Preschools for Science: The Child Study Centre at the University of British Columbia, 1960-1997

The development of the Child Study Centre (CSC) at University of British Columbia (UBC) provides a unique perspective on the complex and often contradictory relationship between child study and preschool education in postwar Canada. In this article, the authors detail the development and eventual closure of the CSC at UBC, focusing on the uneasy interdependencies of scientific child study research and the education of preschoolers. Similar to laboratory schools on Canadian campuses, the CSC was a strange hybrid of school and clinic, educational classroom and psychological lab, a place intended to cultivate both cutting edge research and children's imaginations. The authors begin by placing the broader struggle for child study and preschool education in the province of British Columbia (BC) into the context of the history of scientific child study in North America. Even though the need for early childhood education had long been recognized by organizations such as the provincial Parent-Teacher Federation (PTF), its potential as an area of scholarly study languished for many years before it was taken up by UBC. (Contains 2 figures and 121 footnotes.)