Public Schooling and Citizenship Education in Canada

ABSTRACT/RESUME This article examines the role of public schools in Canada as agents of citizenship education. The historical development of citizenship education in Canada is outlined and the current neglect of citizenship education in favour of economic and vocational priorities is examined. The article describes seven elements of citizenship education and illustrates the ambiguities and contradictions of the concept of citizenship in a school setting. The article also presents some suggestions for the reinvigoration of citizenship education in the schools, in terms both of curriculum and pedagogy. Cet article examine le role de l'instruction publique canadienne dans le cadre de l'education pour la citoyennete. L'auteur offre un sommairede I'histoire del' education pour la citoyennete au Canada et examine le fait que cette education soit negligee perdant les annees recentes, car les ecoles portent leur attention surtout a la preparation les jeunes pour le monde du travail. L' article decrit sept composantes del' education pour Ia citoyennete et examine les ambiguites et les contradictions de ce concept dans le contexte scolaire. L'article propose aussi quelques suggestions a propos du renouvellement de l'education pour In citoyennete dans l'optique non seulement du curriculum, mais aussi de la pedagogie. Introduction From their very beginnings public schools in Canada, as in other countries, were expected to prepare the young for citizenship. That, in fact, was the very reason why the state compelled parents to send their children to school in the first place since in school they would he subject to an officially approved curriculum, taught by officially trained and certificated teachers, using officially authorized curricula and textbooks, and subject to officially appointed inspectors and officially organized examinations -- all designed with the goal of producing citizens. It is true that, for pragmatic and political reasons, governments often had to make some allowance for private schooling, but they did so reluctantly and did their best to bring it under some degree of state control and supervision. Hence, for example, the sporadic quarrels between church and state over the years, in Canada and elsewhere, concerning the content and organization of schooling. Althusser oversimplified a complex reality and grossly und erestimated the autonomy of schools when he described them as part of what he called the state apparatus, but he had a point notwithstanding, for public schools are intended to teach those things that the state desires to be taught. (1) Normal schools, for example, were so called because they were supposed to establish the officially approved norms that governed what and how teachers were required to teach. By the end of the nineteenth century the combined pressures of industrialism, nationalism, and liberalism (in the sense of elected legislatures with more or less power depending on a given political regime) had made the idea of public schooling virtually irresistible in the industrialized world. Boys and girls were no longer to be left to their own devices or to do as their parents chose. They had to be turned into national citizens. As the historian Eugen Weber stated, peasants had to be turned into Frenchmen (2) -- and Frenchwomen, presumably. In the well-known remark of an Italian nationalist after the unification of Italy in 1870, We have made Italy; now we must make Italians. (3) In the world of the nation-state, children had to speak the national language, read the national literature, learn the national history and geography, and internalize the national values. And, if they were of working class or peasant background, as inevitably the majority were, they had to learn to know and keep their pla ce in the social order. In Gramscian terms, schooling was designed as an instrument of ideological and cultural hegemony by which those in positions of power endeavoured, with more or less success, to shape the thinking of society at large. …

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