Hilda Neatby's 1950s and My 1950s

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2006 by Dewar, Kenneth C

Hilda Neatby (1904-76), long-time professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, came into her own during the 1950s. A member of the Massey Commission, which reported in 1951, and author of So Little for the Mind (1953), a critique of progressive education, she acquired a high profile based on both of these endeavours. This essay argues that, in her concept of nationhood, her intellectual seriousness, and her posture of moral leadership, Neatby exemplified traits widely shared among others of her generation, and that these traits were manifested as her generation came into its own in the 1950s. The essay reflects on the significance of the decade, partly on the basis of the author's own experience.

Hilda Neatby (1904-1976), professeure d'histoire pendant longtemps à l'université de la Saskatchewan, se fit connaître dans les années 1950. Membre de la Commission Massey qui présenta son rapport en 1951 et auteure de So Little for the Mind, une critique de l'enseignement progressif publiée en 1953, elle se tailla une réputation à partir de ces deux activités. Le présent article avance qu'avec son concept d'esprit national, sa gravité intellectuelle et sa position de leadership moral, Mme Neatby présentait des traits qui étaient partagés par beaucoup d'autres personnes de sa génération dans les années 1950. L'article se penche sur l'importance de cette décennie en se fondant en partie sur l'expérience de l'auteur.

I was taught not self-expression but self-control, not confrontation but respect for my seniors, not to go after flower power or student power or sit-ins or live-ins but to do my duty.1

(Hilda Neatby, quoted in Hayden 1983c, 10)

Hilda Neatby, long-time professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, came into her own in the 1950s, which were also her fifties. Born in England in 1904, she was an infant when her family immigrated to Canada two years later, settling first in the tiny village of Earl Grey, Saskatchewan, north of Regina, and then on a farm further to the northwest, near Watrous. Growing up in conditions of genteel poverty, Neatby attended the University of Saskatchewan in the early 1920s and later went on to do graduate work at the University of Minnesota under A.L. Hurt, a respected historian of the "Old Province of Quebec"-that is, Quebec after the Conquest. Completing her PhD in the midst of the Great Depression, she found herself looking for an academic post when they were few and far between, a situation made decidedly worse by male academics' suspicions about female intruders. The fact that she received an appointment at Regina College in 1934, another at the University of Toronto (though only temporary) 10 years later, and a third at Saskatchewan in 1946 was testament to her strength of will as well as her professional competence. She became the leading anglophone authority in Burt's field and, as head of the Saskatchewan history department from 1958 to 1969, she guided her department through the challenges of rising enrolment, curriculum expansion, and student unrest (Hayden 1983c).

It was not her expertise in history that made her name, however, but her appointment in 1949 as a member of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, which became famous as the Massey Commission. Participating in public hearings across the country and other commission activities, Neatby acquired a national profile. She also formed a close working relationship with the chairman and future governor general, Vincent Massey, who encouraged her, morally and financially, in her independent investigation of the state of public schooling-independent because the subject fell under provincial, rather than federal, jurisdiction. The result was the publication in 1953 of her famously astringent assault on the principles and practices of progressive education, So Little for the Mind. During the ensuing controversy, Neatby talked and wrote more about the ills besetting the education of Canadian children than she did about eighteenth-century Quebec. In doing so, she became a prominent public intellectual (e.g., Neatby 1954b).

The Massey Commission and the debate aroused by So Little for the Mind were emblematic of a decade that we too often remember through the sentimental haze of nostalgia for ducktail haircuts and drive-in movies, and that we too often think of as the staid, stable, and repressive mirror image of the exhilarating, turbulent, and liberating decade that followed. The premise of this essay is that, from the perspective of Hilda Neatby, the 1950s may be seen in a slightly different light from that cast by the mythic simplicities of popular culture, or even from that so far offered by historians of the era. One hastens to add that historians of the era are not all that numerous (though growing more so), with the result that what I am offering here is more by way of a proposition than a thesis (e.g., Owram 1996; Korinek 2000; Parr 1999; Christie and Gauvreau 2003; Kuffert 2003). I want to suggest that Neatbys thought and the manner in which she expressed it offer a means of examining the pivotal character of the decade, which (I also want to suggest) was more significant in its dull and quiet way than its more colourful and exciting successor.