JAC Volume 16 Issue 3

These three books provide an excellent introduction to the history of postsecondary education in Canada and the state of writing instruction in contemporary Canadian universities. Huberts Harmonious Perfection and Graves' Writing Instruction in Canadian Universities are already standard reading for Canada's relatively few writing instructors and students of rhetoric; along with Emberley and Newell's Bankrupt Education, the three make substantial use of Canadian-American comparisons and thus also provide a helpful resource for readers interested in how and why Canadian postsecondary education and writing instruction have developed differently from trends in the United States.

The three volumes reflect differing attitudes toward and treatments of history: Bankrupt Education is an intellectual history, Harmonious Perfection is a social/material history, and Writing Instruction in Canadian Universities combines historical and futurist perspectives to assess writing instruction in Canada. And while Hubert's and Graves' concerns and issues will seem familiar to rhetoricians, thus having greater appeal for readers of JAC, because of Emberley and Newell's positioning as political scientists—which brings a philosopher's rather than an orator's perspective to bear on their work—many of their claims about truth, the canon, and multiculturalism may not sit easily with rhetoricians. Emberley and Newell's book speaks out of the liberal education tradition in Canada, however, and it shows clearly, if indirectly, why rhetoric and writing instruction has never had a prominent position in Canadian postsecondary education.

Presenting a short history of liberal education from Plato to Hegel, Emberley and Newell's Bankrupt Education explains how that tradition was adapted to Canadian education in the nineteenth century. Their genealogy looks very much like what Bruce Kimball, in Orators and Philosophers, calls the philosopher's version of liberal education: a pursuit of Truth through geometry and dialectic for Plato or a pursuit of truth through the sciences from the Enlightenment on. The authors do stress a balanced education involving the arts, but for them the goal of a liberal education always remains "still, quiet encounters with the truth" (65). Their history ignores the Isocratean, Ciceronian, Quintilian tradition of liberal education, much as Canadian postsecondary education has ignored that tradition.

To illustrate what they see as the differing receptions of liberal education in Canada and the U.S., Emberley and Newell compare Thomas Jefferson's failed educational philosophy to the largely successful educational views of the prophet of Canadian Confederation, Thomas D'Arcy McGee. Although Jefferson and McGee held similar outlooks on liberal education, Emberley and Newell argue that the American educational system—built on pragmatism, utilitarianism, and scientism—was not receptive to Jefferson's ideas. The U.S., they contend, is an eighteenth-century Enlightenment nation, while Canada is a nineteenth-century Victorian nation that values tradition and freedom.

According to Emberley and Newell, liberal education in Canada has only recently failed because the proper focus on virtue or arete has been replaced by partisan views from both the right and the left. They argue that curricula have become hybrids of "social grievance, workplace behaviours, sociological experimentation, and intellectual fashion" (27). The corporate takeover of schooling is as destructive to liberal education as is the deconstructive fashions that these two neo-Hegelians find so shallow, yet pervasive, in university communities. Finding fault with both the right and the left leaves Emberley and Newell in the classic but discredited state of detached judgment associated with liberal education.

In Harmonious Perfection, Hubert balances his intellectual history with political and social analysis of anti-American, pro-British sentiments in Canada. Besides being a British colony, British North America was a refuge for the United Empire Loyalists after the American Revolution. Anti-American sentiment was strengthened by the War of 1812, and the war ensured that American culture and education would be resisted in British North America. As Hubert explains, "This distrust of American culture in politics, religion, and education would influence the development of colleges in the colonies of British North America until Confederation in 1867—and even after that" (26).

Hubert stresses that the consequence of this anti-American sentiment was a particularly receptive climate for Hegelian and Arnoldian idealism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Within English departments, this epistemology generated an anti-rhetorical philosophy that persists even today (178). However, Hubert sees in Egerton Ryerson, a Wesleyan Methodist and founder of Victoria College (now a part of the University of Toronto), a Canadian tradition of rhetorical or social democratic education. He notes the presence of other nineteenth-century Canadian teachers of English who showed an interest in rhetoric but were unable to disrupt the hegemony of liberal education and its elitist values. Harmonious Perfection outlines three periods of the development of English departments in Canada, each moving further away from Ryerson's balance of rhetoric and poetics and closer to the modern specialization in literature.

Graves' short history of writing instruction in Canada is much indebted to Hubert's Harmonious Perfection in its earlier form as a dissertation, but Graves adds a closer analysis of modern developments. Anti-American sentiment is less of an issue in Writing Instruction in Canadian Universities, but Graves does point out some important institutional differences. He observes, "The lack of large-scale freshman composition programs constitutes perhaps the single most obvious difference that distinguishes writing instruction in Canadian universities from American universities" (67). Graves also points to the absence of a strong administrative structure overseeing writing instruction and the dispersal of responsibility into various departments as other significant differences.

Graves' hero from the past is not Ryerson but Daniel Fogarty, Dean of Education at St. Mary's University in Halifax. Fogarty drew on the work of I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, and the General Semantics movement "in an effort to assemble a modern rhetoric that could be used in teaching" (qtd. in Graves 27). His impact was not immediate, but his text represents, according to Graves, an important departure from the values of Canada's leading literary critic, Northrop Frye. Two years before the publication of Fogarty's work, Frye wrote: "The English teacher's ideal is the exact opposite of effective communication,' or learning to become audible in the marketplace. What he has to teach is the verbal expression of truth, beauty and wisdom: in short, the disinterested use of words" (qtd. in Graves 26). Fogarty's views have found increasing support in the last 30 years, but Frye's influence on English studies and writing instruction in Canada still far exceeds Fogarty's. Rhetoric and writing instruction in Canada have not been professionalized as they have been in the U.S.—writing instructors in Canada concentrate on "surviving, not thriving" (38)—but university-wide interest in writing instruction has spawned more writing-intensive courses.

The core of Graves' book is not his history but the reporting of a survey he sent to the deans of all undergraduate faculties in the 87 schools that comprise Canada's university system. His survey found that only one university offers comprehensive first-year composition in Canada, that only four writing-across-the-curriculum programs exist, and that much writing instruction takes place outside of English departments, about two-thirds of it by non-permanent staff. Graves believes that the amount of writing instruction done outside of English departments indicates that other departments and faculties feel a need for practical instruction, a need thwarted by the cultural goals of Canada's very traditional English departments. The challenge for Canadian universities, Graves suggests, is to convert this "unplanned policy" shift toward more writing instruction into organized change. And the most likely direction for change, he argues, is through writing-across-the-curriculum or writing-in-the-disciplines programs.

Although each of these books utilizes Canadian and American contrasts to clarify uniquely Canadian features of education and writing instruction, in doing so not one of them fairly assesses the importance and popularity of liberal education or the resistance to writing instruction that exists in American universities. Emberley and Newell note the presence of American Hegelians in St. Louis during the middle of the nineteenth century, and Hubert notes a similarity in the liberal attitudes of eastern American schools and Canadian colleges; but both shape a distinctly Canadian tradition by contrasting it with a monolithic characterization of American culture and education. Graves escapes this problem by emphasizing differences between clearly identifiable administrative structures rather than ambiguous cultural preferences, and he raises the difficult question of which culture dominates in Canada: British, American, or a uniquely Canadian culture? Thoroughly developed interpretations of Canadian education that rely on contrasts with American education would significantly benefit from closer and more complex analyses of American education and culture.

One can also see the authors' different attitudes toward history in their treatments of nationalism. The inclination to recover the past in order to guide the present permeates Bankrupt Education. Emberley and Newell believe that the ideal of liberal education stretching from Plato to Hegel is still relevant today, but they do nothing to acknowledge the conflict between orators and philosophers that is central to an understanding of this tradition and its relevance for contemporary education. Hubert also finds positive precedence in the past in Ryerson's balanced rhetoric and poetics curriculum, but in suggesting that this balance is relevant for modern English departments, Hubert is carefully selecting only one aspect of Ryerson's moral and religious educational philosophy. Although understanding Ryerson's position in Canadian educational history seems important for understanding how and why liberal education came to dominate educational philosophy in Canada, resurrecting him and his essentially classical curriculum would not seem to address modern curricular challenges. For Graves, the need for practical English can be met through WAC or WID, not through a balance of rhetoric and poetics, and his interest in Fogarty does not translate into an acceptance of his pedagogy. Instead, Graves uses Stuart Smith's Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Canadian University Education and Robert Reich's The Work of Nations to analyze the current state of education in Canada and writing instruction's futures. Rather than look to rhetoric's past for an ideal of education, Graves accepts Reich's argument that an ideal education for "symbolic analysts" involves developing four basic skills: "abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration."

Scholars of rhetoric and composition likely will not find Bankrupt Education's argument for a return to liberal education convincing, but they may appreciate its analysis of Canadian politics and its political-science perspective on the history of liberal education. Harmonious Perfection is an extremely rich history, both in its account of the development of English studies in Canada and its analysis of British and Scottish rhetorical history. However, I am surprised that Hubert, after closely delineating three distinct periods of nineteenth-century English study development, concludes that the pattern for English education in the twentieth century was largely set. His generalization certainly has some merit, but I think a close analysis of twentieth-century English studies in Canada will yield distinct periods of interests and levels of professionalization, and not simply a straight line of influence from 1884 to 1959 and beyond. Graves provides a glimpse of what writing instruction in Canada has looked like from Fogarty on, but the historically minded need even more analysis of the twentieth century; his survey will likely inspire closer study of cases in point and will increase not only our understanding of writing instruction in Canada but the policies that institutionalize it.

For Canadian scholars of rhetoric and poetics, these books contribute significantly to a sense of self-understanding; for American scholars, they provide an excellent introduction to liberal education, English studies, and writing instruction in Canada. Americans, however, may also be surprised to find the degree to which Canadian culture and education is shaped in relation to, often in direct opposition to, American culture and education.