What is it about?
This article examines the description of social structures and social inequality in 19th-century Ontario, Canada, in the schoolbooks used in elementary schools from about 1840 to 1910. It shows how these books selectively portrayed the social structure of the time, and encouraged children to adopt specific social values and expectations for social mobility.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
An empirical content analysis which sheds important light on the formation of values and attitudes in the early period of industrialization. While the schoolbooks clearly support the distribution of wealth emerging during that time, they also contain misjudgements and wrong assessments of features of 19th-century society which run counter to dominant interests. The article therefore shows the complexity of the relationship between social class and social culture.
Perspectives
Meenaz Kassam and I used an archive of all approved schoolbooks for this period, some of which still contained dried flowers the children must have inserted between the pages some 150 years ago. This study gives a unique insight into a time during which modern values and attitudes toward social inequality emerged. The books presented a static view of society, discouraged 'unrealistic' ambitions, and suggested that hardship and pain were an inevitable part of the lives of poor and rich alike. The educational bureaucracy which approved the books was also keenly aware of the role schoolbooks had in reducing the potential for social conflict. For all their ideological bent, however, the books also offered a simple but broad curriculum for the four years of schooling most children got at the time.
Professor Bernd Baldus
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: "Make Me Truthful, Good, and Mild": Values in Nineteenth-Century Ontario Schoolbooks, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, January 1996, JSTOR,
DOI: 10.2307/3341770.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
