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Shunning the Bird’s Eye View: General Science in the Schools of Ontario and Quebec

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Abstract

This paper considers the adoption of general science courses in two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Quebec, during the 1930s. In Ontario, a few science teachers had followed the early general science movements in the United States and Britain with interest. During the 1930s, several developments made the cross-disciplinary, applied thrust of general science particularly appealing to Ontario educationists. These developments included a new demand for vocational education, renewed reservations about pedagogical rationales based on transfer of training, and a growing professional divide between high school science teachers and university scientists. Around the same time, scientists in the Quebec’s French-language universities were engaged in a concerted campaign to expand the place of science in the province’s francophone secondary schools. The province’s prestigious classical colleges, which were the scientists’ principal target for reform, privileged an inductive view of science that had little in common with the applied, cross-disciplinary emphasis of the general science courses gaining support in English-speaking school systems. In 1934, however, a popular American general science textbook was adopted in a workers’ cooperative devoted to adult education. Comparing the fate of general science within these two education systems draws attention to the fact that general science made inroads in francophone Quebec but had little influence in public and private schools. In light of the growing support general science enjoyed elsewhere, we are led to explore why general science met with little overt interest by Quebec scientists pushing for school science reform during the 1930s.

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Notes

  1. For examples see OEA (1901, p. 20); (1902, p. 18); (1904, p. 25); (1905, p. 22)

  2. The establishment of the national laboratory would in fact be delayed until 1932, but at the time it seemed like an imminent prospect (Enros 1991, p. 46).

  3. The teaching brothers pressured the Catholic committee by running the primaire supérieur course independently until the committee caved and welcomed it under its auspices in 1928.

  4. Even so, by 1953, less than 1 % of French Canadian girls were enrolled in secondary school (Magnuson 1980, p. 97).

  5. One exception was the colleges run by the Compagnie de Jésus, which were independent (Corbo 2004, p. 12).

  6. According to Troger and Ruano-Borbalan (2005), enrolments in French lycées represented less than 15 % of age group (chap. 1, pt. VII). In Quebec, in 1946, fewer than 25 % went beyond 8 years of total schooling, and only about 2 % finished secondary school (Corbo 2004, p. 14).

  7. Université Laval was established in 1852, when the Séminaire de Québec was granted university status by a Royal Charter. It fell under the authority of the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education until 1971, when it acquired a new charter and became a fully independent, secular university. The clergy’s authority over higher education extended only to the French-language universities. The English, Protestant McGill College (later University), which was English-language and Protestant, was a public institution.

  8. See, for example, Diament 1933; Lortie 1934; Morin 1934; Dalbis 1923; Flahaut 1927.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. I would like to thank Josep Simon for his helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

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  1. Victoria College, University of Toronto, Rm 316, 91 Charles St. West, Toronto, ON, M5S 1K1, Canada

    Michelle Hoffman

  2. 496 Brunswick Ave, Toronto, ON, M5R 2Z5, Canada

    Michelle Hoffman

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Correspondence to Michelle Hoffman.

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Hoffman, M. Shunning the Bird’s Eye View: General Science in the Schools of Ontario and Quebec. Sci & Educ 22, 827–846 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9517-x

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