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

While most historians and scholars of education generally take for granted that the concept of progressive education has existed for more than a century, its history in Canada has yet to be written. Christou’s Progressive Education: Revisioning and Reframing Ontario’s Public Schools, 1919-1942 attempts to address this absence through an examination of what he calls “progressivist language” during the interwar years. A former school teacher and rising scholar in the field of educational history, Christou informs the reader that undertaking this study was a very personal pursuit for him. As a teacher, he had been “accused of being a progressive on three different occasions” (p. 3), and for three different reasons. The question that lingered in his mind after each accusation was: what exactly is a progressive? This question led him to graduate school and the writing of the most in depth study of progressive education in Ontario to date.

Christou uses a number of primary and secondary sources in his study, but two in particular inform the bulk of his probe into progressivist language in the interwar period: The School, an educational journal written for teachers, teacher candidates, and school administrators; and, The Canadian School Journal, the official organ of the Ontario Educational Association. From the beginning of his analysis Christou concedes that there was a confusion and lack of clarity in these journals regarding what progressive education meant (p. 36). Nevertheless, Christou is able to weave consistency and order out of the various definitions attributed to it. By probing the language used in the two journals for common themes or domains, the author identifies three: the promotion of active learning, the shift toward individualized instruction, and the progressive educator’s concerns for closer bonds between school and society.

Christou analyses those three themes in three separate chapters, which form the bulk of the book. Each theme is furthermore examined more closely from three orientations: child study, social efficiency, and social meliorism. In his analysis, Christou finds the birth of child-centred teaching, the rise of economic terminology and aims in education, and the promotion of critical thinking to reinforce democratic civic engagement. A single chapter highlights the opposing rhetoric of “humanist” educational thinkers (a term Christou prefers to “anti-progressivist”), who desperately attempted to hold onto a classical curriculum in an educational world where practical skills and “relevant” lessons triumphed the teaching of Latin and Greek. Ultimately, Christou points out, humanists were grasping at straws. Progressive rhetoric was “intertwined with the decline of the classical, academic model of schooling” (p. 112) espoused by humanists, which “elevated content over individual interest,” promoted “rote memorization and recall,” and encouraged teaching “that bore no relation to contemporary life;” humanist concerns were ultimately “at odds with the core sensibilities of Ontario’s progressivists” (p. 114). According to Christou, the rhetoric of progressive education would prevail, and eventually find its way into public policy as well, with a major overhaul of the curricula introduced in 1937 and 1938. Christou analyzes this overhaul through to its revisions in 1942 in the final chapter, and demonstrates how it reflected the ideas of progressive educators found in The School and The Canadian School Journal. Among the major reforms, health study was woven into curriculum, a new social studies program promised to replace the history and geography curricula, and the study of English would remove the classics from Ontario’s schools. Experiential and project-based learning would be promoted as well, and all academic undertakings would have to have actual relevance outside of the classroom.

Despite keen insight combined with graceful writing, there are some limitations to Progressive Education. In concentrating on the examination of only two school journals, to what extent can we be sure that Christou’s analysis of “progressivist language” accurately reflects that with which the educational public in Ontario was engaged? Could the same educational language be found in the pages of newspapers and other...