Hall-Dennis and the Road to Utopia by Josh Cole

Author:Josh Cole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The quest for utopia and the fear of dystopia – both drawing upon that forward-looking approach to time intrinsic to modernity – is also richly documented in the evidence left behind by Hall-Dennis’s other excursions. In 1968, committee members embarked on extended tours through Britain, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Atlantic Canada, and Northern Ontario. How these places and their schools ranked as inspiring utopias, or conversely as forbidding dystopias, tells us much about the committee members’ imaginations. A utopia is a “Eutopia,” i.e., “an elaborate vision of ‘the good life’ in a perfect society which is viewed as an integrated totality,” or as a plan or blueprint toward that end.71 A dystopia is a utopia “gone wrong,” suggesting a dark and depressing, and perhaps terrifying, future.72 The true antonym of both terms is chaos, in this context a completely unplanned society that is static or backward, deeply anti-modern, and the outcome of a society unable or unwilling to shape the future at all.

As Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor observe, utopian projects often entail movement, and more specifically, travel from one location to a very different one (whether imaginary or real) in order to learn about new social possibilities. Travellers often assume “utopia exists now, in the present, but in another place we have yet to find.”73 Hall-Dennis members sought to find such alternative arrangements through their educational trips. What they took from Britain and Sweden were three related utopian elements that would later suffuse Living and Learning: 1) the idea that a modern education system should focus on the needs of the individual child; 2) that economic (or utilitarian) concerns had to be tempered by liberal-democratic ideals; and 3) that education had to be extensively planned to achieve a better postwar world.

Unlike some of its European counterparts, Britain had been decimated by the Second World War, both physically and economically. Despite the Allied victory, Britain was left “tighter, poorer, grayer, and grimmer” than many other countries on the continent.74 Although Britain did emerge from the war with a powerful sense of national community, it also confronted economic problems that compelled its leaders to accept a level of centralized socio-economic planning unthinkable (in the mainstream at least) before the war. This burst of planning led Britain under the Labour government to establish its first genuine welfare state after 1945. Education – traditionally the bastion of British inequality – was drawn into this newly planned, liberal-interventionist state structure. As historian Roy Lowe argues, despite the conservative mood of many British educators in the immediate postwar period, progressives by the 1960s had attained access to the levers of educational policy making.75 As planners themselves, these progressives also entrenched themselves in teacher education, thus ensuring the expansion of their pedagogical viewpoints As a result, progressivism became normalized; “formality” in much of the system was discouraged.76 Hall-Dennis arrived in Britain just as the country was embroiled in fascinating educational debates.

The members of Hall-Dennis who visited that country included farmer and Middlesex County politician J.E. Duffin, lawyer G.

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