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Article Excerpt
Introduction
Sybil Shack helped define education in the province of Manitoba, Canada, as much as Manitoba and its schools defined her. She was a teacher, teaching principal, textbook writer, educational writer, broadcaster, leader of teachers' organizations, and civil libertarian. Her influence extended to the nation-at-large reaching the profile of a national public figure.
This article sets her life history as the context for a discussion of her ideas and professional involvement. (1) This approach is grounded in the thesis that Sybil Shack's views on educational issues were rooted in her lived experience not only as a student and as a teacher, but also as a child of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled in the north end of Winnipeg, an ebullient political neighbourhood. Her parents introduced her to socialist and humanistic ideals instilled in her a love for freedom, egalitarianism, and a sense of identity. Her life history provides a window to recreate life and schooling in Manitoba in the first half of the century while helping to understand how she construed the ideas, she expounded.
Sybil Shack's ideas were published in various venues, mostly teachers' magazines and refer to her professional work. She did not pretend to be a scholar. In fact, she distrusted academic educators and their conclusions. Instead, Sybil Shack engaged teachers and the public in the issues of the time. She was guided by her profound belief in the articulation of theory and practice, her own practice, and her belief in the role of public education in cultivating and strengthening the Canadian polity, the professionalization of teaching, women's rights, and freedom of thought and expression. Rather than creating a new body of knowledge, Sybil critiqued the social institutions and practices of which she was part. At the core of her arguments, there was always the intersection of Canadianism that she absorbed at school, non-marxist socialist ideas, civic humanistic values, and civil libertarian views of freedom. (2) Not surprisingly, at one point or another, she embraced pedagogically progressive ideas and she even applied the project method that was known in Alberta in the 1930s. (3) In the last part of the article, I focus on Sybil Shack's understanding of the role of public education in articulating a Canadian polity and related issues of freedom, diversity, and nationhood. I examine Sybil's mistrust of multiculturalism in the early seventies and her notion of a Canada differentiated from the United States. Her own life history provides an explanation of her inability to break with early political and ideological frameworks to embrace new social demands.
Family Background and Manitoba Context
Sybil Shack's very presence in Manitoba was the result of the mass immigration movement that brought a diversity of people to Canada. She was the daughter of Alexander Shack and Pauline Katz Shack. Sybil Shack's father's family arrived in Canada in 1903 from Odessa (now in Ukraine), when Alexander was nineteen, while her mother's family, originally from western Ukraine, had come to Canada in 1904, after a sojourn in New Jersey. Both families left behind memories of injustice, compulsory military service in spite of being disenfranchised, and lack of rights even to own their land. (4) Thanks to the pen-strokes of French Canadian immigration officers who shortened a long, and--to their minds--difficult name, Sybil Shack's father officially became Alexander "Shack." Thus, he was able to found a family in Manitoba with a Canadianized surname. Her father had graduated in Odessa from a Jewish technical school where he took a trade, half-days in the trade and half-days in the academic program. He was a polyglot whose languages included Russian, Ukrainian, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish (the language spoken by his family) and "had a background rooted in socialism, humanism, and intellectualism." (5) Both of Sybil Shack's parents were also literate in English. From the time that her father entered Canada, he began learning English on his own. However, he held blue-collar jobs and his salary was just enough to keep the family well. In an anecdote shared with the author and a group of women, Sybil Shack recalled that her father once told her that his first reading of English was a sign in a shop window the day he got off the train and walked down Main Street in Winnipeg. The sign read: HELP WANTED. NO ENGLISHMAN NEED APPLY. She concluded ironically, by saying "the remittance men were not popular in a town which was founded by Scots." (6) For Sybil Shack's mother, Pauline, formal education started in the Italian section of New York and ended at age fourteen, in grade eight, in Winnipeg. Pauline Shack had a strong business sense, and when Mr. Shack was out of work, she opened up and ran a small store with great success, but when he got a permanent job, she closed the shop and returned to her duties as homemaker. She inspired Sybil, and in some ways resembled the women described by Sybil in chapter two of her book Saturday's Stepchildren. (7)
The Shacks and their families joined a vibrant Jewish community from Eastern Europe that had made Winnipeg, a real centre of Canadian Jewry, their home. (8) Sybil Frances Shack was born in 1911, during a period of marked public consciousness of the demographic shifts in immigration that had brought her parents to Canada. By the mid-and late-1910s educational and political leaders identified the large number of non-British newcomers to Manitoba as a public issue. In 1918, the Minister of Education, R. S. Thornton, in his address to the Manitoba Educational Association, emphasized the need to bring newcomers more quickly into Canadian national life, and into the life of the province. (9)
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Schools in Manitoba aimed at a form of Canadianism that was rooted in Anglo-conformity. In 1916, the year before Sybil Shack started school, the legislature repealed the section of the Public Schools Act permitting bilingual instruction, and it unanimously approved the School Attendance Act. While communities such as the Franco-Manitoban one, entered into a phase of active resistance, she argued in her historical writing that such measures were necessary to secure Canadian unity and identity, and to restore some order to the linguistic chaos generated by hundreds of one-room schoolhouses in which no word of English was spoken or taught. (10)
Shack's Early Life
Sybil Shack's formal education began in Winnipeg in 1917 at the William Whyte School (a school that had been built in the north end for immigrants and their children), where, according to her recollection, probably two-thirds or more of the pupils were Jewish that first year. (11) During Sybil's early life, the Shack family moved several times, first to northern Manitoba, and then to Veregin, Saskatchewan, home to a Doukhobor community, which Sybil felt offered insight into a very interesting and genuine communal life. Again, there were not many English-speaking families in the district, and Sybil Shack completed two grades in one year in Saskatchewan. In 1920, however, the family returned to Winnipeg, where Sybil was able to complete her studies. (12) The return to Winnipeg underlined the fact that Sybil was indeed a daughter of the north end, where her parents had met, married, and where she was born in 1911 in the bedroom behind her grandparents' store on Pritchard Avenue. Shack's detailed descriptions of her colourful neighbourhood on Boyd Avenue also attest to her sense of belonging there:
Our next door neighbours to the west, when I was a little girl, were the Dahlstroms ... Her voice, with its interesting Swedish lilt, was a familiar part of my childhood. One of the first things I learned from the Dahlstroms was that homes had different smells. Our house, and the houses of my aunts and cousins, smelled of familiar foods, of fish cooking, and chicken fat being rendered, and onions frying, and bread baking, and clothes being boiled in the large copper boiler on the kitchen range. Mrs. Dahlstrom's house had completely different smells, because, as I learned very soon, she used fats for frying that were forbidden to Jews. Strictly speaking, I wasn't supposed to eat anything in her house because it was not kosher, but I can confess now that I loved her cookies, especially those that Tekla, her daughter, used to sneak out to us kids. To the east of us lived the Hinkels, who spoke only German at home because old Mrs. Hinkel, the grandmother, knew no English. She had been a midwife in the old country, and in spite of her age still officiated (illegally, of course) when a doctor was not obtained, or was too expensive. (13)
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The Shack family that included Sybil, her parents, and Freda who was five years younger than Sybil, lived on Boyd Avenue at the time. Later in life Sybil recalled passing shop windows with signs in various languages, Chinese (mostly laundry), German, Yiddish; later Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese. She wrote:
On windy days newspapers in those languages blew against our legs as we walked to school, and demanded our attention. We picked up the laundry and carried home the groceries wrapped in them. It was no accident that so...
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