History Pre-confederation (to 1867)
Ruling by Schooling Quebec
Conquest to Liberal Governmentality - A Historical Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2012
- Category
- Pre-Confederation (to 1867), Social History, History
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781442641181
- Publish Date
- Sep 2012
- List Price
- $106.00
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781442610491
- Publish Date
- Aug 2012
- List Price
- $54.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442662490
- Publish Date
- Aug 2012
- List Price
- $44.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
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.
About the author
BRUCE CURTIS is Professor of Sociology at Carleton University.
Editorial Reviews
‘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.’
American Historical Review vol 119:01:2014