Rewind starts a new season by going back to school. Michael Enright celebrates teachers and students, chalkboards and laptops, shiny new pencils and smart phones. He will listen to the anticipation of a five year old about to set foot in a classroom for the first time, to a teacher who describes the staff room. There will also be stories about free schools and the back to basics movement, recess and the latest fashions, middle school cliques and school songs.

You can listen to the show right here!

 The show starts with a clip from 1959 and the program Assignment. The hosts are Bill McNeil and Maria Barrett.

As excited as those particular children might be to set foot in the classroom, for their teachers, the work had already begun.

School wasn't always a happy experience for First Nations children though. In 1970 Inuit writer Zebedee Nungak remembered one experience from school in the 1960s.

By the late 1960s, a lot of educators were looking for new ways to teach children. Some of them included so called free schools. Rewind aired a discussion from a program called Bringing Back the Future in 1971. 

As so often happens with social experiments, where there's change, there's backlash. American educator Zacharie Clements talked about the changing flavours in education theory.

Going back to school in September always means a change of pace, but for young women who wanted to go to university a hundred or so years ago, there were particular challenges. In 1978, on the program Voice of the Pioneer, Bill McNeil talked to Mrs. C.D. McAlpine. After doing brilliantly in high school, she had gone on to study at the University of Toronto. It was an unusual move for a girl in the early 1900s. Mrs. McAlpine graduated from the University of Toronto in 1908.

If you were going to university in 1925, you might be singing this song, a big hit that year. It was called Collegiate, and it was performed by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. It went all the way to number three on the charts, and also appeared in the Marx Brothers movie Horse Feathers in 1932. The song mentioned, among other things, the snappy clothing you need to make an impression in school. Which is as true now as it was then. And for the kids of 1981, it was all about snug cords, legwarmers and pointed shoes. 

Recess might be fun for the kids, but for teachers, it might mean yard duty, or a trip to the staff room. The clip we aired was first on in the mid 70s on the program Concern. It was a time when teachers were still allowed to smoke on school property.

But what about the school building itself? Does architecture make a difference?

Of course school is about so much more than classes, teachers and homework. It's about friends and hierarchy, who's in and who's out, the groups, the cliques and the outcasts. We had a portrait of social life at River Heights Junior High in Winnipeg in 1982.

And with it's time to let the teachers and children go back to their classrooms and the rest of us to say goodbye until next week. Thanks for visiting!

Music on this programs was:
Early One Morning, two versions. The first by

ANTON LEO,RICK WHITELAW,RICK FOX,JANE BUNNETT,RICHARD EVANS,MARK KELSO,GEORGE KOLLER and the YOUNG AT HEART BAND

The second:
CELTIC RATHSKALLIONS,PAUL MILLS

Collegiate by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians.