Alpha Children Wear Grey: Postwar Ontario and Soviet Education Reform

Abstract

The author examines a prominent Ontario education commission’s tour through the Soviet Union in 1966. This tour is situated within the larger contexts of the Cold War, and postwar North American education reform. Using the commission’s unpublished tour report on the U.S.S.R., and the theoretical tools of utopia and dystopia, contradictions within the commission’s response to Soviet education are explored and then linked to deeper tensions in their views on education and its ideological role in postwar Ontario society. Keywords: education, Ontario, Cold War, utopianism, liberalism