprocity becomes the prime mode of socialization."57

CHAPTER NINE

Progressive School Reformer

On his return from British Columbia in 1925, Putman decided that he had to tackle two major administrative reforms in the educational system of Ontario. Following the passage of the Adolescent School Attendance Act in 1919, intermediate or junior high schools needed to be established for adolescents who were compelled to attend school until sixteen years of age. Larger administrative units were needed in rural areas to equalize educational opportunities and the great range of tax rates in local districts throughout the province. Although neither goal was successfully attained during his lifetime, the measures, when they were achieved, brought to fruition twenty-five years of New Education reforms that Putman had implemented in the Ottawa public schools and significantly marked the transition of the earlier idealistic movement to the more instrumentalist movement of the 19305 in Ontario. As Robert Stamp recently observed, "More than anyone else, Putman provided the link between the New Education reforms of the early 19005 and the Progressive Education movement of the 1930s."1 Profiting from his British Columbia political experience, Putman "preached" his message "in and out of season,"2 as his friend and colleague Frank Perney described his campaigning. Putman addressed service clubs, wrote frequently to the newspapers and to the newly established trustees' periodical, The Canadian School Journal, and served as the president of the Ontario Educational Association in 1931. Finally, he promoted these two causes in a series of articles in the Toronto Globe, subsequent to running as a Liberal candidate in Ottawa South in 1937 with the promise of the post of minister of education under Premier Mitchell Hepburn. He was assisted in his campaign by a number of parallel trends in the educational history of Ontario. Following the passage of the Adolescent Attendance Act, secondary school enrolment rose by 35 per cent in four years. With the introduction of intelligence and achievement tests to the province on a widespread basis after World War I, special education grants increased

i yo Chapter Nine greatly and the classification and accommodation of exceptional children of all types became much more prevalent. There was a thrust at all levels towards administrative efficiency, especially during the Depression, to cut school costs. In the Ottawa area Putman and the Public School Board profited from the continuing sectarian school strife and the non-co-operative stance of the Collegiate Institute Board. A major reason for the Collegiate Board's antagonism was that Putman and other elementary school reformers were redefining the meaning of education. As M.A. Cameron later told two thousand eastern Ontario teachers, "Progressive education served to bring a new attitude, new spirit and new way of thinking. It had resulted in a virtual educational renaissance."3 Putman stated that this would "demand some sacrifices and from many people a changed attitude of mind as to what education means. The great sacrifice required would not be more money for education, but a giving up of certain fixed prejudices."4 In his judgment "the single most serious problem in his work as an administrator" was that of the fourteen to sixteen year old who had failed his entrance examination and was therefore barred from both the collegiate institutes and the Ottawa Technical School, especially as accommodation became scarce.5 In the Ottawa area the School for Higher English continued to be Putman's main lever to achieve his progressive goals. As mentioned earlier, in 1923 it acted as a pilot project for the adoption of the rotary principle of classification, and junior high school organization.6 This was one year after the rotary system had been instituted in the Windsor public schools, which Ottawa Principal A.E. Meldrum had visited. After Putman returned to Ottawa from British Columbia, where he had strongly promoted the new administrative model, he again addressed Ottawa public school ratepayers on the merits of the intermediate school in his 1925 annual report.7 Not only did the intermediate school suit the varying mental powers, tastes, and economic status of a diversity of adolescents, but it enabled administrators to bypass the entrance examination obstacle. In rural areas it suited the larger administrative units and would equalize vocational opportunities in both rural and urban environments. In 1927 he raised the issue that was to become his major argument to Ottawa ratepayers, the seventeen hundred empty seats in the public schools which could be used if a city-wide intermediate school system were adopted.8 The year previously Putman had succeeded, after a twelve-year campaign, in winning Ottawa voters over to the city-at-large election system, along with a halving of the size of the Public School Board. As V.K. Greer, Ontario's chief inspector for public and separate schools, explained, public attendance at school board meetings across the province was dwindling, and trustees were relying increasingly on education experts for advice. This was "as it should be" because the talents of the school inspectors and principals would

171

Progressive School Reformer

be fully utilized, greater loyalty would be developed within the teaching body, and "the weaklings among educational experts will be noted and will be forced out of office early."9 He commended this experiment in school administration, which was being tried in his own London board as well as in Ottawa. Putman used the city-wide system in the same way he had earlier employed it for his curricular reforms, as a device to withdraw power from local ward politicians and to implement his central control of progressive reforms. He assumed that members of the Public School Board in 1928 were interested in the city at large and were prepared to view the accommodation problems of the school board "without a shadow of bias."10 Therefore intermediate schools should appeal to all who were interested in efficiency. In particular, he was attempting to counter the embarrassing tactics of Trustee Harold Shipman, who had brought his harassment campaign against Putman and the School for Higher English to a head in 1925 while Putman was in British Columbia. Allying himself once again with the sensationalistic journalist tactics of the Ottawa Journal, Shipman attempted to force a provincial inquiry into the school because of its alleged lack of commercial efficiency. Having failed in this endeavour, he succeeded in blocking the school board's payment of the last four months of Putman's salary while he was in British Columbia. He and his Orange Lodge colleagues carried their vindictiveness to ridiculous lengths in July 1927 when Shipman attempted to stop the singing of "O Canada" in French by the pupils of the School for Higher English. Even the Journal on 4 July 1927 wondered where Shipman's ideas and the respect of Orangeism for equal religious rights had gone. But this time Putman's appeals to efficiency and his reputation for pluralistic toleration discredited any of these overt displays of sectarian interests. Behind the scenes, however, the public school boards of Ontario were concerned about the growing power of the separate schools. Shipman and Putman's friend W.E. Cowling, the board's financial wizard, carefully investigated the amount of public school taxes that they considered were being diverted to Ottawa separate schools. A Court of Revision judgment ruled in favour of the public schools in 1927, just as regulation 17 was lifted by Premier Howard Ferguson's government, thus allowing the Ottawa separate schools to draw more than $67,500 in grant funds which had been withheld from them by the Department of Education for fifteen years because of nonconformity to departmental regulations. In 1931 another court decision led to the acceptance by the Ottawa separate schools of Department of Education qualifications for standards of public school teachers. The department immediately rewarded this final conformity to its efficiency standards by sending the Ottawa Separate School Board a further fifteen thousand dollars in grant money. The militancy of the recently formed Catholic Taxpayers' Association

172 Chapter Nine continued to worry the Orange order. The association mounted a consistent lobby for a guaranteed share of local corporation and utility taxes; it also drew up plans to extend the separate schools' hold on lower schools to grades nine and ten by means of the proposed intermediate plan. This alarmed Shipman. In 1933 he became grand master of the Ontario East branch of the Grand Orange Lodge, and he warned his Orange Lodge colleagues of Catholic separate school submissions to the department for a grant of forty thousand dollars to cover the return of secondary school pupils to the Collegiate Board because the indebtedness of the Separate School Board forced a closure of Catholic secondary schools. He saw this as a "dangerous situation."11 Judge J.F. Scott of Perth warned George Henry, who followed Ferguson as premier, that he would have a "peck of trouble" if he continued his proposed intermediate school legislation.12 Meanwhile, both the department and Putman were satisfied that insistence on standards of efficiency had been upheld and the Ottawa separate schools had stopped their school strikes and employment of unqualified teachers and had returned to orderly and peaceful school government. As Deputy Minister A.H.U. Colquhoun expostulated to Premier Ferguson about the troubles in the Ottawa separate schools: "That any Public or Separate School in this Province should refuse entrance to the State Inspector is almost an act of revolution ... Attention should also be drawn to the unauthorized setting up of a teachers' training department in the University of Ottawa. As the Provincial law gives to the Minister the sole right of training and certifying teachers, this policy of the Ottawa University is mere impudence."13 Even the Frenchspeaking trustees on the Ottawa Separate School Board were learning the more subtle efficiency tactics of the progressive reformers. Their Englishspeaking colleagues realized just in time that a move to have elections at large and a reduction of the size of the board, in imitation of the Ottawa Public School Board, was a subtle manoeuvre to rid the Separate School Board of its English-speaking members. In 1926 the Department of Education made demands on the other racalcitrant Ottawa school board. F.W. Merchant insisted that beginning in September 1927 the Collegiate Board provide accommodation for the seven hundred students at the School for Higher English, which had been carrying the burden of commercial training for seventeen years. In his judgment Ottawa, because of its large civil service, required a high school of commerce more than any other city in Canada. He favoured the British model of a small, closely controlled institution, allowing for a maximum of personal supervision. The Ottawa Public School Board immediately offered to sell the Kent Street School to the Collegiate Board for ten thousand dollars. Trustee Shipman, on the other hand, felt that the board was not acting in the best interests of the ratepayers by making a snap decision to approve a new high school of commerce and declared, "There is something wrong with a system

173 Progressive School Reformer

which resulted in Protestant ratepayers of Ottawa paying 80 per cent of the taxes to support the Ottawa Technical School, where 70 per cent of the pupils were Roman Catholic."14 The failure of these negotiations led to the decision by the Public School Board to continue the junior high school organization at Kent and in November 1927 to appoint Florence Dunlop as supervisor of special education for the board. The following year she introduced intelligence testing, which in 1931 was administered to all pupils from grades four to eight by their teachers, supervised by a psychologist. In 1928 S.B. Sinclair, Ontario's inspector of auxiliary classes, singled out the Ottawa Public School Board as an example of a progressive urban board. Its fourteen classes for backward children were providing facilities for all such public school students in the city.15 As his successor, H.E. Amos, advised Greer four years later, the rationale for these special education classes was that without this provision "handicapped children tend to drift into indigence and crime, to become a heavy charge on the state, a drawback to society and a source of misery to themselves and their parents."16 Putman shared this eugenicist approach to special education classes and to intelligence testing, especially according to the Binet method. Addressing the One Hundred Club in July 1926, he used a chart to demonstrate the gradations of intelligence.17 If all hoboes, tramps, and prison inmates were subjected to intelligence quotient tests, he averred, 75 per cent would be found to have IQ'S less than seventy-five; these "morons" should be placed in institutions and under direction could be of use to society. He expected to see the time when all schoolchildren would be subjected to an intelligence test before being permitted to enter a high school course. Speaking on the same subject, by then a familiar address, to the Rotary Club in November, he stressed the importance of scientific testing for the proper placement of pupils. Testing was particularly important for the education of dull or backward pupils who lack literary ability, the subject of another address by Putman to the Canadian Education Association in November 1927. Defining this class as those with IQ'S of 76 to 90 per cent of normal intelligence, or 18 per cent of the school population, "the class from which, with marked exceptions, is recruited our domestic servants, our low-paid factory hands and our manual labourers," he stated that few school authorities in Great Britain, Canada, or the United States made special provision for "this large class of dull, concreteminded children." With the passage of the Adolescent Attendance Act their plight in the urban areas of Canada was "thrown into bold relief."18 The solution that he and Peter Sandiford, his BC survey colleague,19 preached to the Ontario public was the intermediate or junior high school. In February 1928 Putman won the approval of the Ottawa Public School Board to adopt a system of intermediate schools for grades six and seven (the board, on Putman's recommendation, had abandoned the eighth grade ten

174

Chapter Nine

years earlier) in the central, eastern, western, and southern parts of the city.20 This was one year before Ferguson's intermediate plan was introduced in the Ontario legislature. The truncated version of the junior high school was adopted in Ottawa, explained Ottawa Inspector McGregor Easson in his doctoral dissertation,21 because of local conditions - the lack of co-operation of the Collegiate Institute Board. The Public School Board considered that if the two-year system was set up, it could easily be expanded in future to three years. In 1929 Putman established his modified version of the junior high school. It bore many of the elements already pioneered in the School for Higher English. Homeroom teachers taught students for half the day reading, language, and arithmetic. Specialist teachers in specially equipped classrooms taught the other half of the day science, history, geography, oral French, physical education, manual training, and home economics. Several years later, when the students had been tested against a control group in Kingston, their academic performance was judged superior in arithmetic, spelling, and reading comprehension. They also reported that they preferred the variety of teachers, the change of classrooms, and the richer curricular offerings. One of Putman's chief arguments for the reorganization was that special classes, meeting the needs of backward adolescents, would be set up closer to their homes.22 In 1930 at the Ottawa Teachers' Institute Putman asked rhetorically if it was not a tremendous blunder that there were two thousand pupils in Ottawa's two collegiates, eight hundred in the High School of Commerce, and only three hundred at the Technical School?23 He urged that a special type of vocational school be established for children best qualified for practical work, those below a certain intelligence quotient. In his address to the Canadian Education Association in 1927, he had gone so far as to term the establishment of this segregated pre-vocational school a democratic right which dull and concrete-minded boys should demand in every city and town in Canada.24 In the Ottawa public schools, special grade six and seven classes were set up in all intermediate schools into which pupils who were retarded by one and a half to two years, or whom the teachers judged to be concrete-minded, were streamed.25 They studied advanced handwork, art, music, nature study, world geography, hygiene, and civil government, as well as modified literature and mathematics courses. Putman frankly admitted that the intermediate school allowed administrators to override parental wishes to have their child follow the academic high school entrance stream. Although there was supposed to be flexibility if mistakes in placement were made, decisions were seldom changed. He estimated that 15 per cent of the school population should be in this stream. Psychological arguments buttressed the measurement techniques which Putman and his progressive colleagues used to gain the acceptance of trustees

175 Progressive School Reformer

and ratepayers alike for the idea of intermediate schools. In his 1930 annual report Putman included two major excerpts, chapter 5, "Child Development and the Intermediate School," and chapter 6, 'The Programme of the Intermediate School," from his 1925 BC Survey of the School System.26 So much attention was given here to the ages and stages of children and the importance of a separate, more efficient institution to suit adolescents that his idealistic philosophical justifications, which supposedly grounded his policies, now sounded curiously redundant. For instance, the right to a school program that would provide for maximum growth and opportunity was immediately followed by the caveat that the great majority of human beings have only average mental powers.27 Putman's definition of education now was much closer to the instrumentalist viewpoint of John Dewey: "Real education has to do with action and all action implies conduct or behaviour."28 According to this more functional, behaviouristic perspective a really well educated person could not behave badly; a person who habitually behaves well, "that is, meets every life situation in a way it ought to be met," had to be well educated.29 Schools were obviously to be designed for life adjustment. Their programs should provide children with life problems. A much greater variety of programs was needed to appeal to a wide range of abilities and to help students adapt to existing social and economic conditions, not for personal or private development.30 Schools in fact had to accept a great deal of the responsibility for the number of vocational misfits in society, who retarded social progress. The academic snobbery of the high schools, copied by most parents, could be blamed for the low status in which primary occupations were held and for the congestion of modern urban centres. Instead, an attitude of social service should be inculcated by the schools, along with the feeling "that any necessary calling or occupation is as honourable as any other."31 A cultural and handwork program suited this basically conservative outlook. Music, for instance, was to be promoted strongly in the intermediate schools for "cultivating an unselfish taste and appreciation that enables its recipient to live his leisure on a high ethical plane." It had an important moral value as well. The senses were refined by a training in good music and it led the citizen towards a preference for the best rather than the second best. Putman considered the musical taste of the average English-speaking Canadian to be "common and undiscriminating";32 even members of the Rotary Club and Kiwanis delighted in listening to jazz. Good library facilities were considered especially important in the intermediate school because they cultivated the reading habit. In Putman's judgment, "The place for an adolescent child, twelve or thirteen years of age, in the evening is at home, and the place of the library is filling the danger

176 Chapter Nine places in the evening life of that child, because the children can take books home from the library."33 In the opinion of J.G. Althouse, headmaster of the University of Toronto Schools, three important principles, then, characterized this modern education. He paid high tribute to Ottawa's pioneer work in intermediate schools in his address before the Ottawa Teachers' Institute.34 The child, rather than the subject, was the most important single factor. Education was essentially a process of experience, and the doctrine of interest and effort, rather than formal discipline, prevailed. In a later article Althouse, at that time dean of the Ontario College of Education, described the activity methods, or learning by doing, as "the will to do is what makes the doing important." In other words a pre-eminence was given to motivation. Two dangers attended this antiintellectual stance: unskilful motivation, which reduced the pupil's interest towards a craving for entertainment, and an undue concentration on motivation, which devolved into morbid introspection. He asked, "How can we have self-centred schools without having self-centred children?" The original thrust of Putman's and John Watson's neo-Hegelian philosophy, which in its ideal form was towards an altruistic, constantly learning human being, was turned on its head. As Althouse warned, "Is there danger, in our zeal for extending equal opportunities to all, of restricting all to the same opportunities?"35 He also pointed out that it cost more per pupil per day to train for manual occupations than for white collar jobs. By now, however, the philosophical justification for progressive education served as a rhetorical device to win greater political control. As Robert Skidelski remarks about English progressives, who were studied with great interest by Putman and other reform-minded Canadians,"The progressives proposed to replace coercive and 'rote-learning' techniques with those that stimulated and made use of dormant interests and potentialities. Stated in this way the progressive revolution becomes largely a revolution in technique and understanding providing more effective methods for achieving whatever it was that the educator wanted to achieve."36 In Putman's case it was the complete support of the Ottawa Public School Board, and a majority of the Ottawa public, for his progressive program. The allegiance of the board had been guaranteed by 1930 (Shipman was no longer on the board). In presenting his proposal to the board for the intermediate school system, Putman summarized an extensive survey he had taken of Ottawa's school accommodation and needs for the next ten years on a huge ten-by-twelve-foot board. A scale map of Ottawa with over ten thousand red-headed pins pointed to the residence of public school pupils. After his presentation, the trustees were convinced that his $170,000 budgetary request was based on sound psychological and sociological considerations. They were greatly impressed by the expertise of Putman and his new inspector, McGregor Easson. The Citizen believed the historical report and survey "may

177

Progressive School Reformer

well mark the beginning of a new Public school era in the city."37 Intermediate schools were to be the keystone of future building policies of the board. Meanwhile, senior departmental officials were becoming convinced that intermediate schools should be adopted provincially. Merchant, acting as chief adviser to the minister of education, proposed to Premier Henry that he continue Ferguson's thrust towards a regrading of provincial schools into the 6-4-3 plan- Both the former premier and Putman had been studying England's 1927 Hadow Report on the education of the adolescent and Merchant drew it to Henry's attention as "one of the most important educational documents of modern times bearing on post-primary education."38 Quoting large excerpts from Hadow,39 he recommended that intermediate schools be established in Canada for two of the major reasons suggested in the report: psychological and practical. All modern educational theorists agreed that adolescents should begin a different stage of schooling to coincide with their new phase of development. The intermediate school would avoid the waste of overlapping the elementary schools' fifth form and the secondary schools' grade nine. It would allow language training to begin earlier and pre-vocational courses to be set up to soothe the restlessness and interests of the twelve year old as well as to help him choose his future career. Putman immediately realized this departmental trend. In a skilful manner he manipulated the department to support him in his perennial battle against the elitist admission policies of the Collegiate Board and Technical School. In letters to Deputy Minister Colquhoun and Director of Education G.F. Rogers,40 he complained of the rejection by the Technical School of forty boys over fifteen who had failed their entrance examination and had spent two years in form four. On the other hand, he also objected to the department's awarding of entrance status to a candidate who, in the judgment of the local Entrance Board of which he was a member, had failed the examination set by the department. He asked that the department give the Entrance Board power to grant a certificate of admission only to a technical or vocational school for those who failed their entrance examinations and would benefit from the experience. After long delay the Ottawa Technical School opened up the special class for those who failed the entrance examination, but the Advisory Vocational Committee won the continued support of F.S. Rutherford, the director of industrial and technical education. Rutherford advised Rogers that the discretionary power of the advisory committee to reject applicants whom the "Public and Separate School Boards are desirous of unloading ... upon the Collegiate Institute Board" should be retained.41 Rogers, however, concluded to Putman, "It seems to me that the situation of which you complain can be best remedied by the establishment of intermediate schools in which courses of study suited to the pupils who are not book-minded can be organized."42

178 Chapter Nine In 1932 Putman complained at length to the department as well as to the editor of the Ottawa Evening Journal about the publication of test results of grade nine students in Ottawa's collegiate institutes by the departmental inspector. He termed the publication of the poor showing in reading, writing, and spelling, supposedly by graduates of the intermediate school system, to be "educationally grossly unfair and misleading."43 What proof had the inspector that these ratings were accurate? How many of the failures were from the Ottawa public schools? Since these students were all considered to have passed the entrance examination set by the department, should it not accept responsibility for their poor results? In a letter to Rogers, he blamed the results squarely on the policy of giving "a high school education of a severely literary type to too large a proportion of our total adolescent population ... The net result is that we have our academic high schools overflowing with young people of an average intellectual calibre much lower than the average of forty years ago."44 In his reply to Putman, Rogers agreed that too many young people were in academic secondary schools undertaking courses they were not capable of doing. He considered the intermediate school would solve many problems, "the chief of which is the problem of educational direction. Such a school would be the logical distributing point from which young people would move towards the vocational school, the academic high school, or the job."45 In his final letter to Rogers, Putman described Ottawa's intermediate school organization and suggested that an added third year would be educationally and economically advantageous. He invited Rogers to visit Ottawa to consider his proposal.46 Having won senior departmental officials to his side, Putman addressed himself to the Ottawa taxpayer, now deeply mired in the Depression and "almost in rebellion against the cost of secondary education," he claimed to Rogers.47 In his 1933 annual report he cited the example of England where because the curriculum was more suited to 50 per cent of the school-leaving population, thousands of pounds were saved.48 With the introduction by the Henry government in March 1934 of permissive legislation to establish intermediate schools covering the first two years of high school, the Collegiate Board began to talk with the Public School Board about the formation of a union board before the establishment of intermediate schools. The Collegiate Board was interested in knowing how Putman would be able to save it up to 2.5 per cent in expenditures. This tentative gesture died, however, after Premier Henry formally withdrew the bill, fearing its political consequences. A year later, with the Liberal government of Mitchell Hepburn once again considering the merits of intermediate schools, and with eighteen hundred empty seats in the public schools, Putman strongly promoted his efficiency arguments. In a series of articles in the Evening Citizen, he maintained that intermediate schools would save Ottawa's taxpayers $51,948, which was

179 Progressive School Reformer

then being spent by the Collegiate Board in seating accommodation, educational services, administration, and entrance examinations.49 A further $24,000 a year would be saved by the Ottawa taxpayer because of incorrect placement of many secondary students.50 Costs of secondary education were too great in proportion to the results. Instead, intermediate schools should act as "touchstones to try out the mettle of prospective students for a secondary school."51 Vocational guidance should play a much more important role; fathers and mothers, in his judgment, were the least qualified to advise children. He termed objections raised by teachers, especially at the secondary school level, as "a special plea for an interested party based on either selfishness or vanity."52 By this time Putman's efficiency arguments had led him to a redefinition of democracy. In his 1935 annual report he advised parents democracy "does not mean that all members of a state are equal either in rank or value as citizens. It does mean or ought to mean that every form of human service is honourable and deserving of recognition."53 Members of the Trades and Labour Council had detected this implication in Putman's proposal for intermediate schools, which they termed an attempt to discriminate in favour of a wealthy class of pupil. They were opposed to any separation of children in the educational field; equal opportunity was their goal.54 The separation of children, however, had been quietly promoted since 1932. Florence Dunlop had used her intelligence tests to identify gifted children and provide for an enriched stream in the intermediate schools.55 Putman predicted that 25 per cent of children never qualified for admission to secondary school and should be transferred to a nonacademic stream at twelve years,56 as recommended in the Hadow Report. As well, the adolescent should be removed from the elementary sphere, since that period was one of "real danger" in which sexual interests and rebelliousness to authority were common.57 But their subsequent streaming in the intermediate school should be done discreetly by professionals. Above all, examinations which highlighted their stratification should be eschewed. As Putman argued in connection with Sir Michael Sadler's anti-examination campaign in Britain, "If we set up in our state schools for all pupils examination standards which ascribe superior cultural values to certain groups of studies for which fifty per cent, of our people have little talent, we are in danger of making our people more and more class-conscious and less and less efficient."58 When Duncan MeArthur, Hepburn's dynamic new deputy minister of education, conducted hearings in Ottawa for his 1935 Committee of Enquiry into the Cost of Education, Putman again promoted the cost benefits of the intermediate school system, now suggesting it should be extended to the grade ten level. It would allow the two thousand vacant seats in the public schools to be filled, would curtail any need for a secondary school building program, and would raise the average intelligence level of pupils in the secondary school,

i8o Chapter Nine

thus allowing its extension as a more selective institution into rural areas along with the adoption of the larger unit of administration.59 In March 1936 Education Minister Leo Simpson introduced permissive legislation for the establishment of intermediate schools to the end of grade ten. Graduates would receive a certificate from the department, allowing them to be admitted into high schools, technical or commercial institutions, but not the collegiate institutes. Unfortunately, fears of encroachment by the separate schools on secondary school territory again caused the Liberals to withdraw the bill. Putman decided to step up his campaign to change public opinion. He wrote an article for the Toronto Globe on the advantages of the intermediate school, citing its psychological, pedagogical, administrative, and economic benefits.60 It held out the possibility of even greater opportunity for rural children. But his major thrust in 1937 was a concerted attack on the Collegiate Board, especially now that he had senior departmental officials as well as a Liberal government on his side. The touchstone was a resolution of the Advisory Vocational Committee of the Ottawa Collegiate Institute to conduct a strong campaign for the construction of a new technical school. As in 1907 Putman rose to the attack. He immediately wrote a letter to McArthur, urging him to launch an inquiry into the justification for this building program, particularly at a time when the city was overburdened with relief debt, the enrolment of elementary schools was declining, and the mill rate to support public and separate schools was the highest in history.61 It was most unfortunate that provincial legislation on intermediate schools had been scuttled, Putman continued. It would have forced principals of secondary schools to admit entrance failures and subnormals, who needed special training, and would have made the Collegiate Board more concerned about the taxpayer rather than about the dedication of "a handsome and expensive school." A gentleman's agreement could still be struck by the three boards with the minister's approval to establish fifth form classes voluntarily in the Ottawa public and separate schools and withdraw control of all such work from the Collegiate Board. Putman even offered a complete modern school, well heated, lit, and ventilated, centrally located, with fourteen modern classrooms, a large manual-training room and assembly hall, ample playground space, and all "on easy terms."62 Thus began what McArthur later termed his Ottawa sickness. G.F. Rogers, chief inspector of secondary schools, and V.K. Greer, chief inspector of public and separate schools, arrived in Ottawa on 12 April 1937 to survey the school situation. Although they found the vacancy rate to be not as simple as Putman had painted it - the separate schools had to rent thirty-seven classrooms and the secondary schools had many overcrowded classrooms they did agree that because of Putman's foresight and leadership, the public schools were in the best position to undertake the work of grade nine with the

i8i

Progressive School Reformer

minimum of expense and effort. In fact in their report they stated, "We know of no other city in the Province which, in the organization of its schools and the personnel of its staff of teachers, is in as favourable a position as Ottawa to adopt the new programme of studies. Ottawa, indeed, may be said to have anticipated the modern trend of education."63 The Public School Board immediately approved the recommendation of the Rogers-Greer Report to transfer all grade nine work to the jurisdiction of the public and separate schools. The Ottawa Separate School Board also agreed with the proposal. But the Collegiate Board was not to be so easily cowed. On 14 May a deputation waited on the deputy minister. In the brief submitted by the board chairman, H.P. Hill, it was admitted that "the system of elementary schools in Ottawa is unquestionably the best in the Province, and it can be assumed that if it is the best in Ontario, it is the best in Canada. The Public School Board and its very capable Inspector, Dr J.H. Putman, should be warmly congratulated on the high standard it has attained." This "super deluxe system of public schools," however, had been established because of a number of special circumstances.64 Over the previous ten years public school attendance in Ottawa had decreased but the assessment of public school ratepayers had increased. In 1926 the assessment stood at $120,375,000, whereas in 1936 it was $127,396,000. Gross income, as a result, rose from $992,000 to $i ,056,000, while in the same period interest and sinking fund costs declined from $186,000 to $170,000. This increased revenue of $80,000 was used for additional and special class work. (In 1935 Florence Dunlop completed her doctoral dissertation at Columbia and was appointed school psychologist and supervisor of special education. In the same year the board received $5*585.52 in special education grants from the department compared with $3,737 received by London.) The average cost per pupil per day in the Ottawa public schools was 54.920 (for 9,568 pupils in 1935) compared with 34.220 in Hamilton, which had twice the public school enrolment (20,157 pupils). This difference of 20.700 multiplied by the extra thousand pupils in Hamilton meant that Ottawa spent $2,000 a day, or $400,000 a year, more than Hamilton, argued the Collegiate Board. According to the brief, Ottawa also employed three times the number of manual-training and music teachers as did Hamilton and had five teachers acting as supervisors or doing special work, which cost an extra $12,400. Teachers' salaries at Hamilton were much less than those at Ottawa and had been cut by 5 to 15 per cent during the Depression. The Hamilton board gave more consideration to secondary education. The trustees argued that if the department was to limit the Ottawa public schools to an expenditure of 170 a pupil a day and turn the savings over to the Collegiate Board, the trustees could pay the entire interest and sinking fund of the $750,000 debenture required for the new technical school. The Collegiate Board suggested an alternative plan. It entailed the

182 Chapter Nine take-over of all special classes for retarded pupils at the grade nine level by the Public School Board and the erection of a central section of the proposed technical school to accommodate 950 students. The trustees voiced one of their main objections to the proposal for intermediate schools. They expected that it would mean the transfer of one-quarter of their teaching staff (thirty-nine teachers) to public school control. "It is readily seen that any major realignment of duties on such short notice would work a very real hardship on teachers who have earned a permanent appointment on our staff by conscientious effort."65 At this point McArthur stepped in to attempt to cure his Ottawa sickness with a compromise plan. The Ottawa public schools were to look after all grade nine manual-training and household science instruction for students at Lisgar Collegiate; the Collegiate Board would take over this instruction for students at Glebe Collegiate, the High School of Commerce, and the Technical School; and county students desiring to attend vocational courses would be accommodated at Commerce and Tech.66 Secondary school teachers transferred to the public schools would spend only 60 per cent of their time at the grade seven to eight level and only one-third of their time on practical work. He insisted that only the east wing of the proposed technical school be built, as recommended by Rogers and Greer. The Public School Board was prepared to agree to this compromise and offered to accept up to eighteen collegiate teachers, provided that they were Protestant, not over forty years of age, and not receiving salaries over twenty-four hundred dollars if female or twenty-eight hundred if male. The board would even guarantee to pay them the same salary as the Collegiate Board had. The trustees, however, were against having grade nine girls in one part of the city (the Glebe) still continuing to be under the Collegiate Board. At this, the Collegiate Board compromised and agreed to allow Glebe girls to attend public schools. On 14 June 1937 the Public School Board decided not to accept the package without the inclusion of grade nine students from the High School of Commerce. The Collegiate Board refused to relinquish them and two days later decided to continue all its grade nine work. The Ottawa separate schools, on the other hand, reorganized their fifth form work to conform to the Rogers-Greer recommendations at a saving of eight thousand dollars in secondary school rental costs.67 They blamed the Collegiate Board for the scuttling of the original proposal. The Ottawa Evening Citizen, however, believed the deadlock was a result of the sense of rivalry between the two boards, "which is bound to arise in the case of public bodies with large spending powers."68 In November Rogers sadly noted to the minister that "no action has been taken by the Ottawa authorities in accordance with the findings of the Rogers-Greer report."69 The Collegiate Board had applied for a 25 per cent

183 Progressive School Reformer building grant and in September proposed that the Technical School be demolished because it was a fire hazard. A new school was to be built, which the minister had tentatively approved. But Rogers praised the Ottawa schools despite their high cost. In his judgment the ratepayers got their money's worth 100-fold. The elementary schools had led the province for many years and were a monument to Putman.70 In his doctoral study of Ontario's educational finances, Maxwell A. Cameron considered that the separate schools had been a major cause of the progressiveness of the Public School Board. In the city of Ottawa ... almost exactly one-half (49.4 percent) of the children are educated in separate schools at a cost (for current expense) of $32 per pupil and a tax rate of 14.8 mills; while for the education of the other half of the school population, over $85 is spent per pupil, and the tax rate necessary is only 7.85 mills. If there were no separate schools in Ottawa, we can scarcely doubt that the public school tax rate would be higher and the expenditure per pupil lower than at present.71 Premier Hepburn, in an effort to alleviate the separate school situation, particularly after his withdrawal of the intermediate-school legislation, introduced a tax assessment bill which forced corporations to divide their school taxes in proportion to the religion of their shareholders. But this proved impossible to execute. In Ottawa the Ontario Court of Appeal decided to divide the taxes arbitrarily for separate schools and let the balance go to the public schools.72 Hepburn was forced to repeal the legislation in the spring session, resulting in an annual loss to the Ottawa Separate School Board of twenty-five thousand dollars.73 But the Liberal government was determined to overcome the opposition. The Me Arthur committee recommended that the province assume a greater proportion of school costs. Economic conditions in the province improved and by 1938 school grants were surpassing preDepression highs. In a confidential memorandum to the minister of education in February 1938, McArthur showed that the Ottawa separate schools were receiving $15,801 in additional grants above $i under the new plan. This was by far the highest among all separate schools, within $3,000 of the Toronto public school grant, and many times that of the Ottawa Public School Board, which that year received only $2,261.25.74 The next year the grant was increased to $30,000. In his letter of thanks to the premier, B.C. Desormeaux, chairman of the Ottawa Separate School Board, explained that the board had found it impossible to meet even ordinary expenditures out of the ordinary revenue without increasing the tax rate, already much too high.75 Needless to say, a delegation of public school boards, including that of Ottawa, presented a petition to the premier, complaining of the loss in public school revenues. The provincial separate schools, apparently, had received an

184 Chapter Nine increase of 53 per cent in grant money between 1927 and 1936, while grants to public schools had dropped by 21 per cent. Despite an attempt by the Windsor board to appeal this policy to the Supreme Court and then to the Privy Council,76 the department prevailed; it had found a less contentious method of providing educational equality. But neither the Department of Education nor Putman was as successful with respect to the rural schools. For over fifty years successive provincial governments had tried to introduce township-sized boards. Surveys had been conducted and special departmental officials appointed to promote agricultural education, better inspection, auxiliary classes, and medical and dental services. All had urged rural ratepayers to adopt the larger administrative unit. In 1919 permissive legislation was passed allowing two or more school sections to consolidate their facilities. The United Farmers government which was voted into power the following year realized the unpopularity of the legislation. Rural people wanted their schools in their own school section, under their direct control. By 1925 only twenty-seven consolidations had been effected. The department concluded that fear of higher costs, dislike of lengthy transportation, and a natural resistance to change made consolidation impossible to implement, either voluntarily or by departmental regulation. This antipathy to consolidation directly affected the Ferguson government's plan for township school boards in 1925. Rural trustees immediately rose to counterattack. They began holding county conventions to encourage grassroots' participation and they launched a province-wide journal. Each year between 1925 and 1929 Ferguson would circulate a copy of the bill to ratepayers, introduce it in the provincial legislature, and before the second reading withdraw it for future consideration. Each year at the annual convention of the Ontario Educational Association rural trustees would defeat it by an overwhelming vote. From the beginning of his inspectorate Putman had promoted consolidation and the county board of administration. At the OEA convention in 1912, for instance, he argued in his address "How to Provide Adequate Supply of Teachers for Rural Schools" that consolidation was the only answer to the waste of too few children per school.77 Only a county board could provide the specialization of personnel and the high standard of excellence required in that modern age. He was one of the delegates from the OEA in 1916 requesting incentive grants to promote consolidation. In 1918 he spoke to the Canadian Education Association in an address entitled "Rural School Administration What Improvements Are Necessary?" He noted that 75 per cent of Ontario's schools were one-room rural schools taught by young girls with no training at normal schools and having less than fifteen children in attendance. He advocated a five-to-seven-member county board elected by proportional representation and a county superintendent appointed by the minister of education. Differing from departmental proposals, his suggestion was for "a

185 Progressive School Reformer very radical change" for Ontario, decentralized power allowing more scope for the development of local initiative. This would achieve "unity of purpose in education without having uniformity of administration."78 In another address to the OEA that year Putman elaborated on the reasons he thought the department, rather than the local board, should appoint the county inspector.79 Outside appointment allowed independence of local control, flexibility for background qualifications, and more freedom. This model provided by an urban superintendent, as well as his overall thrust towards efficiency, led Putman into difficulties with rural school teachers, who wrote a series of letters to the Ottawa Citizen deploring their low salaries and pensions.80 Arguing that the small rural school had outlived its usefulness, that advertisements in the Toronto papers gave rural teachers' salaries as high as $600 to $750, quite adequate for "young women who have no previous experience as teachers and who teach classes that average ten to fifteen pupils,"81 and that complaints about niggardly pensions came from old Ryerson-era pensioners, Putman stated that consolidation had to take place before there could be better salaries and schools. His hardhearted treatment of the plight of rural teachers drew angry responses from a number of them, one even warning him that "consolidated schools were tried in Ontario and failed hopelessly."82 Following his BC survey, however, Putman became more politically astute. In their report he and G.M. Weir remarked that "consolidation of schools is theoretically advisable but politically impolitic." But because a greater proportion of educational costs was already borne by the BC government than by the public, a major recommendation was that consolidation of assisted schools should be carried out "with the approval of local boards if possible, but in face of their disapproval if necessary. Only when ratepayers bear the major portion of a financial burden should they be allowed to determine the amount of that burden ... The state owes the children in assisted school areas a good education; it is morally bound to give this education without unnecessary waste of public money."83 Putman decided to carry this message to a wider audience. In 1926 and 1927 he wrote articles to the rural trustees' new journal, The Canadian School Board Journal, explaining the past history of the rural school and the necessity of eliminating petty localization and traditional programs. Rural children had to be provided with better standards of health, school supplies, library facilities, handwork, music and art instruction, as well as modern courses in scientific agriculture.84 At the end of his presidency of the Ontario Educational Association in 1931-2, Putman delivered a major address, "School Administration and School Finance in Ontario, Can They Be Improved?" He proposed that the good qualities of individuality and independence which characterized rural life should be retained, but at the same time he suggested a model which avoided the centralizing tendencies

186 Chapter Nine of the Ontario Department of Education, which produced "standardized Canadian Babbitts."85 In his address Putman advocated county boards because they would equalize the tax rate, reduce the number of rural trustees, provide equal opportunity for rural children to attend secondary school, and allow a decentralized administration as well as a county director of education. The number of school boards would be reduced from 5,300, with 16,000 trustees, to 168. With increased power being delegated to local boards, a healthy growth of interest in education would result. Patronage in the hiring of teachers would be eliminated, and waste through poor attendance, lack of interest, or poor health of the students largely controlled. Carrying over another idea from his BC survey, Putman recommended that a i per cent tax be collected by all employers on payrolls above ten dollars a week as well as from those who were not then taxed by municipal authorities. A similar amount should be collected by municipal councils, except from those engaged in agriculture. These proceeds, he recommended, should be forwarded to the department to supplement provincial grants for secondary education. In 1933 in another OEA address Putman stressed the importance of the county director having a free hand to select and place teachers for maximum efficiency of the system. "If experience showed that ten or twenty per cent of this total teaching force was relatively incompetent it would be comparatively easy to replace it from the surplus supply available."86 Needless to say, Putman's outspoken criticism made senior officials of the Department of Education regard him as "a more aggressive type whose views, however, would require to be carefully weighed."87 He was passed over at the beginning of Cody's regime as minister for the position of assistant chief inspector. On his return from British Columbia he was interviewed for the vacant post of chief inspector of the Toronto Schools.88 But it was only after the appointment of Duncan MeArthur as deputy minister under Hepburn's Liberal government that Putman felt that his ideas would be accepted. After a long meeting with McArthur at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, Putman summarized their discussion in a letter to him, which was prefaced with the hope "that you are planning some really progressive school legislation and believing that you and Dr. Simpson are sincerely desirous of doing something worthwhile for the Province." Putman strongly criticized the highly bureaucratic system of Queen's Park, which had tried to improve education by propaganda and centralized control. Expanding on his earlier ideas, he urged that McArthur establish instead a decentralized system, giving local boards more responsibility, particularly in maintenance and equipment of elementary schools, while at the same time establishing a system of county boards under the guidance of a well-qualified director of education. The need for inspection by the department would be greatly lessened, although the cost would probably not decrease. Above all, there would be "great gains in

187

Progressive School Reformer

efficiency." A second major policy change that Putman recommended was a broader base of taxation, specifically a i per cent tax on the thousands of employees of banks, wholesale houses, loan companies, insurance companies, and department stores, "who owe their earning power directly to the educational system."89 When MeArthur's committee on the cost of education met in Ottawa on 9 July 1935, Putman continued to promote his idea of county, rather than township, boards because he claimed that the great objection to the township plan and the great fear of consolidation had discredited the idea.90 County boundaries were already defined and counties were placed more strategically for agricultural and higher secondary courses. He again urged Me Arthur to trust the people, to let them manage their own schools so that greater interest would be created and a better job done than under the Education Department. Although a Township School Board Act was passed in 1935, and although Greer strongly promoted the larger administrative unit, Me Arthur concluded in his 1938 report that public opposition continued to block it and that great inequities continued to exist in the burden of taxation. By 1940 only 516 school sections had been reorganized. Even in his seventieth year Putman was determined "to do something to improve rural education. It is in dire distress and nobody seems to have the courage to strike at the root of the problem."91 True to his country life roots, he assumed that the stock market crash of 1929 was the climax of years of an unhealthy stimulation of urbanization. It was "nature's way of calling man to account for his economic and social sins."92 The root of the trouble was that teachers taught their pupils to have an inferiority complex about agricultural life. Only an educational revival could change this outlook. Twelve articles in the Toronto Globe written by Putman were designed to promote this necessary attitudinal change towards progressive educational reform. In evangelical style they extolled the virtues of a modern, urban administrative organization - specialized teachers, good library facilities, adequate school equipment, group singing and organized games for students, professional control of teacher appointments, and intermediate schools, as well as technical instruction suitable for rural children. But Putman's intent remained basically conservative; 90 per cent of rural pupils could "make their finest contribution to society and achieve their maximum self-satisfaction by remaining in the country." There could be no real prosperity in Canada unless it was based on a happy, contented, and prosperous rural life. Because the city tended to attract only those with average intelligence or less, it became an evil environment in which these rural immigrants were exploited by those with "a keener wit and a duller moral sense."93 The result was moral degradation and slum conditions. The county board, on the other hand, by improving the efficiency and standard of living in rural Ontario, would produce social intercourse on a

188 Chapter Nine distinctly higher plane than that which prevailed. The intermediate schools, located at strategic places throughout the county, would become evening social centres in which rural people would hear lectures and debates, see movies, or attend dances. In Hegelian fashion Putman depicted this more efficient, specialized school as a model with which rural people could interact. In the process their attitudes and expectations would be changed. He hoped they would strive for a higher form of citizenship and a more efficient productivity, all in the service of the state. Not surprisingly, the co-operative movement interested Putman at this time. While on a trip to Britain and the Continent under the sponsorship of the National Council of Education in 1936,94 he had seen co-operative stores in Sweden and England, co-op marketing in Denmark, and millions of homes in England and Sweden built at reduced rates of interest. In his Protestant judgment it was a system infinitely to be preferred to living on charity. He thought federal and provincial governments ought to sit down and work out co-operative enterprises which would get rid of unemployment. When he became city controller in charge of the Works Department in 1939, Putman tried to implement this rather simplistic solution to the city's unemployment problem. He challenged Tom Moore, Trades and Labour leader, to organize a co-operative building association among the idle skilled mechanics, architects, plumbers, and carpenters in Ottawa.95 He would do his utmost to persuade the city to provide the materials and the lots. Together they would build six semi-detached homes, auction them off, and split the proceeds. This positive suggestion, he said, was to counteract the negative preaching of social workers, youth leaders, and cheap politicians whose pessimism made youth think they were victims of circumstances. But as Moore retorted, not only did Putman ignore the more than 100 qualified people who had applied for the position of city dog-catcher (Putman had claimed there was abundant opportunity for the employment of trained youth), or the over 102 relief cases described each day in the press, but he did not offer the workman much security in the house-building plan. The worker would receive his wages only after the architect, supply man, and investor had been paid off. Moore suggested that Putman look at the unsold houses built under the Dominion Housing Act. By the late 19308 even Putman's political position appeared unrealistic. When Mitchell Hepburn announced the beginning of his second election campaign as premier in August 1937, Putman offered his services, assuring the premier that he would have the support of the Ottawa Citizen.96 An opportunity arose in the riding of Ottawa South, which was in a tangle. The sitting Conservative member, Arthur Ellis, had an injunction against the holding of a convention called by two fellow Conservatives. He had also insulted the ladies of Ottawa South by his attempts to keep them from the convention.97 The Liberal organizer, Paul Leduc, considered that Putman

189 Progressive School Reformer

would be a strong candidate in this traditionally Conservative riding. It was understood that should he be elected and the premier returned to power, Hepburn would offer him the portfolio of minister of education.98 Putman easily won the nomination as candidate on the first ballot, the next day resigned from the Ottawa Public School Board, and five days later chose Ida M. Cummings, vice-president and treasurer of the Zonta Club, as his official business agent. This was the first time a woman had been appointed to this position and was doubtless a counter to Ellis's anti-feminist stance. In his acceptance speech Putman struck the curiously unreal, gentlemanly tone he was to pursue throughout his campaign. He was paraphrased as saying "Liberalism was an attitude toward life ... a state of mind. It was the way people thought about their relations with their neighbor. Liberalism was a good man's ideal of proper human relations."99 At the same time a Liberal was painted as dynamic and progressive in contrast with a real Conservative who was static. Putman suggested that a Liberal, reflecting his own personality, was restless and progressive, wanted something better; the Conservative said, "Let well enough alone." At a time when Hepburn was alienating both his own pro-union members (Arthur Roebuck and David Croll opposed his anti-cio stance and withdrew from the party) and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Putman suggested that what was needed was a number of men in the legislature who were above politics. The Ottawa Citizen depicted him as "a man of original and progressive mind, independent and forward-looking in thought, and fearless in the expression of his views."100 During the election campaign, lines of opposition to Putman quickly formed. Conservative Opposition Leader Earl Rowe designated as candidate in Ottawa South George H. Dunbar, a strong Conservative and controller in charge of the Works Department. Ellis was persuaded to drop out of the race and support Dunbar. Significantly, H.P. Hill, chairman of the Collegiate Board, and Putman's foe in the intermediate and technical school battles, was chosen as Dunbar's official agent. Other enemies soon appeared on the horizon. In opening his campaign at Burritt's Rapids, an Orange Lodge stronghold, on 25 September, A.H. Acres, MLA, posed two questions to Putman. Did he intend to force township boards onto rural ratepayers when he became minister of education? How would he vote if a bill which allowed a sharing of corporation taxes with separate schools was introduced?101 Putman's reply three days later appealed to his past record and was more prescient than he realized. "I've been here for 43 years, and for the past 27 years I've been laboring to build up a Public school system which is just a little better. If any man or woman thinks I'd do anything in the Legislature to injure the Public schools, he'd better vote against me."102 This appeal to the good judgment of the wise elder statesman was matched by a series of moralistic advertisements written by Putman in the newspapers,

190 Chapter Nine "Little Stories on the Political History of Ontario," in which even progressive Conservative leaders were extolled for their ability to rise above petty partisanship and develop the province. For instance, Putman considered that Howard Ferguson had showed real statesmanship in repealing regulation 17 and establishing bonne entente with French Canadians.103 He had expanded Ontario Hydro but had been unwise to sign a number of contracts for power which increased the provincial debt. He had improved the province's highways, had repealed the liquor legislation, and under the Bennett government had been high commissioner in London where he had proved himself a "staunch Canadian." His successor, George Henry, on the other hand, was "an honest kindly man, more interested in thorough-bred farm stock than in politics." He had no Cabinet members of outstanding ability and his "grossly extravagant Government" was deservedly smashed by Hepburn in 1934.104 Dunbar ridiculed these pedantic ads and Putman's arrogance in putting his own picture beside those of statesmen of the calibre of Oliver Mo watt. Action was needed, not history, said Dunbar. But he must have been worried by the large Liberal rally at the Ottawa Auditorium on 24 September at which Hepburn said that he was deeply impressed by Putman's knowledge of farms and farm economy. Federal ministers, notably the Honourable Ian Mackenzie, minister of national defence, who paid tribute to Putman's report which was then guiding educational reform in British Columbia, and the Honourable C.G. Power, minister of pensions and national health, who depicted Putman as an outstanding educationist, gave even more credence to the view that Putman's stature could overcome federal-provincial squabbles. On 5 October, however, Dunbar revealed the extent to which he knew the dirty tricks of a campaign. A chain letter, addressed to all Protestants, was circulated, which claimed that although the separate school tax had been repealed, an agreement had been signed between Hepburn and the Roman Catholics. It urged Protestants to rally behind the Conservative party and oppose school taxes throughout the province. A manifesto issued by the Orange Lodge called on all Orangemen to vote against Hepburn. Stanley Hudson, deputy grand master of Ontario East, pointed out that the loss to the Ottawa Public School Board owing to the premier's school legislation amounted to twenty-nine thousand dollars. Putman's reaction to the chain letters was angrily unstatesmanlike: "We are going to win in spite of all the despicable, lying slanders being circulated in cowardly, unsigned, mimeographed circulars, called chain letters. The electors of Ottawa South are too intelligent to be fooled by this discredited trick." If he went to Toronto he would make no promise or pledge; he would vote on issues of the day as his conscience and intelligence directed him and for what he judged would be the good of Ontario. "We are members of one

191 Progressive School Reformer body, one Provincial family, and my aim shall be to establish and maintain the political and moral health of this family," Putman concluded.105 The times had changed, however. This moralistic, Hegelian rhetoric of the progressive municipal reformer no longer persuaded the voters. Dunbar, who had specifically pledged himself to present Ottawa's relief problem to the provincial legislature, won by 893 seats over Putman. He had particularly picked up votes in the centre-town wards of Capital and Wellington, previous strongholds of Shipman and his Orange colleagues. Hepburn, on the other hand, easily retained his majority, winning sixty-three seats over the Conservative's twenty-three. As Neil McKenty concludes, this victory was due more to Conservative weakness than to Liberal strength, although he commended Hepburn's adept campaigning and occasional good social welfare legislation.106 Putman, meanwhile, switched positions with Dunbar, becoming a controller on City Council in charge of the Works Department. He also started writing his memoirs and served on the Quebec Protestant school inquiry of 1938 under the chairmanship of W. A. Hepburn. His Appendix in, "Organization of District Boards" for that inquiry recommended once again that the large administrative area was the only solution to the rural school problem.107 The same model of the expert educational leader advancing the cultural and economic interests of the people with whom he lived prevailed. Finances were to be based on more equitable standards, never on a parochial base. Outstanding men and women were to be attracted to administer these district boards by being properly paid and were to be hired for their merit and high qualifications. Throughout his life Putman's message had been constant. A progressive administration gave top priority to efficiency. Specialization and scientific procedures led not only to a higher standard of living but to a higher moral culture. Outstanding leaders must reveal the path to be followed. But this philosophy also reinforced the Canadian tendency towards formalism, conservatism, and deference to authority. In the end progressive education in its Canadian expression thwarted individual and private forms of growth and development. Its rhetoric concealed the strong thrust of those with newly acquired professional status to take control of the educational system and run it along business-efficiency lines. A new managerial elite emerged, and the goals of the New Education movement became swamped by the progressive education system.

Epilogue

In the last ten years of his life many people heralded John Harold Putman for his progressive leadership in education. In 1931 he was appointed president of the Ontario Educational Association. Four years later, on the occasion of his silver anniversary with the Ottawa Public School Board, his fellow teachers held a large banquet in his honour at the Chateau Laurier. Included in the toasts were many tributes to his outstanding service. In 1936, in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the OEA, Putman was chosen as one of four leading educationists in Ontario to receive an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Toronto. Again, at his retirement in 1937 he was cited as an educationist who had established a Dominion-wide reputation for his progressive ideas in education. His wonderful understanding of human nature, firm conviction about educational problems, and forceful personality were judged, at his death in September 1940, to be the chief reasons for his success in building such an efficient system in the Ottawa public schools. On the level of programs, quality of teachers, and special services, the Ottawa public schools had certainly been transformed under Putman's leadership. There was more emphasis on the psychological characteristics of children and adolescents as well as on individual differences among children. Much more attention was paid to the nonacademic pupil and to those with special abilities or with handicaps. Project work, school gardening, manual training, household science, and a variety of handwork activities gave the student a measure of freedom from the more authoritarian regime of the traditional school. The intermediate school with its rotary plan of organization, specialized teachers, and vocational guidance services helped many adolescents avoid the perils of blind-alley jobs. Ironically, despite its name, however, the progressive education that Putman and his followers promoted was basically a conservative movement. Like their New Education forbears and urban municipal colleagues, progressive educators nostalgically attempted to conserve the traditional values of

193 Epilogue their rural past. They naively copied modern business practices in their administrative policies. They embraced the rhetoric and rationale of new liberalism in selling this transformed, more efficient public school system to the public. In Putman's case, because of Ottawa's bilingual problems and the traditionalist stance of the Ottawa Collegiate Board, a situation of divide and rule allowed him to take advantage of the elementary school vacuum, attract taxpayer support, and build a more efficient system. Throughout his inspectorship he was hampered by departmental attempts to control these "Reds in eastern Ontario," but he was also probably assisted by his distance from Toronto and the preoccupation of departmental officials with the separate school difficulties in Ottawa. Putman's powerful personality, knowledge of the latest educational ideas from the United States, and excellent communication skills effectively convinced his Ottawa supporters that this progressive direction, both in municipal politics and in schooling, was necessary for the modern age. But neither Putman nor his progressive colleagues would have considered a change in the basic structure of the common school movement they had inherited from the Ryerson era. Progressive education was to occur within a public, provincially run system of schooling supported from a locally assessed tax base. Quality and efficiency were determined by provincial standards and supervisory personnel. Local variation could take place, in extreme instances to the extent that the Ottawa separate schools differed from their public counterparts, but this was a situation that had improved by the 19308. The norms of greater efficiency, higher professional standards, bigger and better school plants, extended programs or school services, and an expanded bureaucracy to administer the system were never questioned by these progressive educators. Progress meant expansion of the existing system. As a result of their rhetoric and substantial transformation of the traditional school in this more modern direction, education became increasingly equated in the public mind with schooling. Putman and his fellow progressives convinced a substantial proportion of the voting populace that the institution of the school was the best and, in most cases, the only place for children to gain an understanding of the social and economic life about them and to learn how to adapt to this life in their work and play. Using teleological notions from John Watson's speculative idealism, political techniques of rising middle-class professionals, and publicity strategies of the advertising industry, Putman and his colleagues painted an ideal picture of this new child-centred schooling in the minds of his viewers. He cleverly emphasized the evolution that would occur in the child's consciousness as he progressed from a materialistic to an altruistic level. Socially correct behaviour was rewarded with attendance prizes and citizen-

194 Epilogue ship awards. School products displaying activities that would enhance the future citizen's social role as homemaker, democratic participant, or efficient worker were widely publicized and lauded. Expert teachers were hired to encourage children to behave more harmoniously in this co-operative community of the school and, at the same time, to participate more actively in their own and the schools' general uplift. They were educated increasingly, in this new organic community, towards social conformity and the equation of learning with doing rather than with rational thinking. This was a perversion, of course, of Watson's original teleological schema. But it suited the utilitarianism implicit in his idealism and it also fitted Principal Grant's concept of the public led by the professional expert. Putman was acknowledged to be an expert in creating a more efficient school system that would help Canada achieve greater economic success in world markets. He and his progressive colleagues had little difficulty in convincing the public that technical schools, more specialized training in specific skills, and the use of intelligence and achievement tests for vocational guidance were necessary reforms at this stage of Canada's development. To fears that this increasingly specialized system might result in moral anomie (the example of Germany was cited after World War i), progressive educators replied that their general English foundations course, mixed with special programs suited to each child's individual differences, would create interested, actively learning students who would voluntarily wish to participate in the progressive transformation of their school and the development of a classless society. A more efficient system, psychologically tuned to the child's needs, would necessarily produce a moral citizenry. But the hidden effects of this more organic, public ethic were not fully recognized by these middle-class, Protestant school leaders. The school, rather than the family, now had the bureaucratic power and psychological techniques to determine from an early age the student's vocational direction. With more effective attendance legislation, the curtailment of unskilled jobs in the workplace, and the public conviction that secondary schooling was necessary, the social pressure on the child to conform to school and urban societal mores increased immensely during this period. Despite his avowed interest in the development of the individual, Putman, by his ready adoption of intelligence quotients and achievement tests, publication of examination results, displays of students' work, and aggressive fight for equal status of his School for Higher English with the Ottawa Collegiate Institute, betrayed his underlying intent to fit his students into the competitive capitalist world. For 95 per cent of them it was assumed that their role would be that of either a commercial employee or a manual labourer. Only the highly motivated, intelligent 5 per cent would proceed to the collegiate, university, and the professions. In his hard-driving campaign to establish a program he considered more

195 Epilogue suitable for these 95 percenters, Putman had to resort to crass political tactics, which also tended to demean the high moral tone of a wise leader advocated by Principal Grant. He effectively emasculated his critics on the Ottawa Public School Board by using his expertise, forceful personality, and backroom tactics to cast them as selfish ward-heelers. Their genuine criticisms of the School for Higher English and complaints about the lack of attention paid to the poorer sections of the city were deflected and later eliminated by means of the election-at-large system of voting, which Putman and the progressive municipal reformers promoted. Merit pay, bonuses, and a complicated salary system rewarded good teachers, and pensions kept them in tenure longer. But Putman's control of hiring practices, his court of appeal, and two-year interim appointments, as well as his high standards of supervision, made him truly a paternalistic Black Prince in the eyes of weaker, and especially older women, teachers whom he tried to pension off early. Parents who did not agree to have their child placed in a segregated auxiliary class were prevented from taking effective action against the inspector because he had gained departmental approval for his control of the placement of students in these classes. During his twenty-seven years with the Ottawa Public School Board Putman had improved the system in an efficient direction but at the cost of local participation in educational decision-making. Power was much more effectively placed in the hands of the inspector and his professional staff. The board and ratepayers had become convinced that they lacked the expertise to make critical comments about the nature of the education their children were receiving, and they believed that the expenditure of large sums of money for this greatly expanded school plant was necessary. Only the French-speaking, Roman Catholic separate school supporter realized the dangers to his rights and freedoms under this unifying Protestant ideology. Only the staunch collegiate supporter recognized the long-term danger to the quality of secondary schooling which the junior high school movement would unleash. Instead of education being an individual's journey in higher forms of self-realization, leading to a deeper understanding of Reality, Watson's ideal, it was to degenerate into an institutional social enterprise, schooling the majority of children for a conserving society.

Abbreviations

AO

CEA

HEQ OC OEA

OEJ OFF OPSB

PWS

QQ RCITTE

RG2

Archives of Ontario Canadian Education Association History of Education Quarterly Ottawa Citizen Ontario Educational Association Ottawa Evening Journal The Ottawa Free Press Ottawa Public School Board J.H. Putman and G.M. Weir, Survey of the School System (Victoria: Banfield 1925) Queen's Quarterly Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education Record Group 2, Education Department Records, Archives of Ontario

Notes

PREFACE I William Goetzmann, The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York: Knopf 1973), 15-16. CHAPTER ONE 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10

OEJ, 2 January 1906, 6. Ibid., ii. OEJ, 8 January 1906, 3. John Fear, "The Lumber Piles Must Go,' Ottawa's Lumber Interests and the Great Fire of 1900," Urban History Review 8, no.i (June 1979): 38-65; Sheila Lloyd, "The Ottawa Typhoid Epidemics of 1911 and 1912: A Case Study of Disease as a Catalyst of Urban Reform," ibid., 66-89; John H. Taylor, "Fire, Disease and Water in Ottawa: An Introduction," ibid., 7-37. Taylor, "Fire, Disease and Water in Ottawa," 37. In 1899 Putman bought one acre of property and built his home on Rideau Terrace, a street on a bluff overlooking the town of Eastview. In time he was to acquire increasing amounts of rental property in Rideau Ward (in 1939 he had thirty-two lots with a total assessed value of $148,000). At his death he was estimated to be one of Ottawa's largest landowners; see Ottawa City Archives, "Assessment Roll, City of Ottawa, 1939, Rideau Ward," 30, 65, IIO-H, 113, 116, 123, 124, 125. John Harold Putman, Britain and the Empire: A History for Public Schools (Toronto: Morang 1904), 431 pp. J.H. Putman, "Reorganization of Professional Schools," in OEA, Proceedings 1904, 282-94. R.H. Cowley, "The Macdonald School Gardens," QQ 12, no. 4 (April 1905): 390-4I9OEJ, 16 March 1906, 16.

198 Notes to Pages 7-16 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

OEJ, 2 October 1906, 3. Lloyd, "The Ottawa Typhoid Epidemics," 67. OEJ, 18 December 1906, 3. J.H. Putman, "Secondary Education," OEJ, 2 July 1907, 4. J.H. Putman, "Secondary Education n," OEJ, 3 July 1907, 5. J.H. Putman, "Secondary Education in," OEJ, 4 July 1907, 7. Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1964), 35°-i18 Putman, "Secondary Education ra." 19 Ibid. 20 Ottawa Morning Citizen, 9 July 1907, 4. 21 John Watson, "The University and the Schools," QQ 8, no. 3 (January 1901): 330. 22 J. Harold Putman, "Country Schools," in OEA, Proceedings 1895, 310. 23 Ibid., 313, 308. 24 Ibid., 312, 313, 314. 25 A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1979), 526 Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1973), 36-7. 27 J.H. Putman, Fifty Years at School: An Educationist Looks at Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1938), 12. 28 Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914-1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1971), 4. 29 J.H. Putman, "Churches and Camp Meetings," OC, 13 September 1939, 16. 30 "The Rev. E.A. Stafford, D.D., LL.D, In Memoriam," The Methodist Magazine 35 (January-June 1892): 136-8. 31 Rev E.A. Stafford, "The Guiding Hand; or, Some Phases in the Religious Life of the Day," quoted in ibid., 143, 139. 32 J.H. Putman, "Hero Worship," OC, 21 April 1939, 20. 33 J.H. Putman, "The Simple Life Has Vanished," OC, 20 January 1946, 14. 34 J.H. Putman, "A Threshing Bee n," OC, 10 May 1939, 18. 35 J.H. Putman, "A Threshing Bee," OC, 9 May 1939, 18. 36 Putman, "A Threshing Bee n." 37 Ibid. 38 J.H. Putman, "The Blacksmith Shop," OC, 23 November 1939, 20. 39 J.H. Putman, "Picking Fruit: Especially Huckleberries," OC, 3 May 1939, 20. 40 J.H. Putman, "Fishing in the River Jordan and Other Things," OC, 22 March 1939, 16. 41 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press 1964), 128, 70. 42 J.H. Putman, "Hoeing Corn," OC, 31 March 1939, 20. 43 Marx, Machine in the Garden, 138.

199 Notes to Pages 17-26 44 Raymond Jackson Wilson, In Quest of Community: Social Philosophy in the United States, 1860-1920 (New York: Wiley 1968), 130. 45 Ibid., 114. 46 PWS, 73, 77. 47 Ibid., 75, 7448 Ibid., 77-8. 49 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 93. 50 PWS, 82. 51 Wilson, In Quest of Community, 137-8. CHAPTER TWO 1 Hilda Neatby, Queen's University: To Strive, to Seek, to Find, and Not to Yield, vol. i, 1841-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1978), 228. 2 Even with his BA degree Putman's salary increased by only $50, from $1,100 in 1897 to $ i, 150 in 1899. When appointed headmaster of the Ottawa Model School in 1902, his salary advanced only to $1,500, hardly enough, in Putman's estimation, to support a family of five and live in the style expected of a headmaster. 3 In his zeal Putman decided that all his children should learn French as well. He got six French primers, lined the children up in the livingroom, and had them read under his instruction. His daughter noted that his pronunciation was vile and the experiment did not last long. Interview, Irene Putman, Ottawa, 6 March 1972. 4 Terry Cook, "George R. Parkin and the Concept of Britannic Idealism," Journal of Canadian Studies 10, no. 3 (August 1975): 23. 5 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), 32. 6 Robert M. Stamp, "Empire Day in the Schools of Ontario: The Training of Young Imperialists," Journal of Canadian Studies 8, no. 3 (August 1973): 34. 7 AO, RG2, letter H.H. Burgess to Jenkins, Owen Sound, 2 January 1905, 3-4. 8 Putman, Britain and the Empire (Toronto: Morang 1904), 4. 9 Ibid., 193. The page numbers of subsequent quotations from this work will be given in the text. 10 Cook, "George R. Parkin," 22. 11 Joseph Schull, Ontario since 1867 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1978), 130. 12 AO, RG2, D-9-A, boxes 7 and 8, letters Putman to John Millar, Ottawa, 23 February 1905; Millar to Putman, Toronto, 24 February 1905; Morang Co to A.H.U. Colquhoun, Toronto, 10 May 1906. 13 AO, RG2, p-2, box 84, agreement and memo, H.M. Wilkinson to minister of education, 22 February 1906. 14 AO, RG2, D-9-A, box 9, copy of order-in-council, 18 July 1910. 15 Interview, Irene Putman, Ottawa, 13 December 1972, and see OC, 7 July 1911,2. 16 Within two years of coming into office in 1905, the Conservative government

200 Notes to Pages 26-32

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

had closed forty rural model schools, had added four new normal schools to the existing three, and had granted both Toronto and Queen's universities secondary school teacher-training programs. The department abolished the county Boards of Examiners and took over responsibility for teacher certification. By 1909 all nonuniversity teacher training was controlled by the department and courses of study were meticulously detailed as to hours and marking schemes. J.H. Putman, Fifty Years at School: An Educationist Looks at Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1938), 35. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. John Watson, "The University and the State," Queen's University Journal 2 (26 November 1898): 25, 26. Ibid., 26-7. Ibid., 28. James Angrave, "William Dawson, George Grant and the Legacy of Scottish Higher Education," QQ 82, no. i (Spring 1975): 79. Adam Shortt, "Legislation and Morality," QQ 8, no. 3 (January 1901): 354. A.J.M. Milne, The Social Philosophy of English Idealism (London: Unwin 1962), 125. Shortt, "Legislation and Morality," 358. Neatby, Queen's University, 187. W.C. Grant and C.F. Hamilton, Principal Grant (Toronto: Morang 1904),

34329 Wilfrid Eggleston, "The Dream of 'Geordie' Grant," QQ 60, no. 4 (1954): 565-74. 30 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 241-2, 240. 31 J.H. Putman, "Hero Worship," OC, 21 April 1939, 20. 32 See Janet Ray Edwards, "Carlyle and the Fictions of Belief: Sartor Resartus to Past and Present," in John Clubbe, ed., Carlyle and His Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of Charles Richard Saunders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1976), 92-4. 33 Putman, "Hero Worship." 34 Ibid. 35 J.H. Putman, "Secondary Education for Girls," The School I, no. I (September 1912): 17. 36 A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1979), 172-82. 37 "The philosophical creed which commends itself to my mind is what in the text I have called Speculative Idealism, by which I mean the doctrine that we are capable of knowing Reality as it actually is, and that Reality when so known is absolutely rational." John Watson, An Outline of Philosophy with Notes Historical and Critical (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons 1898), vi. 38 John Watson, "The Outlook in Philosophy," QQ 7, no. 3 (January 1901): 249.

2Oi

Notes to Pages 32-41

39 Ibid., 250. 40 J.H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1922, 22. 41 J.H. Putman, "The Relative Value of Subjects," in OEA, Proceedings 1924, 218, 215-16, 217. 42 J.H. Putman, "The Teacher: An Essential Qualification for His Success," OC, 21 February 1913, 3. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 J.H. Putman, "The Relative Value of Subjects," 218-19. 48 Ibid., 219. 49 See J.H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1922, 21: "More and more children are being treated as rational beings with sacred rights, each child with an individuality that carries with it his potential and peculiar value to society." 50 J.H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1918, 19. 51 Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House 1968), 126. 52 Ibid., 142. 53 Ibid., 87. 54 "Industrial Output Swamps the Schools," OC, 13 February 1914, 7. 55 Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1970), 120. 56 John Watson, "The Outlook in Philosophy," 253. 57 John Watson, "Humanism," QQ 13, no. 2 (October, November, December 1905): no. 58 John Watson, "The Idealism of Edward Caird," Philosophical Review 19, no. 3 (1909): 261. 59 Watson, "Humanism," 118. 60 John Watson, "The University and the Schools," QQ 8, no. 3 (January 1901): 325. 61 Ibid., 335. 62 J.H. Putman, Egerton Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada (Toronto: Briggs 1912), in. The page numbers of subsequent quotations from this work will be given in the text. 63 See Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History (Toronto: Oxford 1976), 6-7. 64 Alison Prentice, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in MidNineteenth Century Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1977), 13-14. 65 J.D. Purdy, "John Strachan's Educational Policies, 1815-1841," Ontario History 64, no. i (March 1972): 64. 66 R.D. Gidney, "Centralization and Education: The Origins of an Ontario Tradition," Journal of Canadian Studies 7, no. 4 (November 1972): 46. 67 Neil McDonald and Alf Chaiton, eds., Egerton Ryerson and His Times (Toronto: Macmillan 1978), 4-5.

202 Notes to Pages 41-50 68 Alison Prentice, 'The Public Instructor," in ibid., 153. 69 R.D. Gidney et al., "The Development of an Administrative System for the Public Schools: The First Stage 1840-50," in ibid., 162. 70 Ibid., 178; and see Putman, Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada, 267-8. 71 H.R. Cummings, Dr. J.H. Putman, 1866-1940 (Ottawa: n.p. June 1969), 7. 72 J.H. Putman, "Country Schools," in OEA, Proceedings 1895, 310-12. 73 J.H. Putman, "Education of Practical Value," OC, 27 May 1911, 3. 74 J.H. Putman, "How to Provide Adequate Supply of Teachers for Rural Schools," in OEA, Proceedings 1912, 361, 369. CHAPTER THREE

1 AO, RG2, Albert H. Leake, "Report on Manual Training in the City of Ottawa, December 1910." 2 AO, RG2, OPSB, copy of report no. I from Charles Macnab, chairman OPSB, to board, Ottawa, 24 October 1910. 3 OPSB, Minutes 1911, 204. 4 David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1974), 127: "The people I shall call the 'administrative progressives' - wished nothing less than a fundamental change in the structure and process of decision-making. This social perspective tended to be cosmopolitan yet paternalistic, self-consciously 'modern' in its deference to the expert and its quest for rational efficiency yet at times evangelical in its rhetorical tone." 5 OPSB, Minutes 1911, 105-7. 6 Ibid., 109. 7 OC, 27 May 1911, 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 OPSB, Minutes 1911, 116. 11 OC, 27 May 1911, 3. 12 OFF, 26 May 1911, i. 13 OEJ, 9 December 1911, 22. 14 OPSB, Minutes 1911, 117 and 141-2, 168. 15 Paul Craven, "An Impartial Umpire": Industrial Relations and the Canadian State, 1900-1911 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980), 27-8. 16 OC, 30 August 1911, 10. 17 J.H. Putman, Fifty Years at School: An Educationist Looks at Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1938), 28-9. 18 Ibid., 95. 19 OC, 29 May 1911, 6. 20 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 41. 21 J.H. Putman, "Secondary Education m," OEJ, 4 July 1907, 7.

203 Notes to Pages 51-9 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

OPSB, Minutes 1911, 118-19. Ibid., 104. Col William White, letter to the editor, OC, 30 May 1911, 6. In a division of votes over the hiring of outside appointments at a school board meeting in July, Anderson and White moved an amendment that teachers in Ottawa and in the district should be obtained instead of persons near the border, "who might introduce sentiments into the school which would not be thoroughly Canadian." OC, 7 July 1911, 2. OC, 30 May 1911, 6. William White, "The New School," OC, 7 June 1911, 6. Craven, "An Impartial Umpire," 80-4. Putman, Fifty Years at School, 71, 77, 74. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 76, 73-4, 78-9, 78. Ibid., 76, 77. Ibid., 75, 76. Ibid., 79, 81-2. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada, 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1974), 107. "Kent Street School i," OC, 2 October 1925, 18. "Kent Street School n," OC, 3 October 1925, 22. OPSB, Minutes 1910, 179. Ibid., 192. OEJ, 6 September 1911, 14; 26 September 1911, 10. OC, 20 December 1912, 16. OPSB, Minutes 1912, 86. OC, 7 January 1916, 5. OEJ, 10 July 1913, 11; 18 November 1913, n. Ibid. OEJ, 5 December 1915, 9. OC, 14 August 1920, 9. OC, 4 December 1913, 4. OC, 17 November 1914, 6, and see, OFF, 8 December 1914, 4. OC, 12 May 1917, i; 16 May 1917, 12. OC, 17 May 1917, 12, and Ottawa Journal-Press, 15 May 1917, 4. AO, RG2, copy of letter deputy minister to Putman, Toronto, 12 June 1917. Putman, Inspector's Report 1921, 17. In the 1924 elections Shipman was accused of being the one man responsible for the "marble palace" on York Street. OC, 3 January 1924, 2. Ottawa Journal, 3 September 1920, 8. OC, 2 May 1919, 13, and see Ottawa Journal, 23 April 1919, 5, 2 May 1919, 2. OEJ, 29 August 1925, i and 4. "Kent Street School m," OC, 25 October 1925, 18.

204 Notes to Pages 59-66 59 OC, 3 September 1925, 4. 60 AO, RG3, Ferguson Papers, General Correspondence 1925, box 62, Education: Ottawa Public School Board, copy of (unsigned) letter to George Rice, Toronto, 21 October 1925. 61 Ottawa Morning Journal, 12 November 1925, 4. 62 R.W. Baker, OC, 18 September 1925, 16. 63 J.H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1923, 27. 64 Putman, Inspector's Report 1918, 22. 65 OC, 7 December 1926, i and 4. 66 OC, 12 April 1927, 18, and Ottawa Morning Journal, 20 June 1928, i and 4. 67 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 30 November 1929, 17. CHAPTER FOUR

1 J.H. Putman, Fifty Years at School: An Educationist Looks at Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1938), 49. 2 J. H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1913, 4. 3 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 165. 4 Ibid., 220. 5 John Watson, "Pragmatism and Idealism," QQ 21, no. 4 (April, May, June 1914): 4716 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 187. 7 OPSB, Minutes 1911, 64-5, and Minutes 1921, 200. 8 J.H. Putman, "Supplementary Reading for Elementary Schools," The School i, no. 2 (October 1912): 109-13. 9 OEJ, 13 May 1936, 4. 10 OC, 8 February 1919, 11, for the abolition of readers; Putman, Inspector's Report 1923, 30-3, for the introduction of classical literature. 11 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 12 January 1929, 28. 12 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 29 May 1935, 15. 13 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 189. 14 Putman, Inspector's Report 1915, 8, 9, 13, 13. 15 H.S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1968), 236. 16 Putman, Inspector's Report 1922, 20. 17 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 142. 18 Sol Cohen, "Sir Michael Sadler and the Sociopolitical Analysis of Education," HEQ 7, no. 3 (Fall 1967): 288. 19 John Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed," in Joseph Ratner, ed., Education Today (New York: Putnam's 1940), 6. 20 Thayer, Meaning and Action, 442-3. 21 Putman, Inspector's Report 1919, 8-9. 22 Putman, Inspector's Report 1920, 9.

205 Notes to Pages 67-72 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

OPSB, Inspector's Report 7920, 45-7. Interview, Miss Lois Stephenson, Morrisburg, Ont, 9 October 1973. OC, 10 June 1922, 4. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 2 June 1931, 23. Putman, Fifty Years at School, 53. OC, 3 June 1916, 13. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 28 March 1929, 13. See George Campbell Trowsdale, "A History of Public School Music in Ontario" (DED diss., University of Toronto, 1962), 477-8. Putman, Fifty Years at School, 85. Donald Heins, "Violin Classes in the Ottawa Public Schools," in OEA, Proceedings 1923, 445. Strathcona formation referred to military drills used by cadets, discussed in chapter 7. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 18 June 1931, 9. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 6 June 1931, 24. Editorial, OC, 4 November 1922, 22. Ottawa Morning Journal, 25 March 1922, 5. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 28 March 1932, 2. Putman, Fifty Years at School, 88. Heins, "Violin Classes," 445. Ottawa Morning Citizen, 16 April 1908, 9. R.H. Cowley, "The Macdonald School Gardens," QQ 12, no. 4 (April 1905): 390-419. J. W. Gibson, "The School Garden in Spring," The School i, no. 7 (March 1913): 466-71, and continuation in no. 8 (April 1913): 534-40. R.W. Hamilton, in OPSB, Minutes 1919, 252. Putman, Inspector's Report 1916, 8. J.H. Putman, "Gardening for City Schools," Agricultural Gazette 7, no. 3 (March 1920): 259, 260. Putman, Inspector's Report 1921, 45. AO, RG2, letter J.B. Dandeno, Toronto, 13 October 1920, i. AO, RG2, Slemon's article. OPSB, Inspector's Report 1915, 35. E.T. Slemon, Inspector's Report 1918, 31. See Donald C. Chipman, "Young Kilpatrick and the Progressive Idea," HEQ 17, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 408-12. See vols. i, no. 7: 499-501; 5, no. 2: 104-5; 7, no. 8: 547; 9, no. 6: 436-40; 9, no. 7: 469-70; 10, no. i: 17-23. See OEA, Addresses 1922, 150-3, 161-4, and 164-5. Ottawa Journal, 28 June 1921, 4. Ottawa Journal, 13 September 1921, 8. Ottawa Journal, 14 September 1922, 3. OPSB, Inspector's Report 1921, 30.

206 Notes to Pages 72-9 58 Slemon, in OPSB, Inspector's Report 7922, 29. 59 Ottawa Morning Journal, 22 June 1928,2; OttawaEvening Citizen, 27 June 1930, 4, and 29 June 1934, 24. 60 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 18 January 1929, 13. 61 Ottawa Morning Journal, 28 January 1929, 4. 62 Interview, Irene Putman, Ottawa, 27 February 1974. 63 Edwin John Pavey, "James Wilson Robertson: Public Servant and Educator" (MEDdiss., University of British Columbia, 1971), 171. 64 James Cappon, "Sir William Macdonald and Agricultural Education," QQ 12, no. 3 (January 1905): 317, 320, 319. 65 James W. Robertson, "Professor Cappon's Article," QQ 12, no. 4 (April 1905): 420-4. 66 Robert M. Stamp, "The Campaign for Technical Education in Ontario, 18761914" (PHD diss., University of Western Ontario, 1970); idem, "Technical Education, The National Policy, and Federal Provincial Relations in Canadian Education, 1899-1919," Canadian Historical Review 52, no. 4 (December 1971): 404-23; Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976). 67 Stamp, "Technical Education," Canadian Historical Review, 410-11. 68 Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society, 199. 69 Canada, RCITTE, Report of the Commissioners (Ottawa: Parmelee 1913), part i: i, 4, and 171-9. 70 Ibid., 2: 166-8. 71 Ibid., 1:5. The part and page numbers of subsequent quotations from this work will be given in the text. 72 Ibid., 2: 78. 73 Ibid., 139-40. 74 B. Edward McClellan, "Vocation, Schooling and Society: A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Thought," Educational Theory 27, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 232. 75 RCITTE, Report, i: 23. 76 Ibid., 2: 394. 77 Ibid., 98-9. 78 Ibid., 285, for farm youth; 176 and 364 for women. 79 Paul Craven, "An Impartial Umpire": Industrial Relations and the Canadian State, 1900-1911 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980), 32. 80 Putman, Inspector's Report 1912, 10. 81 AO, RG2, F-3-H, vol. 5, covering letter Albert H. Leake, 2 May 1913, 2. The report of Robertson's royal commission noted that the education of apprentices in the average printing office was no longer possible because specialization had afflicted the industry. The Typographical Union told the commission that it was spending more than fifteen thousand dollars a year in Canada and the United States to advance the interests of its special trade course in printing. See RCITTE,

207 Notes to Pages 79-91 Report, 4: 2050-3. At the annual convention of the Ontario Typographical Union on 23 May 1913 held in Ottawa, that city was cited as one of the principal places where child labour was being used in the printing industry, making it difficult to organize a local union. See OEJ, 23 May 1913, i. 82 OPSB, Minutes 1913, 112. 83 OEJ, 28 August 1913, i. 84 Putman, Inspector's Report 1914, 19-20. 85 R.W. Hamilton, in OPSB, Minutes 1919, 254. 86 Putman, Inspector's Report 1920, 9. 87 Putman, Inspector's Report 1923, 18. 88 C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1977), 44ff. 89 OFF, 31 December 1915, 7; and see ibid. , 10, for a full-page excerpt of Ottawa's proposed Municipal Representation Bill. 90 OFF, 16 December 1915, 4; 21 December 1915, 7; 23 December 1915, 6. 91 OC, 4 January 1916, i. 92 OC, 31 January 1916, 5. 93 Ibid. 94 Macpherson, Life and Times of Liberal Democracy , 64-9. 95 Ibid., 69-70. CHAPTER FIVE 1 David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1974), 126-7. 2 J.H. Putman, "American Schools and Other Things through Canadian Eyes, 'i. Boston,'" OC, 29 March 1913, 5. 3 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'xvi. Indianapolis,'" OC, 22 April 1913, 5. 4 Putman, "American Schools ... 'i. Boston.'" 5 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'x. Washington, D.C.,'" OC, 12 April 1913, 16. 6 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'n. Boston Secondary Schools,'" OC, 31 March 1913, 5. 7 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 4 xv. St. Louis, Missouri,'" OC, 21 April 1913,58 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... *v. Newton, Massachusetts,'" OC, 4 April 1913, 12. 9 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'vm. Horace Mann School, New York/" OC, 7 April 1913, 12. 10 J.H. Putman, "American Schools... 'vm. GirardCollege, Pennsylvania,'" OC, 9 April 1913, 12. 11 Paul Craven, "An Impartial Umpire": Industrial Relations and the Canadian State, 1900-1911 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980), 96-7.

208 Notes to Pages 91-7 12 13 14 15 16

OPSB, Minutes 1911, 84-6. Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 1911, 239-41. AO, RG2, Putman to deputy minister, Ottawa, 31 January 1914. AO, RG2, R. Ingram, OPSB chairman, printed copy of duties of school inspector. David Tyack, "Pilgrim's Progress: Toward a Social History of the School Superintendency, 1860-1960," HEQ 16, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 261-2. 17 Ibid., 262. 18 AO, RG2, R.H. Cowley, "Report on the Public Schools of Toronto," 1912, i. 19 Tyack, "Pilgrim Progress," 278. 20 E.T. Slemon, "The Programme of Studies and the Inspector," The School 2, no. 10 (June 1914): 636. 21 Ibid., 637; italics in original. 22 Putman, "American Schools ... 'n. Boston Secondary Schools.'" 23 J.H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1914, 24. 24 Putman, Inspector's Report 1919, 13. 25 Marvin Lazerson and W. Norton Grubb, eds., American Education and Vocationalism: A Documentary History, 1870-1970 (New York: Teachers College Press 1974), 16. 26 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... *in. Boston Industrial and Trade Schools,'" OC, 2 April 1913,527 Ibid. 28 Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971), 174. 29 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... *vi. New York City,'" OC, 5 April 1913,4. 30 Lazerson and Grubb, American Education and Vocationalism, 21. 31 Putman, "American Schools ... 'vi. New York City.'" 32 Lazerson and Grubb, American Education and Vocationalism, 25. 33 Putman, Inspector's Report 1913, 35-6. 34 William Wirt, "Progress in Education through School Administration," in Dominion Educational Association, Proceedings 1917, 78. 35 Putman, Inspector's Report 1917, 13. 36 Ibid., 16. 37 Dewey gave three addresses on functional psychology when he attended the 1917 meeting of the Dominion Educational Association with Wirt. The topics were entitled "Observing and Thinking," "Socializing the Schools," and "Information and Thinking." At the end of the session he was made an honorary member of the association. 38 Putman, Inspector's Report 1917, 21, 23. 39 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'xin. St. Paul and Minneapolis/" OC, 18 April 1913, 7: "Any boy over ten years who does not profit from the regular class instruction may be sent to this school, where he receives a minimum of book work with a great amount of handwork." 40 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'xi. Chicago, The Parental School,'" OC, 14 April 1913, 4.

209 Notes to Pages 98-107 41 Cyril Greenland, "Services for the Mentally Retarded in Ontario, 1870-1930," Ontario History 54 (December 1962): 270. 42 OEJ,i4 December 1912, 6, and see 26 February 1912, 6; 6 July 1912, 9; 5 December 1913, 15; OC, 4 October 1912, 4; 15 November 1912, 2; 23 November 1912, 5; 4 December 1913, 5; 5 December 1913, 2. 43 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'iv. Massachusetts School For FeebleMinded,'" OC, 3 April 1913, 5. 44 Ibid. 45 Barry M. Franklin, "Curriculum Thought and Social Meaning: Edward L. Thorndike and the Curriculum Field," Educational Theory 26, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 301-2. 46 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'ix. Vineland, New Jersey, Training School for Defective Children,'" OC, 11 April 1913, 14. 47 Ibid. 48 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'xvn. Cleveland, Ohio,'" OC, 26 April 1913, 1749 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'XL Chicago, The Parental School,'" OC, 14 April 1913, 4. 50 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'XL Chicago,'" OC, 15 April 1913, 5. 51 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'xvi. Indianapolis.'" 52 J.H. Putman, "American Schools ... 'xi. Chicago,'" OC, 14 April 1913, 4. 53 Franklin, "Curriculum Thought and Social Meaning," 304. 54 Barbara E. Corbett, "The Public School Kindergarten in Ontario, 1883 to 1967: A Study of the Froebelian Origins, History and Educational Practice of the Kindergartens in Ontario" (PHD diss., University of Toronto, 1968), 26. 55 Putman, Inspector's Report 1911, 12. 56 J.H. Putman, Fifty Years at School: An Educationist Looks at Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1938), 68. 57 Marvin Lazerson, "Urban Reform and the Schools: Kindergartens in Massachusetts, 1870-1915," HEQ n, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 131. 58 Ontario, Department of Education, Minister' s Report 1913, 330. 59 S.A. Morgan, The Monies sori Method (Toronto: Cameron 1913), 19. 60 Ibid., 39-40. 61 Dom Cavallo, "From Perfection to Habits: Moral Training in the American Kindergarten, 1860-1920," HEQ 16, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 155-6. 62 Ibid., 159. CHAPTER SIX 1 Michael Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire: The Life and Business Times of Sir Joseph Flavelle, Bart., 1859-1939 (Toronto: Macmillan 1978), 119-20 and 303. 2 J.H. Putman, "Waste in Education," in OEA, Proceedings 1916, 42. 3 W.L. Richardson, Administration of Schools in the Cities of the Dominion of

210 Notes to Pages 108-31

4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Canada (Toronto: Dent 1921), 146-7. The page numbers of subsequent quotations from this work will be given in the text. See also ibid., 138-9 and 286. Ibid., table 16, 298. Ibid., table 17, 137-8. C.E. Mark, The Public Schools of Ottawa: A Survey (Ottawa: Pattison Printers 1918), 61. The page numbers of subsequent quotations from this work will be given in the text. J.H. Putman, "Shortening the Elementary School Course," QQ 27, no. 4 (April, May, June 1920): 398. Ibid., 404. AO, RG2, p-3, box u, J.H. Putman to deputy minister, Ottawa, 14 May 1914. Peter Sandiford, "Exceptional School Children," The School 4, no. 10 (June 1916): 835-9. Sheila Lloyd, "The Ottawa Typhoid Epidemics of 1911 and 1912: A Case Study of Disease as a Catalyst for Urban Reform," Urban History Review 8, no. I (June 1979): 66-89. OC,2 May 1913, 2, and OFF, 22 October 1914, i. Mark, Public Schools of Ottawa, 44. AO, RG3, Cody Papers, letter Putman to A.H.U. Colquhoun, Ottawa, 29 January 1918,4 pp. Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 79/5, 17. OPSB, Minutes 1919, 247-52. Ibid., 252. Mark, Public Schools of Ottawa, 76.

CHAPTER SEVEN 1 J.H. Putman, Fifty Years at School: An Educationist Looks at Life (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1938), in, 112. 2 Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the TwentiethCentury Consensus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 191. 3 Canada, Department of National Defence, DHIST, 506.009 (Di4), "Strathcona Trust," i. 4 J.H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1911, 24. 5 Putman, Inspector's Report 1912, 22. 6 Desmond Morton, "The Cadet Movement in the Moment of Canadian Militarism, 1909-1914," Journal of Canadian Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 65; and see OFP, 18 March 1913, 4. 7 Putman, Inspector's Report 1912, 24. 8 OC, 27 July 1912, 10. 9 Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 1914, 595. 10 OC, 4 June 1914, 5.

2ii

Notes to Pages 131-5

11 Morton, "The Cadet Movement," 65. 12 Ethel M. Cartwright, "Physical Education and the Strathcona Trust," The School 4, no. 4 (December 1915): 307. 13 I.E. Collins, Inspector's Report 1916, 29. 14 Collins, Inspector's Report 1917, 35-6. 15 Florence Jamieson, Inspector's Report 1921, 40. 16 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 111, 112. 17 OFF, 16 November 1915, 9. 18 Putman, Fifty Years at School 114. 19 OPSB, Inspector9s Report 1921, 41. 20 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 115. 21 OPSB, Annual Report 1922, 50. 22 OC, 7 January 1920, 5. 23 OPSB, Minutes 1914, 119 and 178. 24 OC, 22 February 1915, 5; 26 August 1918, 8; 28 January 1919, 8; 16 August 1922, 8. 25 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 10 February 1928, 22. 26 Morton, "The Cadet Movement," 64. 27 Don Morrow, "The Strathcona Trust in Ontario, 1919-1939," Canadian Journal of History of Sport and Physical Education 8 (May 1977): 80. 28 Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society, 193. 29 Putman, Fifty Years at School, 116. 30 Joel H. Spring, "Mass Culture and School Sports," HEQ 14, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 488. 31 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1970), 257. 32 OEJ, 30 September 1910, 10. 33 OFF, 24 September 1912, 9. 34 See also Chris Warfe, "The Search for Pure Water in Ottawa, 1910-1915," Urban History Review I (June 1979): 90-112. 35 OEJ, 27 September 1912, 14; and see OC, 28 September 1912, 6. 36 OC, 7 July 1913, 2; 8 July 1913, 7. 37 Frank Perney, letter to the editor, OC, 9 July 1913, 12. 38 OC, 10 October 1913, 2. 39 OPSB, Minutes 1911, 206; Minutes 1913, 23, 51, 211; Minutes 1914, 48, 79, 9940 W.E. MacPherson, Visual Aids in the Teaching of History (Toronto: Cameron 1913), 23 pp. 41 OC, 19 September 1914, 14; and see 6 October 1914, 12; 4 December 1914, 14. 42 OC, 4 December 1914, 14. 43 OFF, 5 October 1914, 4. 44 Robert M. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1876-1976 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982), 92-3.

212 Notes to Pages 136-41 45 AO, RG2, P-3, copy of letter J.E. Wetherell to six reviewers, Toronto, 19 September 1917. 46 Ibid., J.H. Putman, Ottawa, "Report on the Present Authorized Textbooks in British and Canadian History," i. 47 Ibid., Putman, "Dent's History," 4. 48 Ibid., Putman, "Report on Nelson's History," 2. 49 Ibid., 3. 50 Putman, "Dent's History," 3. 51 J.H. Putman, City Government Ottawa (Ottawa: James Hope 1919), 3, 5. 52 Ottawa Journal, 17 November 1923, 5; and OC, 17 November 1923, 5. 53 Putman, City Government Ottawa, 58-60. 54 Ibid., 43, 46. 55 Berger, The Sense of Power, 158. 56 Putman as quoted in OC, n May 1922, 16. 57 OC, 12 February 1915, 12; and see 13 February 1915, 7 and 13. 58 OFF, 5 November 1914, 4. 59 After fifty lessons the students were judged to be able to read, write, and spell English as well as carry out simple arithmetic tasks. 60 OEJ, 9 November 1911, 10; and 10 November 1911, 6. Putman objected to this sentence in the Journal: "It is the object to educate the unfortunate people who have not had and are not having the opportunity of gaining an education." Putman retorted, "The above is a very unfortunate sentence ... The Committee of the Public School Board ... have no intention of catering to the needs of any particular class of people. The lectures, while of a popular and educational nature, will, I am sure, appeal to all classes but especially to those who have literary, scientific, and historical interests." See J.H. Putman, letter to the editor in OEJ, 15 November I9II.5. 61 OC, 2 March 1914, 14. 62 OC, 30 October 1916, 14; and see Putman, Inspector's Report 1912, 15-18: call for the school to become the rallying point of the community - quoted in Robertson's royal commission report. This was revived by urban progressives and by Trades and Labour Council leaders in 1916. See OC, 21 June 1916, 12; 27 September 1916, 12; 23 September 1916, 16; 10 October 1916, 2; 25 October 1916, 12. 63 OC, 3 November 1916, 11. 64 OC, 18 December 1916, 3. 65 OPSB, Minutes 1922, 88-90. 66 OC, 5 October 1912, 4. 67 OC, 28 January 1916, 14. 68 Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914-1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1971), 63. 69 CEA, Proceedings 1918, 9. 70 J.H. Putman, "Rural School Administration - What Improvements Are Necessary," in CEA, Proceedings 1918, 32-40.

213 Notes to Pages 141-5 71 OEJ, 18 September 1937, 4; and see OPSB, Minutes 79/9, 167. 72 Ottawa Morning Journal, 7 October 1919, I and 2. No further documentary evidence of Putman's activities in the conciliation board can be found. 73 OC, 22 January 1919, 7; and see J.M. Bliss, "The Methodist Church and World War I," Canadian Historical Review 49, no. 3 (September 1968): 231-2. 74 Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 1918, 5. 75 Ibid., 5-6. 76 Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 105. 77 OC, 7 February 1919, I. 78 OC, I April 1921, 17; and see her equally Deweyan "Educational Creed" outlined in an editorial in OC, i December 1924, 18. 79 OC, 12 November 1923, 2; and see editorial in OC, 9 November 1923, 16, and Ottawa Journal, 30 January 1923, 6. 80 Paul Rutherford, "Tomorrow's Metropolis: The Urban Reform Movement in Canada, 1880-1920," Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers 1971, 217. 81 OC, May 1922, 18. 82 OC, 8 December 1920, 3. 83 OC, 16 March 1922, i. 84 OC, 25 September 1925, 16. 85 OC, 24 March 1922, 2. 86 For the National War Savings Committee, see Public Archives of Canada, RG2, i, vol. 960, 2 December 1918, PC 2974, copy of Committee of the Privy Council recommendation; and ibid., vol. 955, 25 September 1918, PC 2355, copy of the order-in-council. 87 Alf Chaiton, "The History of the National Council of Education of Canada" (MA thesis, University of Toronto, 1974), Appendix H. 88 OC, 24 January 1919, 7. 89 OC, 3 February 1919, 3. 90 Putman, Annual Report 1919, 16-19. 91 Ibid., 18. 92 Ibid., 19. 93 OPSB, Minutes 1908, 136; and see their reports in OEJ, 13 February 1909, 16; 2 April 1909, 12; and in OC, 16 February 1909, 7. 94 AO, RG2, p-3, letter Fred J. Ney and accompanying brochure to John Seath, Winnipeg, 27 November 1911. 95 Ibid., "Hands across the Seas," two letters Ney to Albeit Leake, London, 20 July and 10 August 1914. 96 Ibid., copy of letter deputy minister to Ney, Toronto, 4 December 1920. 97 Ibid., a copy League of Empire and Canadian Teachers and Dates of Sailing: no. 9, Miss Mina Burns, no. 10, Edith A. McLean, no. II, Gertrude Mclntyre, no. 12, Bertha Watts, all from Ottawa; and see OC, 12 August 1921, 3, for an account of their trip. 98 Ottawa Journal, 24 February 1920, 7.

214 Notes to Pages 146-51 99 OC, 22 July 1925, 12; 3 August 1925, 12; and 4 August 1925, i and 2; Putman, C.F. Hamilton of the Collegiate Board, and Helen MacMurchy arranged for their reception. 100 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 7 October 1935, 24. 101 OC, 27 May 1930. 102 Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 1935, 10. 103 Chaiton, "The History of the National Council of Education," 42. 104 OC, 17 February 1923, 13. 105 OC, 19 February 1923, 16. 106 OC, 28 February 1923, 3. The next year the Ottawa Public School Board purchased one hundred copies of Newbolt's Heroes of Land and Sea. See OPSB, Minutes 1924, 20-4. 107 OC, 2 April 1923, 14; 5 April 1923, i; 7 April 1923, I. 108 OC, 13 April 1923, 18. 109 OC, 18 March 1926, 16; 13 February 1926, 20. 110 OC, 7 April 1926, i. 111 OC, 19 December 1933, 18. H2 Chaiton, "The History of the National Council of Education," 111-14. CHAPTER EIGHT 1 Public Archives of British Columbia, copy of resolution submitted from the report of the Union of BC Municipalities, in memo to superintendent of education from the minister of education, 26 November 1923, Minister's Office and Provincial Secretary's Department, "Letter Book, Correspondence Outbound," ser. 6-3, vol. 10, October i - March 31, 1923-4, item 1623. 2 Daily Province, Vancouver, 5 June 1924, i. 3 See Weir's address to the Victoria Women's Canadian Club in which he remarked on the sociological trend which stressed the need for education to train the child for life and for special attention to be paid the adolescent. Daily Colonist, Victoria, 21 May 1924, 6. 4 George M. Weir, The Separate School Question in Canada (Toronto: Gage 1919). 5 Educational costs had escalated from $532,692 in 1900-1 to $2,641,522 in 1910-11 and to $i i, 149.996 in 1928-9. See Timothy A. Dunn "The Rise of Mass Public Schooling in British Columbia, 1900-1929," in J. Donald Wilson et al., eds., Schooling and Society in Twentieth Century British Columbia (Calgary: Detselig 1980), 38. 6 PWS, 2-3. 7 Norman Fergus Black, "School Surveys, 'i. Their Origin and Meaning,'" The BC Teacher 3, no. 5 (January 1924): 106. 8 Norman Fergus Black, "School Surveys, 'in. Answers to Questions,'" The BC Teacher 3, no. 8 (April 1924): 172. 9 Black, "School Surveys, i," 105.

215

Notes to Pages 151-8

10 Public Archives of British Columbia, copy of letter (no signature) to Charles Woodward, Vancouver, 16 June 1924, in Premier's Correspondence 1924, box 239, file 21, item 58; and see BC Teachers' Federation, Minutes January 1924 December 1926, 201. 11 BC School Trustees' Association, Annual Report 1923 -4, 50-1. 12 Ibid., 53. 13 Vancouver Sun, 8 July 1924, i. 14 Victoria Times, 16 July 1924, I. 15 Ibid. 16 Daily Province, 22 July 1924, 6. 17 In 1922 Walter Lippman's highly influential book Public Opinion was first published. 18 Daily Province, 23 October 1925, 27. 19 PWS, 34. 20 PWS, 57; the page numbers of subsequent quotations from this work will be given in the text. See also lead editorial in the Colonist, 10 July 1924, 4: "We have heard, and it is a matter for consideration, that a doctrine of Socialism is insinuated, if not actually taught, in one of the principal High Schools of the Interior ... It is true that a considerable percentage of those pupils are foreigners, but the attempt is being made to weld them into the Canadian citizenship, and it does not seem a good thing, even in jest, to spread Socialist doctrines either by innuendo or in any other way ... This is a serious matter. The schools should not, in any sense, be the hotbeds of political propaganda as they are in Russia ... In State education it is obvious that there should be State standards of interpretation and routine and the teachers should be bound by certain restrictions affecting the inculcation of any precocity of political or religious viewpoints they may entertain." 21 Vancouver Sun, 21 April 1925, 2; and see Patricia E. Roy, "British Columbia's Fear of Asians, 1900-1950," HistoireSociale I Social History 13, no. 25 (Mai-May 1981): 162, n. 12: "From 1911 through 1941, British Columbia had the greatest percentage of British-born in her population of any province and the lowest percentage of Canadian-born." In 1921, 50.3 per cent were born in Canada, 30.6 per cent in the British Isles and possessions, and 73.9 per cent were of British racial origin. 22 PWS, 30. 23 Daily Colonist, 6 August 1924, 15 and 6 May 1925, i. 24 PWS, 270. 25 Ibid., 298. 26 Ibid., 278. 27 Daily Colonist, 7 July 1925, 4. 28 PWS, 296. 29 Ibid., 297. 30 See Theodore J. Lowi, "Distribution, Regulation, Redistribution: The Functions of Government," in Randall B. Ripley, ed., Public Policies and Their Politics: An

216 Notes to Pages 158-67 Introduction to the Techniques of Government Control (New York: Norton 1966), 27-40. 31 Daily Colonist, 7 November 1925, 3. 32 Public Archives of British Columbia, copy of letter and recommendations from Norman MacLean to A.L. Me Williams, chairman, Board of School Trustees, Vancouver, 19 February 1926, i, in Premier's Correspondence 1926, box 255, file 17, item 13. 33 Ibid., 4. 34 City of Vancouver Archives, Ro8, ser. A-2, vol. n, Vancouver School Board, "Minutes 1925," 1786-4. 35 Ibid., 1785. 36 In April 1926, for instance, Nicholson denied that Major H.B. King and Weir were seeking the position of director of education for Vancouver and that he was supporting them. See ibid., "Minutes 1926," 2066. 37 Ibid., "Minutes 1925," 1784. 38 Ibid., vol. 12, Vancouver School Board, "Minutes 1926," 2022-20. 39 Ibid., 2010. 40 See Jean Mann, "G.M. Weir and H.B. King: Progressive Education or Education for the Progressive State?" in Wilson, Schooling and Society, 96-7. 41 Ibid., 98. 42 In 1922 Sandiford addressed the Ottawa Teachers' Institute on the subject of intelligence tests and their value. See OC, i March 1922,3. In October of that year the BC Teachers' Federation recommended that he serve on its proposed survey commission, help in the proper grading of pupils, and supply tests to school boards. See BC Teachers' Federation, Proceedings 1922-3, 16. 43 Professor P. Sandiford, "Examinations or Intelligence Tests," The School 7, no. 10 (June 1919): 643-4. 44 PWS, 355. 45 Ibid., 356. 46 Robert L. Church, "Educational Psychology and Social Reform in the Progressive Era," HEQ n, no. 4 (Winter 1971): 400. 47 PWS, 506. 48 See Mary Ash worth, The Forces which Shaped Them (Vancouver: New Star Books 1979), 74-100. 49 23,532 Chinese and 15,000 Japanese. See Patricia Roy, Introduction to The Writing on the Wall: Chinese and Japanese Immigration to B.C., 1920, by Hilda Glynn-Ward (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974), ix. 50 PWS, 448. 51 Ibid., 228. 52 Cited in the Journal of Educational Psychology, December 1924. 53 The BC test in fundamentals of arithmetic Sandiford considered so much superior to the Woody-McCall test that he urged the department to standardize it for continued use in the schools. PWS, 499.

217 Notes to Pages 167-74 54 Mann, "G.M. Weir and H.B. King," 98. 55 Ibid., 100. 56 The two major recommendations of this King Report were that a 2 per cent income tax should be imposed and large administrative units set up to replace school boards - a recommendation that Putman strongly condemned. 57 Barry M. Franklin, "Curriculum Thought and Social Meaning: Edward L. Thorndike and the Curriculum Field," Educational Theory 26, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 309. CHAPTER NINE 1 Robert M. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 1876-1976 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982), 70. 2 "Dr. J.H. Putman Honoured," The Canadian School Board Journal 14, no. I (January 1936): 13. 3 Ottawa Evening Citizen, 29 October 1938, n. 4 J.H. Putman, "'vm. An Intermediate School': Talks on Education," Toronto Globe, 8 May 1936, 4. 5 AO, RG2, p-3, 1933, J.H. Putman to George F. Rogers, Ottawa, 14 September 1932. 6 J.H. Putman, Inspector's Report 1923, 26-9. 7 Putman, Inspector's Report 7925, 12. 8 Putman, Inspector's Report 1927, 4-9. 9 V.K. Greer, in Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 1927, 4, 5. 10 Ottawa Morning Journal, 29 December 1927, 17. 11 AO, MSS, Henry Papers, 1932, box 27, May, item 6, Harold Shipman to Morgan O'Brien, Ottawa, 9 March 1933. 12 Ibid., Judge J.F. Scott to Premier Henry, 20 December 1932. 13 AO, RG3, Ferguson Papers, General Correspondence, 1925, box 61, Education: Bilingual Situation, memorandum A.H.U. Colquhoun to Ferguson. 14 Ottawa Morning Journal, 8 October 1926, 17. 15 S.B. Sinclair, in Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 1928, 37. 16 AO, MSS, Henry Papers, 1932, box 26, March 1-3, H.E. Amos to Greer. 17 OC, 8 July 1926, 9. 18 J.H. Putman, 'The Education of Dull or Backward Pupils Who Lack Literary Ability," in CEA, Proceedings 1927, 121, 122, 123. 19 Peter Sandiford, "Junior High Schools and Junior Colleges or the Reorganization of Secondary Education," QQ 34, no. 4 (April, May, June 1927): 367-83. 20 OPSB, Minutes 1928, 15. 21 McGregor Easson, "The Intermediate Schools in Ottawa" (PH D diss., University of Toronto, 1934), 19. 22 J.H. Putman, "The Intermediate School," pamphlet issued to parents June 1929, in Inspector's Report 1929, 17-22.

2i8 Notes to Pages 174-9 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Ottawa Morning Jurnal, 15 February 1930, i and 3. Putman, "The Education of Dull or Backward Pupils," 127. OPSB, Minutes 1930, 230-1. Putman, Inspector s Report 1930, 15-47; excerpts from PWS, 71-95. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 83-4. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 93. AO, RG2, p-3, J.H. Putman, "Our Urban School Organization - Can It Be Improved?" Urban Trustees' Association, Windsor, March 9-12, 1931. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 7 February 1931, 7. J.G. Althouse, "What's All This about Education?" Ottawa Evening Citizen, 9 February 1939, 16. Robert Skidelski, English Progressive Schools (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1969), 150; and see 118: Badley, whom Putman cited in his BC Survey as an English progressive educator making valuable experiments with new types of school work in England (PWS, 81), was described by Skidelski as being "Liberal in Politics, Puritan in morals, Evangelical in religion." OC, 8 November 1930, 30. AO, MSS, Henry Papers, 1932, box 26, April, item 4, memorandum for Hon G.S. Henry on a proposed regrading of the provincial schools by F.W. Merchant, 5 April 1932, i; and see Ontario, Department of Education, Minister's Report 1930, u, which states that Ferguson's intermediate schools were copies of the English system which was to be given a trial in Ontario. In 1928 Putman spent five months studying English secondary schools and visiting the Continent with his family; see J.H. Putman, "A Peep at Schools in England," in OEA, Proceedings 1931, 102-6. Compare Merchant's memorandum to Henry, 3-5, cited in n.38, with London Board of Education, The Education of the Adolescent: Report of the Consultative Committee (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1927), 70-7, 89-92. AO, RG2, p-3, Putman to Colquhoun, Ottawa, 8 September 1932, and Putman to Rogers 14, 16, and 21 September and 27 November 1932. Ibid., Rutherford's memo to Rogers, 11 January 1933. Ibid., Rogers to Putman, II January 1932, 2. Putman, letter to the editor, OEJ, i March 1932,6. This was ironic considering his own use of achievement tests in British Columbia. AO, RG2, p-3, Putman to Rogers, 25 February 1932, 2. Ibid., Rogers to Putman, 3 March 1932, 3. Ibid., Putman to Rogers, 24 March 1932. Ibid., Putman to Rogers, 25 February 1932, 3. Putman, Inspector's Report 1933, 19. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 26 February 1935, 15.

219 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79

Notes to Pages 179-85

Ottawa Evening Citizen, 7 March 1935, 13. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 23 March 1935, 28. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 30 March 1935, 18. Putman, Inspector's Report 1935, 22. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 16 March 1935, 22. Florence Dunlop, "Measurement in Education Guidance," OC, 30 January 1939, 13OC, 8 May 1929, 2. PWS, 74. Putman, Inspector's Report 1935, 22. AO , RG2, p-3, copy of the minutes of the sixth meeting of the Committee of Enquiry into the Cost of Education held in Ottawa, 8-9 July 1935, 1-2. J.H. Putman, '"vin. An Intermediate School': Talks on Education," Toronto Globe, 8 May 1936, 4. AO, RG2, p-3, Putman to Me Arthur, I March 1937. Ibid., 2, 3. Ibid., 1937, George F. Rogers and V.K. Greer, "Report to the Minister of Education," 3. Ibid., "A Suggestion as to Equalization of School Costs as between Elementary and Secondary Schools in Ottawa," i, 4. Ibid., "Alternative Plan," 3. Ibid., "Report of Committee Appointed to Confer with Elementary School Boards re Rogers-Greer Report," i. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 10 August 1937, 5. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 16 June 1937, 22. AO, RG2, p-3, 1937, memorandum from Rogers to the minister, 25 November 1937, 3Ottawa Evening Citizen, 8 November 1937, 3. Maxwell A. Cameron, "The Financing of Education in Ontario" (PHD diss., University of Toronto, 1935), 200. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 12 January 1937, i. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 25 March 1937, I. AO, RG3, Hepburn Papers, General Correspondence, Private, 1938, confidential memorandum Duncan Me Arthur to the minister of education, Toronto, 21 February 1938, 2 and 4. Ibid., 1939, Ernest C. Desormeaux to Hepburn, Ottawa, 28 December 1939. OEJ, 8 November 1939, 12. J.H. Putman, "How to Provide Adequate Supply of Teachers for Rural Schools," in OEA, Proceedings 1912, 361-71. J.H. Putman, "Rural School Administration - What Improvements are Necessary?" in CEA, Proceedings 1918, 36. "Should County Inspectors Be Appointed by the Department of Education?" in OEA, Proceedings 1918, 96-7.

220 Notes to Pages 185-91 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107

OC, 26 November 1918, 12; 28 November, 12; 7 December, 18; 9 December, 14. J.H. Putman, OC, 11 December 1918, 12. Margaret Gordon, letter in OC, 16 January 1919, 14. PWS, 300, 302. J.H. Putman, excerpt from "The British Whig," Kingston, in The Canadian School Board Journal 5, no. 5 (April 1926): 14-15, and "The Larger Unit of Administration," in ibid. 7, no. i (December 1927): 8, 10, 12. J.H. Putman, "School Administration and School Finance in Ontario, Can They Be Improved?" in OEA, Proceedings 1932, 7-26. AO, J.H. Putman, "Selection of Teachers," in OEA, "Proceedings 1933," 3. AO, RG2, P-3, 1918, John Seath, memorandum for the minister, n.d. Ottawa Morning Journal, 5 January 1927, i. AO, RG2, P-3, J.H. Putman to Duncan McArthur, Ottawa, 16 November 1934, i, 5,6. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 10 July 1935, 5. J.H. Putman, " 'm. The Primary School': Talks on Education," Toronto Globe, 27 April 1936, 4. J.H. Putman, "'Rural Schools and Country Life Versus City Life': Talks on Education," Toronto Globe, 15 May 1936. Ibid. J.H. Putman, Schoolmasters Abroad: A 1937 Diary (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin 1937), 98 pp. Ottawa Evening Citizen, 23 January 1939, 4. AO, RG3, Hepburn Papers, 1937, General Correspondence, Private, Putman to Hepburn, Ottawa, 8 and 15 September 1937. Ottawa Journal, 15 September 1937, 18. OEJ, 23 August 1937, 3. OEJ, 18 September 1937, 5. OC, 20 September 1937, 22; D.M. Gray, in a letter to the editor in the same issue, considered the depiction of Putman's unselfishness as "not entirely opportune"; he was five years beyond retirement and under the regulations of the board should have retired after forty years of service. OC, 25 September 1937, i. Ottawa Journal, 29 September 1937, 18. Ottawa Journal, 30 September 1937, 5. Ottawa Journal, i October 1937, 2. Ottawa Journal, 5 October 1937, 5. Neil McKenty, Mitch Hepburn (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1967), 137. J.H. Putman, Appendix m, "Organization of District Boards," in W. A. Hepburn, Report of the Quebec Protestant Education Survey (Quebec: Protestant Committee Province of Quebec 1938), 340-55.

Index

Acres, A.H., 189 Act respecting Special Classes of 1911, 98 Activity methods, 12, 64, 72, 102, 176. See also Experiential learning; Naturalism; Play Adams, Thomas, 56 Administration of Schools in the Cities of the Dominion of Canada , 1 07- 1 5 , Il8, I2I-2

Administrative progressive, 46, 52-3, 88, 202n4 Adolescence, stage of, 17-18, 50, 97, 177 Adolescent School Attendance Act of 1919, 66, 93, 169, 173 Adolescents: access of, to schooling, 8, 177; problems of urban, 11-12, 45, 175; curriculum for, 47-8, 178; needs of, 57, 100, 130, 145, 177, 179, 2i4n3; and school attendance, 66, 76, 87-8, 93, 106, no, 169, 173; in u.s. schools, 95; programs for, in OPSB, 123, 174, 192; inBC schools, 154-5. See also Junior high school Adult education: in library, 8; Queen's extramural lectures, 28; in School for Higher

English, 48; recommended by volunteer organizations, 87; Putman's promotion of, 128, 137; in Ottawa public schools, 139-40; by Ottawa Teachers' Association, 140; university extension lectures, 140, 144; Workers' Educational Association, 143-4; National Council of Education, 146-7 Advance Committee, 134 Agriculture, scientific, x, 70~3> 99> I O I > l%4-5- See also Gardening; MacdonaldRobertson movement Allen, Richard, 13, 141 Althouse, J.G., 176 American Conservation Conference, 56 American Eugenics Record Office, 99 American Playground and Recreation Association, 133 Amos, H.E., 173 Anderson, W.P., 49-52, 55, 203n25 Angus, H.F., 151 Arithmetic: classes in commercial, 8; at Ottawa Model School, 26; and child's developmental needs, 35; classes in Ottawa public schools, 47, 116, 123-4, 174; Putman advocates, 49; "Big

Brush" method of teaching, 63; Dewey on, 65; and community projects, 71; and general education, 75; in u.s. schools, 90, 94; recommended for primary, 104; in BC schools, 1 66 Army Alpha Test of the United States, 163 Art: at Ottawa Model School, 26; importance of, 31, 35, 49, 54, 174; in Ottawa public schools, 47, 51-5; supervision of, 54, 1 08; picture study, 54, 121; in u.s. schools, 90; in rural schools,

185

Asiatic Exclusion League,

164 Assisted schools, 155-6,

185

Association canadienne franc,aise d' education d' Ontario, 120, 146 Attendance: in rural schools, 42-3, 184; in Ottawa public schools, 73, no, 125, 181; in u.s. schools, 88, I oo ; in kindergartens, 102; compulsory for auxiliary classes, in; and medical clinics, 113; in BC schools, 157; legislation on, 194. See also Adolescent School Attendance Act of 1919

222 Auxiliary classes, 61, 81, 91, 98, 107, in-12, 159, 173, 184, 195 Auxiliary Classes Act of 1914, 98 Ayer, F.C., 151 Ayres, Leonard, 62, 107 Bachman, Frank, 96 Bailey, Liberty Hyde, x Bain, Alexander, 73 Barnes, Earl, 139 Basketry, 61 Beattie, W.C., 122 Beckett, S.E., 151 "Behaviour Problems," 72 Belcourt, Napoleon A., 120, 146 Berger, Carl, 20, 133, 138 Binet-Simon classification, in, 173. See also Intelligence testing; Psychology Biological concepts, influence of, on education, 36, 62, 64, 75, 101, 139 Black, Norman, 151 Boards of control, xi, 6-7, 82 Boards of Trade, 74, 82, 87 Bobbitt, Franklin, 106, 124 Boer War, 20-1, 25 Bolton, Eliza, 103 Bookkeeping, 47, 6 1 Borden, Frederick, 129 Borden School, 112 Boston schools, 88-9, 93-6, 100

Botany, 11, 71 Britain and the Empire, 5, 21-5, 128, 133 British Columbia Teachers' Federation, 148, 2i6n42 British imperialism. See Imperialism British Labour party, 141-2,

147 Brown, Craig, 56 Bureau of Measurement, 158, 1 60 Bureaucracy in school administration: conflicts with individual development, xi, 126; as advocated by Putman,

Index

41-3, 50, 193; demanded of New Educator, 51, 91, 105, 194; recommended by Richardson, 107; and classification of students, 112; and role definition, 122; recommended in PWS, 158, 167-8; criticized by Putman, 1 86 Burgess, H.H., 21 By Ward, 59-60 Cadet movement, 21, 128-31,

133 Caird, Edward, 31, 37, 78 Calhoun, Grace, 57 Calisthenics, 61, 129-33 Cameron, M.A., 170, 183 Canadian Bureau of Statistical Measurement, 154 Canadian Clubs, 82, 88, 143-6 Canadian Education Association, 141, 144, 173-4, 184. See also Dominion Educational Association Canadian Industrial Reconstruction Association, 147 Canadian Manufacturers' Association, 74, 87, 146 Canadian School (Board) Journal, The, 169, 185

Cappon, James, 73-4 Cardboard work, 61, 78, 102 Carleton East Teachers' Association, 133, 135 Carlyle, Thomas, 21-2, 30-1, 39,53 Carmichael, Herbert, 152 Carnegie, Andrew, 34 Carnegie Public Library, 6-9, 63,83 Carpentry, 65 Carter, W.S., 141 Cartwright, Ethel, 131 Catholic Taxpayers' Association, 171-2 Cavallo, Dom, 105 Centralization of school administration, 40-3, 46, 50-2, 54, 88, 106, 154, 185-6 Chaiton, Alf, 147

"Character Development: The Objective of All Education," 143 Character training: in public schools, xiii, 33-5, 72, 75, 142, 144-5; fr°m handwork, 1 8; from history, 22-5; from physical education, 131; advocated by National Council of Education, 145-7; in BC schools, 151 Chicago schools, 100-1 Child-study movement, 12, 17, 33-4, 64, 95-6, 101-5 Christian Brothers, 10 Church, Robert, 163 City Government Ottawa, 137-8 Civic Improvement League, 56, 140 Civics, 35, 49, 66, 128, 134-9,

174 Clay modelling, 61, 67, 78-80, 125 Cocks, A. W., 151 Cody, H.J., 142-3, 146, 1 86 Coleman, H.T.J., 103 Collins, E.J., 129-31 Colquhoun, A.H.U., 98, 119, 172, 177 Columbia University, 67,

90 Commercial classes, 45-52 Commission of Conservation,

56,75 Commission on School Finance (BC), 167 Committee of Enquiry into the Cost of Education, 179, 183, 187 Common school movement, ix-x, 39-42, 193 Community projects, 67, 71-2, 105, 126, 192 Composition, 26, 34, 47, 115, 124 Concrete-minded pupils, 61-2, 77-81,97, 173-4. See also Retardation of pupils; Subnormal children

223 Conservative government: in Ontario, 7, 25, 120, 188-91, I99ni6; in BC, 149, 160 Consolidation of rural schools, 41, 43, 73, 106, 141, 167, 184-5, 187 Cook, Ramsay, 56 Cook, Terry, 20, 24 Cooking classes, 57, 61, 65, 94, 109. See also Household science Coombs, F.E., 72 Co-operative movement, 188 Corbett, Barbara, 102 Cote, Louis, 120 Country life movement, 13-19, 29-30,48, 53, 62,

187 "Country Schools," 11-12 County school boards, xiii, 43, 184-7 Cowley, R.H., 69, 92 Craven, Paul, 48-9, 53, 78 Cringen, A.T., 68 Croll, David, 189 Crowson, A., 79 Cubberley, Ell wood P., 107,

159

Cudmore, S.A., 143 Cummings, Harley, 42 Cummings, Ida M, 189 Curriculum, elementary school: naturalistic order of, 34-5; for girls, 47, 52, 131-2; for concrete-minded pupils, 61-73, 75, 78-81; differentiation of, 76-7; in BC schools, 158, 162, 1 66 Curriculum, junior high school, 50, 57, 76-7, 174,

177 Curriculum, secondary school, 7, 38, 41, 86-90, 93-6, 178 Currie, L.W., 103 Darwin, Charles, 17, 64, 97 Dean, John, 152 Decentralization of school administration, 77, 88-90, 106, 159, 185-6

Index

Democracy and schooling: as advocated by Putman, 39-41, 66, 70, 81-2, 174, 179; promoted through curricular innovations, 67, 96, 105, 126-7, r 33; promoted through textbooks, 135; promoted through adult lectures, 139, 143-4; allied to BC'S social system, 153, 156 Dent's history textbook, 136 Desormeaux, E.C., 183 Developmental democracy. 81-5, 126 Dewey, John: instrumentalism, x, xii, 175; influence of, on Putman, xii, 26, 46, 49-50, 62, 64, 94, 97; on social conflict, 51; on New Education, 61-2; and social behaviourism, 64-6, 75, 1 75; genetic psychology, 65, 78; liberaldemocratic ethic, 70, 82, 105; and Gary system, 96; on kindergartens, 101-2, 105; at Dominion Educational Association, 2o8n37. Works: The School and Society, 62, 65; "My Pedagogic Creed," 65 Director of education. See School superintendents Director of industrial and technical education for Ontario, 60, 78, 86 Domestic science. See Household science Dominion Educational Association, 21, 96, 141, 2o8n37. See also Canadian Education Association Draper, P.M., 82 Drawing classes, 8, 61, 75-6, 79-80, 94 Dressmaking classes, 94-5 Dunbar, George, 189-91 Dunlop, Florence, 173, 179,

181 Easson, McGregor, 174, 176

Efficiency of schools: as advocated by Putman, xii, 10, 39-44, 50-3, 86-106, 119, 178-9, 185-6, 191, 193; in the Ottawa public sector, xii, 58, 123, 126-7, i ? i . 181, 183, 192, 195; of New Education movement, 51, 126; recommended by RCITTE, 76; in Ontario, 87-8, 170; and kindergartens, 102; recommended by Richardson, 107-1 1, 1 13; and public health campaign, 1 12-14; and unified board of education, 1 19; and new standards, 122, 172; in military drill and school sports, 128; warnings against, 139; in BC, 150-2, 162-3. See also Bureaucracy in school administration; County school boards; Experts in education; School superintendents; Waste in schools Egerton Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada, 38-42 Election-at-large system, xi, 60, 170-2, 195 Elgin Street School, 122 Ellis, Arthur, 188-9 Ellis, James A., 3-4, 6 Empire Day, 21, 134, 139 English. See Literature, English Entrance examinations, 7, 48, 61, 93, 120, 125, 170, 177-80 Ep worth League, 13 Ethics, 17, 31, 35-7, 49, 69-70, 73, 131, 138,

147 Eugenics, 98-101, 111-12, 162, 165, 173 Eurhythmies, 35-6, 67, 131-2 Examinations, ix, n, 62, 72, 151, 194; at grade eight, 7, 48; influences history textbooks, 22, 134; advocated by Watson, 38; and junior

224 Index public school graduation, 58; affects school program, 91, 93; PWS on, 159, 162, 167; and failures, 177-80. See also Entrance examinations Exhibitions of school work, 58, 68, 71-2, 80, 109, 125, 134 Experiential learning, 12, 17, 29-30, 32, 36, 53, 62-81, 176 Experts in education: and control of school system, xii, 108, 170-1, 191; and teacher's ideal role, 34; advocated by Putman, 42; as perceived by businessmen, 49; and New Education movement, 51; recommended by RCITTE, 78; in U.S., 88-101, 139; recommended by Richardson, 108-9; Putman as, 108, 126, 176; needed in physical education, 131; in PWS, 148, 151-4, 158-60, 162-3 Falconer, Robert, 144 Family and schooling, 9, 18, 29-30, 34, 43, 104, 132, 153, 194 Feeble-minded children, 98-100, 110-13 Ferguson, G. Howard, 171-2, 174, 177, 184, 190 Fifty Years at School, 29 Finlayson, W.B., 68 Fireproof school buildings, 120, 157 First Avenue School, 69, 122, 134 Fisher, Harold, 63 Flexner, Abraham, 96 Folk-dancing, 67, 103, 109, 131 Foster, George, 135 Franklin, Barry, 101, 168 Fred Victor Mission, 13 French-Canadian Educational Association, 120 French-language instruction, 119, 166, 174, I99n3

French-speaking Canadians: Putman 's proposal for, 8-10; and Ottawa separate school battle, 82, 89, 119-20, 146, 171-2, 190, 195. See also Ottawa Separate School Board; Regulation 17; Separate schools Froebel, Friedrich, ix, 12, 26, 62, 101-5. See also Kindergartens Frye, Northrop, 12, 35-6

Graded school system, ix, n-12, 41, 93, 110 Grammar, 34, 63, 125 Grammar school tradition, 9, 41. See also Ottawa Collegiate Institute Board Grant, George, xi, 20-3, 28-9, 43, 194-5 Gray, R.A., 147 Green, T.H., xi, 9, 28, 31 Greer, V.K., 146, 170, 173, 180, 187 Griggs, Edward Howard, 140 Grubb, Norton, 95-6 Gulick, Luther, 133 Gymnastics, 67, 129-30

"Garden City" movement, 56 Gardening: MacdonaldRobertson Rural School Plan, 6, 69, 73; Hall advocates, 18; by Putman, 26, 29-30; by Hadow Report, 177, 179 Ottawa public school pupils, Hall, G. Stanley, x, xii, 12, 61, 67, 69-70, 123, 125-6, 16-19, 33-4, 64, 101, 192; Dewey advocates, 105 65; in u.s. schools, 101 Hamilton, R.W., 59, 81, 122 Garvock, W.B., 86, 122 Hamilton School Board, 181 Gary school system, 96-7, "Hands across the Seas," 145 108-9 Handwork, x, 18, 26, 30, 36, Genetic community, 17 45,49, 61, 73-104 pasGeography: and Putman 's field sim, 174-5, 185, 192 trips, 6; and child's develop- Harcourt, Richard, 21 mental needs, 35; in OtHarris, William T., ix-x tawa public schools, 47, 57, Harvard University, 67 63,67,69,71-2, 115, Health of children, 75-6, 124-5; in u.s. schools, 94; 112-13, 121-2, 129, 133, in BC schools, 165; in 142, 185-6. See also intermediate schools, 174 Hygiene classes; Physical George Street School, 139 education Germany, education in, 38, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ix, 31-2, 63-4, 75 Gibson, J.W., 69, 149 101, 105, in, 153, 163, Gidney, R.D.,42 176 Gifted children, 77, 90, in, Hegelian stages of conscious113, 161-3, 179 ness, 22-5, 27-35, 37-8, Girard College, Philadelphia, 153-4, 163, 176, 193 100 Heins, Donald, 68-9 Gladstone, William Ewart, Henderson, T.L., 140 Henry, George S., 172, 177-8, 23-4 Glashan School, 91, 122, 130 190 Glebe Collegiate, 182 Hepburn, Mitchell, xiii, 169, Goddard, Henry, 98-100 178-9, 183, 186, 188-91 Goetzmann, William, x Hepburn, W.A., 191 Gordon, Daniel Miner, 29 "Hero Worship," 30 Gordon, J.S., 151-2, 159-60 High School of Commerce Cowling, W.E., 171 (Ottawa), 172-4, 182

225 Index High schools: fees for, 7-8, in; 1904revisedcurriculum of, in Ontario, 7-8; specialization of, 9-10; curriculum of, as advocated by Putman, 41; access to, 48,50,61, 173-5, 177, 194; under unified board, 86, 89; in U.S., 89-90, 93-6; in BC, 150-1, 153-5, 160-1, 165; in Ontario, 169, 180, 184, 195. See also Curriculum, secondary school; Ottawa Collegiate Institute Board Hill, H.P., 181-2, 189 Hill, Patty Smith, 105 Hinchliffe, Joshua, 160 History: subject, ix, 65, 143; textbooks on, 21, 124, 135, 136, 137; Putman advocates, 22-6, 35, 47, 49» 57» J33-7; anc* community projects, 71; in Ottawa public schools, 124-5, 128; BC test scores in, 165; in Ottawa intermediate schools, 174. See also Community projects; Patriotism and education Hobhouse, L.T., 81-2 "Hoeing Corn," 16 Home Garden Clubs, 70,

123 Hope well School, 71 Horace Mann School, 90 Household science: objectives in teaching, x, 48, 70; recommendations on, for Ottawa public schools, 44-5, 48; in Ottawa public schools, 47, 57-8, 67, 121-2, 174, 182, 192; objections to, 49, 52; Putman advocates, 57, 93; recommended by RCITTE, 76; in Manual Arts School, 78-81; recommended by volunteer organizations, 87; supervision of, 91, 1 08; in U.S., 94-9, 122; lack of, in Ottawa separate schools,

118; in BC schools, 151, 161, 165-6 "How Far Has the War Created New Educational Problems?" 142-3 "How to Provide Adequate Supply of Teachers for Rural Schools," 42-3,

184 Hudson, Stanley, 190 Hughes, James L., 92 Hughes, Sam, 130 "Humanism," 36-7 Humphreys, John H., 82-3 Hygiene classes, 35, 61, 113, 124, 129, 174 Idealism: influence of, in Canada, xi-xiii; of Watson, xi-xii, 13, 26-38, 78; of Putman, xii, 22-5, 33-5, 54, 73; of Stafford, 13; of Hall, 17; and adolescence, 18, 130; creed of Britannic idealism, 20-5; of country life movement, 29-30; creed of practical idealism, 31, 38-42, 107, 145; influence of, on Mead, 64; and business efficiency, 91-2, 126-7; and physical education, 131-2; and history textbooks, 135; and citizenship, 137, 139-40; evils of, 143 Immigrants, ix, 95, 139, 163-4, 2i2n59 Imperial Conference on Education, 98 Imperialism, xi, 68; of British Empire League, 20, 145, 2i3n97; Empire Day, 21; in Britain and the Empire, 21-5; of proportional representation movement, 83; of Putman, 128, 136-7; of physical-training program, 131; of lecturers in adult education, 139-47; of Overseas Education League, 146; of National Council of Education, 145-7 Industrial development and

education, 54-5, 73-8, 81, 87, 96-7, 144 Industrial Education Act of 1911, 45, 78, 86-7 Intelligence testing, 81, 92, 99, 112, 127, 151, 161-9, 173-4, 179, 194 Intermediate school. See Junior high school International Kindergarten Union, 102 James, William, 33, 36-7, 64,78 Jamieson, Florence, 67, 131-2 Johnstone, E.R., 98 Judd, C.H., 107 Junior high school: in Ontario, xiii, 169, 177-80; School for Higher English, 93, 170, 173; in U.S., 96-7, 108, no; Putman's campaign for, 97, 108, 173-83, 188, 192, 195; industrial, m; in BC, 151, 158-60, 166, 168; and separate schools, 180; English model for, 2i8n38. See also Curriculum, junior high school Kant, Emmanuel, 26, 36-7 Keele, Joseph, 80 Kemp, D.S., 80 Kent Street School. See School for Higher English and Applied Arts Ketchum, Carl J., 147 Kidd, George, 161 Kilpatrick, William Heard, 71-2 Kindergartens: Froebelian origins of, ix, 62, 75; in Ottawa public schools, 61, 71, 102-3, 121; in U.S., 86, 101-5; supervision of, 91; teachers of, 102-3; Ontario special committee on, 103-5; kindergarten-primary course, 103; costs of, 109; lack of, in Ottawa separate schools, 118 King, William Lyon Macken-

226 zie, xi, 48-9, 51, 53, 74, 83-4, 189

Ladder system of schools, 38, 1 06. See also Graded school system Laggards in Our Schools, 62 Language training, 38, 90, 125, 174, 177; correlated with other subjects, 6, 104 Laski, HJ.,83 Laurier, Wilfrid, 20, 25, 74, 129 Laurier Avenue School, 71 Lawr, D.A., 42 Lazerson, Marvin, 95-6, 103 League of Canadian Municipalities, 4 Leake, Albert, 44-5, 48, 78-9, 87 Leatherwork, 78 Leduc, Paul, 188 "Legislation and Morality," 28 Legislative grants, 40, 70, 87, 98, 104, 106, 112, 155-7, 169-72 passim, 181-6 Liberal government: in Ontario, 5, 169, 178, 180, 186, 188-91; in BC, 149-50, 167 Liberalism: classical, ix, xii; new, xi, 9-10, 44, 49-50, 56, 62, 66; of Putman, xiii, 117, 136-7, 189-90, 193; of Grits, 40; ideology of, 48-51, 53, 81-5, 140; and development, 55, 78; and postwar idealism, 142; of Weir, 167 Lisgar Collegiate, 8, 182 Literature, English: Putman teaches, 26; importance of, 31,35-6, 49, 63, 134, 146, 174; and child's developmental needs, 34; Watson advocates, 38; in Ottawa public schools, 46-7, 57; in U.S. schools, 90; in WE A extension classes, 143 Local control of education. See Decentralization of school administration

Index

Local Council of Women, 58, 88, 99, 152 Local industrial advisory committee, 45, 78, 177, 180 London School Board, 181 Lyttleton, Alfred, 131 Me Arthur, Duncan, 179-80, 182-3, 186-7 McClellan, B. Edward, 77 Macdonald, D. Bruce, 143 Macdonald-Robertson movement, 6, 44, 49, 53, 62, 69-70, 73-4, 83, 87, 133 McDowell, W.T., 143 Maclntyre, Mary E., 103 McKenty, Neil, 191 Mackenzie, Ian, 190 McKillop, Brian, 12 MacLean, J.D., 148-9, 154, 158 MacMurchy, Helen, 98, III-I2

Macpherson, C.B., 81, 83, 84 Mann, Jean, 161, 167 Manual Arts School, 78-81, 87,93-4,97, in, 125 Manual training: objectives in teaching, x, 70, 94; campaign of New Educators for, n, 44; Hall advocates, 18; Putman advocates, 35, 93; Macdonald-Robertson classes in, 44, 48; in Ottawa public schools, 44, 47-8, 54,67,90, 103, 121, 124-5, 174, 182, 192; supervision of, 54, 91, 108; types of, 61; Dewey on, 65; birdhouse competition, 71; community projects, 72; recommended by RCITTE, 75-6; in Manual Arts School, 78-81, 94; promoted by volunteer organizations, 87; in u.s. schools, 91, 93, 100-1; supplies, 109; lack of, in separate schools, 118; Mark on, 125; in BC schools, 151, 161. See also Handwork Mark, C.E., 107, 110-12, 114-18, 121-6, 166

Marty, A.E., 143 Marx, Leo, 16 Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, 98 Massey, Vincent, 147 Mathematics. See Arithmetic Mead, George, 64-5 Meldrum, A.E., 170 Mentally defective children, 98-100, 110-13 Merchant, F.W., 60, 78, 86, 120, 172, 177

Metal- work classes, 61, 65, 78-9, 94, 125 Metcalf, Caleb, 72, 79 Methodism, 13, 42, 106, 141 Methodist General Conference, 141 Military drill, 61, 128-33 Mill, J.S.,27, 81-2 Mitchell method of violin technique, 68 Montessori, Maria, 99, 104 Moore, Tom, 188 Morality and education: as advocated by Putman, xii, 10, 12, 23-4, 29-30, 33-6, 39-43,73,81, 141, 144, 175, 187, 189-91, 194-5; in Anglo-Saxon thought, 12, 84, 104-5; of Watson, 27-8, 35; of Shortt, 28; of conservation movement, 56; of Dewey, 65-6, 101-2; implicit in Ottawa public schools' curriculum, 67-72; of Thorndike, 99; of cadet camps, 130; of adult lecture series, 140; during postwar reconstruction, 142-3; in PWS, 162, 167 Morang and Company, 21, 25, 136 Morgan, S.A., 103-5 Morris, William, 53 Morrow, Don, 133 Morton, Desmond, 131, 133 Mowatt, Oliver, 190 Municipal reform in Canada: public principle of, 3, 137-8; League of Canadian Municipalities of 1901, 4;

227 proportional representation movement, 82-5; allied to New Education, 143; and the National Council of Education, 144-7; in BC, 149-50 Music classes, 31, 35-6, 49, 54, 58, 61, 67-9, 103, 109, 125, 174-5, 185 "My Pedagogic Creed," 65 Myth: of concern, 12; Romantic, 35-6; of common school movement, 39 National Council of Education, 120, 145-7, 188 National Extension University, 146 National Intelligence Tests, 1 66 National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, 93 National War Savings Committee, 144 Naturalism, 17-19, 34, 37, 62, 64 Nature study: at Ottawa Model School, 26; and child's developmental needs, 34, 174; in Ottawa public schools, 61, 69-71, 123-4; and Macdonald-Robertson movement, 73; recommended by RCITTE, 76 Nelson's history textbook, 136-7 New Education movement: curricular innovations of, x, 26,36, 150-1, 161; allied to urban reform, xii, 11-12; grounded in Protestant idealism, 19; Putman as proponent of, 44-55, 141; allied to country life movement, 44, 48, 53; conservative ideology of, 49-51; transformed, 51, 62, 97, 101, 169, 191-2; social goal of, 65-6, 143; expression of, in RCITTE, 73-8; and Black, 151; and psychological testing, 163

Index

Newbolt, Henry, 146, 2i4nio6 Newlands, A.F., 51-6, 123 Ney, Fred, 145-7 Nicholson, F.J., 148, 151, 2i6n36

Ottawa Art Students' League, 8 Ottawa Arts and Letters Club,

141 Ottawa Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded,

98

Ottawa Board of Control, xiii, 7, 82, 138 Oliver, John, 148-9 Ottawa Board of Health, 138 Ontario: 1880 Toronto, 13; Ottawa Children's Aid Socisouthwestern, rural life, 14-16; earlier twentieth-cenety, 99 Ottawa Collegiate Institute tury changes, 87 Board, 7-10, 45-58 passim, Ontario Department of Edu78, 87, 93, 144, 170-80 cation: and Putman, 5, 87, 91, 1 86; and secondary school passim, 189, 193-4 Ottawa Field Naturalists, 69 curricular policy, 8, 86-7; and Ottawa public school Ottawa Horticultural Society, programs, 81; and tech29,70 nical education, 86-8, 172; Ottawa Humane Society, 71 view of inspectors' role, Ottawa Literary and Philo92; and junior high schools, sophical Society, 82 no, 183-91; and proOttawa Model School: and vincial medical services, 113; Putman, 3, 5, 20, 26, 69, 71, and directors of English and I99n2; and Newlands, 52 of French instruction, 120; Ottawa Normal School: and and visual aids, 135; and Putman, 5-6, 26, 69, separate schools, 171-2 70, 128, 149; and NewOntario Educational Associalands, 52 tion, 5, 12, 69, 71, 185; ad- Ottawa Playgrounds' Associdresses given at annual meetation, 133 ings of, 5, 11-12,42-3, 68, Ottawa Public School Board 1 06, 143, 146; and Putman, (OPSB): progressiveness and 144, 169, 185-6 efficiency of, xii, 126, 173, Ontario Provincial Associa181, 183, 192, 195; and tion for the Care of the Putman, 44, 107-8, 189, Feeble-Minded, 98 192; and technical/commerOntario Special Kindergarten cial education, 45, 60, 78-9; Committee of 1912, 103-5 School Management ComOntario Typographical Union, mittee, 51-2, 79, 115-16; 207n8i and Slemon, 70, 91; central Orange Lodge, 120, 171-2, supply depot for, 91, 108; 190-1 survey of, 107-26; play"Organization of District grounds of, 133; adult educaBoards," 191 tion provided by, 139-40, Orientals, 150, 163-4, 2i2n6o; strife of, with Colle2i5n2i, 2i6n49 giate Institute Board, 170-3, Osborne, W.F., 145 178-82; and intermediate Osgoode Street School, 122 schools and intelligence Oswego, NY, teacher-training testing, 173, 179; revenues school, 5 and expenditures of, 181, Ottawa, city of, 3-5, 46, 60, 190. See also individual sub137-8, 180, 187, 191 ject headings for classes

228 Index Ottawa Separate School Board, 58, 82, 118-20, 132, 171-2, 180-3 Ottawa South, riding of, 188-90 Ottawa Teachers' Association, 5, 139-40, 142-3 Ottawa Teachers' Institute, 72, 144, 174, i?6 Ottawa Technical School, 94, in, 170, 173-4, 177-8, 180-3 "Outlook of Education, The," 147 Overseas Education League, 146 Parental schools, 100-1, 158 Parent-Teachers' Federation of British Columbia, 148 Parker, Francis, x Parkin, George, 24 Paton, J.L., 151 Patriotism and education, 21, 129-36, 145. See also Idealism; Imperialism; Morality and education Pavey, E.J., 73 People's Forum, 83 Perney, Frank, 134-5, l69 Pestalozzi, Johann, 5, 26, 71 Pews, Helen, 79 Physical education, 6, 26, 35, 67, 102, 108, 113, 128-33, 160, 174 Physics, 71 Pidgeon, E. Leslie, 144 Platoon system, 96-7, 170 Play: activities, ix, 102; and child study, 17, 64; and general education, 75-6; and Gary schools, 96. See also Activity methods; Kindergartens Playground activities, 35, 61, 122, 132-3 Pottery, 61, 67, 78-80, 125 Power, C.G., 190 Pragmatism, 26, 37, 62, 73, 78 Principals' Association of Ottawa, 83

Principles of Psychology, 33,

36,64 Printing classes, 61, 78-9, 94, 207n8i "Progress in Education through School Administration," 96 Progressive education: as advocated by Putman, xi-xii, 169, 187, 192-3; movement, xii-xiii, 88, 92, 95-6, 106, no, 143, 174, 176, 191, 194; transformed, 101, 105; in Ottawa public schools, 126; in BC, 152, 158, 167; in Ontario, 170; in England, 2i8n36 "Project Method, The," 71 Projects, 67, 71-2, 105, 126, 192 Property assessment: in Ottawa, 118, 181, 183; in BC, 155-7 Property-Owners' Association of Vancouver, 148, 158, 160 Proportional representation movement, xi, 82-5, 184 Proportional Representation Society of Canada, 83, 144 Prosser, Charles A., 93, 97 Protestantism and idealism, ix, 22-7 passim, 31-5, 41, 127, 135-6, 140-6 passim, 165, 167, 188, 190-5 passim Provincial party (BC), 149 Psychology: viewpoint of Putman, xii, 7, 32, 50, 61-6, 97; of Thorndike, xii, 97, 105, 161-2, 167; functional, xii, 36, 64, 66, 78, 97, 102, 175, 2o8n37; of individual differences, xii, 17,77,93-5,97, 101, 113, 162-8, 194; child study, 12, 62, 65; developmental, 17-18, 65, 175, 179; physiological, 31; idealistic, 31, 33; social, 50, 75; behavioural, 63-4, 97, 143; Binet-Simon classification, ill, 173-5; Terman's

intelligence quotients, 112; alliance with medical examinations, 113; in PWS, 161-8, 175; in Ottawa public schools, 173, 176, 192. See also Intelligence testing Public health campaign, 112-13, 129 Public opinion, 152-5, 158, 162-3, 1 80 Public School Administration, 159

Public School Athletic Association, 132 Public School History of England and Canada, 2 1 ,

25

Public Schools of Ottawa: A

Survey, 1 10-12, 114-18, I2I-6

Putman, Clarence, 29 Putman, John Harold: biographical sketch of, xi-xiii, 3-6, 20-1, 25-30, 38, 42, 44, 128, 144, 148-9, 188-95, I97n6, I99nn2,3; philosophy of education of, xii, 26, 33-5, 46, 54-6, 73, 95, 143, 145, 153, 170, 176; on educational psychology, xii, 7, 32, 50, 62-6, 97; on curriculum, 8-9, 46-9, 61-72, 78-81, 174; on secondary schooling, 8-10, 178, 1 80; on school administration, 36-42, 88-105, IIQ , 184; on separate schools, 40, 89, 119; critics of, 51-3, 59-60, 185, 195. Works: Survey of the School System,

xiii, 17-18, 148-58, 162-8, 175-6, 185-6, 2i6n42; Britain and the Empire, 5, 21-5,

128, 133; "Country Schools," 11-12; "Hoeing Corn," 16; Fifty Years at School,

29, "Hero Worship," 30; "Secondary Education for Girls," 30-1; Egerton Ryerson and Education in Upper Canada, 38-42; "How

229 Index 174, 182. See also Concreteminded pupils Richardson, W.L., 107-15, 118, 121-2 Rideau Ward, 3,5, I97n6 Rifle shooting, 61, 129 Government Ottawa, 137-8; Robertson, James W., 45, "Rural School Administra48, 73-7, 82-6, 94, 97, tion," 184; "School Adminis126, 2i2n62 tration and School Finance," Robertson, W.J., 21 185; "Organization of Roebuck, Arthur, 189 District Boards," 191 Rogers, G.F., 177-8, 180-3 Putman, Merritt, 133 Rogers-Greer Report, 180-2 Pyne, R.A., 87, 135 Role of women, 47, 94-5 Quebec Protestant school in- Roosevelt, Theodore, 56 Ross, George, xi, 5, 21 quiry of 1938, 191 Queen's Alumni Association, Rotary Club, 88, 140, 144, 146-7, 173, 175 140, 144 Queen's Society, 6, 29, 140 Rotary plan, 96-7, 170 Rowe, Earl, 189 Queen's University: and Grant, xi, 20-1, 27-9; and Royal Commission on Industrial Training and TechPutman, 5, 19-20, 25-9, nical Education (RCITTE), 33 » 36, 38-9; and Watson, 45, 48, 73-8, 84, 86, 19-29, 36-8; sense of 94, 126, 2i2n62 community, 28; and Shortt, "Rural School Administration 28; and Gibson, 69; and - What Improvements Slemon, 70; and Cappon, Are Necessary?" 184 73; and teacher training, Rural schools: advantages of 200ni6 one-room school, 11-12; problems with, 42-3, 54, Racism in textbooks, 135 184; in BC, 155-7, 166; Reading: at Ottawa Model and junior high school, 170, School, 26; and child's 1 88; trustees of, 184; in developmental needs, 34, Ontario, 184-8; in Quebec, 65; synthesis-analysis-syn191 thesis method, 62-3; and Ruskin, John, 53 general education, 75-6; in u.s. schools, 90; recom- Rutherford, F.S., 177 mended for primary, 104; in Rutherford, Paul, 143 Ottawa public schools, 123, Ryerson, Egerton, 34, 38-43 125, 174, 178; in BC schools, 157, 1 66; imporSadler, Michael, 65, 146-7, 179 tance of, for adolesSandiford, Peter, 107, cents, 175 Recapitulation, theory of, 17 111-13, 142, 151-2, 161-7, Reconstruction of society, 173, 2i6nn42, 53 postwar, 127, 140-7, 154 School accommodation, 92, Regulation 17, 58, 89, 108, 120, 122, 150, 154, 119-20, 171, 190 157-8, 170-1, 176, 178-83 Religious instruction, 119 "School Administration and Retardation of pupils, 62, 78, School Finance in Ontario, 107, IIO-H, 113, 150, Can They Be Improved?" 185 to Provide Adequate Supply of Teachers for Rural Schools, "42-3, 184; "Shortening the Elementary School Course," no; City

School and Society, The, 62,

65 School architecture, 120-3 School concerts, 67-9, 125 School costs, 118-21, 148-53, 155-61, 170-2, 176, 178-9, 181, 183-7 School dental services, 61, 113, 184 School finance. See Taxation and schools School for Higher English and Applied Arts: basic program of, 44, 46-53, 56-8; art program of, 51-6; offer of sale, 58, 172-3; attacked by Shipman, 59, 171, 195; on rotary plan, 60, 170; practical science classes at, 71; vocational training at, 87, 94; and merit pay, 90; as alternative to collegiate, 93; program of, praised, 123, 125; as junior high school, 173-4; status of, 194 School inspector. See School superintendents School libraries, 175-6, 185,

is?

School lunches, 48, 104 School medical services, 61, 100, 112-14, 184 School nurse, 108, 112-14, 1 60 School of Decorative and Applied Arts, 1 60 School sports, 128-33, 187 School superintendents: under Ryerson, 40; and social order, 51; in U.S., 88-90; new role of, in Canada, 91-2, 108, 115-16, 119, 158-60, 184-5, 191 School supplies, 91, 109, 185, 187 School surveys, xiii, 17-18, 46, 49, 88, 92, 98, 106-7, in, 113-14, 148, 180, 184. See also Survey of the School System

230

Index

Simpson, Leo, 180, 186 Sinclair, S.B., 112, 173 Skidelski, Robert, 176 Slater Street School, 71 Slemon, E.T., 70-2, 91-2, 123 Smith, Jimmy, 68 Smith-Hughes Act, 93 Sneddon, David, 97, 103 Social behaviourism, 62, 64, 66, 75-8, 104-5. See also Psychology; Schooling for life adjustment Social Darwinism, 13, 27 Social efficiency, 65, 92, 97, 102-5 Social gospel, xii, 4, 13, 140 Social reform through education, 49, 51-4, 141, 154, 161. See also National Council of Education; New Education movement; Reconstruction of society, postwar Social Service Council, 141 Social studies, 126. See also Community projects; Geography; History Socialization through schooling, 18-19, 32-3, 104-5, 126, 168, 193. See also Schooling for life adjustment; Social behaviourism Sociology and education, xiii, 89, 96-7, I I I - I 2 , 162, 164, 174, 195. See also 78, 101, 139, 149, 153-4, 163, 176, 2i4n3 Auxiliary classes; Streaming Soldier's party (BC), 149 of pupils Spaulding, Frank, 107 Seguin, Edward, 99 Special education classes, 80, Separate School Question in 98, 100, 112, 169-70, Canada, The, 149 173-4, 177, 181-2. See Separate schools, 8-10, 40, also Retardation of pu89, 171-3, 180-4, 190-1, pils; Segregated classes 193, 195 Sewing classes, 45, 58, 61, Spelling, 34, 94, 116, 123-5, 65, 94, 103, 109 166, 178 Shipman, Harold, 59-60, 116, Spencer, Herbert, 17, 26-7, 73 171-2, 176, 191, 203n54 Spring, Joel, 133 Shop work, 94, 97 Stafford, Ezra, 13 "Shortening the Elementary Stamp, Robert, 21, 74, 142, School Course," no 169 Shorthand, 46-7 Standardized achievement Shortt, Adam, 28, 143 tests, 96, 123-4, 127, 151-2, Sifton, Clifford, 56 161-9, 194, 2i6n53

School textbooks, 21-2, 25, 135-7, 155 Schooling for life adjustment, xiii, 18, 61, 67, 76, 96, 147, 167, 175, 194-5, 2i4n3. See also Social efficiency; Socialization through schooling Schools as social centres, 132, 139-40, 188, 2i2n62 Schull, Joseph, 25 Science classes, 6, 8, 47, 49, 70-1, 76, 165-6, 174. See also Agriculture, scientific; Botany; Country life movement; Gardening; Nature study; Zoology Scientific management, 62, 86, 90-2, 106-7, 122, 126. See also Efficiency of schools Scott, Duncan Campbell, 143 Scott, J.F., 172 Scott, J.H., 120 Scottish Rite Masons, 6, 88, 144 Seashore, C.E., 36 Seath, John, 45, 86-8, 91, 98 "Secondary Education for Girls, "30- 1 Secondary schools. See High schools Segregated classes, 79-80,

Stenography, 61 Sterilization laws, 99-101 Stirling, J. Hutchison, 31 Strachan, John, 39 Straight, R., 160 Strathcona Trust, 128-33 Streaming of pupils, 9-10, 97, 168, 174, 179 Subnormal children, 61, 81, I I I - I 2 , l6l-2, ISO

Superintendent of buildings, 121-2, 159-60 Supervisors of special subjects, 51, 54, 68, 108, 116, 118, 121, 123-4, 173, 181 "Supplementary Report to Vancouver School Trustees," 159-60 "Supplied or Self-Help," 72 Survey of the School System (PWS), xiii, 17-18, 148-58, 162-8, 175-6, 185-6, 2i6n42 Sutherland, Miss A.G., 79 Sutherland, Neil, 74, 129, 133 Taxation and schools, 148-50, 154-61, 171-2, 183, 186-7, 2i7n56. See also Property assessment; School costs Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 9i Taylor, John, 4 Teachers: as specialists, 10, 38, 41 , 46, 50, 1 1 1 , 150, 159, 174, 181, 187, 194; ideal role of, 11-12,33-4,65,95,97; in rural schools, 11-12, 43, 141, 151, 157, 166, 185; at School for Higher English, 46, 50, 59-60; in Ottawa public schools, 57, 114-18, 123-6, 192; and moral training, 72, 138-9, 142, 145; appointments and contracts of, 90, 108, 114, 118, 1 60, 195; pensions for, 90-1, 114-15, 144, 185, 195; in secondary schools, 95-6, 179, 182; female, 100, 145; male, 114,

231 15 1 ; grading of, 115-16, 1 1 8; federations of, 115-16; professionalism, 117, 167; on exchange, 145-6; and intelligence testing, 161, 173; in intermediate schools, 173-4 Teachers' College, Columbia University, 90, 105 Teachers' salaries: in rural schools to 1911, 43, 185; in School for Higher English, 48; of Newlands, 51; of Calhoun, 57; in U.S., 89-90; and merit pay, 89-90, 115, 117-18, 159, 195; in Ottawa public schools, 108, 116-18, 181, 195; in BC, 154-5, 157 Teachers' training: Whitney reform of, 26; for physical education, 67, 113; for violin classes, 68; agricultural certificates, 70, 126; for manual-training classes, 79; qualifications, 89, 114, 117, 126, 171-2; for auxiliary classes, 99; inservice, 1 08; at the University of Ottawa, 1 19-20; for Strathcona classes, 129-30, 140; in BC, 150 Technical education: Putman on, 8-10, 41; Watson on, 38; Ottawa campaign for, 44-5, 48; allied to art, 54; allied to national development, 74-8, 84, 194; in Ontario, 78, 86-7; industrial and trade schools in U.S., 93-6; in Vancouver, 159-61; in rural areas, 187. See also Manual Arts School; Ottawa Technical School; RCITTE; Vocational training Technical Education Act of 1919, 94 Terman, Frank, 112 Thayer, H.S., 64, 66 Thorndike, Edward, xii, 77, 97, 99, 101, 105, 113, 161-2, 167

Index

Thorne, James, 91 Tolmie, S.F., 160 Toronto, city of, 13, 98 Toronto Normal School, 12 Toronto public schools, 92, 98 Tory, H.M., 146 Township School Board Act of 1935, 187 Township school boards, 184, 187, 189 Trade unions, 8, 87, 143-4, I 88, 2o6n8i Trades and Labour Council, 179, 2i2n62 Trades training. See Vocational training Truancy. See Attendance Tyack, David, 45-6, 88, 91-2 Typewriting, 46-7, 59, 6 1 Unified school system, 86-9, 102, 119-20, 178 Union of British Columbia Municipalities, 148, 157 United Farmers: of Ontario, 120; of BC, 149, 184 Unity League, 120 "University and the Schools, The," 37-8 University extension courses, 143-4. See also Adult education University of British Columbia, 149, 151, 161, 165 University of Ottawa Teachers ' College, 120, 172 University of Toronto, 72, 98, 107, 144, 151, 192, 2Ooni6 Urban School Trustees' Association, 133 Vancouver Board of Trade, 148 Vancouver School Board, 148, 158-60 Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, 148 Victoria Museum, 71, 124, 147 Vineland Training School for the Feeble-Minded, 98-100

Vocational guidance, 77, 94-6, 158-9, 179, 192, 194 Vocational training: demands for, x; and general studies, 48, 97; Dewey on, 65; in RCITTE, 76; in Manual Arts School, 78-81; in Ontario, 87; in U.S., 93-4; for girls, 94-5, 97; for misfits, 97, i oo- 1, 175; for feebleminded, 99-100; for adolescents, 106, in, 177-8; in BC, 150, 153, 159, 161, 167, 175; in rural schools, 170; for pupils with low IQ'S, 174-5. See also High School of Commerce (Ottawa); Ottawa Technical School; School for Higher English; Technical education Waller Street School. See Manual Arts School "War and the School, The," 135 Ward politics, 6, 60, 150, 153, 171, 195 Washington Irving High School for Girls, 95 Waste in schools, 106, 109, 154, 159, 177, 184-6 Watson, John, ix, xi; influence of, on Putman, xii, 20, 26-8, 32-7, 63; on Frenchlanguage teaching, 10; on speculative idealism, 19, 31-3, 193-4, 200n37; Caird's influence on, 31, 37; rejects positivism, 35; on importance of the arts, 35, 38; on psychology, 36-7, 62; on education, 37-8, 48, 73, 104, 167, 176, 195; tensions in his philosophy, 37-8, 51; on social order, 38, 51, 78; on Greek philosophy, 142. Works: "Humanism," 36-7; "The University and the Schools," 37-8 Waugh, John, 59, 120 Weaving, 65

232 Weir, G.M., xiii, 149, 151, 153, 159, 161, 167, 185, 214113, 2161136 Wellington Street School, 71 White, James F., 6 White, L., 79 White, R.B., 69 White, William, 52, 55, 203n25 Whitney, James, 7-8, 26, 86 Willis, S.J., 148 Wilson, Raymond Jackson, 17,19 Wilson, Woodrow, 82, 141 Winnipeg Educational Con-

Index

ference, 144-5 Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, 84, 141 Wirt, William, 96-7, 107 Woodwork, 61, 78, 94, 103 Workers' Educational Association (WEA), 143-4 World War i, 20, 66, 93, 107, 127-8, 131-2, 135, 137, 140-1, 145, 169 Writing classes: at Ottawa Model School, 26; and child's developmental needs, 34; in Ottawa public schools, 51, 123, 125, 178; Dewey

on, 65; and general education, 75-6; in u.s. schools, 90; supervision of, 108; recommended for primary, 1 14; in BC schools, 166 Wundt, Wilhelm, 36, 64 York Street School, 59, 139, 203n54 Young, Ella Flagg, 100 Young Men ' s/Women ' s Christian Associations, 87-8, 129, 140 Zoology, n, 70