School Teaching in Canada

Dennis Blake is a high-school history teacher with the Halton Board of
Education.

With this book, Lockhart has provided some interesting insights into a
respected profession that is on the edge of transition. He outlines the
general parameters of the current debate for the reader, and while he
holds up no crystal ball to the future, Lockhart’s brief analysis
helps define the conflicting pressures and choices that face public
schoolteachers in a rapidly changing, politically complex world.

A sociology professor at Trent University, Lockhart has an analytical
background in educational theory, practice, and planning. This book is
the result of scholarly research begun in 1984 as part of a more general
Statistics Canada project.

Written as a sociological overview for educated but not necessarily
sociologically trained readers, the book introduces data measuredly,
allowing readers to rely on their own contextual sense of relevancy and
validity. As an aid to this process, Lockhart provides three
well-thought-out appendixes and an extensive bibliography.

Lockhart’s arguments are consistent within a presentation format that
focuses on the relationships between societal characteristics and
institutional dynamics. The role that technology might play in defining
or changing the profession is outside the scope of this work. The author
examines the sociodemographic characteristics of teachers’ work and
career patterns, and the role of professional associations. In a chapter
on the political environment, Lockhart briefly reviews the contemporary
status of the growing private alternatives to public education.

Lockhart’s last chapter, “Education, Pedagogy, and the Public
Interest,” is concise and suggestive. A short description of a
possible reshaping of the teaching career system gives strength to his
previous comments on the conflicting and countervailing forces of
professionalism, political will, political costs, and public demands.

Schoolteaching in Canada is an optimistic work, filled with brief but
carefully thought out policy alternatives. This work is useful to both
the specialist and the neophyte interested in the state of education in
Canada.