ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one of the three progressivist interest groups that lobbied for educational reform, representing social meliorism, or social reconstruction. At the most basic ideological and conceptual level, meliorist progressives were interested in reforming Ontario’s society through the schools, with the ultimate aim of promoting social justice. This is a fundamentally different goal than that upheld by social efficiency advocates who promoted refinement and management of schools so that they correlate more closely to extant societal conditions, whether they be industrial, economic, or material. This is also quite dissimilar from the developmentalist orientation, which promoted a closer correlation of schooling to the development, interests, and psychological welfare of children. In this case, the reformist thrust of social meliorist progressives was far more radical, for it envisioned a reconstruction of society in ways that would promote critical citizenship, foster debate, and target the inequalities in standard of life and opportunity entrenched in interwar Ontario societal structures.
