The Impact of Cold War Events on Curriculum and Policies, and the Protection of Children in Postwar Ontario Education, 1948-1963

Between 1948 and 1963 Ontario educators and policy makers, at the school boards and within the Department of Education, confronted the challenge of how to educate students for a divided and dangerous Cold War world. That the Cold War was not a distant or esoteric phenomenon became apparent when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949. In addition, local Communist Party members, particularly within Toronto, actively sought to recruit students to their ranks. As a result, the protection of children, both physically and ideologically, became a paramount concern: physically through civil defence drills within schools to protect against nuclear attack and ideologically against anti-capitalist and atheist Communism through citizenship education that reinforced a conservative form of democratic citizenship, including the nuclear family, civic rights and responsibilities, Protestant Christianity, a consumer capitalist society, and acceptance of the anti-Communist Cold War consensus under the auspices of the United Nations and NATO. The Cold War paradigm, however, began to shift starting with the implosion of the Labour Progressive (Communist) Party in 1956 following the revelations of Stalins crimes. Thereafter, the Communist threat shifted from domestic Communists to fear of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Moreover, in the 1950s and especially by the early 1960s, a minority of students and teachers questioned the wisdom of the Cold War consensus and its contradictions such as the idea that nuclear deterrence and proliferation could prevent war. Dissention against nuclear arms, McCarthyism, religious education, and traditional approaches to curriculum and pedagogy, were evident throughout this study challenging the notion that the early Cold War era was one of conformity and consensus.