Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British Columbia

Wendy Johnston is a freelance writer.

This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing
body of historical studies on childhood and education in North America.
The editors, leading figures in the field who teach at the University of
British Columbia, have compiled a rich array of specialized studies on
the experience of youth, teachers, and schooling in 19th- and
20th-century British Columbia. While most of the 21 essays have been
previously published, this volume makes them available to a wider
audience.

An introductory text by Jean Barman traces the origins and evolution of
educational structures in 19th-century British Columbia, highlighting
the particularities of the system emerging from regional conditions. The
remaining contributions are organized in three parts, dealing with
childhood and pupilhood, the training and everyday experience of
teachers, and the organization and reform of schooling. The studies
examine a broad range of themes, reflecting the diversity of historical
experience in private- and public-school systems, in rural and urban
settings, and in ethnic and racial minority and majority communities.
The experience of children both within and beyond the classroom is
examined, notably by Neil Sutherland, who focuses on the “culture of
childhood” in Vancouver in the first half of the 20th century and on
the working lives of children in the province’s pioneer communities
during the same period. The largely separate and unequal experience of
aboriginal children receives attention in two articles by Jean Barman,
while the makeshift schooling provided for Japanese-Canadian evacuees
during World War II is analyzed by Patricia Roy. Nor are teachers
neglected. Teacher education and the professionalization of teaching, as
well as the difficult working and living conditions of teachers in small
rural communities, are the subject of six of the articles. While most of
the texts in the collection deal with the period before 1960, policy
initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s are analyzed in two studies by Barman
and Sutherland.

This volume reflects new tendencies in the field of the history of
education and childhood, an expanding area of research in the past 25
years. Influenced by the rise of social history in the Western world and
sensitive to the role of education in the reproduction of social
inequality, historians have turned away from a narrowly institutional
approach to focus on the everyday experience of childhood and youth, as
well as on the dynamic relationship between school and society. The
authors of these essays thus make good use of nontraditional sources and
methodologies, including oral history, diaries, and manuscript censuses,
to explore diverse topics and concerns. The usefulness of this valuable
book would have been enhanced with a more substantial general
introduction situating the work within the broader trends of educational
and childhood historiography.