Unit 2
How Common Was the Common School?

In Unit 2, we look at how the evolution, and even the concept, of common public schooling was fragmented by tensions within the social fabric of nineteenth-century Upper Canada. This fragmentation was filtered by underlying social views and attitudes towards groups considered socially marginal. It is interesting to note that William Ormiston, a grammar school inspector in the late 1850s, commented that in the near future every child should be able to receive an education “without distinction of class, or sex, or colour” (quoted in Prentice, 1977, p. 140).1

Bruce Curtis offers an insight into the issues of equality when he comments on how “educational reformers in the governing classes consistently stress both the necessity and the beauty of class differences and of the social subordination of women [and of people of other races]” (1988, p. 13). Lessons taught in state schools reinforced this message, and educational administration became a form of political domination. In Canada West, once initial interventions were made to establish a state educational structure, the attempts made by different groups and classes to realize the promise of educational equality and self-determination conflicted with the concern of the governing classes to preserve and reproduce inequality. Curtis notes that out of this process of conflict grew many of the institutions, devices, practices and techniques of power that solidified the educational domain. Many of these forms of power persist today.

Objectives

After completing this unit, you should be able to

  1. discuss the differing experiences of the common school for those marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, language and religion.
  2. discuss how the evolution of a common public school system was fragmented by race, class, language and ethnicity.
  3. identify the mechanisms of the “hidden curriculum,” and describe its operation in the nineteenth-century common schools of Ontario.
  4. indicate the specific structure and strategies of schooling which reinforce the underlying values of education for First Nations’ students in the nineteenth century.

Footnote

1Prentice, A. (1977). The school promoters: Education and social class in mid-nineteenth century Upper Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Top