Chapter 4: Categorizing the Data -- 1970s Documents --Education Policy Documents with Start Years 1964 to 1973 and Complete Years 1967 to 1974

4.3a

Categorizing the Data -- 1970s Documents --Education Policy Documents with Start Years 1964 to 1973 and Complete Years 1967 to 1974

   The 1970s documents have not been analyzed with any thoroughness. In part this is a consequence of the numbers of documents produced in the 1970s and the challenge of selecting those that are of consequence to an analysis. There are many more ‘Departmental’ and ‘Legislative’ documents than R1 documents for 1970s set. The set I have collated stands out as marking out exact ten year intervals – 1963 to 1973 for the start years of the documents and 1964 to 1974 for the complete years. 

Following is the table I constructed the table using Goulson’s list to identify a range of selected key documents:

Education Policy Documents with Start Years 1964 to 1973 and Completion/Publication Years 1967 to 1974

(highlighted entries are transcribed)

Province	Doc Type & Commissioner	Start Year	Complete Year	Report Title
Newfoundland	R1 – Warren	1964	1967	Royal Commission on Education & Youth
Ontario	D – Hall Dennis	1965	1968	Committee on Aims & Objectives of Education
Alberta	L – Lamothe	1966	1966	Report of the Special Committee on the Interest and Concern of the Public with Respect to the Centralization of Schools
Ontario	D – MacKay	1966	1969	Minister’s Committee on Religious Education
Alberta	R1 – Worth	1967	1971	Commission on Educational Planning
PEI	S – Smitheram	1970	1971	Teacher Education: Perseverance or Professionalism
NWT	D – Gillie	1970	1972	Survey of Education
Nova Scotia	R1 – Graham	1971	1974	Royal Commission on Education, Public Services and Provincial Municipal Relations
Yukon	D – Levirs	1972	1972	Committee on Education for the Yukon Territory
New Brunswick	D – MacLeod, Pinet	1973	1973	Committee on Educational Planning

   Explanation for the documental production increase in the 1970s could be the first signs of what was being analyzed by 1990s scholars as the “failure of the welfare state.” In order to make corrections, and to obscure rising education financing and increase public confidence, so many more public education policy documents were produced. The increase could also be argued as a feature of changing politics, changing notions in democracy -- one large royal commission report was no longer sufficient to address changes at this time in history. A series of documents that is responsive to change and targets specific issues in public education policy is now considered more valuable and this is the time where this practice is set.  There is a rise in expertise as a consequence of the post-war population increase, and perhaps public commissions are smaller because of increasing available expertise. At this time education is the focus of politics and the provinces compete within Canada to produce the best policy. At the time the focus was on education spending which appears to have been rising exponentially with teachers’ strikes and increasing demand for infrastructure. Ontario’s (1968) Hall-Dennis addresses capital spending and pitches public education as innovative and representative. The commissioners convey that rising public education costs are worth it. 

   Technically, for the purposes of the category, since Ontario Hall-Dennis was published in 1968, I consider Ontario’s 1968 Hall-Dennis report a 70s document. The design of the document is indicative and for the purposes of improving content analysis I transcribed the document. I also transcribed it to make it available on the internet (it is probably now available on microfiche but access is still limited with this format). A policy feature of the 1970s was justifying increases in public education spending where such increase contributed to the failure of the welfare state according to some interpretations. Hall-Dennis was likely a policy report designed to win the public over to the matter of the rising education costs at this time through representation of advances symbolizing change and rewards for such spending through innovative design and presentation. Hall-Dennis fits into the 70s era set.

  Why do we see such a change in policy production from the 1970s? Manzer describes Hall-Dennis, Quebec’s Parent Report and Alberta’s Worth Report as “person-regarding” documents. Is this explanation satisfactory? What was going on in Canadian public education production in the 60s and 70s decades? Focussing the investigation on the 20^th century emphasizes post-World War II policy. Such a framing makes an enormous difference to understanding what may be done in Canada in terms of public education policy for the 21^st century.