Significant numbers of Canadians in the 1960s believed their society and their schools
required substantial change. A few, believing the public school system was authoritarian,
competitive, unimaginative, and unlikely to change, set out to establish their own schools. In
British Columbia, like-minded parents, educators, and even high school students founded over
twenty alternative schools in the 1960s and early 1970s in the Lower Mainland, Vancouver
Island, and the West Kootenays. Most of these people nourished idealistic world views
comprising elements of pacifism, socialism, or spiritual mysticism. They claimed to be motivated
by a sense of social and democratic responsibility, and also put a high value on personal freedom
and the possibility of public and private transformation.
Until the 1960s British Columbia independent schools had been organized chiefly on
religious, ethnic, or class grounds. However, founders of alternative schools in the early 1960s
typically followed a Progressive approach, emphasizing a "child-centred" curriculum based on
the ideas of John Dewey. Later in the decade alternative schools took up the Romantic or "free
school" ideas of A.S. Neill, and allowed young people almost complete freedom to organize their
own educational activities (or none at all), and to be responsible for their own behaviour. They
were influenced by the American Progressive and English Romantic educational traditions as well
as Canadian social democracy, the American counterculture of the late 1960s, and the Human
Potential Movement. By the early 1970s, alternative schools became "therapeutic" with the goal
of attracting alienated young people back into the educational sphere and helping them to achieve
personal growth.
Two fundamental tensions existed in alternative schools-how democratic their decisionmaking
would be, and how directive or free the adults would be in regulating the academic
learning of the students. Although these schools tried to govern themselves in a participatory
democratic manner, consensus was difficult to achieve. Furthermore, the participants could not
usually agree on which educational approach they favoured. For students attending alternative
schools educational results were mixed. Although most believed they had gained in self-reliance
and inter-personal skills, many did not acquire sufficient literary or arithmetic knowledge and
found their educational and professional careers limited.
Alternative schools were hindered by financial instability, parental divisiveness, and the
absence of a workable educational methodology. Further, the schools accepted too many children
with special needs, or hired too many young adult teachers whose enthusiasm was greater than
their pedagogical skill. Meanwhile, the social and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s had at last
caused the public school system to accept some of the pedagogical and psychological premises
of the alternate school movement. The examples of the alternative schools of the 1960s and early
1970s, along with the wider cultural changes of the time, led to a more flexible and inclusive
public school system in the 1970s.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10089 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Rothstein, Harley S. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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