A Review of Selected Materials in the Educational History of Western Canada: Opportunities for Further Research

Abstract

The study of the history of education in Western Canada presents educational historians, particularly those interested in reinterpretation and revision, with almost unlimited opportunities. The majority of the relatively small number of publications in this field, a few provincial histories and a small number of articles scattered through the periodicals, tend to glorify past educational achievements as logical steps in the inevitable march of the progress of schooling. Given the quickening interest in "new" interpretations of educational history which this journal has witnessed in the past five years it would appear that the history of education in Western Canada is open to revision. Writing on the historiography of education in the United States Patricia Rooke opened the way for subsequent articles by Donald Wilson and David Jones which examined the subject in Canadian context. 1 Wilson and Jones indicated the revisionist advances made in Ontario and there is evidence to suggest that a similar trend is under way in Western Canada.