Launch of Progressive Education by Theodore Christou at Novel Idea on Nov 20

Queen's Faculty of Education & The University of Toronto Press invite you to the launch of Progressive Education: Revisioning and Reframing Ontario's Public Schools 1912-1942 by Dr. Theodore Christou.

7:00 pm
Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Novel Idea Bookstore
156 Princess St., Kingston

Please RSVP to erin.wicklam@queensu.ca

Please join us for a festive evening, featuring a reading, light refreshments and lively conversation. Copies will be available for purchase.

About the book

Over the course of the twentieth century, North American public school curricula moved away from the classics and the humanities, and towards 'progressive' subjects such as health and social studies. This book delves into how such progressivist thinking transformed the rhetoric and structure of schooling during the first half of the twentieth century, with echoes that reverberate strongly today, and investigates historical meanings of progressive education.

Theodore Michael Christou closely examines the case of interwar Ontario, where the entire landscape of public education, including curricula and avenues to post-secondary study, was radically transformed over just twenty years. Christou contextualizes this reformist thinking in light of a social, political, and economic climate of change, which demanded schools that could actively relate learning to the real world. Through its examination of educational journals published throughout the interwar period as well as previously unexplored archival sources, this book illuminates how the present structure of curricula and schooling was achieved.

Theodore Michael Christou has given us a work of considerable scholarly value that is now required reading for anyone concerned with the history of Canadian education in general, and that of Ontario in particular. It is a detailed, clear, and thoroughly engaging. The insightful story of progressive education's growing domination over the minds of Canadian educators and the problems associated with this, makes it a book of much wider practical and current importance than its initial description might suggest.

Kieran Egan, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University