In a 1966 appeal to the Ontario Department of Education, Dorothy McGuire, from the Christian Women’s Council on Education of Metropolitan Toronto, opined that “Canada has been steadily losing its image as a British country.”1 She blamed this loss of a British identity on the massive and mostly non-British post-World War II immigration program into Canada as well as the increase in the French–Canadian population. She argued that immigrants were still mostly loyal to their original homeland because “patriotism [had] not been impressed upon Canadians as much as it should have been.”2 English-speaking students, who McGuire asserted were more loyal to Canada, could naturally be expected to “cherish the symbolism of the Union Jack and Red Ensign which is a part of their heritage.” But minority groups needed to be educated more completely on Canada’s history.3 For McGuire, schools were the site at which the intellectual elite could construct and instill into young people a shared vision of Canadian society. If the education system did not convey a strong spirit of nationalism , then Canadians would not be able to achieve the “national destiny.”4 She recommended a strengthened system of religious education for Ontario schools that would lay a moral foundation for a unified Canadian nationalism , bridging the gap between the various cultural groups that composed Canadian society.
McGuire’s appeal to the Ontario Department of Education was a reactionary response to a major transition within the English-speaking provinces of Canada. In the 1960s, the political and cultural relationship with Great Britain faded in its significance to their sense of national identity. By the late 1960s, McGuire’s attachment to Britishness was out of step with the predominant educational thinking of the day. A major commission on education produced an influential report just two years later with a profoundly different viewpoint. According to Living and Learning, a central task of educators was to aid the “Canadian struggle to establish a national identity reflecting its multi-cultural nature and its bicultural base,” an identity that would transcend “the bounds of narrow nationalism .”5 Educators rejected Britishness in favor of a multicultural approach that would, at least in theory, celebrate the many different peoples of Canada rather than focus exclusively on the Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Educators through the 1950s promoted an exclusivist Anglocentrism as the basis for the Canadian national identity. They believed the imperial relationship was crucial for Canadian international prestige and relevance. But years of immigration by non-Britons, the accelerated pace of decolonization within the British Empire, and a major nationalist surge by French Canadians prompted the Canadian federal government to officially declare itself a multicultural nation in 1971. This represented an official acceptance of cultural diversity within Canadian society and ended overt appeals for cultural assimilation. This was a remarkably swift change for a state that had not even developed a formula for national citizenship until 1947, relying instead on the concept of British subjecthood for most of its existence.6 But this rapid construction of a new identity was not unique to the Canadian experience. At much the same time, Australia went through a similar metamorphosis from an Anglocentric identity to one of official multiculturalism . Constructing National Identity in Canadian and Australian Classrooms: The Crown of Education traces the development and eventual abandonment of the exclusivist and assimilationist identity centered on Britishness that had been at the heart of Victorian and Ontarian education in the mid-twentieth century.
Looking at this shift in national identity through the lens of education and within a comparative framework, this project addresses several critical questions regarding the cultural decolonization of Canada and Australia from the 1930s until the late 1970s. How did educators and government officials maintain and reinforce Anglocentrism and the imperial attachment in the 1940s and 1950s? And, by the 1960s and 1970s what forces drove the abandonment of Britishness as a critical component of the national identity? How did the educational establishment navigate the critical transition from Anglocentrism to multiculturalism , and in what ways did other actors in these societies contest, debate, and ultimately define this movement? Answering these questions helps us understand how Canadian and Australian national identities were constructed and contested in the critical decades from the Second World War through the 1970s.
Educational institutions offer a unique window into issues of national identity in settler societies since they were designed specifically to protect, defend, and reproduce views on the world deemed acceptable by policymakers. In the words of an Ontarian Royal Commission on education published in 1950: “Education is everybody’s business.”7 Ever since education became the responsibility of the state, it has been a primary means by which policymakers and intellectuals promote their notions of national identity.8 As the locus of national identity slowly shifted away from the concept of Britishness, this was powerfully evident in educational curricula , textbooks , and other materials that had to redefine how to teach, in a literal sense, what it meant to be Canadian or Australian.
Although educational systems often declare themselves value-free, historians have demonstrated that one purpose of public education is to produce “a national ethos, and an incontrovertible sense of political orthodoxy.”9 In Canada and Australia the schools were a critical site at which the intellectual elite constructed and disseminated an officially sanctioned version of the national identity. Textbooks, curricula , and educational publications provide a valuable lens for historians to view the evolution of national self-understanding.
Primary and secondary educational sources document this historically significant transition away from Britishness in the colonies of white settlement. The production of texts for primary and secondary schools was a complex process that occurred at the intersection of political, intellectual, and cultural constructions of the national identity. There are few places where officials in Canada and Australia were quite as explicit in defining the national identity as in textbooks and curricula meant for primary and secondary students. Educators and the political officials who approved their work transmitted the normative cultural ideals they found essential to pass down to the next generation. Educational materials, therefore, contained an officially sanctioned worldview for students deemed necessary for the preservation of the Australian and Canadian way of life.
The centrality of education to the process of national identity formation in the mid-twentieth century British World is widely acknowledged, but as yet there has been no full-length study on this important subject. Jatinder Mann ’s recent work examines the Australian and Canadian transition towards multiculturalism , and he acknowledges that education was a crucial component of the national identity in Canada.10 But he does not address Australian educational initiatives in his work. José Igartua argues in his work The Other Quiet Revolution that English Canadians, in the face of the French Canadian Quiet Revolution, swiftly abandoned their previous Anglocentric ethnic form of nationalism in the 1960s, replacing it with a sense of civic nationalism as a foundational principle.11 Both of these works raise important questions about the nature of Britishness after the Second World War, and they hold implications for the rest of the British Dominions. This project builds upon these insights by offering the first book-length study of the rise and demise of Britishness in education as a key site of national identity construction in Canada and Australia.
Canada and Australia are comparable not only because of the historical parallels in their development as colonies but also because they responded similarly to the collapse of the British Empire by officially designating themselves “multicultural nations,” thereby resolving the identity crisis brought on in part by that collapse.12 Because education in both places was a provincial or state responsibility, this study focuses on the province of Ontario and the state of Victoria as case studies of the challenge posed by the decline of a British-affiliated identity for the wider English-speaking communities of the two countries.13 Ontario and Victoria offer a valuable basis for comparison because of their large population size, which gave them a high degree of influence over the production of educational materials in Canada and Australia, and because of several other critical historical parallels, which together make the comparison of these locations appropriate and meaningful.
Ontario and Victoria were the second most populous territories in their countries. Both were dominated by a major urban center, Toronto in Ontario and Melbourne in Victoria, with a large and sparsely populated hinterland. For the time period under consideration, Ontario was the largest English-speaking province in Canada and the center of educational publication.14 Many publishers of textbooks focused on creating books that met Ontarian standards, and these materials were often used in schools throughout Canada. Victoria was also a major market for textbook publishers in Australia, and, along with New South Wales, considered one of the leading states in Australian education.15 Detailed analysis of textbooks is central to several chapters of the book, so the large population in both Ontario and Victoria and hence their importance to textbook production and marketing in Canada and Australia make these two territories crucial case studies for an understanding of educational developments in these nations as a whole.
Ontario and Victoria also shared numerous postwar historical similarities that revealed important parallels in the ways they used and ultimately discarded Britishness as an important component of their national identities. In the postwar era, Ontario and Victoria made education a major priority, as evidenced by the rapid rise in postwar educational expenditure.16 Both territories were major centers for postwar immigration , necessitating both an increase in the physical capacity of educational systems as well as attention to the special needs of non-British immigrant students. Since many of these new Canadians and Australians were not of British origin, their presence in the educational systems challenged officials and educators to alter the assimilationist policies that had promoted conformity to an Anglocentric ideal.
Critically, as Chaps. 4 and 5 show, both Ontario and Victoria experimented with new forms of religious education during and immediately after the Second World War, modeled in part on similar legislation occurring in England, to correct a perceived problem of moral decay. Their choices to make religious education compulsory were steeped in the rhetoric of Britishness and proved enormously controversial. The debates surrounding religious instruction in Ontario and Victoria over the next three decades reveal critical perspectives on issues of national identity and illuminate the changing understanding of Britishness in Canadian and Australian society.
This project supports the findings of British World scholarship that view the relationship with Britain and British culture as an essential component of the development of Canadian and Australian identity.17 The development of the British Dominions across the globe created a transnational system centered on the ideal of Britishness.18 The mass migration of Britons to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa created a series of communities with shared traditions and cultures. This scholarship has challenged older interpretations that viewed the relationship with Britain as an impediment to a unique and stable national ident...