在第二次世界大战结束后的四分之一个世纪里，社会和经济发生了剧烈的变革：战后资本主义面貌的变化、通信技术的革命、青年文化的兴起以及个人自由的显著提升，所有这些都极大地推动了社会的重塑，从而改善了社会。这种推动在教育领域尤其明显，教育是战后世界从根本上实现现代化的主要工具。霍尔·丹尼斯和《通往乌托邦之路》通过一个强大而有影响力的教育改革项目探索了这一复兴时刻：1968年的生活与学习：安大略省学校教育目标与目的省级委员会的报告。众所周知，霍尔·丹尼斯报告（Hall Dennis report）敦促安大略人接受一种新的教育愿景，即学生不再以班级为单位，他们的进步不再以成绩为衡量标准，他们的经历不再以痛苦的学科习得为特征，而是以快乐和开放的学习过程为特征。这种新的民主教育体系与战后进步、自由主义和人道主义的最高理想联系在一起，但它的建议却矛盾地既极端又保守。其前卫的研究策略和备受争议的“后文化”课程改革通过一种旨在将学生塑造成顺从的公民和富有成效的经济行为体的教学方法加以平衡。当加拿大人再次发现自己在急剧变化的环境下对教育的目的和目标提出了根本性的问题时，乔希·科尔重访霍尔·丹尼斯，展示委员会及其报告如何代表加拿大文化和政治史上的一个重要时刻，这是教育史上的一份有先见之明的文件，揭示了20世纪下半叶全球现代性的支离破碎的情况。
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Hall-Dennis and the Road to Utopia: Education and Modernity in Ontario
The quarter century that followed the end of the Second World War was marked by intense social and economic transformation: the changing face of postwar capitalism, a revolution in communications technology, the rise of youth culture, and the pronounced ascent of individual freedom all contributed to a dramatic push to remake, and thus improve, society. This push was especially felt within education, the primary vehicle for modernizing the postwar world from the ground up. Hall-Dennis and the Road to Utopia explores this moment of renewal through a powerful and influential education reform project: 1968’s Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario. The Hall-Dennis report, as it became known, urged Ontarians to accept a new vision of education in which students were no longer organized in classes, their progress no longer measured by grades, and their experience no longer characterized by the painful acquisition of subjects, but rather by a joyous and open-ended process of learning. This new, democratic system of education was associated with the highest ideals of postwar progress, liberalism, and humanism, yet its recommendations were paradoxically both profoundly radical and fundamentally conservative. Its avant-garde research strategies and controversial “post-literate” curricular reforms were balanced by a pedagogical approach designed to mould students into obedient citizens and productive economic actors. As Canadians once again find themselves asking fundamental questions about the aims and objectives of education under radically changing circumstances, Josh Cole revisits Hall-Dennis to show how the committee and its report represent a significant moment in Canadian cultural and political history, a prescient document in the history of education, and a revealing expression of the fragmentary circumstances of global modernity in the second half of the twentieth century.
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