ABSTRACT
In 1986 Chad Gaffield noted that Canadian history of education, as it then existed, paid little attention to students and their experience, especially at the level of the classroom. Although Neil Sutherland’s description of elementary school life did come out that same year, little has been done since to answer Gaffield’s challenge to produce a ‘comprehensive perspective on the actual experience of sitting in a classroom’ (Gaffield, 1986, p. 116). In fact, Harold Silver has recently accused historians of education in Britain and the United States of exactly the same failing (Silver, 1992, pp. 97-108). The following description of the day-to-day experience of schooling as it took place at the London Technical and Commercial High School (LTCHS) between 1920 and 1940 is an attempt to answer at least part of the challenge (Barman, 1984). The image painted here emerged primarily in a series of interviews held with twenty-four former students and two former teachers of the school.1
