Ruling by Schooling Quebec provides a rich and detailed account of colonial politics from 1760 to 1841 by following repeated attempts to school the people. This first book since the 1950s to investigate an unusually complex period in Quebec's educational history extends the sophisticated method used in author Bruce Curtis's double-award-winning Politics of Population.
Drawing on a mass of archival material, the study shows that although attempts to govern Quebec by educating its population consumed huge amounts of public money, they had little impact on rural ignorance: while near-universal literacy reigned in New England by the 1820s, at best one in three French-speaking peasant men in Quebec could sign his name in the insurrectionary decade of the 1830s. Curtis documents educational conditions on the ground, but also shows how imperial attempts to govern a tumultuous colony propelled the early development of Canadian social science. He provides a revisionist account of the pioneering investigations of Lord Gosford and Lord Durham.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One. The Battle Between the Sword and the Mouth
Chapter Two. The Eunuch in the Harem: School Politics, 1793-1829
Chapter Three. The Colonial ‘Monitorial Moment’
Chapter Four. Creating a ‘Taste for Education' in the Countryside, 1829-36
Chapter Five. Schooling the People, 1829-36
Chapter Six. The Normal School
Chapter Seven. Governmentality and the ‘Social' Science
Chapter Eight. Governing through Education
Conclusion
Appendices
A: Legislation for Rural Elementary Schooling in Lower Canada
B: Robert Armour Jr. (1806-45)
C: Stephen Randal’s 1838 Educational Proposals
D: Christopher Dunkin’s Draft School Ordinance of 1840
About the Author :
Bruce Curtis is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University.
Review :
‘This deep analysis of early nineteenth-century Quebec will fuel debate about the complex origins of public schooling not only in the St. Lawrence Valley but elsewhere in North America as well.’
- Chad Gaffield (American Historical Review vol 119:01:2014)
