HISTORY OF EDUCATION COURSES IN THE PREPARATION OF CANADIAN TEACHERS

Abstract

Recent publications on both sides of the Atlantic foreshadow as lively a debate on the nature and purpose of history of education during the decade of the 1970's as Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society provoked during the 1960's. What was missing during the previous decade was a concerted attempt to relate the debate to the Canadian scene. This gap must be filled in the coming decade. Exciting developments in the historiography of American and British education, plus repeated criticisms of educational history by both "academic" historians and educational administrators in Canada give the problem a certain urgency. The time has arrived, therefore, to ask some basic questions about the place of history of education courses in the preparation of Canadian teachers. Does history of education have a place? If it does, then how prominent a place - as a required or an elective component of teacher education programs? What kind of history of education? Basic questions such as these lead naturally to the more fundamental questions of the very nature and purpose of history of education.