Vipond - Making a global city: how one Toronto school embraced diversity

Why would we publish an ethnographic and political history of one inner city Toronto school in a book series on global affairs? One hint is found in the subtitle to Rob Viponds lively history of Clinton School: Making a Global City. The history of this one school helps tell the wider story of how a bastion of Anglo culture, once known as Toronto the Good (read monolithic and bland and buttoned up), became one of the most vital and diverse urban centres on earth.

But the story is even more global than the civic history would suggest. In 2016, the year that saw the rise of Trumpism, the shock of Brexit, a Hungarian referendum that ratified a refusal of an authoritarian government to take any refugees on a continent overflowing with need, this fresh story of Clinton School provides a much-needed counterpoint. It is the story of bottom-up mutual accommodation, of shifting demographics that prompt constant evolution in how a community is built and maintained, of a construction of citizenship that is both inclusive and bounded.

Professor Vipond traces remarkable Canadian immigration shifts over the course of the twentieth century that produce three distinct periods in the life of Clinton School, what he calls Jewish Clinton, European Clinton, and Global Clinton. Somehow, in each period, students who were new Canadians were made to feel that they were somebodies. When the Ontario government created regulations that sought to reaffirm a dominant Protestant culture in the 1950s, the local school community resisted and found ways to ensure that Jewish students and their families felt welcome. In the early 1960s, when children of Italian immigrants came to dominate the school numerically, communications from the school and from its parent committee were routinely sent out not only in English but in Italian (and later in other languages as well). In the 1980s, when Global Clinton emerged, the schools parent committee struggled to balance a commitment to ensure that new immigrants learned English quickly while supporting their desire to maintain their original language and culture.

The twentieth-century history of Clinton School reveals a complex, daily negotiation of what came to be called multiculturalism. Viponds story is not a simple progressive narrative, for it frankly acknowledges failures and conflict. Not all the former students interviewed had fond memories; many told stories of exclusion and bullying. Teachers sometimes remembered stronger academic commitment than the students could recount. Yet, despite the imperfections, Clinton School managed in successive generations to create forms of respect that allowed new Canadians to feel part of a receiving culture without sacrificing personal and community histories. As Vipond concludes: Finding the right balance at Clinton between acculturation and adaptation was all part of the daily routine. Every day was a practice in the construction of civic identity.

A single school in a single city can tell us much about some of the biggest issues of our own era. How can new waves of immigrants find a place in their new countries? Is a nation made up only of those who share a common history and culture? Can shared identity be built through education? What does it mean to be a citizen? In this first monograph in our Munk Series on Global Affairs with the University of Toronto Press, Vipond demonstrates vividly that the history of public education can provide helpful ways to ponder these fundamental questions. Little Clinton School in the heart of Toronto has global significance.

Prof. Stephen J. Toope

Director, Munk School of Global Affairs