How Schools Worked
How Schools Worked

Author: R.D. Gidney

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2012-02-21

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0773587306

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Between the 1880s and the 1940s, children in English Canada encountered schools and school systems profoundly different from today's. In How Schools Worked, R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar map the contours of that world, retrieving it from the obscurity created not only by the passage of time but by fundamental shifts in organization, pedagogical values, and beliefs about the role of public education. Moving beyond the rhetoric on school reform that marked the period, How Schools Worked focuses squarely on schooling itself. How many children went to elementary or secondary school, how often, and for how long? What was the range of their educational attainments? How were their patterns of attendance influenced by social class, gender, and where they lived? What and how were they taught? How were they assessed and promoted from grade to grade? What were their teachers' qualifications and experience? What were their school buildings like? Who paid the bills and how much did they pay? How well or badly were children and young people served by their schools? And how did answers to these questions change over time? A sympathetic yet critical analysis, How Schools Worked is a portrait of a complex enterprise at work. Gidney and Millar offer a rich understanding of the period, a reappraisal of some major debates, and insights into educational issues that perplex us still.

Children in English-Canadian Society
Children in English-Canadian Society

Author: Neil Sutherland

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0889205892

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“So often a long-awaited book is disappointing. Happily such is not the case with Sutherland’s masterpiece.” Robert M. Stamp, University of Calgary, in The Canadian Historical Review “Sutherland’s work is destined to be a landmark in Canadian history, both as a first in its particular field and as a standard reference text.” J. Stewart Hardy, University of Alberta, in Alberta Journal of Educational Research Such were the reviewers’ comments when Neil Sutherland’s groundbreaking book was first published. Now reissued in Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s new series “Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada,” with a new introduction by series editor Cynthia Comacchio, this book remains relevant today. In the late nineteenth century a new generation of reformers committed itself to a program of social improvement based on the more effective upbringing of all children. In Children in English-Canadian Society, Neil Sutherland examines, with a keen eye, the growth of the public health movement and its various efforts at improving the health of children.

Idealism Transformed
Idealism Transformed

Author: Anne Wood

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 1985-08-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0773585389

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John Harold Putman, inspector of Ottawa public schools between 1910 and 1937, was a leading progressive educator. At that time the progressive education movement in Canada was composed of two major intellectual strands, neo-Hegelian idealism and new liberalism. By tracing the thought and practices of this eminent educator, Wood shows how the neo-Hegelian philosophy of the late nineteenth century was transformed by its own logic and social imperatives into what seems to be its opposite. Idealism, ironically, ultimately comes to resemble pragmatism. Elected to the Ottawa City Council in 1905, Putman allied himself with progressive urban reformers seeking solutions to urban chaos, ward patronage, and inefficient city government. As inspector of public schools, he brought his reformist outlook to bear on providing for the discontented adolescent in the school and on implementing an efficient school system. Two schools established by Putman provided a diversified program for the adolescent; they led, however, not to the self-realization of the individual but to social unification and streaming for vocational roles. At the end of World War I the Ottawa public schools under Putman were judged the most efficient and progressive of any in Canada. But following the tenets of new liberalism and of urban school reformers in the United States, Putman achieved this goal by creating more bureaucratic practices and more formalized procedures, which again contradicted the idealist's moral, humanistic intent. In the postwar period Putman extended the efficiency principle to his survey of schools in British Columbia and his campaigns for junior high schools and county boards in Ontario. By the end of the 193OS, the author contends, the progressive educator had effectively transformed the use of schooling for life adjustment, not for intellectual purposes.