Progressive Education: Revisioning and Reframing Ontario’s Public Schools, 1919–1942 by Theodore Michael Christou (review)

In the history of public schooling, perhaps no concept has been more controversial or more misunderstood than “Progressive Education.” It has represented to its detractors everything wrong with the modern education system and to its supporters nothing less than a panacea for solving the problems of education and society as a whole. Furthermore, many historians who have sought to undertake the quixotic task of preparing an objective assessment of the movement have been frustrated by an inability to define exactly what was meant by the term in the first place. Progressive educational thought has taken on many forms, some of them seemingly contradictory. Thus, Theodore Michael Christou’s Progressive Education: Revisioning and Reframing Ontario’s Public Schools 1919–1942 is an ambitious and welcome entry into the field of education history in Canada. Christou examines progressive educational thinking in interwar Ontario with an eye to answering broader questions about how progressive education itself was understood within the context of a society that was being rapidly transformed by the processes of modernity, world war, and economic depression.

Christou argues that these decades saw the complete transformation of the Ontario public education system. This transformation was guided by progressive thinking that took hold in the minds of educational authorities. By examining progressive rhetoric as expressed in two educational journals, The Canadian School Journal and The School, Christou defines “progressive education” as consisting of three distinct domains or themes: active learning, individualized instruction, and the linking of schools with society. Within chapters discussing each of these themes, Christou explores three recurring interpretations of what these progressive principles meant. Progressives were divided into those who saw progressivism through the lens of “child study and development,” those who were interested in promoting “social efficiency and industrial order,” and those whose primary concern was “social meliorism and cooperation.” (7) In exploring these three “orientations” (7) of progressive education, Christou argues that progressive education must be understood both in terms of common pedagogical beliefs and in terms of the differing ways in which these beliefs were interpreted in widely different ways by those with different educational agendas. While the explicit connection of these agendas to specific ideological positions and/or political factions could be more clearly drawn, Christou succeeds in illustrating the connection between educational change and the broader social and political context of the time.

The greatest strength of this study lies in its ability to differentiate between the motives of different groups of so-called progressives. While they all shared an antipathy to what Christou terms the “humanist” vision of the school, in which students passively received lessons in areas of classical study and sought to memorize and recite a series of facts that were unconnected to daily life in order to master intellectual “discipline,” they could not agree on what the new purpose of schooling should be. (103) Some, versed in the newly developing field of child psychology, insisted upon education that would foster individualism and self-directed personality development. Others regarded the process of education as designed to construct citizens well fitted to success within the existing social and industrial order. Children were to be given scientific tests that would evaluate their innate academic aptitude and in preparation for whatever future vocational path their potential suggested. Finally, there were those who argued in favour of schooling as a way of achieving social reform and social justice. These individuals promoted the idea of school being focused primarily upon preparing students for participation within democratic institutions. They were outspoken critics of laissez-faire capitalism and argued that a better society based around cooperation rather than competition could only emerge if children were educated in a progressive fashion. Among Progressives, then, there was no consensus regarded what progressive education was actually intended to accomplish. Indeed, the vast differences between the latter two factions calls into the question the very idea of whether they should be considered part of the same educational movement at...