Voices from the Past

Voices From The Past

Ken Osborne

“New Teaching” or “Idealistic Twaddle”? A 1920s Model of History Teaching

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Unlike its predecessors, this column does not look back to some specific episode in the past, but presents a digest of the writing on the teaching of history from the 1890s to the 1920s. Its argument is that by the 1920s we knew what it took to teach history well, so that an ideal of history teaching had emerged — much of it remarkably similar to today’s beliefs. However, as I have said in previous columns, we have all but forgotten our past and every generation of history teachers seems to reinvent the wheel anew.

By the 1920s it was increasingly common. in all subjects, including history, to speak of “the new teaching,” based on what were seen as the findings of psychological and pedagogical science, and emanating from the university departments of education that had been founded in the late nineteenth century, when universities saw pedagogy as something that could be studied and taught scientifically. (Adams, 1919) The most enthusiastic supporters of this “new teaching” were to be found among the proponents of progressive education, but more traditional educationists also adopted many of its tenets.

Today John Dewey is usually seen as its most prominent spokesperson, but he was more its representative than its originator and many of its advocates, especially in Europe, did not look to Dewey for leadership. They looked, not so much to Dewey, as back to Herbart, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and other such historical figures, and its most influential exponents were the now largely forgotten school superintendents, school administrators, and professors of education in universities and normal schools, who actually converted it from abstract philosophy to concrete teaching strategies and learning resources, such as Willard Wirt at Gary, Indiana; Carleton Washburne at Winnetka, Illinois; Jesse Newlon at Denver; Frederick J. Gould in England; F.W. Sanderson at Oundle, an English public school; Sir John Adams at the University of London; M.W. Keatinge at Oxford; Célestin Freinet in France; Henry Johnson at Columbia; and many others. It was people like these whose work appeared most frequently in the education journals that proliferated in the early years of the twentieth century as education became more specialized and professionalized. The pedagogical literature of these years, especially in the 1920s, is full of references to such innovations as the Dalton Plan, the project method, the Winnetka Plan, the Gary plan, the unitary method, the problem approach, the contract method, the laboratory method, and the like.

All of these new approaches shared certain common features, of which at least twelve stand out. One, they all viewed learning as an active process. Indeed, “activity” was a much favored word in these years. They wanted students to be either physically or mentally active, and preferably both together, in the classroom. They did not reject the memorization of facts, though some enthusiasts came close to doing so, but they saw learning as involving very much more than students memorizing and repeating what their teachers and textbooks told them. Even the traditionalist University of Toronto history department, which was no friend of what it saw as educational faddism, agreed in 1923 that “it is clear that the pupil derives most benefit from the work he does himself. The teacher therefore must be capable of guiding him in his pursuit of knowledge in the school libraries.” (National Council of Education, 1923: 16) In the words of an influential American Historical Association report, published in 1899, historians wanted history to be an “educational” and not just an “informational” subject.

Historians were very conscious of the struggle that they had had in the late nineteenth century to get history established in the university curriculum over the objections of those who said that history was merely a branch of literature and thus lacked intellectual rigor, requiring only the exercise of the memory. As a result, they were determined to show that the study of history was as academically demanding and intellectually rewarding as any of the longer established subjects, such as mathematics or classics. As a prominent Canadian historian, Chester Martin, put it in 1917:

The student’s task is not merely to know the facts, but to understand them. The study of a series of historical problems throughout a period — the writing of essays upon them based upon as wide a range of evidence as possible — was designed to bring to history the methods long since taken for granted in scientific subjects. Books are the apparatus; varying or conflicting views are the reagents; the experiments are supplied not by the awkward manipulation of the students but from the recorded experience of the past. (Martin, 1917: 225)

For their part, stirred by the findings of psychology and the arguments of philosophy, proponents of the “new teaching” saw learning almost in what we now call constructivist terms, a process in which students were active makers of meaning. Thus, historians and educationists fought from the same corner, if with different motives, in insisting that the study of history had to be an active and intellectually challenging process.

Two, the “new teaching” equated active learning with problem-solving, rather than with recitation. In the words of one enthusiast in 1930: “The day of the individual, the class and the school project is here. It is the day of spontaneous, whole-hearted, many-sided activity. Perhaps the day is not far distant when much of the work of the school will be outlined as problem activities — each problem demanding work in thinking, feeling, doing.” (McIntyre, 1930: 50) Here is the same speaker (the Principal of the Manitoba Normal School, in fact) three years later, in 1933: “A better method might be to consider a lesson in history or geography as a problem which is discussed with the class with the idea of having them reason from what they already know and arrive at certain conclusions about it.” He used the Battle of Hastings of 1066 as an example, suggesting that, rather than simply telling students the story of the battle, the teacher should get them to think about it by imagining themselves to be there: “Would Harold draw up his army on a hill or in a hollow? Why? What weapons did his men have? Would he form his army in a square or in a line? Why?.... Would it better to place his archers in the front or rear?” (McIntyre, 1933: 195)

Problem-solving, of course, can take many forms. Advocates of the “new teaching” used it to embrace everything from rephrasing a textbook or other historical account in one’s own words, through such hands-on activities as building models and writing and staging historical plays, to pursuing full-blown, original research projects that had never been done before, either involving historical topics, such as a history of the school or of one’s family, or a community study of some kind. As described by one advocate of the approach the problem-method revolved around “a specific problem involving a rather prolonged and careful examination of data and a reassembling of this by the student himself in the form of an individual answer to some major query.” (Knowlton, 1926: 85)

The problem-method of studying history consisted of two strands. One involved studying the people of the past dealing with the problems they faced. The other meant seeing history as itself problematic. The first strand was described by an American history educator in 1921 as a way of leading the students “to see the problems which confronted people in the past and to solve them as they were solved by people in the past.” (Tryon, 1921: 83) The second involved understanding history as an interpretative discipline, in which the facts were only building blocks to be used in creating structures of explanation. In the words of a British teacher in 1917:

The first educational use of the study of history lies not in the knowledge acquired (and subsequently forgotten), but in the method of acquiring it. It is the business of independent selection and analysis which is of the greatest educational value. Learning other people’s selections of facts and other people’s generalizations is hardly better than learning so many pages of Bradshaw (an encyclopedic railway timetable - K.O.) (Welch, 1917: 241)

Even the pedagogically conservative history department of the University of Toronto conceded that “the teacher, if he is to be real help to his classes, must able to illustrate the problems that lie beneath history as written.” (National Council of Education, 1923: 16)

At its worst, the problem method could become a static and mechanistic, one-size-fits-all approach to history teaching. As one sympathetic observer noted, it was not a panacea and could easily be overdone: “A long-continued day-by-day use of the method would be likely to end in disaster to the teacher, to the student, and to the subject, history.” (Tryon, 1921: 85) Others, however, were more enthusiastic and saw the problem-method as a way to organize a whole course. In the words of another American history educator, writing in 1926: It has been assumed that the revelation of what history is and what knowledge of it means in the world of today rest in no small measure upon the setting up of the subject matter in the form of historical problems. This is part of the task involved in developing “a course in history.” The problem in the lower stages assumes a more elementary character; it is a less penetrating analysis; or an analysis and a synthesis of a more comprehensible character. It is not merely the thought- provoking question or problem that is sought, but some phase or phases of that greater, all-inclusive task of “reconstruction.” It may be a reconstruction of environment, of the externals of living, of actions, of thoughts, or of these in combination. It involves more or less of interpretation, but this should originate with the student himself and be guided by the teacher instead of being foisted upon him in a superficial fashion as is too often the case. (Knowlton, 1926: 85)

In this problem-oriented spirit, innovative teachers organized students to create school museums based on local history. And, as I have described in an earlier column in this series, the years from 1890 to 1920 saw an active movement to introduce primary sources into the history classroom, precisely in order to turn history into a problem-solving discipline in which students would have to work with raw materials and interpret data in order to achieve a desired result, just as in the science laboratory. This kind of exercise, in fact, was seen as possessing multiple advantages: not only would it turn history into a problem-solving subject, it would thereby make it more interesting to students and more intellectually rigorous, while also stimulating active learning. (Keatinge, 1910)

Three, the “new teaching” placed great emphasis on individualized learning and curricular flexibility, believing that real learning took place only when students were committed to a task that genuinely interested them. Thus, proponents of the “new teaching” disparaged lecturing, the recitation, and all other methods of whole-class teaching. They accepted as a regrettable reality that, in the actually existing world of schooling, whole-class teaching was often inevitable due to the demands of the timetable, of examinations, or administrative exigencies, but they never liked it. Many of the curricular innovations of the “new teaching” were designed with the intent of injecting individualized learning into a school system that was predicated on whole-class teaching. Similarly, much of the opposition to them arose, not so much from philosophical or theoretical objections, but from claims that they were impractical and unworkable in the everyday world of the public schools.

Four, the “new teaching” embraced individualized learning out of a conviction that students learned at different rates, so that whole-class teaching necessarily penalized both the more able and the less able students. In their view, whole-class teaching left the better students bored and the slower students puzzled. The only solution, therefore, was to devise teaching strategies and curriculum plans that allowed students to learn at different speeds. Five, if students were to learn individually, or perhaps in small groups, their work had to be clearly organized so that they knew exactly what they were expected to accomplish. Proponents of the “new teaching,” were no supporters of directionless or permissive teaching. They wrote extensively about such things as contracts, unit outlines, worksheets, and the like, not because they wanted to regiment what teachers and students did, but because they were looking for ways to make clear to students what they were expected to do. Paradoxically, supporters of the “new teaching” turned to what appeared to be lock-step devices, such as contracts and outlines, in order to free teachers and students from the routines of the traditional classroom. As an American advocate of the new methods emphasized in 1921: “The teacher must explain this system very carefully before it is attempted and he must see that the pupils thoroughly understand what they are to do, so that there will be no time wasted.” (Wilgus, 1921: 24-5)

Six, this meant that teachers had to be equally clear in their own minds about what they wanted to achieve when they taught history. Advocates of the “new teaching” constantly emphasized the importance of teachers setting specific objectives, of their knowing exactly what they wanted students to learn, and of their ensuring that their teaching plans and outlines were always consistent with their objectives. But they also insisted that this clarity of purpose had to come from within the teacher, not from the dictates of an imposed curriculum guide. For the champions of the “new teaching,” the example of the teacher was all important. The teacher had to be not only someone who could work with children, but also someone who served as a model of dedicated scholarship and who could make the past live in the minds of students. As H.G. Wells said of F.W. Sanderson, an English headmaster and history teacher: “You made us think and feel that the past of the world was our own history; you made us feel that we were in one living story with the reindeer men and the Egyptian priests, with the soldiers of Caesar and the alchemists of Spain; nothing was dead and nothing alien; you made discovery and civilization our adventure and the whole future our inheritance.” (Wells, 1919: 221)

Seven, the “new teaching” insisted that, since students learned at different speeds and were of varying abilities, all teaching plans had to be organized in terms of minimal or essential requirements — those things that all students must know and be able to do — and optimal or optional requirements for students who could perform at a higher level.

Eight, this meant a new role for teachers. In the “new teaching,” teachers were no longer to be lecturers or note-givers, but planners, organizers and orchestrators, most of whose time would be devoted to creating learning environments, designing and monitoring learning activities, and working with students individually or in small groups. In the words of an American educationist in 1921, who stressed that the teacher should be “the pupil’s constant adviser and guide:”

The teacher from time to time should call the whole class together and discuss the progress of the work as well as various individual difficulties that the pupils may have. The teacher should also, when necessary, hold individual conferences with the pupils and discuss their individual troubles.” (Wilgus, 1921: 25) Nine, this meant, in turn, that teachers had to know their students extremely well if they were to assign them work that was commensurate with their abilities and would appeal to their interests. Thus, the ”new teaching” devoted a lot of attention to testing, not so much of actual performance but of capacity and readiness for learning. In a sense, if the “new teaching” worked, its close attention to planning curriculum and to fostering and monitoring learning made performance testing unnecessary, since teachers could almost predict what students would end up being able to do. As one exponent of the “new teaching” put it in 1921, in what is virtually an anticipation of what later came to be known as mastery learning:

With this method it is not necessary to give an examination, as the finished product is what the pupil should be judged by. The whole is the examination and no-one should fail, for the teacher has been constantly supervising each pupil’s work and making suggestions and criticisms where necessary, lending a helping and encouraging hand always. Thus the pupil is marked on what he has actually accomplished and not on what the teacher thinks he has accomplished and knows, as is frequently the case in many history recitation classes. (Wilgus, 1921: 25)

This was largely why the “new teaching” was so opposed to external examinations, which were seen as antithetical both to good teaching and to true history. In 1923 even the University of Toronto historians, in their otherwise conservative report on history teaching, acknowledged the validity of the criticisms of the “cast-iron examination system, by which pupils are more often than not encouraged to memorize verbally large sections of a text which they do not understand and in which they are quite uninterested.” (National Council of Education, 1923: 14) Historians claimed that examinations ruined history by converting it into a series of memory exercises. Educationists claimed that they reduced teaching and learning to the passing of not very good tests. In the words of one Winnipeg critic, reflecting on his career of some fifty years in education: “It is doubtful if anything to-day is doing more to defeat the ends of true education than the examination system as it is applied in our schools. These end-of-term tests do not develop power of understanding and application. They do not as a rule measure education at all. At best, they are pigeon-hole tests, and very imperfect at that.” (McIntyre, 1935: 251)

What was essential in the “new teaching,” however, was testing and diagnosis to ensure that teaching matched students’ readiness to learn. In the “new teaching,” for example, a unit of work began with some kind of pre-test, either formal or informal, written or oral, to ascertain what students already knew, what their interests were, and what their level of readiness was for what they were going to learn. Without this information in their possession, said the proponents of the “new teaching,” teachers could never plan successful units of work.

Ten, advocates of the “new teaching” unanimously rejected any view of history that saw it simply as the learning of facts about the past. They recognized the obvious reality that to learn history meant learning some factual knowledge, but they insisted that facts were only the building blocks of historical understanding, and that the ultimate goal of historical study was to think historically, to become historically minded. It is perhaps no coincidence that that great parody on history-as-facts, 1066 And All That, appeared at the end of this period (in 1930 in fact). The more adventurous proponents of the “new teaching,” following in the footsteps of such historians as James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, and Carl Becker, argued that facts were in any case less factual that they seemed to the uninformed observer, since facts, as recorded in the historical record, were of a different order from the events they purported to describe, and said nothing until they were spoken to by the historian. Beyond this, they agreed that to study history was not to memorize facts, but to use them to form relationships, correlations, principles, and the like.

Eleven, this emphasis on historical thinking meant that practitioners of the “new teaching” were generally dismissive of what even the traditionalist University of Toronto historians described in 1923 as “the outrageous importance which the prescribed textbook possesses in the system of instruction.” (National Council of Education, 1923: 15) They were fiercely critical of the textbooks actually in use, and, more fundamentally, they were skeptical of the value of textbooks at all. They reluctantly accepted them as a practical necessity in existing circumstances, and some of them, such as the historians, James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, set about rewriting them (and earning substantial incomes in the process) on new principles to make them more educationally useful, but they insisted on the need for other resources also, most notably primary sources, which they saw as central to the effective teaching of history. If textbooks had to be used, the “new teaching” preferred the use of multiple copies of different textbooks to one set text for a whole class. In this way, students would learn some basic research skills and could not fail to come face with face with discrepancies and differences among texts, all of which would serve to make them more historically minded.

Twelve, this insistence on the use of a variety of books and other learning materials derived from the conviction of the “new teaching” that history had to be taught through problems, and that the history classroom had to be organized as a “laboratory.” As a visitor described the schools of Gary, Indiana, in 1916, the classrooms were “not merely rooms where children study together and tamely recite, but essentially workshops where children do interesting things with their minds, just as in the shops they do interesting things with their hands. The history room is a real history laboratory. Maps and charts made by the pupils cover the walls, magazines lie about, pictures and books overflow the tables. The visitor realizes that he is in a room saturated with history, past and present.” (Bourne, 1916: 28)

A history classroom had to contain tables, not desks. It had to have its own library, containing a wealth of resources that students could consult on the spot, as needed. It had to be furnished with maps and pictures and such technical equipment as epidiascopes and projectors (and at a later stage radios and film projectors). It had to allow for flexible groupings of students. And above all, it had facilitate the kind of teaching favored by the “new teaching:” problem-oriented, individualized, resource-based, outcome-directed. Here, for example, is a 1916 description of a history classroom in Gary, Indiana: The history room in the Emerson School ... is found by the visitor to be almost smothered in maps and charts, most of them made by the children themselves, in their effort to “learn by doing,” and to contribute their part to the school community. A huge Indiana ballot, a chart of the State Senate, a diagram of the State administration, a table showing the evolution of American political parties, with many war maps and pictures, covered the walls. The place is a workshop rather than a classroom, with broad tables for map- drawing, and a fine spread of papers and magazines. The ninth-grade Gary children are, in fact, conducting what some progressive colleges have introduced as “laboratory work in history.” (Bourne, 1916: 117)

In England, the pioneering headmaster of Oundle School, F.W. Sanderson, took this idea much further, planning to organize the whole school around a “House of Vision.” This began as a combination of memorial to a former student killed in action in the First World war and a museum of industrial history, centering on the story of invention and technology over the centuries. It soon became, however, something much more than this, in effect an educational display of the whole of the human past. It was not a lecture room but a place where students could go and ponder the whole of human history, learning to see themselves, not as little Britishers, but as citizens of the world. As described by Sanderson’s great friend, H.G. Wells:”

It was to be empty of chairs, desks, and the like, and clear for any one to go in to think and dream. About its walls, diagrams and charts were to display the progress of man from the sub-human to his present state of futile power and hope. There were to be time-charts of the whole process of history.... The memorial ceased to be a symbol merely of industrial reorganization and progress, and became a temple to the whole human adventure. He (i.e. Sanderson – K.O.) began to stress first social and then imaginative growth.... The realization of the past is the realization of the future, and it was an easy transition to pass to the idea of this unfolding as an expression of the creative will in man. In it the individual boy was to realize the aim of the school and of schooling and living. It was to be the eye of the school, its soul, its headlight. (Wells, 1924: 134-5)

In the event, Sanderson died unexpectedly in 1924 and his successors allowed his dream to crumble, but, though never fully realized, it vividly demonstrates the kind of history the more innovative champions of the “new teaching” had in mind.

Their view of good history teaching had become a kind of orthodoxy by the 1920s. They described it time and time again in the pedagogical literature of the period. However, their victories were always more theoretical than real. Indeed, the very frequency with which the “new teaching” of history was described in the education journals of these years suggests that it had not really penetrated the classroom. If everyone was doing it, there would have been no need to write so much about it.

It remains, then, to inquire why it was not more successful than it was. First, it must be acknowledged that educationists who supported the “new teaching” were fighting a force that in many ways proved to more powerful than they were. They preached the virtues of active learning but they had to wrestle with an alternative psychological tradition, based in behaviorism, and represented in education by such influential figures as E.L. Thorndike, W.W. Charters, David Snedden, and Franklin Bobbitt, who saw learning, and therefore teaching, much more in terms of a stimulus- response process of memorize-repeat-recite-and-drill.

As historians of education have often told us, Dewey might have won the battle of the books, but Thorndike and his followers won the battle of the classroom. Thus, for example, despite the best efforts of the disciples of the “new teaching,” perhaps the most often recommended teaching method in history in these years was the significantly named “recitation” and its offshoot, “the socialized recitation,” both of which, as their name suggests, consisted of students repeating aloud what they had read in their textbooks or learned from their teachers. Neither method was given much support by supporters of the “new teaching” with their conviction that learning meant having to translate learned material into a new form or put it to a new use, but they apparently met the needs of many teachers.

Nor were all historians as enamored as Chester Martin and others of teaching through problems in order to teach students to think historically. Some, such as France’s Ernest Lavisse, who exercised enormous influence on the French curriculum in the early twentieth century, insisted that the chief task of the history teacher was to teach patriotism and citizenship. As Lavisse put it: “If the pupil does not come away with a vital memory of our national glories; if he does not know that his ancestors went into battle for noble causes; .... if he does not become a citizen imbued with a sense of duty and a soldier who loves his rifle, the teacher will have wasted his time.” Nora,1997:181) Others refused to believe that school students were in any way ready for serious historical study. In the words of the University of Toronto history department in 1923, it was “absurd” to expect students below the higher levels of university to do research, so that “in all grades of primary and secondary instruction history must in the main be taught as a body of accepted truths.” (National Council of Education, 1923: 15)

Second, In the broadest sense, the “new teaching” asked too much of teachers in the working conditions that faced them. Large city high schools enjoyed high enrolments and an adequate tax base that made possible the hiring of well-qualified subject specialists, but most teachers were minimally trained, worked in small rural schools, taught a variety of subjects across a range of grade levels, were starved of resources, had no preparation time, and generally found themselves struggling to survive. In such circumstances, the “new teaching” was far too utopian to be practicable. As a Manitoba teacher observed in 1923:

Very little effort is made to deal with the practical difficulties with which every teacher has to cope. Overcrowded classes, mixed grades, lack of equipment — all these are ignored, and young teachers, their minds crammed with vague generalities and idealistic twaddle, find themselves helpless and discouraged when they try to practice, under the grim reality of actual conditions, what has been preached to them from the clouds..(Manitoba Teachers Federation Bulletin, 15 April, 1923: 355-6)

As a report on history teaching put it in that same year, teachers were “too often asked to perform a hopeless task.” (National Council of Education, 1923: 14)

Third, it could also be that many teachers found themselves intimidated by the demands of the “new teaching.” As a Manitoba teacher put it in 1921:

Many of us are still reading books, thinking abstract thoughts, going to meetings to discuss progressive procedures, and yet not really doing anything to make our own schoolroom a place where there may be found a whole-hearted activity.... Perhaps as teachers we are afraid to do anything radically different in our rooms. We may fear that we would be embarking upon an unknown sea, without chart or compass, and are surely inviting disaster which must surely come. (Tingley, 1921: 729-30)

The “new teaching” presupposed that teachers were not only pedagogical experts, but that they were also well versed in the discipline of history, which many of them, through no fault of their own, were not. In 1923, for example, Manitoba introduced a new Grade 11 Canadian History course for which there was no textbook. A few teachers rejoiced in their new-found freedom, but within a year the history teachers of the province were formally protesting to the Department of Education. As one such teacher complained; “Our history syllabus has us gasping. Many of us are not long out of high school or university — our library is a thing of the future — our schools are without a usable reference library, and what are we to do?” (Manitoba Teachers Federation Bulletin, 15 November, 1923: 471-2)

Fourth, even when a teacher was attracted by the ideas of the “new teaching,” they proved very difficult to implement in a single classroom if the rest of the school did not follow the same path. They demanded a degree of timetable and curricular flexibility that required the commitment of the whole school. A teacher could do only so much if the rest of his or her school pursued more traditional ways. And, in Canada, the exigencies of the provincial examination system, with its insistence that all students learn the same history in order to answer a set of questions that turned history into little more than an exercise in memorization, certainly militated against any large-scale adoption of the “new teaching.”

Where there was an innovative administrator, such as Jesse Newlon in Denver, F.W. Sanderson at Oundle, or Carleton Washburne in Winnetka, something was possible. More than one Canadian educationist made the pilgrimage to such places to see how things were done. And there were administrators across Canada who did what they could to introduce the principles of the “new teaching” into their schools. Even they, however, often found their efforts stymied by lack of resources, by the examination system, or by conditions in the schools, so that the “new teaching” remained more talked about than practiced. The reality was that, in the circumstances that existed in most schools, it was easier and certainly more practical, to teach in the old way: to dictate notes, to hear recitations, to work through the textbook; to assign worksheets — especially when a teacher’s success was largely judged on how well or badly students did on provincial examinations.

Nonetheless, there were teachers across the country who did what they could to apply the “new teaching” in their classrooms. In 1924, the historian, George Wrong, noted of history, that “Probably in no other subject has there been more striking improvement in teaching.” (Wrong, 1924: 303) Ten years later, another observer agreed: “Both in professional skill and in technical apparatus the teachers are better equipped than they were ten years ago. The actual teaching is, probably, on the average, better than we have any right to expect.” (Watson, 1934: 155-6) The pedagogical literature of these years is full of articles written by classroom teachers describing imaginative ways to teach history. Across the country energetic teachers maintained school museums, organized projects in local history, set up classroom reference files of clippings and pictures, took their classes on visits and field trips, held mock elections, staged historical plays, used primary sources, and generally looked for ways to move beyond the textbook. In the early 1930s, for example, the Public Archives reported an increasing demand for photocopies of documents from teachers. Some teachers taught history through artifacts and material objects. Some looked for themes or connecting ideas that would help their students make sense of the facts of history. By the 1910s, historical plays, stories and pictures were increasingly available, while from the 1920s teachers began to incorporate radio and film into their teaching.

Through the 1920s and beyond, the “project” approach to teaching history, popularized by W.H. Kilpatrick of Columbia University and Canadianized in the 1930s by Donald Dickie as the “enterprise” method, gained some momentum in Canadian schools, especially in the examination-free earlier grades. So far as history was concerned, it organized the subject-matter in the form of problems or research topics to be investigated by students working in small groups and sometimes as a whole class. On the positive side, it had the advantage of turning history into a source of open-ended problems that gave lots of room for student inquiry. On the negative, it tended to swamp history under a concern for socialization and citizenship and to convert it into a presentist, interdisciplinary social studies as teachers set students to work on here and now community problems and aspects of contemporary life that they thought would interest them more than the long ago and far away topics studied in history. (Kilpatrick, 1925; Dickie, 1940)

Overall, however, such innovations remained the exception, with the result that in 1968, Hodgetts’ national survey of Canadian history teaching, What Culture? What Heritage?, reported a truly depressing state of affairs. It seems that we still have a good deal to learn from those now largely forgotten pioneers who preceded us nearly a hundred years ago. References

Adams, J. (ed.). The New Teaching. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919.

American Historical Association. The Study of History in Schools: Report to the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven. New York: Macmillan, 1899.

Bourne, R. The Gary Schools. Boston. Houghton Mifflin, 1916.

Dickie, D. The Enterprise in Theory and Practice. Toronto: Gage, 1940.

Hodgetts, A.B. What Culture? What Heritage? Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1968.

Kilpatrick, W.H. Foundations of Method: Informal Talks on Teaching. New York: Macmillan, 1925.

Knowlton, D.C. “History and the Other Social Studies in Junior and Senior High Schools: The Tenth Grade.” The Historical Outlook, XVII (1926): 70-91.

Martin, C. “The Educative Value of History.” Western School Journal, XII (1917) 224- 225.

McIntyre, W.A. “The New Day.” Western School Journal, XXV (1930): 46-52.

McIntyre, W.A. “Teaching Children or Subjects?” Western School Journal, XXVIII (1933): 195-196.

McIntyre, W.A. “Education and Examinations.” Western School Journal, XXX (1935); 250-252.

National Council of Education. Observations on the Teaching of History and Civics in Primary and Secondary Schools of Canada. Winnipeg: National Council of Education, 1923.

Nora, P. “Lavisse: The Nation’s Teacher” in P. Nora (ed.). Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, Vol. 2: 151-184.

Sellar, W.C. & R.J. Yeatman. 1066 and All That. London: Methuen, 1930.

Tryon, R.M. The Teaching of History in Junior and Senior High Schools. Boston: Ginn, 1921. Watson, S.B. “A Layman’s View on the Teaching of History.” Canadian Historical Review, 15 (1934): 158-170.

Welch. O.J.G. “Historical Periods in School Examinations.” History, XII (1927): 241- 243.

Wells, H.G. The Undying Fire. New York: Macmillan, 1919.

Wells, H.G. The Story of a Great Schoolmaster. New York: Macmillan, 1924.

Wilgus, A.C. “The Laboratory Method in the Teaching and Studying of History.” The Historical Outlook, XII (11921): 23-27.

Wrong, G.M. “The Teaching of the History and Geography of the British Empire.” Canadian Historical Review, 5 (1924): 297-313.

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