The quarter century that followed the end of the Second World War was
marked by intense social and economic transformation: the changing face
of postwar capitalism, a revolution in communications technology, the
rise of youth culture, and the pronounced ascent of individual freedom
all contributed to a dramatic push to remake, and thus improve, society.
This push was especially felt within education, the primary vehicle for
modernizing the postwar world from the ground up. Hall-Dennis and the
Road to Utopia explores this moment of renewal through a powerful and
influential education reform project: 1968's Living and Learning: The
Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education
in the Schools of Ontario. The Hall-Dennis report, as it became known,
urged Ontarians to accept a new vision of education in which students
were no longer organized in classes, their progress no longer measured
by grades, and their experience no longer characterized by the painful
acquisition of subjects, but rather by a joyous and open-ended process
of learning. This new, democratic system of education was associated
with the highest ideals of postwar progress, liberalism, and humanism,
yet its recommendations were paradoxically both profoundly radical and
fundamentally conservative. Its avant-garde research strategies and
controversial "post-literate" curricular reforms were balanced by a
pedagogical approach designed to mould students into obedient citizens
and productive economic actors. As Canadians once again find themselves
asking fundamental questions about the aims and objectives of education
under radically changing circumstances, Josh Cole revisits Hall-Dennis
to show how the committee and its report represent a significant moment
in Canadian cultural and political history, a prescient document in the
history of education, and a revealing expression of the fragmentary
circumstances of global modernity in the second half of the twentieth
century.
