What a better way to inculcate ‘Canadian values’ in children across the land: have them read the same stories. This volume has nice poetry (a lot of Walter de la Mare, an American, who I came to love as a child) and lots and lots of animal stories. The Canada it portrayed was a rural Canada and the children from other lands it described still lived in other lands – and not on my Montreal street. The Mountie picture above introduces that section. (Doesn’t the image make Canada seem so much better than the other countries?)
I found an article from a 1912 Canadian Magazine criticizing the New Ontario Reader, published by T. Eaton and Company. (It was on the Quebec list of approved Textbooks.)
The author, Arnold Haultain, thought the New Ontario Reader did a fine job of promoting ethical values through the literature it offered: ‘courage, honour, obedience, kindness, love of country, implicit veracity, high resolve’. But any good literature, indeed, all high art promotes these values, he writes.
His problem was with the selections, themselves: they were modern, for the most part, by untested authors, most still alive. The compilers of the New Ontario Reader hadn’t waited for posterity’s verdict on these selections and he did not approve.
But that was not his principle objection: he didn’t like that all the selections being ‘high art’ and not practical pieces, aimed at down to earth boys and girls, who might grow up to work the land.
This high falutin’ literary stuff was not of any use to a farmer – and, this man felt, just like J.W. Robertson, that Ontario needed more farmers, or at least, fewer children to foresake the family farm for the town or city.
A girly story from Up and Away, my textbook.
In Quebec and Ontario schools in 1910 they still used Royal Crown Readers. I happen to have a copy of the Fourth Book, aimed at older kids. Mr. Haultin may have approved, for it contains a hodgepodge of stories, one about Sowing Seeds, one on Bananas, one on an Ostrich Farm, one on the Cotton Trade, the Sloth, Bird Houses, Muscle, the Life of the Fly (Well, it’s British, so EMPIRE.) It strikes me of more interest to males than the stories from the Canadian Reading Development Series. Oh, it also had a story called A Nation of Soldiers, about Sparta, where the young women ‘were as brave as the men’ and trained in similar martial arts.
Well, I guess textbooks had their place in shaping Canadian values during the 20th century, especially History Textbooks, giving that sense of “National Purpose” J. C. Sutherland wrote about in the article I quoted in a recent blog.
Mother Margaret Nicholson’s patriotic fervour came from some place and it wasn’t likely from her kin, who were Old Country and spoke Gaelic.
By the time my sons, Margaret’s great great grandsons, went to school, in the 1990′s, there were no textbooks to speak of. It was a French Immersion program and the teacher made do by cobbling together loose sheets of this and that. But by that time there was a thriving children’s literature industry. We bought hundreds of books for our boys, a few of which they actually read. For the most part, these were stories of very high calibre…. or not, like the books based on Television Series, like Goosebumps..I myself, made a point of buying Canadian books, (The Hockey Sweater!) but the people who ran the book fairs at my kids’ school really didn’t care if the books they sold en masse were by Canadian or American authors, good or bad. They just wanted to earn money for the school.
So, I don’t know what being Canadian means to my sons. Well it means they can go and work in BC or Halifax, if they wish. They pull for Canada’s hockey team, big time, like most everyone else at World Meets. But that’s it. They like Jay Barushel, but more because he’s a Montrealer.
But the media they garburate is mostly American, but often scripted by Canadians. Go figure.
