Affecting Eternity : Origins of the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Education

John Calam

It provides us with a deep understanding of the issues surrounding the role of schools, teachers, and teacher education in the province in the twentieth century. [...] My memory of Neville Scarfe and his contemporaries, and of the faculty members of my own times (and I am sure this applies to the times that followed), are of people, artists, performers, scholars, all of them teachers, eager and able to improve the education of children, no mat- ter what the program was. [...] Philosopher, poet, and writer on major edu- cational concepts, Coleman brought to UBC and continued to cultivate such progressive ideologies as the social significance of play, democracy and the schoolroom, education and nature, education for leisure, and the individual and social ends of education. [...] As a result of Weir’s absences—first to co-author with J. Harold Putman a commissioned survey of the B. C. school system; later to fulfill his pol- itical ambitions in the cause of provincial liberalism—UBC’s department headship in education fell in an acting capacity to Daniel Buchanan, then head of the Department of Mathematics. [...] In particular it is the story of two powerful bodies: the B. C. Department of Education wielding fiscal and curricular control of the provincial school system and teacher certification; and UBC, steward of ancient academic values and eventually the province’s intellectual centre of gravity.