Life history as a window to understanding the politics of teaching and schooling: Manitoba teacher Sybil Shack (1911-2004).

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)