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Disciplining the Student Body: Schooling and the Construction of Canadian Children's Bodies, 1930–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Mona Gleason*
Affiliation:
Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia

Extract

In the spring of 1957, journalist Sidney Katz wrote a story for Maclean's Magazine entitled “The Lost Children of British Columbia” which detailed the disturbing events leading up to the forcible removal of 100 Doukhobor children from their New Denver homes by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers. The children, all between the ages of seven and fourteen, were taken to the New Denver Dormitory, located approximately 260 miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, where they remained until they reached the age of fifteen. They were not permitted to speak their native Russian, visit home (although parents were allowed brief, supervised visits to the dormitory), take holidays, or visit friends and relatives in the nearby town of New Denver.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Katz, SidneyThe Lost Children of British Columbia,“ in Canada from the Newsstands ed. Clary, Val (Toronto: McMillan of Canada, 1978), 89100.Google Scholar

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5 Some recently completed theses and dissertations make important contributions to the topic. In the Canadian context see Hart Caplan, ‘“A Law Unto Oneself: Compulsory Schooling and the Creation of the Student('s) Body in New Brunswick, 1850–1914,” (MA Thesis, University of New Brunswick, 1998); Margaret Ptolemy, “A Postmodern Exploration of the Discourse(s) of Childhood and How They Produce the Active Child's Body: A Case Study of Toronto Parks and Recreation Documents (Ontario),” (MSC, University of Toronto, 1998). American studies include Rebecca Noel, “Schooling the Body: The Intersection of Educational and Medical Reform in New England, 1800–1860,” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1999); and Donna Bailey, “Excess, Intimacy, and Discipline: Curriculum of the Body in the Early Childhood Classroom,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998).Google Scholar

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19 For the role of psychologists in this process see Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).Google Scholar

20 van Manen, Max and Levering, Bas Childhood's Secrets—Intimacy, Privacy, and the Self Reconsidered (New York: Teacher's College Press, 1996), 9394. See also Andrew J. Strathern, Body Thoughts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 1–2; Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Mindful Body,” Medical Anthropology 1 (1977): 6–41; Thomas Csordas, “Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology,” Ethos 18 (1990): 36–51.Google Scholar

21 Canada was not, of course, unique in this respect. See for example Christina Florin and Ulla Johansson, “Three Cultures, Three Stories: Discipline in Grammar Schools, Private Girl's Schools, and Elementary Schools in Sweden, 1850–1900,” in Discipline, Moral Regulation, and Schooling eds., Rousmaniere, Dehli, and de Coninck-Smith, 73–96.Google Scholar

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37 In the European context, Bruce Curtis has shown how shifts in punishment from corporal to moral and emotional suasion shored up bourgeois hegemony. Curtis, “ ‘My Ladie Birchley must needes rule': Punishment and the Materialization of Moral Character from Mulcaster to Lancaster,” in Discipline, Moral Regulation, and Schooling, 19–42.Google Scholar

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41 As Kate Rousmaniere found amongst New York teachers in the 1920s, “successful” teachers were those who achieved student compliance through moral suasion rather than physical punishment. Rousmaniere, “Losing Patience and Staying Professional”; Dianne M. Hallman, “ ‘A Thing of the Past': Teaching in One-Room Schools in Rural Nova Scotia, 1936–1941,” Historical Studies in Education 4 (1992): 115; Harry Smaller, “Regulating the Regulators.”Google Scholar

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62 Similar findings regarding the implications of space as a refuge for outlawed or taboo sexual and social activity in other contexts include Karen Dubinsky, The Second Greatest Disappointment—Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1999). Steven Maynard, “Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890–1930,” in Gender and History in Canada eds. Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld (Toronto: Copp Clark Ltd., 1996), 165–184.Google Scholar

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72 As Shirley Pendergast has argued, competitive athletics are particularly suited to acceptable notions of active, dominant, male bodies: sports “prioritize energy, action, and size…this reaches its epitome in the drama of formal, organized sports.” Shirley Pendergast, “ ‘Throwing Like a Girl…. But Catching Like a Boy': Some Thoughts on Gender and Embodiment in Secondary School,” Children, Health and the Body Conference—Conference Papers (Department of Child Studies, Linkoping University, Sweden, April 26, 1996), 9.Google Scholar

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84 Examples include Henry Davis, Carl ed., Gynecology and Obstetrics, Volume 1 (Hagerstown, Maryland: W.F. Prior Company, Inc., 1935); William P. Graves, Gynecology (Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders, 1929), 158. Although these textbooks were produced in the United States, they were among those used to train Canadian doctors. I am indebted to Wendy Mitchinson for these references.Google Scholar

85 Ibid. Google Scholar

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