Posts com a Tag ‘Hall-Dennis and The Road to Utopia: Education and Modernity in Ontario (T)’

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When you open Josh Cole’s book Hall-Dennis and The Road to Utopia you find a series of photos of children and teachers happily working in open concept classrooms, engaging with new postwar technology (TVs, headphones, tape machines), and running freely in fields. These photos are part of the 1968 Ontario education document Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education, also known as the Hall-Dennis Report. The images, along with the written report, suggest a new purpose for education, at the forefront of modernity, progress, and creativity. Cole argues these images were used to indicate schools were no longer “a place of confinement but instead a place of enjoyment,” now depicted as modern art galleries, highlighting “clean lines, bright lights and a modernistic sensibility” (185). However, Cole also suggests that the images, and much of the narrative in the report, were a veneer of openness and did not represent the real substance of the report, which was to maintain conservative libertarian positions on individualism and citizenship. Leia Mais