Border Crossings: US Culture and Education in Saskatchewan, 1905-1937, by Kerry Alcorn

Abstract

Border Crossings: US Culture and Education in Saskatchewan, 1905-1937, by Kerry Alcorn. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queens University Press, 2013. viii, 218 pp. (paper). Kerry Alcorn's Border Crossings: US Culture and Education in Saskatchewan, 1905-1937 has a simple, yet important, point to make: education and much of the broader cultural formation in western Canada, especially the political culture, owed much to the influence of the United States. Indeed, using Saskatchewan as the case study, Alcorn's work stands in stark opposition to the writings of several prominent scholars of Canadian educational history (and one could say in opposition to an older understanding of Canadian history itself). Collectively these scholars of education have tended to assume that the broad outlines of the history of education policy and cultural development that prevailed in Ontario --rooted in British practice and in the values of the dominant Anglo-Celtic elite which were often overtly anti-American--can be applied, with minor regional variations, to western Canada. In contrast, Alcorn argues that it was the US, especially the Midwestern and Plains regions, which provided the real model for the educational system that was put in place in the newly created province of Saskatchewan between 1905 and the depression years. Moreover, Alcorn argues that the greatest part of the intellectual inheritance of Saskatchewan's emerging educational system was rooted in the profoundly American philosophy of Pragmatism, while the overtly political manifestations of the province's culture owed much to American Populism and Progressivism. In many ways Border Crossings is a proud and self-conscious throwback to the continentalist approach undertaken by scholars such as Paul Sharp and Seymour Martin Lipset in their earliest works (The Agrarian Revolt and Agrarian Socialism respectively), but it is also leavened by an appreciation of Borderlands studies approaches and by theoretical formulations that are far more post-modernist in orientation than either Sharp or Lipset--or heaven forbid, Walter Prescott Webb--would ever have embraced. Still, it is the work of an older generation upon which the author builds: W.L. Morton, A.S. Morton, Sharp, Webb, and Lipset come to mind in this regard, and even Fredrick Jackson Turner gets the occasional favourable mention. Meanwhile, it is a somewhat younger, but still well established, generation of educational historians--notably George Tomkins and Alison Prentice--whose work of the 1970s and 1980s Alcorn most directly challenges. Perhaps because of this appreciation or critique of such classics, historians reading Border Crossings may well find Alcorn's appreciation of Canadian and American historiography somewhat antiquated; indeed, there are moments when it almost seems as if Donald Creighton and Harold Adam Innis were still alive and well and the Laurentian thesis still the dominant paradigm in Canadian history--and thus the intellectual dragon that Alcorn must slay. …