Commissioned Citizenship

The Evolution of Pedagogical Citizen Construction in Canada, 1947–1994

Bibliographic Data

ID20460742
AuthorsJ P Lewis (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume40
Issue4
Pages478-494
Publication date2010-11-15
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Review of Canadian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0272-2011 • E-ISSN: 1943-9954
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02722011.2010.519398
OpenAlexW2009236390
LanguageEN
References cited15

One of the most influential tools that the state wields in developing citizenship is public education. The 19 royal commissions and major reports on education completed in provinces across Canada between 1947 and 1994 offer valuable insight into what the Canadian state conceives as ideal citizenship. The following work attempts to answer two research questions: (1) When do provincial governments desire to change the direction of education (and construction of citizens)?; and (2) How do provincial governments define the ideal citizen once reform is initiated? This essay finds that through three eras of reform, the pedagogical focus on citizenship moved from the individual to the community to a diluted form with no unifying vision. The sum of these attempts at change and conceptions of ideal citizenry leads one further from an accepted meaning of the continually elusive notion of Canadian citizenship. Keywords: Canadian citizenshipeducation policyprovincial governmentsdiscourse analysispolicy reform Notes 1. Government of Nova Scotia. Report of the Royal Commission on Education, Public Services and Provincial-Municipal Relations (Halifax: Queen's Printer, 1974), Chapter 36, 30–31. 2. William Kaplan, "Introduction" to Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship. Ed., William Kaplan (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 21. 3. Desmond Morton, "Divided Loyalties? Divided Country?" In Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship. Ed., William Kaplan (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 59. 4. Jean Barman and Neil Sutherland, "Royal Commission Retrospective." In Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British Columbia. Eds., Jean Barman, Neil Sutherland, J. Donald Wilson (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises Ltd, 1995), 411. 5. Henry Marshall Tory playfully remarked, "if we are going to change it must first appoint a royal commission to tell us how it is done" and as an editorial writer commented, "whenever there is a hot political potato we usually refer it to a royal commission ... this is a sure way to cool if off": from Henry F. Johnson, A Brief History of Canadian Education (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Company of Canada Limited, 1968), 168. Hugh Stevenson argued, "The fact remains that their implementation depends ultimately on political desirability, not educational need. Consequently, the record of change resulting directly from them has not been very impressive. Royal Commissions have become the burying ground for the ideas of our best thinkers,": from Hugh Stevenson, "Ten Years to Know-where" in The Failure of Educational Reform in Canada. Ed., Douglas Myers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1973), 400. 6. Stevenson, 400. 7. As Aristotle observed, "The nature of citizenship ... is a question which is often disputed," from Politics. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 1274b. 8. Michael Krzyzanowski and Ruth Wodak. "Multiple Identities, Migration and Belonging: 'Voices of Migrants'" Eds., Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Rick Iedema. Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 100. 9. Ruth Wodak. "What CDA is about – a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments" Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Eds., Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 3. 10. Krzyzanowski and Wodak, 114 11. John Wilson. "Political Discourse" The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Eds., Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton Boston, (MA, Boston: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001), 398. 12. Gunther Kress. "History and language: towards a social account in linguistic change" Journal of Pragmatics. Vol. 13 No. 3. 1989, 445–466; Wodak, 3 (2001). 13. Ruth Wodak and Gilbert Weiss. "Analyzing European Union discourses: Theories and applications." In A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinary. Eds., Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005), 128. 14. Wodak and Weiss, 123. 15. Roger Gomm. Social Research Methodology (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 259. 16. Gomm, 258. 17. Gomm, 263. 18. Michael Hoey. On the Surface of Discourse (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 64. 19. However, much of the most cited literature on citizenship education is based on survey work addressing the impact of citizenship education courses. Over forty years the accepted consensus moved from a position of no impact on political behavior and knowledge (M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi. The Political Character of Adolescence: The Influence of Families and Schools. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974) to presence of an impact on political behavior and knowledge (Richard Niemi and Jane Junn. Civic Education: What Makes Students Learn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 20. Siegfried Jager. "Discourse and knowledge: Theoretical and methodological aspects of a critical discourse and dispositive analysis." In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Eds Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 52–53. 21. Ronald Manzer, Public Schools and Political Ideas: Canadian Educational Policy in Historical Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 107. 22. Hugh A. Stevenson, "Developing Public Education in Post-War Canada to 1960" In Canadian Education: A History. Eds., J. Donald Wilson, Robert M. Stamp, Louis-Philippe Audet (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall of Canada Limited, 1970), 390. 23. Led by Senator Donald Cameron, Alberta completed a Royal Commission on Education in 1959. In just under two years, the commission spent 162 days in 60 meetings. John W. Chalmers, Schools of the Foothills Province: The Story of Public Education in Alberta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 164. The same year, another major pedagogical investigation was completed in Manitoba when Minister of Education W.C. Miller called a comprehensive review led by R.O. MacFarlane. The British Columbia commission led by Sperrin Chant began its comprehensive inquiry on January 17, 1958. The Chant Commission received 366 briefs and conducted 34 public hearings. Government of British Columbia, Report of the Royal Commission on Education (Victoria: Queen's Printer, 1960), 4. Between 1958 and 1960, royal commissions on education were completed in British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba. 24. Douglas Myers, "Introduction" to The Failure of Educational Reform in Canada. Ed., Douglas Myers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1973), 11. 25. Stephane Levesque, "History and Social Studies in Quebec: An Historical Perspective" In Challenges and Prospects for Canadian Social Studies. Eds., Alan Sears and Ian Wright (Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press, 2004), 61. 26. Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Report of the Royal Commission on Education and Youth (1967), xv. 27. Manzer, 150. 28. Peter McCreath, "Current Developments in Education in Atlantic Canada" In The Failure of Educational Reform in Canada. Ed., Douglas Myers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1973), 169. 29. Government of Nova Scotia, 3. 30. Government of British Columbia, A Legacy for Learners: The Report of the Royal Commission on Education (Vancouver: The Commission, 1988), 3. 31. Government of British Columbia, A Legacy for Learners: The Report of the Royal Commission on Education, 4. 32. Government of Newfoundland, Our Children, Our Future: The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Delivery of Programs and Services in Primary, Elementary, Secondary Education (St. John's: The Commission, 1992), 13. 33. Brian O'Sullivan, "Global Change and Educational Reform in Ontario and Canada" Canadian Journal of Education Vol. 24. No. 3. 1999. 318. 34. Government of Ontario, For the Love of Learning: Report of the Royal Commission on Learning (Queen's Printer for Ontario, 1994), 2. 35. In an effort to describe breaks in the evolutionary record, paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed the term punctuated equilibrium. 36. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 84. 37. Ibid., 38. Robert S. Wood. "The Dynamics of Incrementalism: Subsystems, Politics, and Public Lands" The Policy Studies Journal. Vol. 34. No. 1. 2006. 2; Howlett and Ramesh describe the 'punctuated equilibrium' model is as follows: "Change is envisioned as involving alternations between long periods of stability involving incremental adaptations and brief periods of revolutionary upheaval." Michael Howlett and M. Ramesh. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 188. 39. Howlett and Ramesh, 189. 40. Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 110 41. Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak. "Critical discourse analysis" Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Vol. 2. Discourse as Social Interaction. Ed. T.A. van Dijk. (London: Sage, 1997), 271-280. 42. Wodak and Weiss, 127. 43. Norman Fairclough, Simon Pardoe and Bronislaw Szerszynski. "Critical Discourse Analysis and Citizenship" Analyzing Citizenship Talk: Social positioning in political and legal decision-making process. Eds. Heiko Hausendorf and Alfons Bora. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2006), 103. 44. Michael Meyer "Between theory, method, and politics: positioning of the approach to CDA" Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Eds Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. (London: SAGE Publications, 2001), 30. 45. Fairclough et al., 101

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