Progressive education

To meet the needs of an increasing industrialized Canadian society in the late 1930’s, the elementary curriculum was revised. This essay will explore the changes BC curriculum endured as a result of the progressive movement within the Greater Victoria area by way of the Greater Victoria Survey of Schools of 1937-38 and the Curriculum Guide: The New Programme of Studies 1936-7. The new system is commonly known as progressive education or the “new education”. Jean Barman describes new education as “… embodying a commitment to a child-centered, relatively unstructured curriculum allowing considerable freedom of choice to pupil and teacher alike, the expression of humane, egalitarian, democratic philosophy of education”. The modern curriculum was an attempt to move away from the emphasis of memorization, facts, formalism and unrelated or irrelevant material within the classroom. John Dewey, an educational philosopher, can be held accountable for the radical outlook on education in the early 1900’s. Dewey believed there was a theoretical gap between child-centered and subject centered curriculum. This gap was a failure to recognize interaction between child and curriculum. Individual difference, child reaction and interest we

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