Educational Discourse and the Making of Educational Legislation in Early Upper Canada

Abstract

In 1787, a group of American refugee settlers in the western portion of Quebec, which would become the colony of Upper Canada in 1791, collectively petitioned the Governor General, Lord Dorchester, for schools. They insisted, in fact, on a relatively comprehensive network of schools funded directly through the government purse. Dorchester responded by appointing William Smith, the former Chief Justice of New York State with whom he had formed a political friendship during the American War of Independence, to head a special committee to report on the state of education throughout the entire province. Several hundred copies of the report were printed and released in 1789. The report recommended a government-supported tripartite elementary, secondary, and university school system. The recommendations were not acted upon, but the report's ideas lingered in public discourse for years to come. In the writing of the origins of schooling in Upper Canada, this report has not received considerable attention. Moreover, the intentions and goals of these early settlers advocating for government-aided schooling are characteristically overlooked. In the dominant view, the building of Upper Canada's school system was motivated by the bureaucratization and institutionalization concerns of major school advocates and politicians in the mid-nineteenth century.