History of Childhood and Education in Canada

The three articles we read this week were based around some interesting concepts that dominated the Canadian view of children and education during the first half of the twentieth century, focusing in the time of World War II. The article by Meyer focuses on the direct effects that the militarization of Canada during World War Two had on legislation regarding children and family and that it also directly affected the curriculums and learning environments of children in the education system. Roy’s article is focused on the educational conditions of Japanese individuals who were placed into internment camps and the strong communities that provided for their members. Lastly, Gleason theorizes that the end of world war two marked the change in Canadian society wherein psychiatry and psychology are considered valid scientific practices which ultimately leads to the weight of blame for the deviance of children to be squarely laid on the shoulders of the parents, focusing mostly on mothers, and results in the change of the responsibilities of the members of the family unit comparable to the last monumental change to the family unit resulting from the introduction of the industrial era.

The period in all these pieces are in the same timeline and relate to one another in regard to the different changes in the requirements of educational bodies to provide specific curriculums to students, the overbearing legislations handed down by the government to prevent child deviancy, and tones of anti-Semitism that resulted from the conflict of the time. The articles are all well written and researched. They provide interesting social narratives in all three concepts which overlap with one another.

The question I would be most interesting in exploring regarding these articles would be a comparison of the information provided in Meyer’s article regarding the increase in juvenile crimes and research into each individual and whether the increase could be directly related to parents or other individuals who provided for the family being drafted into the war effort and whether those crimes were mostly related to the curfews and perhaps thefts to provide for families struggling with providing for themselves after the loss of the main bread winner.