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A Safety Valve to Modern Living: Antimodernism, Citizenship, Leisure, and the Environment in Toronto's Outdoor Education Centres, 1953-1997

In 1960 the Toronto Board of Education opened its first residential outdoor education centre, the Toronto Island Natural Science School, which signaled the beginning of an outdoor education movement in the city. By the mid-1980s the school boards and conservation authorities of Metropolitan Toronto had opened 12 residential outdoor education centres to serve Toronto public school students. This thesis seeks to explain why these programs were developed at this time and in this place. It finds that these programs fit into a broader ‘modernizing antimodernism’ paradigm which shaped many similar formal and informal educational programs in the twentieth century, and argues that democratic citizenship education was the major factor that was used to justify and shape them. This democratic citizenship education had three main components: education for democratic living, education for productive use of leisure time, and education for the environment, each of which is explored in depth.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/33656
Date29 November 2012
CreatorsJoyce, Katherine Anne
ContributorsSandwell, Ruth W.
Source SetsUniversity of Toronto
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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