Making a Global City

How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity

by Robert C. Vipond

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Pub Date Apr 11 2017 | Archive Date May 17 2017

University of Toronto Press | Munk Series on Global Affairs

Nonfiction (Adult) | Politics

Description

Half of Toronto’s population was born outside Canada, and more than 140 languages are spoken on the city’s streets and in its homes. How to build community amidst such diversity is one of the global challenges that Canada and many other Western nations has to face head-on.

Making a Global City critically examines the themes of diversity and community in a single primary school, Clinton Street Public School in Toronto, between 1920 and 1990. From the swift and seismic shift from a Jewish to southern European demographic in the 1950s to an increasingly multicultural community starting in the 1970s, Vipond eloquently and clearly highlights the challenges posed by multicultural citizenship in a city that was dominated by Anglo-Protestants. This book celebrates one of the world’s most multicultural cities and stresses the fact that public schools are a vital tool in integrating and accepting immigrants and children in liberal democracies.

Robert C. Vipond is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

Half of Toronto’s population was born outside Canada, and more than 140 languages are spoken on the city’s streets and in its homes. How to build community amidst such diversity is one of the...

Advance Praise

“One of Canada’s leading political scientists, Robert Vipond, has written a superb and significant account of how education shapes citizenship in Canadian political development. Making a Global City is a beautifully written and meticulously researched account of Clinton Street Public School in Toronto from the 1920s to the 1990s. The study expands our understanding of a myriad of topics, including the role of the Canadian state in education, evolving notions of citizenship, the development of a multicultural society, and the functioning of an institution experienced by all Canadian children. I highly recommend this outstanding study.”

Desmond King, Andrew Mellon Professor of American Government, University of Oxford

“This is really an essay on citizenship, cloaked as the diary of a school, and flowing from the insight that a public school is an ideal lab for working out from the bottom up what Canadian citizenship means, versus dictating it from above. Robert Vipond is the ideal guide: equal parts scholar, citizen, and parent. He writes with both passion and precision.”

Rick Salutin, playwright, novelist, journalist, and former Clinton parent

“Robert Vipond does something unique and moving here: He gives us the widescreen story of Canada’s difficult transformation into a plural and diverse nation by taking a detailed look at 70 years of history of a single public school, its students, and its community. The result manages to be an intimate and surprising narrative that ties a single community to the great policy debates and national dialogues that shaped Canada’s century of expansion and development.”

Doug Saunders, columnist for the Globe and Mail and author of Arrival City and The Myth of the Muslim Tide