Monday, April 22, 2013

Chapter 4: Categorizing the Data -- 1970s Documents -- 1968 Ontario’s Hall-Dennis & 1969 Ontario


4.3c

Categorizing the Data -- 1970s Documents -- 1968 Ontario’s Hall-Dennis & 1969 Ontario


   Hall-Dennis commission began its work in 1965 and finished in 1968. The Living and Learning document is rather famous on account of its presentation. There are very few pages of the document that contain text only. The reading of the content is broken by photographs, pictures, doodles, pop-art and colour. This makes a complete reading in one sitting of the document impossible in a certain sense, because the reader’s attention is always been diverted by the visual component. This is probably even truer now than it was then, since the document’s visuals date it and also distracts the reader from fully considering the policy content. An additional fact about the document is its size and the difficulty the analyst has in looking at it on an average desk. When opened, it is about two feet long and measures almost a foot high at ten inches. A critical perspective would consider this all a part of a possible plan to submerge the details of policy, to “divert” the reader’s attention. Looking at policy through a coffee table book could be construed to symbolically alleviate ‘crisis’.  It is in aspect child-like also, and a child’s focus is perhaps required to distract from the ‘crisis’. Of course the document is meant to address in large measure Kindergarten to Grade 12 policy and is thereby designed to be appealing to readers aside from politicians and bureaucrats. By contrast with Quebec’s Parent Report where the notion of crisis is stated outright and not subordinated, perhaps the crisis is acute to such a degree that it has to be covertly dealt with using smoke and mirrors. Notwithstanding, the document is one of the most recognized public education policy reports in Canada, many copies were produced, and it can be located in most public education policy department offices and libraries in universities across the country. Most Canadian public education scholars immediately identify it. Also clear for Hall-Dennis is that the cost of conducting the commission and realizing its work in such a document was not an issue. The government of the time (under Premier William Davis) felt the expense was absolutely valid. The front cover, for example, is a photograph of eight children running through green grass that isn’t manicured but also isn’t quite meadow. A front cover of this photographic quality would have been quite expensive. (By contrast, Alberta’s 1971 Worth report, appears to not have been the product of similar lavish reproduction.) What’s significant is that the children are running toward the reader out of a darkness behind the children that is woods or forest. The metaphor is significant to a broad interpretation of the document particularly as it understands reform policy to be primarily that of realizing child-centered learning in the education system. The sense of the new psychology, sociology, science and research as revealing the mental complexity of the ‘modern’ child and child development is evident. Both the Parent report and the Hall-Dennis report base new elementary teaching from Piaget’s stages of the child (particularly the Parent report which covers Piaget’s stages [Vol. 2, pp. 40-43]. The front cover also represents freedom, a feature in child-centered learning and a pedagogical offering necessary to encouraging the burgeoning youth population to stay in school and off the street planning revolution. But the picture is also symbolic, representing larger social movements, the end of the war and 1950s recession opening into a new world of opportunity, integrated with action, which at this time involved a focused sense of civil rights and democracy. The projection of interest onto the child draws also along the lines of ‘the child in the man’, in a kind of Wordsworthian treatment. A whole generation of the age producing the document grew up in cultures constrained by morality, religion and social taboos, and they now have an opportunity through the process of policy making to face those demons. Additionally the authors if aged 45 would have been young adults during the Second World War and would have known the loss of many soldiers and would have been oriented to the importance of children as promise for the future. The social trend was towards growth and reproduction and so these were the years of the baby boomers.
   As mentioned, a centralization plan is key to the document, and the costs of education are cited. The administrative details and nuances appear more towards the end of the document a point at which the ‘mass reader’ may decidedly have lost interest. In order to begin to attempt to effectively begin to deconstruct the text, it was necessary to free it from pictures. This was achieved for the purposes of analysis, through transcription.


No comments:

Post a Comment