Published
October 1, 2003
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Abstract
The quarter of a century between 1972 and 1996 witnessed
the end of the Imperial Age of school administration in British
Columbia. The historical pattern of strong central control which
had directed the course of provincial schooling for a century
was beginning to unravel even before the 1960s were over,
prompted in part by a malaise inside educational government and
by new forces in and outside schools. Although provincial
authorities entered the 1970s still confident in their capacity
to control and direct public education, the Ministry of
Education found itself before the decade ended, like Napoleon’s
army retreating from Moscow, bewildered by an unfamiliar
landscape and harried on all sides by adversaries who seemed to
materialize from nowhere, each with its own special brief for
provincial schools. By the 1980s, the province’s education
bureaucracy, once the dominant and solitary voice in school
affairs, was obliged to compete on the public policy stage with
a chorus of others eager to contest the province’s right to
speak on behalf of children. By the mid-1990s, the rising power
of the teachers’ Federation, increasing parental and public
demands for participation in educational decisions, and the
Ministry of Education’s ambiguity about its own purpose had all
served, in various ways, to reduce the province’s leadership in
public education.
