Much of the literature appearing within the past decade on the reform and centralization of urban school governance throughout America from 1890 to 1920 has dwelled upon the influence of bureaucracy and social class to the neglect of very significant ethnic and religious factors. Only token recognition, if any, is granted to ethnicity and religion by Michael Katz and others who depict the centralization movement nearly exclusively as a class effort displaying an anti-working class bias and born out of an elitist thrust for power. From this perspective, the contests for school reform as outlined for New York, Boston and elsewhere appear one-dimensional in nature and over simplified.

Undifferentiated fear of left-wing radicalism, defined by its enemies as ‘militant socialism’ or ‘Bolshevism,’ has had important consequences for schools in western societies during certain crucial periods. In the years immediately following the Russian revolution, public education in Britain, North America and Australasia was subjected to intense pressure aimed at making schools assume a greater role in resisting subversion. This pressure, in many instances, was to lead not only to increased instruction in patriotism but also to the systematic monitoring of teacher and pupil loyalty. In the United States many state legislatures instituted loyalty oaths for teachers, while the investigations of the Lusk Committee resulted in the dismissal of teachers suspected of harbouring left-wing sympathies. In New Zealand the introduction of compulsory school flag-saluting and teacher's loyalty oaths during 1921 were roughly contemporary and were similarly motivated. Apart from affording an interesting comparison with larger countries, New Zealand, with its largely centralised education system and small population, was a country where public fear of left-wing radicalism was unhesitantly expressed and where appropriate educational remedies were quickly tried. In particular, this article considers three vital factors which shaped patriotic education in New Zealand schools during the early 1920s: the widespred, generalised public alarm over left-wing militancy; the attempts, largely by professional educators, to shape syllabus requirements to counter the possible subversion of school children; and the Government's increasing willingness to resort to regulation and legislation to weed out disloyal teachers.

Into the 1970s Canadian professors, on the whole, were not much involved in politics or in public controversy. In The Vertical Mosaic (1965), the eminent sociologist John Porter wrote of Canada: “It would probably be hard to find another modern political system with such a paucity of participation from its scholars.” Two political scientists noted in 1967: “Ideological contributions of intellectuals to any party have been slim, certainly since the League for Social Reconstruction helped the young CCF draft the Regina Manifesto of 1933.” Another political scientist complained in 1970 that Canadian professors “… have become [sic] intellectually conservative and loath to engage in controversy that has not been sanctioned by their professional norms.”

Prof. Mattingly:

Welcome to this Symposium, “Institutionalization and Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” This afternoon we hope to initiate several lines of inquiry which will be productive in the historical study of institutionalization and education. Both of these notions have become increasingly important in all disciplines of American scholarship, and in a sense in proportion to this heightened significance their meaning becomes progressively confused. It would not be totally out of place to make that ratio one of the maxims for studying both institutions and education today.