Education Students & Student Life
Making a Middle Class
Student Life in English Canada during the Thirties
- Publisher
- McGill-Queen's University Press
- Initial publish date
- Oct 1990
- Category
- Students & Student Life
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780773507531
- Publish Date
- Oct 1990
- List Price
- $125.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9780773562424
- Publish Date
- Oct 1990
- List Price
- $95.00
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Description
Using a rich array of archival and quantitative sources, and oral testimony from ex-students across Canada, Axelrod explores the characteristics and significance of university life during a trying decade. He describes who went to university, what they were taught, how they amused themselves, how they responded to the pressing political issues of the day, and what became of them after graduation. Axelrod argues that these students shared the aspirations of middle-class communities elsewhere. Dreading the prospect of downward social mobility, they craved the status a university degree and professional credentials might produce. Accordingly, they forged an associational life on campus that challenged the control of paternalistic authorities, perpetuated the values of middle-class culture, and helped them cope with the stresses of the time.
Women composed almost one-quarter of the student population -- and faced discrimination inside and outside the classroom. How they coped with this, how they adapted their own expectations, and how they contributed to campus and community culture are extensively discussed.
Through the prism of the student experience, Making a Middle Class furnishes fresh insights into the social history of higher education, the history of youth, the history of the middle class, and the history of the Depression.
About the author
Paul Axelrod is professor and former dean of the Faculty of Education at York University.
Editorial Reviews
"[This book] is the best comparative analysis of Canadian post-secondary education available ... Its cogent analysis, highly sensitive to gender differences, will become an essential bench-mark for any future investigations of Canadian universities and student life." Keith Walden, Department of History, Trent University.
Other titles by
Making Policy in Turbulent Times
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Knowledge Matters
Essays in Honour of Bernard J. Shapiro
Values in Conflict
The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education
The Promise of Schooling
Education in Canada, 1800-1914
Youth, University, and Canadian Society
Essays in the Social History of Higher Education
Scholars and Dollars
Politics, Economics, and the Universities of Ontario 1945-1980