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State of the Nation or Community of Spirit? Schooling for Civic and Ethnic-Religious Nationalism in Insurrectionary Canada

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Bruce Curtis
Bruce Curtis*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa Canada
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This article focuses on the two leading projects in the educational “struggle for the hearts and minds” of the people in the British North American colony of Lower Canada (currently the southern portion of the Canadian Province of Quebec) in the wake of the insurrectionary struggles and armed border incursions of 1837–38. (See Figure 1.) English Radicals and Whigs, with some Canadian allies, promoted a broad-ranging reconstruction of colonial government and legal and cultural institutions. The educational component of their project centered on the “nationalization” of the French- and English-speaking populations through the attendance of young people in common schools, where they would be instructed in a nonsectarian civil religion later known as “our Common Christianity.” The cooperative management of such schools by adult male property holders would train men in the operations of local representative self-government. Most of those involved in promoting this project for a new form of community understood it to be aimed at the assimilation of French Canadians to a broadly “British” nationality.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , Fall 2003 , pp. 325 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by the History of Education Society 

References

1 In earlier work, Curtis, Bruce “The State of Tutelage in Lower Canada, 1835–51,“ History of Education Quarterly 37 (Winter 1997): 25–43, I focused on the conflicts that surrounded the implementation of interrelated reforms of local government and public schooling in the 1840s. This article deals with an earlier phase in educational politics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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25 See Curtis, Bruce “The Buller Education Commission; or, the London Statistical Society Comes to Canada, 1838–42,“ in The Age of Numbers/L'Ére du chiffre, eds. Beaud, J.-P. and Prévost, J.-G. (Quebec: PUQ, 2000):278–97; and idem., “Education and the Manufacture of Solidarity,” for surviving sources and for the enquiry as inventory rather than diagnostic science.Google Scholar

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27 On the content and history of the Irish texts, Goldstrom, Social Content; on their introduction and subsequent fate in Canada West, Bruce Curtis, “Curricular Change and the ‘Red Readers': History and Theory,” in Re-Interpreting Curriculum Research: Images & Arguments eds. Geoff Milburn, Ivor Goodson and Robert Clark (London, Ontario/Sussex, England: Althouse Press/Falmer Press, 1986), 41–63; and idem., “The Speller Expelled: Disciplining the Common Reader in Canada West,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 22 (Fall 1985): 346–68.Google Scholar

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37 Fecteau, “La construction d'un espace social.“Google Scholar

38 I have followed the convention of leaving most formal names in the original French. The orders in question were: the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Order of the Holy Cross, the Clerics of St. Viator, the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.Google Scholar

39 Ferretti, Brève histoire, 62–4; and more generally, René Hardy, Contrǒle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Québec, 1830–1930 (Montréal: Boréal, 1999).Google Scholar

40 Ferretti, Brève histoire, 183; also, Lucien Lemieux, L'établissement de la première province ecclésiastique au Canada. 1783–1844 (Montréal: Fides, 1967), 468–9.Google Scholar

41 Fecteau, “La construction d'un espace social.“Google Scholar

42 For more on the national project in relation to portrayals of the nation through the census, Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: Statistics, State Formation and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). For the continuing efforts of intellectuals to prevent the infection of French Canada by the vulgar materialism associated with American culture, Michèle Martin, Victor Barbeau. Pionnier de la critique culturelle journalistique (Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1997).Google Scholar