Canada sent military personnel across the Pacific to fight in the Korean War (1950–1953) under the banner of the United Nations. The effort was one manifestation of Canada's part in the Cold War, a struggle against North Korean communism and against the Soviet Union.
In 1952, Queen Elizabeth II succeeded her father, George VI, and in 1955, Alberta celebrated its golden anniversary.
In 1956, John Diefenbaker campaigned successfully for leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party. In 1957 and 1958, he won federal elections and formed the first federal Tory government since the defeat of the Bennett government in 1935.
The Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 and accelerated the race with the Americans for the exploration of space. This feat was a technological victory of the Cold War.
In 1953, Hilda Neatby, a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, published So Little for the Mind, a critique of progressive approaches to education. Addressing all Canadian educators, she argued forcibly for a return to traditional educational approaches. Her virulent assault on progressive approaches to education was widely debated across Canada, but her ideas were largely resisted.
In 1950, Alberta passed the County Act, which amalgamated municipal and school governance. The organization of school jurisdictions into counties and into rural school divisions, which remained in place until the 1990s, afforded county residents with a particularly strong means of influencing education.
In 1952, the government established the Coterminous Boundary Commission to study and adjust the irregular boundaries that resulted from the amalgamation of various jurisdictions. The Commission completed its work in 1955. By 1953, Alberta was fully organized into larger units of school administration (Swift 1970, 28). By 1965, some 28 counties were established (Chalmers 1967, 298). Large rural school divisions and counties were prominent features of Alberta's answer to the challenge of schooling the rural population.
In 1955, Minister of Education Anders Aalborg (1955, 40) celebrated the golden anniversary of Alberta's entry into Confederation by sending friendly greetings to the teachers of Alberta and drawing attention to the improvements in teaching conditions that had occurred during the past 50 years. By teaching conditions, he was referring to both physical facilities and to advances in the progress of teaching as a profession.
During the 1950s, the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta established specialized departments in elementary education, educational psychology, secondary education and educational administration. Requirements for initial teacher certification were increasing.
The establishment of larger school districts and larger schools led to a demand for principals and superintendents with good leadership and management skills. Planning to develop competent and talented school leadership began early in the decade, when Herbert Coutts, dean of the Faculty of Education, engaged in exchanges with the Canadian Educational Association (CEA) and the American Kellogg Foundation (Swift 1970). Under the sponsorship of the CEA and the Kellogg Foundation, a series of pilot short courses was conducted in Edmonton and elsewhere in the province, beginning in 1953. The participants included teachers, principals and superintendents. In 1955, the Department of Educational Administration was founded at the University of Alberta with grant money from the Kellogg Foundation.
Dr Arthur Reeves, a leading figure in the establishment of the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Alberta, served as its first chairman from 1955 to 1968 (Swift 1970). The founding of the department marked the emergence of educational administration as a field of study and established the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta—the first such department in the British Commonwealth—as a national and even international leader in this area. From the outset, the department was set up to serve not only Alberta but also Canada. In due course, the department's programs would draw students from across Canada and around the world, and the department's graduates would go on to establish other departments of educational administration in Canada.
The launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union was a technological achievement that led to revisions in programs of study and renewed emphasis on science, particularly physics, chemistry and math. Some educators in the United States expressed alarm at the rapid development of the new curricula. The Soviet accomplishment was interpreted as a challenge to American education, and reforms in education took on the urgency of a matter of national defense. Canadian educators went along with the curriculum reforms.
In 1957, the Alberta School for the Deaf opened its doors in Edmonton.
The year 1957 also marked the opening of Lethbridge Junior College, Alberta's first public junior college. Many other public colleges were established in Alberta in subsequent decades.
In 1957, the government of Alberta established the Royal Commission on Education in Alberta (also known as the Cameron Commission) to reconsider Alberta's approach to education. Headed by Senator Donald Cameron, the Commission took two years to gather briefs and formulate its report, which was released in 1959. The report contained nearly 280 recommendations for the improvement of education in Alberta, some of which generated considerable controversy. The recommendations focused on concerns as diverse as the pedagogy of progressive education, the dawning of the space age evidenced in the launching of Sputnik, the frustration of business with the supposed unsatisfactory skills of graduates and the dissatisfaction of university groups with the alleged inadequacy of high school programs (Kach and Mazurek 1992a, 204). Perhaps more than anything else, the Commission on Education indicated that Alberta society was growing, changing and searching for an appropriate educational vision.
In a special issue of the ATA Magazine in 1960, Dr S C T Clarke, executive secretary of the Alberta Teachers' Association, published a condensed—albeit still lengthy—version of the Cameron Report for the benefit of teachers.
It is not easy to trace Alberta's subsequent educational reforms directly to the Cameron Report. However, there is little doubt that the report served as a vast reservoir of proposed educational improvements and allowed the government to bring in selected reforms according to its own timing over the next decade. Among other things, the commission likely encouraged the development of the province's college system.
In general, the 1950s was a time of huge expansion for public education in Alberta. The decade is perhaps best summed up in Aalborg's New Year's greeting to teachers in January 1960:
In 1950 in this province, there were 173,000 pupils in 2,136 elementary and secondary schools taught by 6,500 teachers who earned an average salary of about $2,500 each. In 1959, there were 273,00 pupils in 1,318 elementary and secondary schools taught by nearly 11,000 teachers who earned an average salary of about $4,700 each. A second look at these figures will bring home a full realization not only of the phenomenal growth and improvement in our school system during the last decade, but also the transformation which has been brought about in rural areas by the centralization of school facilities. Ten years ago there were still 1,545 one-room schools in operation. By 1959 this number had dropped to 275. To keep pace with this unprecedented change and expansion 6,642 new classrooms valued at $183,000,000 were built during the fifties in carrying out a mammoth construction program that reached into every part of the province. The total budgets of all school boards soared from $29,000,000 in 1950 to over $85,000,000 in 1959. (Aalborg 1960, 7–8)
Summary
In general, public education in Alberta grew significantly during the 1950s, both in the number of students and the number of teachers. It was an era of pride for the government, which invested massively in more teachers and newer facilities. It was also a time of pride for the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, which developed a reputation within Canada and the Commonwealth for advanced studies in education. The establishment of the Cameron Commission indicated that the province was attempting to address shortcomings in its educational system. Academically, Alberta was able to take pride in the initiatives that gave it a national and international reputation for leadership studies in education.
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