Using the example of the 1937 Ontario elementary school reforms, this article will make the case for considering pedagogical knowledge as a distinct object in the history of education. In this context, pedagogical knowledge refers to the conceptual and normative aspects of teaching and learning that seek to inform the decision-making of the…

This article compares and contrasts the use of mental testing and the formation of educational streaming in Denmark and Ontario during the interwar years. In this sense, the article adds nuances to the meaning of internationalism as well as contributing to our knowledge about how ideas of testing practices circulated among countries and…

School inspectors and school inspection were integral features of the elementary public school system in Ontario from the 1840s until the practice was abandoned in 1967. From its earliest beginnings and subsequent development, school inspection and school inspectors were established as an important institution of the educational state. By…

Following the end of World War I, the Ontario Department of Education initiated a series of reforms aimed at both elementary and secondary schooling. This article examines the reforms that were made to elementary school curriculum and pedagogy. These were initiated within the context of a call for a general reconstruction of education and society…

This article examines the educational reconstruction that was undertaken by the Department of Education in Ontario during the first years of the twentieth century. It draws on Foucault's method of archaeology to identify how schooling reforms comprised a discontinuity in pedagogic knowledge. This mutation created the conditions of possibility for…

This paper analyses the science of education that was formed in Ontario between the years 1910 and 1934. It is substantiated through the use of archival material such as curriculum documents, statutes, annual reports, the published proceedings of the Ontario Educational Association (OEA) and a close reading of the "Science of Education"…

In 1937, the Ministry of Education in Ontario published a document entitled "Programme of Studies for Grades 1 to VI of Public and Separate Schools" that became known amongst teachers as the "little gray book". The curriculum and pedagogy in the document enunciated a rupture or mutation in pedagogical discourse that broke with…

Teachers' institutes for public elementary school teachers in Ontario began to be implemented in the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of the efforts of Egerton Ryerson Superintendent of Schools for Canada West as Ontario was then known. They were based on similar practices that Ryerson had observed on an educational tour in 1845 during…