The Denial of Bilingual Education in 1970s Ontario

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Exposing Majoritarian Narratives: Sociohistorical Misrepresentation and Mythology in Language Policy

Abstract

This final paper complements the first two insofar as it addresses Canada—a context often held up as the opposite, or at least the antidote, to political trends in the U.S., such as the rise of Trumpism. The paper takes as its starting point a key argument developed by Haque (2012) and Haque & Patrick (2014) in their historiographies of the Official Languages Act of 1969 and the Multiculturalism Policy of 1971. On the one hand, official bilingualism works to resolve one fundamental tension in the Canadian state, insofar as it re-organizes a White-settler identity to include both Anglophone and Francophone settlers. On the other, it exacerbates another fundamental tension by denying official status or rights to First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and (non-official) immigrant languages. In this way, official bilingualism (and related policies of multiculturalism) sustains and reproduces a hierarchy of minoritized and racialized languages.
The goal of this paper is to understand this contradiction from an historical perspective. This is not just a methodological choice. Instead, an historical or genealogical approach allows us to hold on to the openness of history, by recognizing that no matter how enduring they may appear, the structures and ideologies we live with today are in fact the result of past conflict and struggles. That is, the structures and ideologies created by past struggles can be recast or undone altogether by future struggles over the same.
The analytical focus of this paper is the Heritage Languages Program (HLP), an educational policy in Ontario that dates to the late 1970s, which continues to structure how Ontario’s youth learn heritage languages today. The paper is based on a larger genealogy of the policy, drawing from over 9,000 pages of scanned archival records of Ministry of Education papers, records from various school boards in greater Toronto, teachers’ unions, and immigrant activist organizations. The HLP was (and still is) a policy that allows students to study their ancestral or community language outside the regular school day with public funding. It was one of the most explosive education policy issues in 1970s and 1980s Ontario. The broader research project from which this paper stems is beginning to document how the HLP served to foreclose opportunities for bilingual education in Ontario. That is, while the policy provided minimal funding for a modest after-school language education program, it functioned in practice to thwart parent and teacher activist demands form this era for more substantial bilingual education. The current paper focuses on research trips made by Toronto Board of Education officials in the late 1970s to New York City (NYC) to study its nascent bilingual education programs. Drawing from three key working group reports and minutes of Board of Trustee meetings which reported the results and interpretation of the research trips, the paper traces how conservative board officials used bilingual education programs in NYC as a foil to counter efforts to expand multilingual education programs in Toronto’s schools.

Author

• Jeff Bale, University of Toronto - OISE