Meeting of the People: School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801B1998 9780773571839

Citation preview

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a meeting of the people

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s t u d i e s o n t h e h i s t o ry o f q u e b e c / étud es d’histoire du québec John Dickenson and Brian Young Series Editors/Directeurs de la collection 1 Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal Louise Dechêne 2 Crofters and Habitants Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848–1881 J.I. Little 3 The Christie Seigneuries Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760–1859 Françoise Noël 4 La Prairie en Nouvelle-France, 1647–1760 Louis Lavallée 5 The Politics of Codification The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 Brian Young 6 Arvida au Saguenay Naissance d’une ville industrielle José E. Igartua 7 State and Society in Transition The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 J.I. Little 8 Vingt ans après Habitants et marchands, Lectures de l’histoire des xvii e et xviii e siècles canadiens Habitants et marchands, Twenty Years Later Reading the History of Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury Canada

Edited by Sylvie Dépatie, Catherine Desbarats, Danielle Gauvreau, Mario Lalancette, Thomas Wien 9 Les récoltes des forêts publiques au Québec et en Ontario, 1840–1900 Guy Gaudreau 10 Carabins ou activistes? L’idéalisme et la radicalisation de la pensée étudiante à l’Université de Montréal au temps du duplessisme Nicole Neatby 11 Families in Transition: Industry and Population in NineteenthCentury Saint-Hyacinthe Peter Gossage 12 The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec Colin M. Coates 13 Amassing Power J.B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897–1927 David Perera Massell 14 Making Public Pasts The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930 Alan Gordon 15 A Meeting of the People School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801–1998 Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen

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A Meeting of the People School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801–1998 roderick m ac leod and mary anne poutanen

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004 isbn 0-7735-2695-1 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2742-7 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2004 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Foundation for the Advancement of Protestant Education in Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication MacLeod, Roderick, 1961– A meeting of the people: school boards and Protestant communities in Quebec, 1801–1998 / Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen. (Studies on the history of Quebec; 15) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2695-1 isbn 0-7735-2742-7 1. School boards – Québec (Province) – History. 2. Protestants – Education – Québec (Province) – History. 3. Canadians, English-speaking – Education – Québec (Province) – History. 4. Protestants – Québec (Province) – History. I. Poutanen, Mary Anne – II. Title. III. Series. lc623.2.q8m32 2004

379.1′531′09714

c2003-907353-x

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Sabon.

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For Andrés Javier MacLeod-Cerrolaza and Daniel Christopher Palacios Products of Quebec Protestant Schooling

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Contents

Figures ix Tables Maps

xiii xv

Acknowledgments

xvii

Chronology of Key Events Pertaining to Protestant Education in Quebec xxiii Abbreviations xxxiii Introduction: Searching for Community

3

1 An Earnest Desire for Education: Early Protestant Schools in Quebec 20 2 Without Distinction of Creed: Common Schools and Protestant Communities 50 3 The Dissenters

78

4 Progress and Civilization: The City Boards

101

5 Local Matters: Protestant Boards and One-Room Schoolhouses 136 6 Central Places: Protestant Communities and Secondary Schools 165

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viii • contents

7 Honorary Protestants: Jewish Pupils and Protestant Boards

195

8 Daughters of the Empire, Soldiers of the Soil: Protestant School Boards, Patriotism, and War 223 9 Pillars of the Community: School Boards and Social Welfare

244

10 Riding the Catholic Bus: The Decline of Rural Protestant School Boards 262 11 Meeting the Needs: Modern Schools, Protestant Architecture 12 The Protestant Metropolis

285

315

13 Numerous and Varied Origins: Immigrants, Human Rights, and the Protestant Tradition 343 14 The Language Bath: Protestant Boards and French Language Instruction 361 15 Paths to Wisdom: the Cree and Kativik School Boards Conclusion: Strange Bedfellows: The Imposition of Linguistic Boards Notes

417

Bibliography Index

479

457

400

380

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Figures

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

The St. Francis River near Richmond 21 The Old Stone Schoolhouse, Melbourne 33 Benjamin Hobson’s house, New Carlisle 36 Schoolhouse in St Roch sur Aulnais 39 William Scriver’s hotel, Hemmingford 51 Superintendent’s list of schools, 1850: Beauharnois County 72 Superintendent’s list of schools, 1850: Missisquoi, Shefford, Sherbrooke, and Stanstead counties 73 Tibbits Hill Schoolhouse, Brome Township 77 Schoolhouse, New Glasgow 84 Longueuil Episcopal Church, Longueuil, 1876 87 Petition to dissent, Belle Rivière 91 Town hall, St Lambert 93 Riverside School, Pointe St Charles, Montreal 102 St Andrew’s School, Quebec 105 St Paul’s church, Recollet Street, Montreal, c. 1865 107 British and Canadian School, Montreal 109 McGill Normal School, Montreal 111 Old High School, University Street, Montreal, 1870 123 New High School, Lower Peel Street, Montreal, c. 1890 125 Victoria School, Montreal 126 Burning of Hochelaga School, Montreal 130 The funeral of Sarah Maxwell 133 Grace Simpson and her students, Lochaber 137

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x • figures

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Lochaber Bay school students 139 Silver Creek School, Lochaber Township 142 Hyatt Schoolhouse, Milby 146 Interior, Hyatt Schoolhouse, Milby 147 Standard schoolhouse design, c. 1900 151 Macdonald College School for Teachers, graduating class 1925 163 Charleston Academy and the Hatley Anglican church 166 Granby Academy 169 Old High School, Quebec 171 Model School, Hemmingford 175 Lennoxville town hall and academy 176 Model School, Leeds 178 CPR railway station, Valois 185 Academy, New Carlisle 189 School Home, New Carlisle 189 Baron de Hirsch School, Montreal 199 Aberdeen School, Montreal 205 Scotland Schoolhouse and Synagogue, Ste Sophie 212 Class, Scotland School, Ste Sophie 213 Strathcona Academy, Outremont 217 Monument honouring the war dead, Richmond 224 Plaque honouring former pupils killed in action, 1914–18, Montreal West High School 230 Gaspé schoolchildren in Montreal, 1939 231 Rebecca Echenberg being presented to the King and Queen, 1939 232 Rubber salvage, Sawyerville, 1942 235 Cooking class, Girls’ High School, Montreal 236 Building model airplanes, Montreal, 1943 237 Cadet corps, Longueuil High School, 1940 238 Princess Elizabeth visits the Molson Stadium, 1951 241 Katimavik: Central Canadian Pavilion, Expo 67 242 Fingernail inspection, Montreal 245 Tuberculosis sanitarium, Ste Agathe 252 Medical inspection by a visiting doctor, Montreal 253 Medical exam in a school clinic, Montreal 257 School bus, Morin Heights, c. 1950 263 Inverness Academy 264 Snowmobile, Escuminac, 1944 275 Interior, school bus, Matapedia, 1944 276 Industrial arts, Montreal 286 High School of Montreal, University Street, Montreal 288

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figures • xi

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Basement plan, High School of Montreal 289 Boys’ gym, new High School of Montreal 290 Girls’ rooftop playground, new High School of Montreal 290 Chemistry lab, West Hill High School, Montreal 291 Girls’ gym class, Lennoxville Academy, c. 1912 293 Art class, Montreal 297 Sketch from the program of the Shawville High School opening, 1953 302 Architect’s drawing for the new Northmount High School, Montreal, 1954 303 “Attractive school grounds”: new West Hill High School, Montreal, 1954 303 Plan for Lindsay Place High School, Pointe Claire, 1958 305 Maquette, Massey-Vanier Regional High School, Cowansville 309 Richmond County Regional High School, Richmond 311 Demolition of Lennoxville Academy, 1982 312 Plan of Lemoyne-d’Iberville School, Longueuil, 1950 331 New psbgm headquarters, Notre Dame de Grace, Montreal 338 The former MacDonald-Johnston garage, Alcove (Wakefield North) 338 Morning prayers in a Protestant school, c. 1940 344 Christmas concert (junior grades), Lennoxville High School, 1948 346 Form for the renunciation of the Roman Catholic religion 358 Roslyn School, Westmount 362 The mission and church, Grande Ligne 365 Presbyterian School, Pointe aux Trembles 367 Cree School Board building, Misstissini 381 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Montreal West 401 Moral and religious education brochure, English Montreal School Board, 1999 410

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Tables

1 Government-funded schools prior to the establishment of the Royal Institution Board of Trustees, 1818 38 2 The state of Hemmingford’s schools, December 1842 57–59 3 Schools run by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1850–70 116 4 Schools opened Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1870–78 121 5 Schools opened or acquired by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1884–95 127–128 6 Consolidation of Barnston schools, 1927–37 157 7 Protestant schools of Leeds Township, Megantic County, in the 20th century 158 8 Montreal Board of Health guidelines for contagious diseases, 1893 249 9 Schools acquired by Montreal’s pbsc through annexation and school building in annexed territories 319–320 10 Population of Montreal Protestant schools by neighbourhood, 1925–43 324 11 High schools opened by the psbgm, 1950–65 326 12 Numbers of psbgm schools and their populations, 1951–91 328 13 Student populations of Protestant school boards, 1991 359

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Maps

1 Southern Quebec: key places and regions 4 2 The St Lawrence and St Francis River valleys: places of early Protestant settlement 24 3 The Missisquoi area, 1815: seigneuries and townships 27 4 Eastern Townships boundaries 28 5 Hemmingford Township: distribution of schools 54 6 Part of Brome Township, 1872 74 7 Montreal and the South Shore, 1872 79 8 The City of Montreal and surrounding municipalities, 1883 104 9 Schools run by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1870 116 10 Protestant Schools in St Ann’s Ward and Pointe St Charles, 1850–1946 122 11 Montreal’s Protestant school districts and their populations, 1895 and 1902 135 12 Lochaber and Buckingham Townships 141 13 Parish of St Antoine de Longueuil 180 14 Communities on and around the Island of Montreal 184 15 South coast of the Gaspé Peninsula 187 16 Ste Sophie, New Glasgow, and St Lin 196 17 Enrolment in Montreal’s Protestant elementary schools, 1925 202 18 Inspector McOuat’s sketch of Ste Sophie and New Glasgow 211 19 Part of Stanstead Township 272

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xvi • maps

20 The high schools (later elementary schools) of Stanstead County, 1972 310 21 South Shore Protestant schools, 1985 316 22 Montreal neighbourhoods: comparison of Protestant school populations, 1925–43 322 23 Schools of the Kativik School Board 382 24 Schools of the Cree School Board 383

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Acknowledgments

In 1998, following the passage of Bill 180, which abolished confessional school boards in the province of Quebec, Eardley P. Dowling, the chair of the Foundation for the Advancement of Protestant Education in Canada, met with members of the Department of History at McGill University to explore the possibility of establishing a research group that would focus on the history of Quebec Protestant schooling. Although the Protestant system of education had existed in Quebec for nearly 200 years, it had received little scholarly attention. As a result of this and subsequent meetings, the Quebec Protestant Education Research Project (qperp) was created. It set out to locate, evaluate, and chronicle the historical documents of the Protestant school boards and to research and write a comprehensive history of Protestant education in Quebec based on these sources. This book, A Meeting of the People: School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801–1998, is in part the outcome of what became an ideal collaboration between the members of the foundation, qperp, and McGill’s Department of History. From our perspective, this partnership has produced both surprising and anticipated by-products. It has brought the public into the university sphere and introduced academia to the public. It has encouraged students and historians to consult school-board documents and communities to value their school boards as archival sources. In keeping with the aims of qperp, a workshop, “Historical Sources in the School Board Archives,” was held in June 2000 at McGill University. Staff of the English school boards and a number of public archives throughout Quebec, as well as representatives of Quebec historical societies

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xviii • acknowledgments

attended. We have established formal links with research groups at McGill and Laval universities and others across the province, as well as with the wider community through the recently established Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network (qahn). This book, let alone the project, would never have been possible without the support of the Foundation for the Advancement of Protestant Education in Canada. On an even more fundamental level, our subject matter would not have been there to study had it not been for members of the foundation and people like them who, for over a century and a half, promoted the values of Protestant education in Quebec’s public schools. It is their history that we have been privileged to write. To Eardley Dowling, John Smith, John Edge, Lise Cooper, Dorothy Staniland, Tom Herron, and the late Harold Napper we express our gratitude for having entrusted us with this story. Professor Brian Young of the Department of History at McGill University has been a constant supporter of the project and a sound critic of our work. His own explorations of Protestant institutions in Quebec have afforded us welcome opportunities for comparative discussion and a chance to meet with students interested in the meaning of Protestantism. Graduate students from whose work and experience we have benefitted include Darcy Ingram, Marie-Eve Harbec, Jadwiga Jasleski, and Janis Zibalik. Other members of the Montreal History Group (with whom we have enjoyed sharing office space and resources) have given us thoughtful advice, notably Bettina Bradbury, Tamara Myers, and Sylvie Taschereau. We would also like to thank others at McGill who have contributed to the success of the project, such as Michael Cantwell of the Faculty of Arts Development Office and, in the Department of History, Georgii Mikula and Jody Anderson, who helped us manoeuvre through the university’s sometimes baffling bureaucracy. Professor Myron Echenberg told us of his own family’s experiences within the Protestant school system. In the Department of Geography, Professor Sherry Olson and her map project gave us invaluable advice on mapping the Quebec countryside. McGill librarians Carol Marley and Lorraine Dubreuil were helpful in tracking down old maps and other documents. Above all, our deep thanks go to Professor Gil Troy, chair of the Department of History at the time the project was launched, who has retained his role as liaison between the department and the foundation. Despite having been raised in a country for whom the notion of confessionally based public schools is a contradiction in terms, he has shown a remarkable appreciation for Protestant education and a sensitivity to the nuances of Quebec society. He has been a tireless champion of our project within the university and an advocate of the scholarly process to our patrons, for whom the pace of academia has no doubt been frustrating at times.

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acknowledgments • xix

We are indebted to the archivists of the English school boards for guiding us through the sources (and sometimes through unusual paths to find the sources) and for their insight into the workings of modern boards: Ann Bilodeau of the Western Quebec School Board, Louise Paradis of the Lester B. Pearson board, Patricia Gonzales of New Frontiers, Jocelyn Thompson of Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board (dividing her time between Lachute and Laval), Lou Brindle of the Eastern Townships Board, Joanna Wrench of the English Montreal School Board, Doreen Bouchard (and her daughter Cathy) of the Riverside School Board, and Alice Miascum of the Cree School Board. The assistance and enthusiasm of Diane Fyfe, director general of the Western Quebec School Board, and secretaries general Cathleen Jolicoeur of the Central Quebec School Board and Bela Mianscum of the Cree School Board were invaluable. Alain Gauthier, assistant secretary general of the Kativik School Board, was especially helpful in explaining the structure of the school board. Janine Desbiens, of the Kativik School Board’s resource room, provided valuable information about Inuit social and cultural practices. We are grateful to many at the Eastern Shores School Board for making the work of research in the dead of winter on the Gaspé coast seem warm and comfortable: Lally Mackenzie, Frances Ross, Christine Grenier, Mike Chesser, and Anne and Gordon MacWhirter. Despite their hectic work schedules, all these people amiably provided space, sometimes in crowded workplaces, cheerfully brought us all the documents we requested, and were genuinely attentive to what we discovered. Not only did they respect and appreciate the historical documents under their management but also they were interested in the information we gleaned from the pages of old, dusty minute books, tattered correspondence, school journals, and cracked and faded photographs. All of them were of the opinion that the project was both timely and necessary. We also appreciate the assistance offered by archivists at other public institutions: Janice Rosen at the Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives; Gordon Burr and Johanne Pelletier at the McGill University Archives; Louis-Joseph Lapointe at the Archives nationales du Québec à Québec; and Elsie Sparrow at the Pontiac Archive. Marion Daigle at the Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations welcomed us into the rich array of sources on modern Quebec education in their archives, and proved a valuable source of information in her own right. Throughout the province members of historical societies, volunteers who work diligently to preserve the local histories of Anglo-Protestant communities across Quebec, generously shared their knowledge and resources with us. Esther and Don Healy of the Richmond County Historical Society opened not only the society’s archives but also their

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xx • acknowledgments

home to us, to say nothing of the extensive tours of the Richmond and Melbourne area that they provided. Some weeks before its grand opening, Bev and Milton Loomis of Milby gave us a private tour of the one-room schoolhouse that they have painstakingly restored by hand. Martin Cullen of the Buckingham Historical Society sent copies of documents about schools in the region. Joan Dow of the British Gaspesian Cultural Village delivered a suitcase full of much-appreciated material for us to consult. Anne Gagné of Hull and Willard Smith of Wawa, Ontario, both passed along memorabilia of their personal histories in Lochaber and Gore. Lou Ryder of the Lennoxville and Ascot Historical and Museum Society provided numerous photos and much information. Thanks also go to Sandra Stock of Morin Heights, Carol Gilkin of New Carlisle, James Charnley of Longueuil, Beverly Smith of Richmond, Amanda Goodwin of the Magdalen Islands, and many others. A number of individuals took time to share their knowledge and experience with us. Gertrude Katz proved a rich source of information regarding the Committee for Neutral Schools and many members of the Elizabeth Ballantyne School governing board provided insight into the working of that institution. The Reverend James Armour of the church of St Andrew and St Paul in Montreal contributed valuable material from their archives and much insight into the city’s early congregations and ministers (who typically served on the school board). We would like to extend a special acknowledgment to Solomon Goodz, Mary Zaretsky, Nathan Rosenberg, and the many other residents and former residents of Ste Sophie and New Glasgow who told us their stories and who honoured us by inviting us to a reunion of the community. Several people read different versions of this manuscript. We especially welcomed the astute comments of Brian Young and Aurèle Parisien. We are indebted to Eardley Dowling for sharing his knowledge and experience as a school commissioner and to Professor Winston Emery of McGill’s Faculty of Education (and also a former school commissioner), whose comments on an early draft of the manuscript were much appreciated. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who offered helpful and thought-provoking suggestions, and Lesley Andrassy for her considerate and respectful criticism. This book is better for all of these discerning commentaries. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the graciousness of our families who, for the past three years, have shared their lives with twohundred years of Protestant schooling. They have always been supportive, often delighting in the stories and even accompanying us on our sojourns in search of Protestant schools. They have also been frustrated by the endless hours we have spent working at and occupying the computer at home. Love and thanks to Elena Cerrolaza for her tireless sym-

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acknowledgments • xxi

pathy (and skill with scanner and graphics programs) and to Jorge Palacios for his wisdom and patience. Last but not least, thanks to our children, Daniel Palacios and Andrés MacLeod, who have benefitted from a Protestant education at Willingdon, Roslyn, and Elizabeth Ballantyne schools in Montreal, and to Elisa MacLeod, who will experience a different sort of schooling under the English Montreal School Board.

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Chronology of Key Events Pertaining to Protestant Education in Quebec

1789

Dorchester Commission

• Calls for a free elementary school in each village and a free secondary school in each county • Calls for a secular college for English and French

1791

Constitutional Act

• Upper and Lower Canada established, each with a legislative assembly

1801

• Creates the Royal Institution for Act for the the Advancement of Learning Establishment of Free Schools in this Province

1816

• Royal Institution schools with more Royal Grammar advanced curriculum schools open in Montreal and Quebec

1818

Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning (rial) incorporated

• Royal Institution has board of trustees and secretary to deal with petitions for schools

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xxiv • chronology

1818

Anglican parishes established

• Anglican ministers serve as local administrators for Royal Institution schools

1824

4 George IV, cap. 31 Fabrique Act

• Provides for Catholic parochial schools • Parishes, with bishop’s approval, may establish schools using up to one-quarter of the annual parish income • Schools under the authority of priests and church wardens • Local councils or “Fabriques” hold property for schools

1829

9 George IV, cap. 46 Syndics’ Act

• Places Assembly in control of education • Communities elect five trustees or “syndics” to receive grants, to build and maintain schools, and to hire teachers

1832

2 William IV, cap. 26

• Renewal of Syndics’ Act • Communities whose schools were operated by the Royal Institution were obliged to decide whether they wished to continue doing so

1837– 38

Rebellions in Lower Canada

• Martial law, ruled by Special Council • Lord Durham made governor general with mandate to study causes of the rebellions

1838

Durham Report (Arthur Buller prepares section on education)

• Program to encourage British values throughout Lower Canada by establishing system of common schools • Religious education to make use of a book of biblical extracts

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chronology • xxv

• Recommends banning clergy from inspecting and supervising schools; a municipally based system with a superintendent suggested • Recommends banning politics in schools, imposing school taxes, improving recruitment and pay of teachers 1840

Union of the Canadas • Unites Lower and Upper Canada • Legislative Assembly replaces Special Council

1841

4 & 5 Victoria, cap. 18 Common School Act (for the united province of Canada)

• Creates a non-sectarian system paid for by government grants (via district councils) and local fees • Establishes a superintendent of education to supervise education budget and to oversee all schools • Creates a Department of Education (run by the supt) with two branches: Upper Canada and Lower Canada • Allows school municipalities (parishes or townships) to elect five to seven commissioners to open and run schools • Creates a board of examiners in cities, with Catholic and Protestant sections • Provides for a right of dissent through an amendment (Article XI) that is promoted by both sides

1843

High School of Montreal founded

• Absorbs Royal Grammar School in Montreal and becomes first Protestant secondary school

1844

Institut Canadien founded in Montreal

• Liberal voice of French Canada

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xxvi • chronology

1845

8 Victoria, cap. 41 Education Act for Canada East

• Places control of school revenue in hands of school commissioners rather than with municipal governments • Allows no compulsory taxation, but voluntary contributions possible • Allows schools operated by religious communities to be regulated by school boards

1846

9 Victoria, cap. 27 Lower Canada School Act

• Makes local taxation compulsory; school commissioners must undertake evaluations • Creates Protestant and Catholic school boards in Quebec City and Montreal; appointed by municipal government and given grants in lieu of taxes

1849

12 Victoria, cap. 200

• Allows clergy to be elected to school boards

1849

Guerre des Éteignoirs

• Marks violent opposition to school taxation, felt across Quebec

1851

14 Victoria, cap. 97 The Inspector’s Act

• Provides for Normal Schools and for twenty-three inspectors to visit schools to check their books

1853

Sicotte Commission

• Calls for more central control of education

1856

19–20 Victoria, cap.54

• Establishes Council of Public Instruction to work with the Supt to set teaching standards • Regulates Normal Schools • Oversees selection of books, maps, etc. for schools • Creates Journal de l’instruction publique / of education

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chronology • xxvii

1857

Normal Schools open • First formal Protestant teacher training

1859

Council of Public • Eleven Catholic, four Protestant Instruction established members

1864

Quebec conference to • Protestants demand their own discuss Confederation superintendent of education, and control of their own schools and tax money

1864

Provincial Association • Advocacy group for the interests of Protestant teachers of Protestant Teachers formed

1867

• Entrenches in the Constitution Article 93 of the the rights of minorities (Protestants British North America in Quebec, Catholics in Ontario) to Act amended a separate system of education

1867

Ministry of Public Instruction created

• Office of superintendent replaced by government minister

1869

32 Victoria, cap. 16

• Expansion of Council of Public Instruction to twenty-one members in two committees (seventeen Catholic members and seven Protestant members) • Grants for education in cities to be divided according to confessional breakdown of taxpayers • Property owners taxed according to four categories: Catholics, Protestants, neutrals, exempt persons

1875

Ministry of Public Instruction abolished

• Ministry replaced by a department with two committees • Protestant Committee governs what is essentially a separate Protestant school system

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xxviii • chronology

1888

51–52 Victoria, cap. 2 • Establishes powers of various boards, confessional committees, taxation, etc.

1902

Adams Report

1903

3 Edward VII, cap. 16 • Acknowledges that in matters of education, Jews to be considered Protestant and their taxes to be directed towards Protestant boards

1905

Kingsey Consolidated • First consolidated school School built

1907

Macdonald College opens

• School for Teachers in rural setting allows thousands to obtain certification

1919

Spanish influenza

• Devastating epidemic, spurs drive for medical attention via schools

1924

3 Edward VII, cap. 16 • Equation of Protestants and Jews for school purposes does not declared guarantee a Protestant form of unconstitutional education to Protestants

1925

Montreal Central Board established

• Association of Montreal Island school boards for mutual financial assistance

1930

Jewish School Commission established in Montreal

• Commissioners elected, who make a contract with Montreal Protestant school board to accommodate Jewish children

• Funded by William Christopher Macdonald • Recommends consolidation of rural Protestant schools

• Commissioners resign a year later 1937

Hepburn Commission • Recommends comprehensive reforms to Protestant school board structure and administration

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chronology • xxix

1939

Royal visit

• Many Protestant children visit Montreal to see the King and Queen

1943

7 George VI, cap. 13

• Requires compulsory attendance at school for 6- to 14-year-olds

1944

8 George VI, cap. 14

• Allows government to distribute free books • Allows collective bargaining to be negotiated between teachers and school boards

1944

Quebec Federation of • Federation of local parents’ associations, forming an advocacy Home and School group for educational concerns Associations formed

1944

Central boards formed

• Federations of small local boards, much as occurred in Montreal 1925

1945

Outremont school crisis begins

• Outremont board will not renew contract to accommodate Jewish children

1951

Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal (psbgm) formed

• Replaces Montreal Protestant Central Board

1952

Royal visit

• Many Protestant children visit Montreal to see Princess Elizabeth

1961

“Quiet Revolution” begins

• Systematic overhaul of public institutions, much greater state control • Royal Commission on Education established (Msgr Alphonse Parent is chair)

1962

Committee for Neutral Schools

• Group of parents and educators, mostly Protestant, advocating the abolition of confessional school boards

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xxx • chronology

1963

First volume of Parent • Recommends a government Report published ministry to be in charge of all education administration • Recommends creation of preuniversity academic or vocational schools

1964

Bill 69

• Abolishes Council of Public Instruction, office of Superintendent, confessional committees • Creates Ministry of Education out of former Dept of Public Instruction and Dept of Youth • Creates Superior Council of Education; Protestant and Catholic committees have authority over curriculum • Gives teachers the right to strike through new Labour Code • Requires attendance to age sixteen

1964

Operation 55 implemented

• Creates regional school boards to administer secondary education and other services • Provides local boards with representation, delegates responsibilities

1965

Reform of psbgm

• Five seats on psbgm reserved for Jews • City of Montreal school commissioners remain unelected

1966

Second volume of Parent Report published

• Advocates reorganization of school boards • Recommends a single regional school commission (no confessional status) to regulate all education

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chronology • xxxi

• Recommends that local parents’ committees should be responsible for deciding school’s linguistic and confessional character • Advocates a Council of School Development to liaise between government and school commissions 1967

Expo 67 in Montreal

• Many school children visit Montreal’s international exhibition, Man and His World

1968

• Suggests replacing Montreal Pagé Commission (Joseph Pagé as chair) Island’s forty-two school boards with thirteen regional boards organized along linguistic lines

1968

St Leonard crisis

• Local Catholic board ends schools’ bilingual programs • Anglophone community rallies to support linguistic rights • Impetus for Gendron Commission on status of French in Quebec

1969

Bill 62 (defeated)

• Organizes Montreal Island into eleven school districts, each Catholic, Protestant, or nondenominational • Each board to be made up of six elected and two appointed officials

1969

Bill 63 (defeated)

• Assures parents’ right to choose their children’s language of instruction

1970

October Crisis

• Imposition of War Measures Act to counter perceived terrorist threat

1971

Bill 27

• Reorganizes school boards outside Montreal: 1100 boards reduced to 200

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xxxii • chronology

• Extends right to vote to general electorate • Gives school committees legal status 1972

Bill 27 takes effect

• Large sector boards replace local school boards

1972

Bill 71

• Confirms confessional basis of education in Montreal • Reduces the number of school boards on the Island of Montreal to eight, of which two were Protestant: Lakeshore and psbgm • Opens seats on board to election by general population • Creates an island council made up of representatives from eight boards

1973

Bill 71 takes effect

• Local school boards on the Island of Montreal abolished • First board-wide elections to psbgm

1974

Bill 22

• Makes French the official language of Quebec • Stipulates that people whose mother tongue is not English must pass a language proficiency test to enroll in English schools

1977

Bill 101

1984

Bill 3 (ruled unconstitutional)

• Restricts access to English-language instruction to those whose parents have gone to school in English, in Quebec • Would have replaced confessional boards with linguistic ones • Montreal and Quebec would have retained confessional boards within 1967 boundaries

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1986

Bill 107 (dropped)

• Would have created linguistic boards everywhere but Montreal and Quebec, which were to retain confessional boards

1996

Estates-general on education makes its report

• Recommends seeking constitutional amendment to implement linguistic boards

1997

Article 93 of bna Act amended

• Quebec legislature and Canadian parliament approve

1997

Bill 180

• Abolishes confessional boards in favour of English and French boards • Creates a governing board for each school to replace school committees and to make decisions regarding school’s curriculum and confessional status

1998

Bill 180 implemented

• First elections to new linguistic school boards • Governing boards elected

1999

Proulx Report

• Recommends that school boards not offer specific religious instruction

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Abbreviations

anq-q Archives nationales du Québec à Québec, Ste Foy cqsba Central Quebec School Board Archives, Sillery csba Cree School Board Archives, Mistissini emsba English Montreal School Board Archives, Montreal essba Eastern Shores School Board Archives, New Carlisle and Gaspé etsba Eastern Townships School Board Archives, Magog and Richmond ksba Kativik School Board Archives, Montreal lbpsba Lester B. Pearson School Board Archives, Beaconsfield mua McGill University Archives, Montreal nfsba New Frontiers School Board Archives, Chateauguay qfhsa Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations rsba Riverside School Board Archives, Longueuil swlsba Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board Archives, Laval, Lachute, and Ste Agathe wqsba Western Quebec School Board Archives, Aylmer

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A MEETING OF THE PEOPLE

We believe that the survival of a community’s language and culture is dependent on its power to make policy and to exercise administrative control over its education institutions … the Minister of Education has recently indicated that he is considering the abolition of elected school boards and their replacement by regional or territorial administrative structures … this would result in the elimination of effective control by the English-speaking community of its elementary and secondary school systems … elected school boards are an essential part of the democratic process and the educational structure … we categorically reject and will oppose with all means at our disposal attempts by the Government of Québec to impose unified regional or territorial administrative structures. Protestant School Municipality of Pontiac, 21 April 1982

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Introduction Searching for Community The secretary is instructed to dispose of all documents, apart from those of historical value i.e. Minute Books etc. that are over 5 years old. Adopted unaminously [sic]. The Pontiac Protestant School Board, 1972.1

The records of Quebec’s Protestant school system are kept in places like the basement of St Mary’s Elementary School in Longueuil, across the river from Montreal. This archive contains the material generated by dozens of distinct communities across this large region, some dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century. In stark contrast to the public archives in Quebec City, where government records are fastidiously organized and easily accessible, documents here are stored in cardboard boxes. Some of them lie on metal shelves but others are simply stacked in a corner. In these cartons are the jumble of papers, books and registers, letters, and the occasional photograph and school blueprint, that is the legacy of Protestant communities and their schools on the South Shore and in the Richelieu Valley. The array of minutes alone maps the history of school boards: the reams of computer-generated pages from the South Shore Protestant Regional School Board, which administered all Protestant schooling in the region from 1992 to 1998; the bound, typewritten pages of the St Lawrence Protestant School

See facing page for caption.

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introduction • 5

Board and the South Central Protestant School Board, themselves amalgamations of smaller boards created in 1972; the volumes of leather-bound tomes that constitute the records of the boards of major towns such as Longueuil, St Lambert, Greenfield Park, and McMasterville, which formed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries and operated with varying degrees of autonomy until they were legislated out of existence in 1972; and the notebooks from the older dissentient boards, which served the tiny Protestant communities of L’Acadie, St Valentin, Candiac, and others that have long since disappeared. Each page in all these cartons records the actions of men (and, in later years, women) who met at regular intervals over the last century and a half to run the Protestant school or schools under their particular jurisdiction. The history of these school boards is the history of the communities they represented. Public schooling in Quebec is now determined by a Ministry of Education, with school boards – themselves typically large and impersonal – serving essentially as an administrative mechanism for educational services, so it is difficult to conceive that the business of running schools once lay at the heart of a community. For most of the last century and a half, sitting on a school board was a means of ensuring that one’s own children received the best possible education and that one’s own community enjoyed the best possible school facilities. School commissioners and trustees were (in most places) elected and so were responsible to their constituents. They were the neighbours, even the family, of those whose taxes paid for the system, and the minutes they took were kept so that these ratepayers (not, as it would be today, the auditors) could see how their money was being spent. School boards were vital community institutions – indeed, in some isolated places they were the only real forum for public discussion. As such, they were particularly crucial for the survival of Protestant communities, which often existed in the midst of a Catholic majority who dominated other forms of local government. Moreover, Protestant schooling was a specific creation of Protestant communities themselves. Catholic education was often the product of church and teaching orders, but

Map 1 Southern Quebec: key places and regions Although only a small portion of the province, southern Quebec is a vast area stretching some 100 km from the Pontiac to the tip of the Gaspé peninsula. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Protestants had settled in virtually every part of this territory and after a few decades had established a presence on the Lower North Shore, the Magdalen Islands, and the Saguenay Valley.

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6 • a meeting of the people

Protestant schooling (except in the cities) typically came from the grassroots, born of a popular desire for literacy. Many Protestant communities had schools even before they had churches, and their schools, unlike churches, served the entire population, not merely one congregation. When an early community gathered to discuss educational matters, the event was known as a “meeting of the people.” Although the history of Protestant education in Quebec is for the most part a history of schooling in English, the “community” has never been defined by its Englishness. It is at once more specific and much broader than this. The changing nature of the term “Protestant,” and by extension of Protestant communities themselves, is one of the problematic issues at the heart of this book. In the nineteenth century, the language of instruction was secondary to the values that characterized a form of education. In some circles such values were those of one denomination; in others they represented a wide spectrum of characteristics, including Britishness, intellectual liberty, scientific curiosity, and even freedom from what was often perceived as papal tyranny. The division of public schooling into Protestant and Catholic systems dates from a time when there was no question of including other groups in the reckoning, but Protestant education had the advantage of being broad enough in its scope, and flexible enough in its approach, to accommodate most of those who could not, or would not, attend Catholic schools. (This is not to suggest that this process did not involve a great deal of effort on the part of those included.) As such, it has been the lot – and, arguably, the nature – of the Protestant system to absorb people with other than British or Northern European backgrounds. It has educated Jews, Orthodox Christians, native peoples, and even many Catholics. This accommodation has at times proved difficult and the older Anglo-Protestant population has not always been happy with the presence of outsiders, but the experience has forced school officials, parents, and pupils to deal with their own perceptions of difference and to sensitize themselves to racism and anti-Semitism. In practice, the addition of outsiders proved critical to Protestant survival in the second half of the twentieth century. Similarly, the education of Frenchspeaking Protestants and the desire of English-speaking Protestants to be educated in French point to another area where the boundaries of what constitutes Protestant education have been stretched. The flexibility and adaptability of Protestant schooling meant a renewal, even a reinvention, of those “characteristic” values for every generation, a process that served to keep the institution vibrant. The abolition of confessional school boards in 1998 put an end to this process – a loss that, to many, seems of no great consequence in a Quebec where most people see the battle lines drawn between French and En-

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introduction • 7

glish, rather than Protestant and Catholic. The placing of Englishspeaking Catholics alongside English-speaking Protestants and other anglophones has allowed all these groups to enjoy a common institution with the objective of maintaining an English-language education system. What has been lost, however, is an approach to schooling that was fundamentally about values, as opposed to language. Catholics, too, can no longer enjoy this approach – at least in theory. In practice, since the majority of Quebec francophones are Catholic, the nature of the curriculum in formerly Catholic schools has changed very little, for reasons that will be made clear by the end of this book. For Protestants, and those who would subscribe to “Protestant” values (however they may be defined), such continuity is rare and nowhere is access to such values guaranteed in the way it was prior to 1998. Many within the Protestant community see the constitutional amendment that allowed for the imposition of linguistic boards as the abrogation of a right – the right to a Protestant form of education – that had been enshrined since Confederation. One often-overlooked feature of Quebec’s Protestant population, and consequently of its schools, is how widely dispersed it was (and, to a lesser extent, still is) across the province. The Protestant schools of Montreal are well-known, thanks to the dominating force that was the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal and, to a slightly lesser extent, to the school boards of Montreal’s West Island, an area that has been a bastion of English Quebec for several decades. The Protestant presence on Montreal’s South Shore and in Laval was nearly as strong during this same period, though the rapid population rise in these areas since World War II has distracted attention from their long histories as important, if dispersed, centres of Protestantism. The historic significance of the Eastern Townships and its schools has been celebrated and promoted by local historical groups for many years, and the same is true on a smaller scale for the Ottawa valley (the Outaouais), the Chateauguay valley, and the Gaspé peninsula. Less well known is the Protestant community in Quebec City, which has nevertheless enjoyed a rich history. A study of school boards reveals a (perhaps) surprising Protestant presence in such places as the Saguenay valley, the Beauce, Northwestern Quebec, the Magdalen Islands, and at various points along the St Lawrence River. The non-Protestant element within the Protestant school system has been concentrated in Montreal, and more recently in the Greater Montreal area, but this should not detract from the important Jewish communities in Sherbrooke, Ste Agathe, and the tiny community of Ste Sophie in the Laurentians. For their part, French Protestants have had a rich history in the region south and east of Montreal, and are still particularly strong numerically there. And while

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8 • a meeting of the people

the Cree and Inuit, whose education is strongly Protestant, are served mainly by the Cree and Kativik school boards respectively, other boards in the south have occasionally accommodated native children. This study focuses on the intricate relationships between Protestant school boards and the communities they served. It is based on the idea that local schools reflected the values and interests of the parents whose children attended the schools and of the members of the school boards who managed them. Any discrepancies between those values and interests created conflicts that invariably had to be resolved between the parties. This study also considers the school board as the arbitrator between the demands of the state and those of the community. For this reason, commissioners and trustees were in the unenviable position of trying to meet the needs of a number of competing interests – those of the Protestant Committee, the Ministry of Education, teachers, and parents – while keeping in mind their purpose of providing an education to the community’s children. They also had to do this in periods of economic recessions and depressions, during world wars and epidemics, and as the Protestant population shifted from the countryside to urban centres – all factors that placed enormous pressure on local resources. As definitions of what constituted a good education evolved, local communities and their school boards had to adjust to meet current realities. Ultimately, this study addresses the nature of communities (both in the local and the cultural sense) rather than the larger changes in education. By considering the school board as both a window onto communities and a vehicle through which communities expressed their educational needs, we aim to provide a fresh perspective on the way educational policy was played out at the local level and on how notions of culture and ethnicity changed over the course of two centuries.

To study communities is to explore the nature of relationships and to give nuance to the operations of institutions. An awareness of the relationship between school boards, teachers, and parents is crucial to an understanding of how these different parties accepted, resisted, and influenced administrative changes to education. Thus, our analysis moves away from a social-control model, which has dominated the literature on schooling in Quebec, to one that reveals and explores local dynamics. Until recently, Quebec scholars of education overemphasized the role played by the state in the province’s system of schooling, resulting in research periodized by legislative change and characterized by a reliance on government-generated sources. Preoccupied as they were with the development of the bureaucratic state, scholars did not challenge

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introduction • 9

this top-down or social-control model, which presupposes that schooling was imposed on an unwilling population. In his influential work on Quebec education, Louis-Philippe Audet presents the history of schooling from the perspective of state initiatives and the resulting administrative structures, his sources being the superintendents’ and inspectors’ reports, the minutes of the Council of Public Instruction, the Journal of Public Instruction, debates of the House of Assembly, and commissioned reports on the status of education. Consequently, his reading of schooling tends to reflect the negative view that government officials had towards the local community: parents lacked interest in their children’s education, teachers were unqualified, and school commissioners were inept and uneducated themselves or more interested in balancing their books than in providing education.2 The local contribution to schooling is disregarded. Audet’s view has been a dominant force in the Quebec historiography and has influenced a generation of historians, who have continued to focus on the development of a public system of education without paying close attention to what was taking place at the local level. Historians have also ignored Protestant schooling in Quebec – so much so that no comprehensive history of it exists. Nathan Mair’s Protestant Education in Quebec (1981) focuses on provincial legislation, curricula, and the Protestant view of moral and religious education, which he presents chronologically and periodizes according to the most significant changes in education laws, beginning with the formation of the Quebec education system and ending on the eve of Bill 101. A concise overview can be found in Whither Protestant Education?, written by Harry Kuntz and Calvin C. Potter for the Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations (qfhsa), which concentrates on the legal and human rights aspects of changes to the educational laws up to the late 1980s. Like Mair’s work, it is highly topical and argues for the continuation of a Protestant school system in the face of impending reforms to the curriculum and school-board structure. Neither deals at any great length with the Protestant community per se – let alone Protestant communities. A number of works dealing with anglophones in Quebec have emerged since the rise of Quebec nationalism in the late 1960s and early seventies, but most pay little attention to Protestants as a group or to Protestantism as a set of values with ramifications for schooling. In Ronald Rudin’s The Forgotten Quebeckers Protestants emerge as a somewhat reactionary force impeding the creation of English-language school boards, which are conceived as potentially vital for Quebec anglophones.3 Other work has looked at aspects of Protestant education without necessarily standing back to take in the full picture.4

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10 • a meeting of the people

The 1980s marked a departure from perceiving the history of education as essentially a legislative process to a consideration of the perspective of social relations. Influenced by French structuralists and their view that education systems were a means to reproduce social relations, Nadia Fahmy-Eid and Micheline Dumont focused their research on the types of strategies the dominant classes used to indoctrinate school systems with their ideologies. They did not explore popular resistance to those strategies or the role played by local communities in determining the form and content of education in their schools.5 Jean-Pierre Charland (“L’Histoire de l’éducation au Québec: regard sur la production récente”) challenges Quebec historians to refocus their research on community reactions to public education, an approach that, in his opinion, is exemplified by historians of Ontario education. However, the centrality of community in their studies notwithstanding, Ontario scholars continue to be predisposed towards a social-control model. In her pioneer work on education, The School Promoters (1977), Alison Prentice contends that a system of schooling was imposed on an unwilling and apathetic population who resisted state education. In a subsequent publication co-authored with Susan Houston, Prentice asserts that the establishment of a state system of education did not usher in an era of popular education but, rather, school promoters were faced with “a giant job of salesmanship” to get a reluctant population on board.6 With fewer alternatives open to them, communities were enticed by government funds to establish state schools; parents were dragged into a system they did not value. Similarly, Bruce Curtis argues in Building the Educational State (1988) that a bourgeois system of education was imposed on a population that had only two options, either to accept it or to resist it – without considering that parents may have influenced and supported some aspects of the school system while resisting those with which they disagreed. In contrast, R.D. Gidney, D.A. Lawr, and W.P.J. Millar show that Ontario communities influenced education policy by resisting the efforts of state officials to enact policies they did not favour, thus forcing bureaucrats to modify their decisions. Indigenous values and interests prevailed at the local schoolhouse despite the formal education policies of the state. Officials learned that they needed to court school trustees to ensure the success of their policies.7 More recently, Quebec historians of education have directed their attention to community. On the one hand, they have posed new questions about schooling; and on the other, they have consulted a range of historical sources – traditional and new – to explore the interactions between the community and the state and between members of the

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community. A case in point is Andrée Dufour’s fresh approach to the origins of public education in Quebec. After examining the interactions between the state and rural communities, she concludes that the local population was strongly implicated in education.8 To understand the contributions made by both the state and rural communities to provide children with an education, Dufour asserts that historians must study the relationship between these two entities. Even so, she is critical of school commissioners, whom she identifies as local elites elected by their communities to manage their schools. We learn little about these elected representatives other than the stereotypical image posited by Quebec historians that they were inept, uneducated, and occasionally corrupt. Moreover, Dufour treats Protestants and their communities as undifferentiated from Catholics, which is surprising given the divergent traditions upon which their schools were based. By contrast, in L’entreprise éducative au Québec (2000), Jean-Pierre Charland focuses on the differences and similarities between Catholics and Protestants with respect to their vision and practice of education. Although he does not challenge the social-control model directly, Charland analyses the nature of the relationship between communities and their school commissioners. He underscores the democratic nature (at least in theory) of school-board elections. Using minute books, Charland details commissioners’ responsibilities, how they were elected, who they were, and how they dealt with criticism from their constituencies. But, like Dufour, he does not explore a subset of complex interactions between the school board, teachers, and parents. Similarly, Robert Gagnon’s history of Montreal’s Catholic school board (1996), while it shows the growing democratization of teaching and the link between the social demands of education and the workings of the school commission, does not pay attention to the relationships between students, teachers, and parents. Two authors especially stress the importance of social relations in the history of schooling. The first is J.I. Little, whose works highlight the role of the community in local schooling. The innovative Crofters and Habitants (1991), for example, examines the Scottish and FrenchCanadian populations of Winslow, in the Eastern Townships, noting how these two ethnic communities initiated and supported local education. They instituted creative measures – a shorter school year and school closures – to keep their schools operating in the face of persistent and inadequate school taxes and fees and the government’s mulish refusal to adequately finance education.9 The other author is Wendy Nelson (‹Rage against the Dying of the Light’: Interpreting the Guerre des Éteignoirs”), whose treatment of the guerre des éteignoirs shows, perhaps for the first time, why the local population of St Grégoire protested the

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12 • a meeting of the people

growing burden of school taxes, and dispels any misconception that it was an anti-intellectual outburst. She concludes that the local elite objected out of self interest; it did not want to support a public system of education in which its own children did not participate. The habitants feared the loss of local control over schooling in the face of the growing influence and power of the village elite.

School-board records are central to this study. We consulted minutes of school-board meetings, petitions, correspondence,10 teachers’ journals, commissioners’ and trustees’ reports, inspectors’ comments, and school censuses, in addition to newspapers, regional and community histories, superintendents’ reports, and petitions and letters that were sent to the superintendent of education in Quebec City. The nature and quality of the collections vary among the archives of the nine English and two native school boards in Quebec. Not all records have been preserved, some are missing and presumed destroyed, some have not yet been sorted and classified. Many useful school-related documents are to be found in the archives of historical societies and in other public institutions. For example, the school records of Shawville and other parts of Clarendon township, an area that falls under the jurisdiction of the Western Quebec School Board, are not located in the school-board archive but in the local Pontiac Archive in Campbell’s Bay. We consulted the secretary’s minutes of school-board meetings in all of the English school-board archives, but targeted certain communities that represent a cross-section of the social and economic conditions characteristic of each region. We looked at urban centres such as Montreal and Sherbrooke; rural districts such as Lochaber, Stanstead, and Hemmingford; small rural towns such as Aylmer, Coaticook, and Ormstown; company towns such as Bourlamaque, Thetford Mines, and McMasterville; suburban communities such as Beaconsfield, Longueuil, Outremont, and St Eustache; and enduring centres of Anglo-Protestant culture such as Shawville and New Carlisle. One of the challenges was to find minute books that have survived from the earliest days. Minute books of the oldest schools boards are more likely to have gaps in the series or do not survive from the time the board began to operate – as is the case for the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, which first met in 1846 but for which there are no minutes before 1865. The minute books of the Hemmingford School Board, which exist for 1842 to 1972, are an exception. The most recent minutes of the regional school boards are also less helpful. As school boards consolidated and eventually came to manage large regions, the minutes became more standardized, general, and le-

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introduction • 13

galistic. Consequently, they are not very descriptive, and the style tends to be somewhat cryptic to those not already familiar with the topics discussed. Minute books also vary widely in quality and in the issues discussed. Each secretary naturally had a particular style of note-taking and some recorded more detail than others. Such minutes are, of course, especially rich, although it cannot be assumed that those boards that generated shorter minutes (or those periods when a board might employ a less prolific secretary) were less busy or had less complex issues to deal with. Even apart from this sort of variation, some minute books are unusually full of information on certain topics that other books barely mention. For example, the minutes of the Longueuil and St Lambert boards on the South Shore contain surprising amounts of detail about war and patriotism, an issue that receives almost no treatment in many minute books, even though it must have affected everyone in the community. Again, it does not follow that if a minute book does not mention an issue it held no importance for the community or even for the board. Silences may reflect the reticence of school commissioners to record discussions on certain topics, either because of their delicacy or because such topics were seen as falling under the jurisdiction of another institution. A case in point concerns the pupils who were directly affected by the death of a father, brother, or uncle during the two world wars. While boards identified ex-students who were killed in action, none discusses the grief of any of the students who attended their schools. Such an omission suggests that, in contrast to today’s practice of hiring grief counsellors, bereavement was dealt with by the family and possibly the congregation and clergyman. Minute books, therefore, must be complemented by other historical documents. We do not claim that a history of schooling – whether Protestant or Catholic – can be written only from school-board records. Despite these limitations, minute books greatly help us to understand the trustees and commissioners and their positions in their communities, as well as some of the difficulties they encountered in fulfilling their mandate. School boards were responsible for building and maintaining schools; providing books and equipment; setting the school tax (known as the mill rate and based on a property evaluation) and school fees; collecting school taxes; hiring teachers and support staff; determining how and when to discipline pupils; promoting Protestant culture in the school (especially when the number of non-Protestant children attending their schools began to rise); and solving conflicts between pupils, parents, and teachers. These records reflect a variety of discourses with respect to attitudes about class, gender, and ethnicity. They also provide a crucial window onto community relations and relations with the state. They allow

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us to link the health of the local economy (which was influenced by economies of greater scale, be they regional, national, or international) with the resources available to fund local education. Any economic downswings could wreak havoc with boards’ financial resources and adversely affect the schools under their care. Striking differences between school boards reflected their rural and urban geography along with economic transformations related to industrialization, urbanization, deindustrialization, and depopulation.

This book attempts to cover nearly two centuries in the history of Quebec, spanning critical social, economic, political, and demographic transformations. To a large extent, it is also a history of Protestants in the province, from the early days of their settlement through economic supremacy to numerical decline as a result of cultural diversity and the rise of Quebec nationalism. In much of this, the story of Protestants is also the story of anglophones, with the curious but significant difference that the Protestant community includes a small number of francophones and excludes large numbers of English-speaking Catholics. This is not to say that the focus is only on Protestants or even on those people whose children came to be accommodated by Protestant school boards. At various times, Protestant education has appeared not so much as the school system of a religious minority but as that of the mainstream – what many places call “public” education. Certainly, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the sort of school system advocated by most Protestants was hardly different from the nondenominational, even secular vision promoted by liberal reformers, and Catholic opposition to such a system stemmed from a fear more of liberalism than of Protestantism. From the 1840s on, Quebec’s Catholic elite appropriated the notion of French-Canadian survival and recast it as essentially Catholic despite a strong tradition of liberalism, even anti-clericalism, among the French-Canadian population. The promotion of Catholic values by this elite, rather than Protestant demands for specifically Protestant institutions, lay behind the eventual establishment of confessional schooling. For Protestants, the ambiguity regarding whether Protestant values were those of a specific cultural group or somehow universal has been a characteristic feature of public education ever since. This ambiguity forms a subtext to the first chapters in this book, which deal with the period leading up to the establishment of confessional schooling (which was in place in Montreal by 1846 but not completely in the rest of the province until the 1870s). During this period it is often difficult to separate the drive for public schooling from the ex-

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introduction • 15

perience of Protestant families trying to secure an education for their children. Accordingly, chapter 1 sketches the early settlement by Protestants in Quebec and the various strategies they used to establish schools. These strategies ranged from opening makeshift schools taught by local women to accepting government assistance, offered as of 1801 by the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, and as of 1829 by the Lower Canada Assembly. This funding was interrupted because of political turmoil in the late 1830s, but resumed with the Union of the Canadas. The program of reform implemented in 1841 was characterized by a belief in non-denominational institutions and effective local government. Chapter 2 considers the attempts by Protestant communities to implement non-denominational education within the political framework established by the Education Acts of 1841, 1845, and 1846. Although the framework persisted, with some retooling (in many cases into the 1960s), the spirit of mutual suspicion in many ethnically mixed communities made a separation along confessional lines seem all but inevitable. Chapter 3 examines the experience of Protestant communities who found themselves a minority within the local Catholic population and who opted to make use of the Education Acts’ “dissentient clause” to form a separate school board. With the increasing isolation of rural Protestants, such recourse became frequent by the late nineteenth century, although many communities learned to join forces with other minority Protestants and create new, geographically extensive structures to administer these isolated schools. At Confederation, all Protestants, regardless of where they might live, were guaranteed the right to a separate form of education from that of the Catholic majority, thanks to the provisions of section 93 of the British North America (bna) Act. In contrast to the rest of the province, Montreal and Quebec City were given special status in 1846: separate Catholic and Protestant boards were legislated into existence, and their members were appointed, not elected. This meant that, unlike their rural counterparts, urban communities had only limited influence on the running of the school system. Commissioners were not directly responsible to their constituents; they also came from a social elite that, given the urban context and the nature of industrial capitalism, was even further removed from the average parent or ratepayer than was the case in rural areas. Chapter 4 describes the nature of the Protestant board, its limitations as an effective administrative unit, and the attempts by urban residents to advance their own interests despite these limitations. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with specifically rural problems, from the earliest days of public schooling into the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter 5 considers the relationships between school boards, teachers,

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and parents at the level of the one-room schoolhouse. The problems these groups encountered have been variously described by historians of education, but rarely from the perspective of community. It also describes the advent of school consolidation, a project that met with limited success, particularly given the changing needs of isolated Protestants. The efforts to provide secondary grades (“model” and “academy,” later “intermediate” and “high school”) are outlined in chapter 6, which also considers how building multigraded schools in central places affected local Protestant demographics, as well as social and gender relations within the teaching staff. This centralizing tendency led to increasing efficiency but also forced the closure of most small schools, often against the wishes of local people. More and more children spent more and more time on buses travelling long distances to school. Chapters 7 through 9 are concerned with themes of special significance to Protestantism in Quebec. Chapter 7 considers Quebec’s Jews as “honorary Protestants,” which they were in practice from the time substantial numbers of Jewish immigrants began to send their children to Protestant schools, and in theory between 1903 and 1924 when Jews and Protestants were equated “for educational purposes.” Relations between several Jewish communities across the province and the local Protestant school boards are explored. Chapter 8 discusses the importance of patriotism in Protestant schools, especially at times of war, and its impact on the shifting sense of Protestant – even Canadian – identity. The introduction of cadet corps, rifle ranges, and drills, along with attempts by student groups to aid the war effort by raising funds or sending packages overseas, helped create a patriotic, even militaristic atmosphere that was also distinctly Protestant. Concern for idle youth during the Depression and especially during the war led to the development of programs to keep children busy in appropriately gendered activities. It also led to the rise of social work as a profession – one that found a key place within the school. Chapter 9 considers school boards as the vehicles for implementing various social measures, from vaccinations to the relief of poverty to psychological counselling, and considers schools as the venues for such measures. Of particular importance in this regard is the role of volunteer organizations – typically Protestant and run by women: the Women’s Institute, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and especially the Home and School movement, which in recent decades has had an enormous impact as an advocate for parents at government levels. The book’s final chapters deal with the impact of the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath on Protestant communities. The Parent Commission, which studied the state of public education in the early 1960s and

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introduction • 17

made a series of recommendations for radical change, paid careful attention to the many successes of the Protestant school system. One of these was the concept of central boards, a Protestant innovation of the 1940s to counter the problems of too many small isolated school boards. The commission proposed a universal system of regional boards to administer secondary schooling and various other aspects of education. This innovation was followed in the early 1970s with the consolidation of all local Protestant boards (with two exceptions) into a handful of huge “sector” boards with big bureaucracies and extensive jurisdictions. Protestants initially embraced these new central bodies, only to find that the absence of local control had a devastating effect on the autonomy of rural communities, as argued in chapter 10. The Parent Commission was also impressed by the range of facilities and services offered in Protestant schools, from central libraries to gyms to science labs, all of which seemed ideally suited to modern society. Chapter 11 traces the physical history of Protestant schools and their characteristic features, and shows how these features were incorporated into the huge new schools of the 1960s and 70s – not always with happy results. Even in the “Protestant heartland” – the Island of Montreal as well as off-island suburban regions – larger boards were a mixed blessing. Chapter 12 shows how tensions arose between local communities and central authorities over what constituted the needs of families and their children and how these needs could be squared with administrative budgets and transportation costs. This chapter also outlines the dramatic rise in the Protestant school population in the Montreal area from the time of World War II on. This created headaches for administrators and challenges for local people, who saw their communities change almost overnight from quasi-rural to virtually urban environments. For the city of Montreal itself, the reforms of the early 70s did seem to bring one significant improvement: the long-awaited democratization of the school board. Chapters 13 and 14 treat two issues that were, and to an extent still are, central to the Protestant experience: multiculturalism and the French language. Building on the discussion of “outsiders” in Protestant schools from earlier chapters, the issue here is the efforts by school boards and by parents’ groups, such as Home and School associations, to welcome immigrant families into the fold. These efforts were not purely altruistic; it became clear by the 1970s that the “Protestant” school population was shrinking, and that a steady influx of outsiders was necessary to keep numbers steady. This process resulted in a further broadening of the definition of what constituted a Protestant education; it also led to the development of an almost entirely secular curriculum and school day. As the “Protestant” school population

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grew more diverse, anglophones became more conscious of the importance of being able to function in French, soon to be the province’s official language. Various strategies, chief among which was French immersion, were used to produce a generation of bilingual students from Protestant schools. The rise of Quebec nationalism in the 1970s presented a challenge to Protestant boards that struck at their heart: by limiting the rights of immigrants to attend school in English, the “language laws” threatened to drive a wedge between the traditional Protestant community and immigrants, an alliance now several generations old. Furthermore, by promoting the replacement of Protestant and Catholic boards with boards that were either French or English, the Parti Québécois government sought to undermine the autonomy of Protestant school boards – particularly the psbgm, which had become one of the province’s few effective English-language institutions, and one that was prepared on occasion to defy the government’s language policy. Arguably, Protestant boards, and the constitutional guarantees that enabled them to exist, also represented an educational tradition that went back to the early nineteenth century: a form of schooling that was liberal in outlook, practical in approach, and nondenominational in content. Many feared that, under linguistic boards, such a system would no longer exist. Chapter 15 deals with a subject that may seem tangential, though it echoes many of the themes and concerns of preceding chapters: the education of native peoples. Two groups are the focus of study: the Cree and the Inuit, each of which had close ties with Protestantism and Protestant institutions before establishing their own (technically nonconfessional) school boards in the late 1970s. The tensions in the relationships between central authorities and local communities and the problems of administering a school system over a great distance (in these cases, over vast distances) are curiously familiar given the history of isolated Protestant communities over the course of the twentieth century. This study of native school systems is, admittedly, only a preliminary one. More work should (and undoubtedly will) be done by Cree and Inuit scholars to give this aspect of the history of schooling its due. No work on the Protestant community in all its diversity, however, could fail to take into consideration the considerable challenges faced by these northern communities. The conclusion of this book discusses the implications of Bill 180, the legislation implemented in 1998 that finally ended confessional schooling and opened the door to a host of new problems for school administrators, not the least of which has been the issue of religion in the classroom.

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introduction • 19

A word about terminology. This book is about Protestant school boards – as well as their ancestors and, to a small extent, their successors – which is to say, school boards designated as serving and being supported by the Protestant community. Schools run by Protestant boards were only “Protestant” to the degree that they were under the jurisdiction of these boards. Architecture and culture notwithstanding, at the end of the day schools are only buildings, which can be filled with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, or people of any other definable category. For convenience we refer to “Protestant schools” even though what we mean is “schools run by Protestant boards.” We have also universally adopted the term “Catholic” rather than “Roman Catholic,” partly out of convenience but partly because there is little possibility of confusion in Quebec. Much more care should be taken with the term “Protestant” in Quebec, where Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Nonconformists – people who have gone to war against each other in other countries – are lumped together in the popular Catholic imagination. Even greater confusion can arise from the term “English,” which in Quebec can mean “everyone who is not French-speaking,” but in Britain means “someone from England” (and not Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, etc.). Particularly in discussing the nineteenth-century experience, we have been careful to use “English” only when intending the latter meaning. Everything depends on context: in Quebec, a person of Irish ancestry can be an “English Catholic,” whereas in Britain the term is used to distinguish a practitioner of Catholicism in England from one in Ireland. If the issue is one of language, we have opted to say that a person or population is “Englishspeaking” or to use that unique Quebec idiom “anglophone.”

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1

An Earnest Desire for Education: Early Protestant Schools in Quebec … a committee consisting of five suitable persons that are proprietors in this Schoolhouse … [shall] be appointed with full powers to repair the house, engage a teacher and agree with him on such terms as they in their wisdom shall see fit; and, generally, that their duty shall embrace every thing that may be necessary for the well being and good government of the school. A “meeting of the people” of Frelighsburg, 11 July 18321

Sometime towards the end of 1801, a certain Miss Kimball was hired to teach the local children, in the Cushing family home. Elmore and Lydia Cushing, the first settlers in Richmond County, had arrived at their concession in Shipton Township in the spring of 1797, having travelled with their extended family from New England, by way of Montreal, to the mouth of the St Francis River, and from there upstream in nine canoes, paddled by their Abenaki guides. A cow and two oxen followed, led ploddingly by two men along the river bank, and by winter the party had cleared a small plot and built a cabin. That even four years later such a struggling family enterprise should have had the apparent leisure to include a teacher is testimony to the importance they placed on learning and literacy.2 The year 1801 also saw the creation of Quebec’s first public school board, the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, though this event would have had little influence on the hiring of Miss Kimball. Early Protestant settlers operated from the deeply held conviction that the education of children was of vital im-

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an earnest desire for education • 21

1 The St Francis River near Richmond This is roughly how Shipton Township would have appeared to the Cushing family when they arrived at their land concession in the spring of 1797. [Author photo]

portance, and did not wait on government initiative. Hard on the heels of Miss Kimball’s classes came other schools as families spread across Shipton Township; the numbers justified the building of an actual schoolhouse by 1807. At that time the Royal Institution still lacked a board of directors – something it would not establish until 1818 – which prevented it from being of much use to communities struggling to establish schools. The creation of the Royal Institution marks the first real attempt by the government of Lower Canada to provide a systematic form of public education, and as such it has preoccupied historians looking at early schooling. Although this attention is justified given the importance of the Royal Institution in the field of higher education (since 1864 it has been synonymous with McGill University), it has come at the expense of considering the input of local communities. To see the passing of legislation as the guiding force behind the appearance of schools is to ignore the existence of a population keen to provide schooling at all costs.3 The evidence of communities such as Shipton would suggest that people, even settlers barely finished clearing their land, were eager to have their children schooled and were willing to hire the most educated person available to teach in whatever space was available. The

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only real variable in those early years was having enough money to pay the teacher, which proved a heavy burden for some families. Later, the desire to build a schoolhouse would assume almost as much importance – perhaps even more for the community as a whole, since these early schools often served as places of worship and social gathering. The appearance of the Royal Institution heralded a new source of funding, of which a great many communities were eager to take advantage. This funding, however, had strings attached: each schoolhouse had to be formally deeded to the Royal Institution and local people had to accept periodic inspection of schools and teachers by outside visitors, many of whom had a religious agenda. For these and other reasons, many communities preferred the alternative funding available from the Assembly of Lower Canada as of 1829. When these sources of funding dried up as a result of political tensions in the later 1830s, communities were once again forced to pay salaries and upkeep themselves. Many were obliged to close their schools because of financial constraints, but others carried on as best as they could, letting buildings decay and sometimes not paying teachers for months at a time. Proper public education depended on government contribution, but the ability of local people to make do should never be overlooked. This determination of local people to open and maintain schools was more typical of Protestant communities than of Catholic ones, at least in the early years of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, among Protestants it was more typical of Presbyterian Scots and American Nonconformists than of members of the Anglican church (Church of England). At the heart of Protestantism lay a religious conviction that it was essential to be able to read the Bible. Nearly as strong was the belief that an emphasis on ritual, rather than on study, was what kept Catholics in ignorance – a state promoted by Catholic authorities, many Protestants would have argued. In fact, the people of New France had enjoyed a relatively high level of education, at least by eighteenth-century standards, much of it undertaken by members of specialized religious orders. By the early nineteenth century, many of these orders no longer existed and the rest were not equipped to teach the larger population. French-Canadians also lacked a tradition of public or state-sponsored schooling, but in this they differed little from their contemporaries in England. Scotland and New England, by contrast, had long traditions of putting public monies into schools for the common people. The Royal Institution, dominated by the Anglican clergy, was singularly ill-equipped to stand as a central body supervising public education, and the militancy of some of its clergy alienated many Nonconformist communities, just as it did most (but by no means all) Catholics.

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At another level, however, Protestants and Catholics co-existed in numerous villages along the length of the St Lawrence valley, and, despite countless differences and prejudices, shared many of the same concerns: notably, how to finance their children’s schooling. The later separation of public schooling into Protestant and Catholic camps would have us read too sharp a division along these lines into these early communities. There are enough cases of schools made up of both Protestant and Catholic students, taught in English or French or both by teachers who might as easily be Protestant as Catholic, to suggest that the early schooling in Lower Canada was complicated and depended less on the nature of legislation than on the needs of each community.

The British conquest of New France in 1760 brought the St Lawrence valley settlements into direct contact with the Anglo-Protestant world. A French-speaking Catholic society was occupied by, and subsequently obliged to share space with, an army of Englishspeaking and mostly Protestant troops. For nearly a century the colony was ruled by a British governor and a military aristocracy who established a strong presence, particularly in the cities of Quebec and Montreal. Much of the army’s rank and file, however, were Scots, and a number were granted tracts of land along the valley on which to settle; the largest concentration was at Murray Bay, beginning a long history of English-speaking settlement on the river’s lower North Shore. The years following the conquest also saw an influx of traders, who took advantage of British military protection and French-Canadian experience in the hinterland to establish networks that stretched from the West to New England, and indirectly back to England itself. Many of these traders were Scots – James McGill and Simon McTavish are perhaps the most famous – who rose from quite modest origins to positions of considerable influence within Montreal and Quebec society. One result of this significant Scots presence was the early establishment of Presbyterian congregations: the colony’s first English-speaking congregation (later to build St Andrew’s Presbyterian church) was begun in Quebec City by the Fraser Highlanders soon after the fall of that city to General Wolfe in 1759; and the colony’s first permanent Protestant church was the Scots Presbyterian church on St Gabriel Street, Montreal, opened in 1792.4 These merchants were conscious, however, of their subordinate social status next to the cities’ aristocratic elite, who were for the most part members of the Church of England. Despite having their own churches, ambitious Scots worshipped with the Anglicans in the

See facing page for caption.

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an earnest desire for education • 25

chapels they had appropriated from the Jesuit and Récollet orders and even helped sponsor the construction of permanent Anglican churches in Montreal and Quebec.5 At the same time, these Scots were aware that the Anglican elite was trying to assert for the Church of England the status of the sole established church, with the same legal privileges it enjoyed at home – namely, that no other denomination could register births, marriages, or burials.6 The Scots argued that as the British crown recognized the rights of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland in Scotland, it should recognize Presbyterian civil rights in Canada. This argument ignored the rights of other Protestant denominations (collectively known as Nonconformists), especially the Methodists, whose ranks included a number of wealthy Montreal families by the 1790s. This debate did not specifically touch on education – largely because the subject of popular schooling was of no great interest to the Anglican church at this time – but it would have far-reaching consequences for the funding and administration of public schools. The issue was partly one of theology and authority: Scots Presbyterians, like the English Puritans, denied the religious supremacy of the English monarch (head of the Church of England) and vested authority in elected church councils. Congregationalists, who were very influential in New England, rejected the authority of any hierarchy above the level of the individual congregation. Methodists emphasized personal salvation and in theory did not worship in churches, merely humble chapels – though the chapel they would build in Montreal rivalled the Presbyterian and Anglican churches in size. To Anglicans, these denominations posed an implicit threat because of their intolerance of religious hierarchy; in some ways they were more of a threat than the highly hierarchical Catholic church, whose leaders had been placated by the 1774 Quebec Act guaranteeing Catholic civil rights in the colony. The Anglican claim to be the sole established church in the new colony also had a very practical aspect: having confiscated vast tracts of land from the Catholic religious orders in the wake of the conquest, the government was set to hand control of this land over to the established church to fund its operations. As this source of

Map 2 The St Lawrence and St Francis River valleys: places of early Protestant settlement Much early settlement was entirely rural, although most townships and parishes had village centres with churches, model schools, and academies. Eventually, with consolidation, these schools would come to serve entire municipalities.

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revenue would be eventually earmarked for the Royal Institution, the degree to which it was to lie in the Church of England’s grasp was of vital importance to all those interested in education. Wary of the power of Nonconformists, the government was unwilling to absorb the large numbers of Loyalists displaced as a result of the American Revolutionary war. For years, New Englanders had been eyeing the “empty” hinterland away from the St Lawrence River and, despite a sense of obligation to those that had remained loyal to the crown, the British government was afraid that to open new lands to refugees would be to invite less deserving, and less desirable, settlers from New England. Even so, hundreds of families fled north during the 1780s and squatted in various settlements along the border, the largest number at Missisquoi Bay at the head of Lake Champlain. This territory was known as St Armand, a seigneury acquired in 1786 by an Englishman, Thomas Dunn, who proceeded to make land concessions to the Loyalists. Other refugees gathered at the mouth of the Richelieu River in Sorel, a seigneury that the government had acquired to establish a military garrison, known as the town of William Henry. More confident settlement took place on the south shore of the Gaspé peninsula, along Chaleur Bay, an area too remote to be of much concern to the government in Quebec City. Loyalists joined Channel Islanders – Methodists, for the most part, from Jersey and Guernsey – who had already established a presence on this coast and concentrated in the village of New Carlisle.7 Several Loyalist settlements also developed far to the west of the colony’s heartland, in what would become Upper Canada (Ontario). A fair number of wealthy Loyalists made their homes in the cities and even took up public office there. A case in point was William Smith, formerly of New York, who was made Chief Justice of Quebec in 1786. Smith did much to make Loyalist settlement palatable to the colonial establishment, principally by promoting the “leader and associates” form of colonization, whereby a wealthier and more cultured individual would assemble a collection of farmers who would do the actual clearing and planting. Elmore Cushing would be a “leader” under this system, although perhaps not one that would have met the aristocratic standards Smith had had in mind. Smith, a Methodist, also led the appeal for an education system for Quebec akin to that enjoyed by many of the colonies to the south before the Revolution. He was the de facto head of the Dorchester Commission (named for the current governor), which in 1789 recommended the creation of a free, non-denominational public school system for the entire colony.

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Map 3 The Missisquoi area, 1815: seigneuries and townships This fragment of a map, drawn by land surveyor Joseph Bouchette in 1815, shows the difference between seigneurial lands, shown on the left, and townships with their rectangular lots, shown at right. Naturally, differences between the types of concessions would have been indiscernible to any contemporary observer. The real difference lay in the mind of the map-maker, and by extension in the minds of potential purchasers of lots, for whom rational subdivision was a mark of British culture and enterprise.

See facing page for caption.

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By 1791 the government conceded to the rising demand for land and agreed to open new areas to the south and north-west of the St Lawrence settlements. In that year the Constitutional Act divided the colony into Upper and Lower Canada, each with an elected assembly and an appointed government. British territorial divisions were applied everywhere. Twenty-one counties – most with English names such as Bedford, Buckingham, Northumberland, Surrey, and Warwick – were superimposed on Lower Canada, adding an additional layer of government to what had been the units of administration until that time: the parish and the seigneury. The unoccupied parts of Lower Canada – the territory that had not been conceded under the French regime – were further subdivided into townships. For the most part, this was done on paper, for these lands were often very difficult to reach, located far inland behind the seigneuries granted generations before along the river. Townships tended to be rectangular pieces of land of about ten square miles each, which were then further subdivided into 200-acre lots – an arrangement well suited for concessions. Even more attractive to potential settlers was that township lots were granted under the terms of British land tenure, “free and common soccage,” rather than the more restrictive terms of seigneurial tenure. Despite much opposition from Protestant newcomers, the Quebec Act of 1774 had perpetuated seigneurialism, a system of landholding whereby those who occupied lands were subject to a wide range of obligations to their seigneur, who could be an individual, an institution (such as a religious order), or even the government (as in Sorel). Seigneurialism was considered to be a form of tyranny by many British immigrants, who were drawn as a result to the townships.8 Thomas Dunn even sold lots in St Armand as though seigneurial tenure did not apply there – a move that made the subsequent transfer of lands very difficult for the settlers of the Missisquoi area.9 Colonizing the Eastern Townships was a very slow process. This vast area in the south-east corner of the colony was densely forested, with

Map 4 Eastern Townships boundaries Townships would become the basic unit of school administration (in seigneurial areas it would be the parish) and many of the township school boards would continue to function until the 1960s. The original boundaries, shown here as they were in 1833, were often modified: Shipton, for example, was divided in 1855 into a western portion known as Cleveland, which contained the town of Richmond, and an eastern portion, which retained the name Shipton, containing the village of Danville – each with its own school board. Incorporated towns and villages typically created their own separate school boards: both Richmond and Danville are examples.

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no proper roads to allow settlers to reach their lots. This isolation suited the government, nervous as it was about letting Loyalists of questionable loyalty live too close to the populous parts of the province. East of the Richelieu River, lots in the townships of Dunham and Stanbridge were eagerly taken up by the refugees from the St Armand seigneury and by Americans willing to pull up stakes and move to cheaper lands north of the border. Vermonters, who had only recently joined the United States and tended to ignore the decrees against transborder contact, set to work clearing lots in Stanstead and Hatley townships along the shores of Lake Memphramagog and in Barnston Township slightly to the east. Some of these settlers eventually followed the Magog River to Ascot and Eaton townships. The village of Hyatt’s Mills, later to become the city of Sherbrooke, was founded in 1801 on the banks of the St Francis River, which promised to be a major navigable waterway through the region. By that time, the Cushings had established themselves in Shipton and others like them had settled in the adjacent townships of Melbourne and Kingsey, in the fertile heart of the river valley. Occupation of the rest of these townships, however, was delayed by land speculation, mostly by Montreal merchants who bought up vast tracts, notably in Megantic County, with little interest in promoting settlement.10 It was also affected by absentee landlords: “leaders” who turned out to have no associates or who for various reasons never bothered to take up their claim. Early settlement was even slower in Lower Canada’s other townships, with some key exceptions. Hemmingford, situated along the United States border to the south of Montreal, soon acquired a substantial population – and one that was generally considered more “loyal” than those of the Eastern Townships. Given its strategic position on the direct line between Montreal and New York, the government was careful to grant individual concessions and paid close attention to the desirability of each purchaser. “Generally those [townships] along this line of frontier require every attention and encouragement in this respect,” land surveyor Joseph Bouchette wrote in 1815. “The political results of any measures that increase the settlements and population of this part of the district will appear obvious when it is recollected that every male, from the age of sixteen to sixty, must become a militia-man.”11 Loyalty also characterized nearby townships along this border; indeed, Godmanchester to the west was settled by former British soldiers, veterans of the American wars. Along the Ottawa River, further west, settlement was less controlled and much more sporadic. One point of concentration was Chatham, not 20 km from the junction with the St Lawrence. Further upstream, the many townships mapped out along the length of the Ottawa River had generally much

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poorer soil than their eastern counterparts, though the presence of the river would eventually prompt settlers to try their hands at forestry rather than farming. A substantial Protestant community grew up in Hull, where Philemon Wright and his associates from New England arrived in 1800 and by 1806 had started what would soon prove a highly profitable logging enterprise.12 Despite the challenges, land was cleared, farms planted, communities formed. Stanstead and adjoining townships near the border were soon connected with the villages of Vermont by roads built by local inhabitants. These links across the border were far stronger than those with Montreal and Quebec City, at least until the government began to construct roads leading to and from the St Lawrence valley. Similarly, the influence of Anglican missionaries in the Eastern Townships was much less significant during these early years than that of American Baptists, Congregationalists, and above all Methodists, who came up in a steady stream from New England and New York.13 The Nonconformist roots of so many of these settlers would later make it difficult for institutions in which Anglicans dominated – including the Royal Institution – to make headway in this region. Despite their strong Protestant faith these communities were sufficiently American to believe that schooling should not be restricted on the basis of creed – which is not to say that they advocated a form of education that could be considered secular. However hostile they may have been to established churches, both politically and theologically, Nonconformists tended to feel that schools governed by Christian principles should appeal to all members of a Christian society. As in Shipton, the children in these townships were receiving some sort of education within a few years of the initial settlement. Teachers were usually local young women like Miss Kimball, typically the daughters of the more prominent families, who had been educated prior to arriving in the townships or, as time went on, were themselves graduates of the first schools. Miss Kimball would later marry into a local family, though this would not necessarily have meant she gave up teaching; in the village of Richmond at the heart of Shipton Township, Mrs Gilbert Healy, wife of the man who had received the first concession, taught several local children out of her own home.14 Generally, however, young women taught because they were available – less involved than their brothers on a day-to-day basis with the workings of the family farms. Throughout the nineteenth century, schooling in rural areas was closely linked to the agricultural cycle: attendance dropped during planting and harvest season and rose during the winter months when roads were easier to travel on. Government inspectors would later interpret this pattern to mean that parents did not care about their

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children’s education, but they underestimated the degree to which schools were valued by the community and integrated into the rigorous work cycle of farm life. Schools existed to educate children whenever they were not needed at home. For most young people, going to school was an important part, but only a part, of a long day that also involved feeding and tending animals, chopping wood, and many household chores. As settlements became villages, residents built schoolhouses by means of public “subscription.”15 In most cases this would be the community’s first public building, serving as a place of worship as well as a local meeting hall; this is further evidence that the first priority for most settlers was the education of their children. Because the immigrant population was essentially Nonconformist, this arrangement was particularly feasible; a plain structure lent itself to a form of worship that involved mainly reading and singing much more readily than it did to the elaborate Anglican (much less the Catholic) ritual. The creation of a schoolhouse normally depended on the generosity of a local farmer who would forgo (not necessarily donate) a tiny parcel of land, a practice that gave rise to the colourful names by which later school districts were named, such as Cleland’s Corners, Balls Mills, and Beebe Plain. Schoolhouses, especially the “old stone school” and “red brick school” houses that figure proudly in local histories, became prominent features of the rural landscape. Nevertheless, they remained something of a luxury during the first decade or so of the nineteenth century. Isolated populations continued to hold classes in private homes or in any building or part of a building that was not used year-round. Robert Sellar, journalist and historian of Huntingdon county (of which Hemmingford would form a part), tells of a school held in a “log barn” and another in an improvised structure with “two layers of slabs for the ceiling with turf on top.” Where schoolhouses existed they were likely to be the schoolmaster’s dwelling also, with a consequent lack of comfort. According to Sellar, “scholars were tickled by hearing what passed on the other side of the board partition and by the oft appearance of the wife to consult her husband. One master utilized the loft above the schoolroom as a winter roost for his hens, and, when they scraped, a shower of dust descended on the heads of the scholars below.”16 Edward Cleveland, Congregationalist minister in the village of Richmond, also noted the distinctly ad hoc nature of schools along the St Francis valley: one was held in a threshing room and another in a room “above Ephraim Magoon’s distillery.”17 Later generations of Protestants may well have been aghast at the moral implications of classes held in a distillery, but they would have approved of a desire to educate that transcended limited circumstances.

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2 The Old Stone Schoolhouse, Melbourne Built in 1819, this is one of the earliest surviving examples of rural schoolhouses. The school is surrounded by a cemetery (one fallen tombstone can be seen leaning against the wall), a reminder that such buildings were often also used as places of worship in the days before formal churches. [Author photo]

The same desire is evident in the Protestant communities that took early root in seigneurial lands along the St Lawrence valley – although education, like most other aspects of life, was complicated by ethnic relations to a degree unseen in the townships. This does not mean that there was always conflict, but the presence of Protestants in a society hitherto almost exclusively Catholic inevitably resulted in tension. This was especially so regarding the education of children, an issue bound to worry the local Catholic clergy, who had generally been in charge of whatever schools existed. Adding to the tension was the number of seigneuries, such as St Armand, acquired by English-speaking Protestants; the Catholic clergy and a relatively devout Catholic population could not have been other than concerned at the social and political implications of having a Protestant seigneur, particularly in the matter of schooling. It can be no coincidence that much of the rural settlement of Protestants prior to 1815 took place on these British-owned seigneuries: Terrebonne, north of Montreal; Berthier, east of Terrebonne; Argenteuil at the mouth of the Ottawa River; Monnoir along the Richelieu; Beauharnois, south of Montreal; and Lauzon, across from Quebec City at the mouth of the Chaudière River. There was also the seigneury of the Baroness of Longueuil, the wife of a British merchant, which stretched from the St Lawrence River to the village of St Jean sur

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Richelieu. Like Thomas Dunn of St Armand, these British seigneurs would have been eager to introduce people of British stock onto the land – if only in the widely held belief that such newcomers would improve agriculture with their superior knowledge and work ethic.18 Aside from St Armand, where Americans (of German extraction) dominated, the early Protestant settlers in these seigneuries tended to be Scots, a situation that would lead to certain clashes with the Royal Institution, just as it did for the Nonconformists in parts of the Eastern Townships. If Scots, especially Highland Scots, brought any knowledge or work ethic to farming in Lower Canada it derived from the experience of cultivating much more miserable soils than they would have found along the Ottawa River. Scots did, however, bring a tradition of popular education that had no parallel in the communities in which they settled, and this they applied with the same enthusiasm shown by Americans in the townships. In Terrebonne, for example, the Scottish minority opened a school in the village as early as 1790, in the absence of any church or other cultural institution to parallel the Catholic parish.19 The seigneury of Argenteuil, an area with a particularly strong Protestant presence (which it retained throughout the twentieth century) saw the establishment of a fair number of schools well before the Royal Institution – and the Anglican clergy – began to make inroads in the region.20 The village of St Andrew’s, at the mouth of the Ottawa River, was the centre of Scottish settlement in the Argenteuil and could boast at least one school by the beginning of the century, but even in the back ranges of the seigneury the Scots built schools. By 1808 the settlement at Lower Chute had a school, although it later fell under the administration of the Royal Institution and later still the local public school board.21 The creation of the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning in 1801 did not make as much of an impact on Quebec’s Protestant settlers as its checkered history would suggest. The Catholic hierarchy was deeply suspicious of this initiative, as it had been of all the discussion about public education since 1789 when Chief Justice William Smith advocated a non-denominational school system. The 1801 Act was largely inspired by his recommendations. It called for a public body that would be able to hold real estate. Communities were to send a petition indicating that the local people would provide the land and build a school, which would then be deeded to the Royal Institution. In return, the Royal Institution would appoint teachers and pay their salaries, and also appoint commissioners, usually selected from the local elite, to oversee the schools. The Act made it clear that the Royal Institution would not interfere with the management of any existing schools, a reference to Catholic fears that the government intended to

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do away with the church’s role in education. The Act’s silence on the question of religion meant to many that there would be no restrictions on religious teaching, though to others it meant that the Royal Institution was an agent of Protestant (and, to many, Anglican) assimilation. The issue was fiercely debated for many years and it was only in 1818 that a board was actually appointed with a secretary able to receive petitions and act upon them. Until that time, many Protestant communities continued to establish schools without making reference to the provisions of the new Act. In the Eastern Townships, a combination of distance from the reins of power and disinclination to trust the British government meant that communities were especially likely to keep building schoolhouses by subscription – though the residents of Hull, Chatham, and even Hemmingford also opened schools with no government assistance. At the same time, the absence of a formal board of trustees did not stop others from making petitions to the government for schools. Even before 1801, Protestants in a number of communities secured funding from the governor’s office for this purpose. Montreal and Quebec City each had at least one school whose teacher’s salary was paid by the government from 1794 on. These were eventually known as the National schools, and served their respective English communities despite growing competition from schools affiliated with various Protestant churches; both would eventually come under the administration of the Royal Institution.22 The same was true of the school in William Henry, which had a government-paid teacher by 1801, although not as a result of a popular petition. The Loyalists of New Carlisle on Gaspé’s south coast had had a resident teacher, Benjamin Hobson, since their arrival in the summer of 1784, but within a decade he would receive an annual government stipend of £25. Hobson, who had served in the British army and had taught the children of soldiers and Loyalists since the war’s end, had travelled with 134 of his former and future pupils on one of the four ships that took these families from Quebec City to the Chaleur Bay settlement. There he kept school in his own house for fourteen years, his classes consisting of forty to sixty students, with equal numbers of boys and girls. The salary, which was increased to £50 in 1810, allowed him to operate the school without charge to local families – except for certain payments in kind; by the turn of the century, for example, they built him a schoolhouse.23 As word of the government’s resources spread, communities responded, despite reluctance in some quarters to seek public funds for schools. This was even true for places that already had schools. The largely American population of St Jean sur Richelieu (known by anglophones as St John’s or Dorchester) had opened a school on their own in

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3 Benjamin Hobson’s house, New Carlisle The late eighteenth-century schoolmaster’s house was used for teaching until a formal school was built shortly after 1800. Given the size of the house, Hobson must have been a man of high social standing, although his wealth can hardly have come from his teaching salary. The house continued to be a residence until the days of photography. [photo courtesy of Carol Gilkin]

1808, but three years later requested that their teacher receive an official licence and a government salary. By that time the government had begun to fund existing schools in St Armand, Argenteuil, Terrebonne, and even the township of Hull. British seigneurs were often major supporters of Royal Institution schools, as well as providers of land for schoolhouses. Notable among these were Roderick Mackenzie of Terrebonne, John Johnson of Monnoir, James Cuthbert of Berthier, and John James Caldwell of Lauzon. The school in Eaton was the first in the Eastern Townships to be given government support (in 1811), followed later by those in Dunham and Stanbridge. Other, more independent, communities in this region only ceded control of their schools to the Royal Institution during the 1820s, and this was often only after a great deal of effort on the part of Anglican missionaries. Stanstead was an exception. As early as 1809 a group of 111 residents sent a petition asking for a government subsidy towards the building of a new school, wording it carefully so that the existence of numerous schools in the township was not made clear: “The inhabitants suffer much in the want of an established School for the education of their children,” they wrote, “which in the general poverty of the people in a newly established settlement precludes them of by their own means.”24 Here, both

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“poverty” and “newly established” were relative terms. The government appears to have been ready enough to help out the petitioners, but eight years passed before the school opened – a delay that can only be explained by local disagreement. The first schoolteacher was Thaddeus Osgood, who had arrived in 1817 to serve as Stanstead’s Congregationalist minister. Such a choice may well have been something of a compromise, given the township’s Nonconformist bent and the Anglican character of the Royal Institution. The advantage in seeking affiliation with the Royal Institution was a financial one: teachers would be paid by the government, rather than by local subscription. Communities were very grateful for this relief, given the weight of salaries as an expense; a community could put together enough to build a schoolhouse, especially with payment-in-kind as part of the construction process, but a teacher’s salary had to be met regularly. Many communities, furthermore, began to want more from their schools than a locally taught young woman could provide. In the absence of institutions of higher learning, the prospects of sons obtaining enough education to take them up the social ladder were slight while the school was run by someone often not much older than they. Significantly, all Royal Institution appointees were men. In theory, such scholars brought to small schoolhouses wisdom they had acquired while training to be clergymen or in other similarly broadening studies. However, there are many examples of teachers who drank too much or were abusive to pupils, or both. As later generations of teachers would discover, it was no easy matter to find acceptance in isolated rural communities. The number of complaints received by the Royal Institution’s first secretary indicates that parents were often very disappointed in their children’s teachers, perhaps especially so because of the high initial expectations. Other communities had very different reasons for petitioning the government to set up schools. A surprising number of early petitions came from francophones, belying the impression that French Canadians spurned the Royal Institution entirely. Indeed, the first formal petition for government assistance following the 1801 legislation was by forty-five residents of St Thomas, a largely French-speaking and Catholic village on the south shore of the St Lawrence some 55 km downriver from Quebec. A school was established with a licensed teacher by 1807, three years after the petition – not long, considering that the procedure was new. By that time, the French-speaking residents of Pointe Lévis, lying across from Quebec, had also requested assistance, to be followed shortly by those of St Roch des Aulnais, further downstream. The land for the school in St Roch was donated and held by appointed commissioners, one of whom was the seigneur. The schoolhouse was

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38 • a meeting of the people Table 1 Government-funded schools prior to the establishment of the Royal Institution Board of Trustees, 1818

Community

Township or Seigneury (T/S)

Petition or Government Subsidy

School Opens

New Carlisle

Gaspé Coast

1786

1774

Montreal

Montreal (S)

1794

1794

Quebec

Quebec (S)

1794

1794

William Henry

Sorel (S)

1801

1801

St Thomas

Rivière du Sud (S)

1804 (French) 1812 (English)

1807 1812

Pointe Lévis

Lauzon (S)

Mount Johnson

c.1804

1806

Monnoir (S)

1805

1807

Hull

Hull (T)

1808

1802

St Roch

St Roch des Aulnais (S)

1809

1811

Berthier

Berthier (S)

1809

1810

Stanstead

Stanstead (T)

1809

1817

Terrebonne

Terrebonne (S)

1810 1814

1790 1814

Lower Chute

Argenteuil (S)

1810

1808

Lachine

Montreal (S)

1810

1810

St John’s

Longueuil (S)

1811

1808

Philipsburg

St Armand (S)

1811

1810

Eaton

Eaton (T)

1811

1811

Dunham

Dunham (T)

1812

1809

Côteau du Lac

Soulange (S)

1812

1811

Douglastown

Gaspé

1814

1813

Drummondville

Grantham (T)

1815

1815

Trois Rivières

Ste Marguerite (S)

c.1815

1815

St Nicholas

Lauzon (S)

1816

1816

Stanbridge

Stanbridge (T)

1816

1817

Portneuf

Portneuf (S)

1816

1816

Cap Santé

Portneuf (S)

1817

1817

Melbourne

Melbourne (T)

1818

1816

Source: Boulianne, The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning

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4 Schoolhouse in St Roch sur Aulnais One of a small number of French-language Royal Institution schools, and one of the few to have survived to the middle of the twentieth century. [Percival, Across the Years, 1946]

built and a teacher installed, with no involvement from any English speaker other than the governor.25 In Pointe Lévis, the land for the school was provided by the English seigneur (Caldwell), but the language of teaching was French; the small number of English-speaking families there apparently conceded to the majority on the question of language.26 Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that the local parish priest, by the name of Mâsse, gave his support to the Royal Institution, at least during the early years. The fair number of French Catholic communities turning to the government for help in setting up schools suggests that, like their American or Scottish counterparts in Hull, Argenteuil, Eaton, Stanstead, and New Carlisle, they were prepared to have faith in the Royal Institution as a funding agency, and take at face value the Act’s neutrality on the question of religion. That these schools operated in French and were taught and attended by Catholics must have struck local people as proof enough that they were not about to become victims of acculturation.

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40 • a meeting of the people

Furthermore, the Act’s insistence that the petitioners for a school represent the majority of the population in a particular area ought to have reassured francophones. In most cases, however, it would be an Englishspeaking minority that negotiated the opening of a school with the Royal Institution, and such a school would operate in English. This apparent violation of the letter of the law is perhaps forgivable given the limitations of head counting and the linguistic patchwork of many rural areas. Exactly what constituted the majority of residents in a community was difficult to say; at times it was easier for the government simply to consider as valid petitioners whichever group took the trouble to promote education. At the same time, many anglophones had a special relationship with their (British) seigneurs and even with the government: the schools in Berthier and Trois Rivières, for example, acquired English-speaking teachers even though the number of anglophones in each community was very small indeed. Such cases inevitably gave the impression that the Royal Institution was anything but disinterested. A much graver concern for Catholic authorities was the question of religion. In these English-speaking schools the teacher would have been Protestant and the curriculum – about which the 1801 Act was also silent – would have been either overtly Protestant or non-denominational. Such a situation would have been intolerable to many parish priests, particularly if children from Catholic families were attending these schools. This was the case in Lachine, the nerve centre of the fur trade and the only community outside the city on the Island of Montreal with a significant Protestant presence. Here, the English-speaking minority (Scots for the most part) petitioned the governor to help open a school over the head of Antoine Duranceau, the local Catholic priest, who had been denouncing the Royal Institution from its inception. The school that opened in 1810 was taught in English, but attracted a number of children from French-speaking Catholic families – either because the curriculum was sufficiently liberal for the teacher’s Presbyterianism not to be a factor or because the standards were high enough for Protestant values not to be a problem. In either case, the school continued to provoke outrage from the parish pulpit for years; on one occasion, Duranceau even threatened to refuse the sacraments to a family that persisted in defying his will.27 From a Protestant perspective, of course, this sort of behaviour merely confirmed the impression that Catholic priests were dictatorial and fundamentally opposed to popular education. In general, the widespread opposition to Royal Institution schools by parish priests may be taken as evidence that these schools attracted Catholic students or at least were a potential threat to any alternative run by the parish or a religious order. In later years, many Protestant schools in Catholic areas would come to fill the same function. At this

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stage, however, most English-language schools existed merely to provide education to English-speaking children, with little in the way of a political or cultural agenda. In most areas with a mixed population, each community was, or soon came to be, highly proprietorial about its schools – and the government consistently overlooked the “majority of the population” rule to keep the peace. In 1812, five years after the establishment of the French school in St Thomas, the local English speakers decided to request their own school; the governor complied, and a second school was built. In other communities the act of petitioning itself became a political issue into which the government was implicitly drawn. In Terrebonne, the French population refused to join their Scottish counterparts in making their application for government assistance in 1810 and set up an alternative school. It met with much success and was eventually also taken under the Royal Institution’s wing, though not before a great deal of ill will had surfaced.28 The appointment of a board of trustees for the Royal Institution in 1818 meant that there was now a bureaucracy to consider petitions, receive school properties, and answer complaints from parents and others in the community. The vast majority of petitions to the Royal Institution date from this time, partly because the machinery was in place to implement a greater number of requests, but mostly because of the steady rise in the Protestant population beginning in 1815 in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The closing of the United States border during the war had dried up the supply of American immigrants, but the active encouragement of outward migration by a British government fearful of a population explosion brought thousands of families from all parts of the British Isles. Only a small percentage of these settled in Lower Canada, but it was enough to people townships that had as yet seen but a handful of pioneers. The government facilitated the process by improving the lines of communication: the northern part of the Eastern Townships was opened to a large extent by roads linking Pointe Lévis across from Quebec City with the villages of Lennoxville, Sherbrooke, Richmond, and Drummondville. Roads were eventually continued westward through the townships of Stukely, Shefford, and Granby to the Richelieu River at Chambly, and beyond to Montreal. British settlers also occupied much of the Chateauguay valley; Ormstown and Huntingdon became the area’s principal villages. Townships such as Rawdon and Kildare in the Laurentians were settled for the first time, as were many parts of the Gaspé. All these Protestant communities were in a position to seek help from the Royal Institution to found schools by the 1820s. The Royal Institution’s board itself was overwhelmingly Protestant. Moreover, the leading figures were all Anglican: the President was the

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Anglican Bishop of Quebec; the secretary was the Reverend Joseph Mills; and the rank and file of the bureaucracy were the Anglican clergy. This was no coincidence. The impetus to establish the board had been largely the result of James McGill’s 1813 bequest of a farm on the outskirts of Montreal and £10,000 for the creation and maintenance of a college or university; without trustees in place, the Royal Institution could not receive this endowment. McGill’s executors, many of whom figured among the colony’s Anglican elite, had clear views on the religious character of such an institution. For its part, the government proved far more concerned for higher learning, which would provide access to the reins of power, than it had been for the education of farmers. With the goal of establishing and maintaining control over an educational path to social betterment, the government appointed the board, which in turn strove to make McGill College first a reality and then an Anglican institution. It also created two grammar schools in Montreal and Quebec City to serve as an intermediate step between primary schools and college. These Royal Grammar schools, opened in 1816, had Anglicans as visitors (an office resembling the later government-appointed school inspectors) and in Quebec City, at least, an Anglican teacher: the Reverend Robert Burrage, who would succeed Mills as secretary of the Royal Institution. The Anglican minister appointed to the school in Montreal did not prove popular and was soon replaced by a Scot, Alexander Skakel, a classical scholar with a sense of scientific curiosity, who had a long history of teaching in that city. The Church of England had also begun to assert itself more aggressively within Lower Canada society in the years leading up to the founding of the board of the Royal Institution. Although it constituted the largest Protestant group in the province in 1815 and continued to be the only official established church, it had made very little impact on rural communities. Many settlers in isolated townships appear to have had no fixed religious affiliation and most would listen to any preacher who seemed inspiring. Churches, where they existed, were often in effect multi-denominational. The Church of England attempted to clarify matters by establishing missions across the countryside, especially in the Eastern Townships but also west into the Ottawa valley and as far afield as Gaspé. The missionaries in the Gaspé probably had the easiest time, at least politically, meeting as they did a population with strong Loyalist roots. On Chaleur Bay the Anglican base of operations became Paspébiac, a community slightly to the east of New Carlisle.29 The Anglicans’ greatest success, however, could be said to have occurred in regions where Nonconformist practice was at its most solid, notably the Missisquoi area and Stanstead and surrounding townships; within a few years of missionary activity there the Church of England could rival the other

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Protestant denominations in popularity. The creation of Anglican parishes in 1818 helped solidify this trend. Charles Stewart, the Rector of St Armand, based in the Anglican church in Frelighsburg, and Thomas Johnson, Rector of Hatley, exercised considerable control over missionary activity in the entire region, as well as over the establishment of Royal Institution schools.30 Similarly, the Reverend Joseph Abbott became an influential figure in the Argenteuil and surrounding townships after his appointment as Rector of St Andrew’s – a strategic choice for an Anglican parish given the village’s preponderance of Scots. Although the Church of England would continue to gain adherents and establish increasing numbers of parishes over the course of the century, its militancy during the 1820s set precisely the wrong tone. Ethnic relations in Lower Canada were rapidly declining even from the not very harmonious state of a generation before; political disputes broke down along linguistic lines, a trend that would complicate the pursuit of democracy right through to the rebellions of 1837–38. It did not help matters that at this time the Royal Institution was locked in a legal dispute with a prominent francophone family over the possession of McGill’s estate, an issue that polarized public opinion and made it even more difficult for French-speaking Catholics to feel comfortable under the Royal Institution’s wing.31 Instead of upholding the liberalism implied in the 1801 Act, the promoters of Royal Institution schools chose to paint it as a Protestant body. Although Secretary Mills strove to counter this impression in his correspondence, the actions of Anglican clergy working within the communities left the strongest mark. This was particularly true in the case of the Anglican missions in Catholic areas. As a representative of the Royal Institution, influencing an area that extended over much of the north shore of the St Lawrence west of Trois Rivières, the Reverend J.C. Driscoll offended many when he argued that the board should appoint only Protestant teachers.32 Despite assurances to the contrary from Mills, similar attitudes alienated Father Mâsse of Pointe Lévis, one of its few friends among Catholic clergy. In 1824 the Legislative Assembly, dominated by francophones, passed the Fabrique Act, which provided public money to Catholic parishes for setting up schools. This legislation effectively ended all petitions to the board from Catholic communities, although it did not mean that all French schools established earlier necessarily broke their affiliation with the Royal Institution. At the same time, having cast the Royal Institution as Protestant, its promoters did not do what common school commissioners would later do and make the institution one for all Protestants. The Anglican clergy were, if anything, even more aggressive against non-Anglicans than against Catholics, which may have won them some spiritual inroads but

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severely weakened the effectiveness of the Royal Institution as a school board. In some places, disputes were over the appointment of teachers: Abbott bickered with the Scots in St Andrew’s over their right to choose a Presbyterian minister as teacher and his counterpart in Hull had similar difficulties with the largely Methodist population there. In parts of the Eastern Townships, where communities had stronger cultural ties with the United States than with Britain, conflicts were more damaging. In some schools, American text books were used, which visiting Anglican missionaries thought highly dangerous.33 Taking their cue from these often outspoken clergymen, the board began to appoint only Anglicans as commissioners and teachers (in Protestant communities) and to remove those deemed to be exerting a negative influence. For example, two commissioners in Melbourne who wished to hand over control of the school to the Methodist church were replaced, while in Eaton a teacher was appointed who proceeded to instruct his non-Anglican pupils in the Anglican catechism and to use the Book of Common Prayer.34 Occasionally, opposition to the Royal Institution from Nonconformists surpassed anything aimed at it from Catholic circles: in 1827 some Protestants in Barnston were so outraged by the local Anglican clergy that they attempted to burn down the schoolhouse.35 The Royal Institution was responsible for funding over eighty schools across Lower Canada, three-quarters of them after 1818. While not an insignificant achievement, this hardly counts as a milestone in the provision of public education. In some communities, turning to the Royal Institution was the only way to open a school; in others, such as Stanstead and the surrounding townships, Royal Institution schools were outnumbered by those supported entirely by the communities themselves, who kept as many schools as possible open right through the 1830s, largely for religious or political reasons. Many communities also felt tremendous pride in their schools and resented the loss of control inherent in the Royal Institution’s assuming the right to name commissioners and visitors. One of the bitterest points of contention was the need to deed all school property over to the board – especially if there was already sensitivity to Anglican dominance. It was generally up to the clergy to negotiate the transfer, an operation that often required many years to complete. Communities that had started schools without the help of the Royal Institution tended to resist having to relinquish what they saw as theirs. On the St Armand seigneury the people of Philipsburg refused to surrender the school they had opened themselves and for which they had been sent a teacher; as a result, the board withdrew its support. The villagers of Frelighsburg and St Armand did transfer their properties, but did so grudgingly, and continued to refer to themselves as the “proprietors” of the school.36

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Despite the steady rise in the number of its schools, the Royal Institution was clearly in a state of political and financial decline from 1824 on. The militancy of its Anglican promoters was chiefly to blame, given the sensitivity of Nonconformists, and although the strength of the Church of England continued to grow, so too did that of the other denominations, as immigrants from all parts of the British Isles swelled the Protestant ranks in Lower Canada. Opposition from the Catholic church was matched by criticism from liberals who, inspired by reform movements from Britain and the United States, called for a form of government-funded public schooling that would be practical in content and non-denominational in character. This liberal tendency would come to dominate the Legislative Assembly in Lower Canada, and by 1829 resulted in legislation that would provide a real alternative to the Royal Institution: the so-called Syndic’s Act. Long before this development, however, the Royal Institution had begun to show its weakness by closing schools that did not comply with regulations or whose population was insufficient to justify their continuing operation. Communities with two schools were especially vulnerable, and in both St Thomas and Terrebonne it was, significantly, the English school that the board chose to close. In the latter case, the closing took place against vehement opposition from the anglophone population, though this is hardly surprising given that Anglicans had failed to establish a real presence in Terrebonne and that the Scottish residents had never been on good terms with the Royal Institution.37 Also beginning in 1824, a number of petitions made to the board were turned down because of lack of funds or, having been accepted, were not pursued by the local residents out of a feeling that the advantages of affiliation with the Royal Institution were outweighed by its discrimination against non-Anglicans. The settlers in many areas were simply too late to take advantage of the Royal Institution. Very little of Megantic county had been settled before 1829, when large numbers of Scots and Ulster Irish began to open the townships of Inverness, Leeds, and Halifax – but no petition to the Royal Institution was made.38 Despite having been established since the beginning of the century, Hemmingford only turned to the Royal Institution in 1828, and received no reply from a board that had grown too strapped to recognize such prodigal children. The following year, Mills received petitions from the people of several new townships, such as New Glasgow in the Laurentians, Lochaber and Buckingham in the Ottawa valley, and Clarendon in the Pontiac. He told these petitioners that they should direct their pleas to the Assembly. Such a frank admission of ineffectualness should not, however, be taken as evidence that the Royal Institution had no further designs on

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education, merely that it recognized – and did not much regret – the end of its monopoly on the provision of elementary schools. The passing of the Syndic’s Act in 1829 coincided with the conclusion of the legal dispute over James McGill’s estate and the formal opening by the Royal Institution of the college that would bear his name. Although it would be another ten years before the board was capable of constructing a formal college building, their attention had already been almost entirely captured by the promise of this new institution. For their part, the settlers of these new townships had little appreciation of the denominational struggles that had plagued the Royal Institution’s early years of operation; like their counterparts of three decades earlier, they were preoccupied with problems of survival. A case in point is the township of Clarendon in the region known as the Pontiac, far to the west of Hull in the upper part of the Ottawa valley. Settlers had only begun to people this region in the 1820s, though the pattern was similar to that of the Eastern Townships: a “leader” – in the case of Clarendon, the Irish-born James Prendergast – was in charge of making concessions to smaller freeholders. But where the American settlers of places like Stanstead brought with them a bias against the established Church of England, the Irish of Clarendon brought a direct experience of living as a Protestant minority within a largely Catholic country. The wave of immigration that began in the wake of the Napoleonic wars included a sizeable Catholic component, one that would increase over the course of the 1830s and balloon after the late 1840s. Immigrants all, Irish families viewed the Pontiac as ripe for settlement, but they did not want the disputes in the old country to be reproduced on Canadian soil. Prendergast’s answer was to ban settlement by Catholics in his area of jurisdiction, Clarendon, by telling prospective Catholic settlers that no more land was available.39 This policy would appear to have been very popular with Protestants, who were of course told that land was available and who did settle there. After Prendergast’s sudden death in 1834 his successor lifted the ban, but a mood had been created and generations of Catholics learned to avoid Clarendon township. Ethics notwithstanding, such tactics speak to the determination of Protestant settlers in the Pontiac to promote their own interests. As had been the case elsewhere, once the land was cleared and crops planted, the settlers’ primary need was to provide schooling for their children and, if the government did not prove willing to help, they made do as they could. Even before making the unsuccessful petition to the Royal Institution, Prendergast went to Hull looking for a suitable teacher – not only to provide education for the children of the first families but also to attract other settlers with the prospect of an established school. He returned with the husband-and-wife team of John

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Maitland and Elizabeth Anne Beek; apparently the wife did the actual school teaching while the husband, who signed the contract, did odd jobs about the community.40 The schoolhouse was built near the river, where the earliest settlers lived, but a second school was soon opened at Clarendon Mills, which lay at the geographical centre of the township and would later become the town of Shawville. Here, on 2 December 1830, following the passing of the Syndic’s Act, Prendergast called a meeting of the people of Clarendon – that is, the heads of families – to elect four school trustees. With himself as chair, this body of farmers meeting regularly at the school roughly resembled many of the later school boards.41 Clarendon township had an additional two schools by 1836, making four school districts serving 102 children. The Syndic’s Act of 1829 brought the political and financial weight of the Assembly behind the cause of public education without the confessional trappings of the Fabrique Act or (as it was perceived) the Royal Institution. The Assembly conceived of arranging Lower Canada into districts, each of which could elect five trustees (or “syndics”) who would administer all moneys allotted to schools. The Assembly voted annual payments to each of these districts, wherever communities were prepared to elect trustees and operate schools. Consequently, much power was entrusted at the local level, a welcome contrast for many to the centralizing tendencies of the Royal Institution. The Assembly did assert a kind of quality control by insisting that payments not be made unless each school was run by a qualified teacher, but it left the certification process in local hands, namely those of “a Curate or Minister of the most numerous Religious denomination,” a Justice of the Peace, or the chief militia officer – in other words, someone of authority who could vouch that the teacher was “known as a person of sober life and conversation, and has been examined by them and found qualified to teach reading, writing and arithmetic in the language of the majority of the inhabitants of the School District in which he or she is to teach.”42 This measure constituted, in effect, an abandonment of the principle advocated by the Royal Institution that schoolteachers should be men, although rural schools would continue to be taught by men as often as not for another generation or so; by the 1860s, however, the feminization of teaching at the level of the one-room schoolhouse would be almost complete. In practice, the ability to employ women, combined with the quality control provided by the ministers and militia officers, meant that communities were assured a supply of teachers who were both cheap and reasonably well qualified or, at any rate, of good character, which was almost as important. In early 1832 the Assembly identified over 1,200 districts, each containing one elementary school. This number included schools operated

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by the Royal Institution, by Catholic parishes, and by independent “proprietors.” Technically, none of these complied with the requirements for funding, but the Assembly was willing to maintain them until their communities should decide under whose authority they wished to fall. Assured of a regular, if dwindling, income from the government, the Royal Institution, now administered by the Reverend Robert Burrage, issued a statement in June 1832 asking each community to hold a public meeting to decide whether it wished to remain with them or to elect trustees under the terms of the Syndic’s Act. Such meetings were held over the summer wherever there were Royal Institution schools and replies were sent back to Burrage from communities in sixteen townships (Kildare, Chatham, Grenville, Hull, Stanstead, Barnston, Hatley, Dunham, Granby, Shefford, Grantham, Melbourne, Ascot, Compton, Eaton, and Frampton) as well as in the Argenteuil, Beauharnois, St Armand, Monnoir, St Hyacinthe, and most of the Gaspé. Replies also came from Lachine, Pointe Lévis, Portneuf, and Cap Santé, the last of which was written in French. This was the strength of the Royal Institution on its last legs as a purveyor of elementary education; other areas of Protestant settlement and the few successes within Catholic areas had severed their ties or closed down their schools. The correspondence resulting from these public meetings reveals a great deal about the education Protestants were receiving and what they thought they deserved. Most communities wrote that they were willing to continue with the Royal Institution, though few did so unequivocally. Some expressed in glowing terms their loyalty to a body “from whom they have received such a cordial support,” while others appear to have acted less out of loyalty than out of an aversion to the “unreasonable” Syndic’s Act, which “confounds the different schools together” in such a way that even “our men of talents” could not figure things out.43 Such sentiment suggests that those who were happy with the Royal Institution resented the Assembly’s standardizing tendencies, just as the proprietors of independent schools had once resented a similar attitude on the Royal Institution’s part. A great many correspondents were annoyed that the Assembly schools provided education only for children over the age of five and under fifteen, and pleased that Royal Institution schools permitted younger and older pupils. Some anglophones in French-speaking areas clearly felt they were being slighted by the local authorities: the writers of the letter from Monnoir, for example, complained of a “prejudice to the English school” on the part of local francophones, who had in fact formed a school district under the Syndic’s Act and wished to take over the Royal Institution school rather than having to put up another building.44 But what was most vehemently expressed in the letters to Bur-

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rage – not surprisingly, given the nature of most public meetings – was dissatisfaction with the current state of local schools. In many places no teacher had been available for months, even years, while many teachers who did have positions were seriously underpaid. The people of Drummondville declared that there should be “no delay in obtaining for the master his arrear of salary, as he is suffering for want of means to provide himself with cloathing [sic] suitable for the winter, and has no way of supporting himself.”45 These problems had to be addressed, and to make sure that they were, some communities were prepared to break with the Royal Institution: “Unless we can retain the confidence of teachers and the community at large it would be far better to … leave the people to avail themselves of the New Act, miserable as it is,” warned the people of Abbotsford.46 Like many of their later counterparts, these anglophones felt that there was no one in authority able and willing to speak for them. This pessimism was not shared by all Protestant communities, many of whom appear to have been well served by the Assembly, at least until 1836. In that year, the political battle between the Assembly and the governor reached an impasse. Funds for education were suspended, hurting all schools in all communities alike. The rebellions that broke out the following year meant a virtual end to support from both the Assembly and the Royal Institution, although the Special Council, which governed through martial law until 1841, did make occasional provisions for the upkeep of schools. If this was far from adequate, it did enable most communities to continue to educate their children in the schoolhouses built over the previous two decades or more. For most, this was very difficult, but every school kept open was a small victory, usually the result of concerted effort by everyone in the community. One schoolmaster in the Gaspé later wrote the Royal Institution to say that he had been teaching there without pay from 1836 until 1844, when he “had to resign in consequence of the inhabitants not been [sic] able to contribute or pay for the tuition of their children, stating that their poverty was the cause.”47 Such obviously inadequate schooling was a far cry from the ideals people may have had when first appealing to the Royal Institution and even further from the standards that inspectors and other officials would apply to schools in rural communities, but it was an expression of hard work and dedication against great odds. Schooling did not implode in the absence of government funding, any more than it had languished prior to state involvement. Critics did not take into consideration the “earnest desire for education” that was so striking in Quebec’s Protestant communities.48

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2

Without Distinction of Creed: Common Schools and Protestant Communities The universal feeling of the Inhabitants of this Township is an earnest desire for Education, and with some assistance from the Public Revenue good permanent schools would be Established, and a superior class of Teachers employed. We and the public generally would approve of a system by which the non resident proprietors of unoccupied lands would (in common with other property) be compelled to contribute to the support of Education. The school commissioners of Hemmingford, 18421

On a spring morning in 1842, a group of men assembled at William Scriver’s Hotel in the village of Hemmingford to form a school commission. Five of them – William Barrett, John Wilsie, Donald McFee, Daniel Heffernan, and Christopher Irvine – had been elected to this office the previous January at a public meeting of all male heads of households from Hemmingford Township. A sixth man, Leon Lalanne, the town clerk, who had coordinated the election, took charge of the first meeting until Barrett was appointed chair, and then continued to serve as the board’s recording secretary. (In subsequent years he, too, would serve as a commissioner, as would the hotel-keeper, William Scriver.) The five commissioners were of British stock (Heffernan was Irish), while the secretary’s background was French.2 Barrett and Irvine were Anglicans, McFee was a Scots Presbyterian, Wilsie and Lalanne were Methodists, and Heffernan was Catholic. This relatively diverse group took it upon themselves to provide “common” schools for the entire population of the township, regardless of a child’s ethnic or social background. Such, they firmly believed, was their mandate. The Common School Fund,

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5 William Scriver’s hotel, Hemmingford Known for years as McClatchie’s general store, this building on Frontier Street in Hemmingford was once a hotel. The first meeting of the School Commissioners for the Township of Hemmingford was held here in January 1842. The building is now a hardware store. [Author photo]

with which they were to run the schools in the township, was “designed for the encouragement of Education throughout the Province without distinction of Creed or Party,” a goal that entailed considerable responsibility for ensuring tolerance.3 The diligence displayed by the Hemmingford commissioners may have been exceptional for the 1840s, but the political culture they nurtured in the face of increasing opposition from many sides was to resonate for another century and a half. The Hemmingford school elections of January 1842 were a direct response to the passing, in September 1841, of the Education Act (4 & 5 Victoria, cap.XVIII), which called for a public meeting to be held in every community in the province. The Act was the first of several during the 1840s that would firmly establish a lasting public school system for Quebec. After two false starts (the Royal Institution and the Assembly’s 1829 scheme) the government made a special effort at this time to create a means to fund and administer schools. In 1841, and again in 1845 and 1846, the legislators fine-tuned the balance between local and central control that had not materialized in 1801 and 1829. Instead of a central body dealing with the ill-defined majority in a given area, or with the people of a village, or even (as with the Syndics’ Act) with the families served by an individual school, the basic unit of educational administration defined in the 1840s was the “school municipality,” which normally corresponded to a township or, in seig-

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neurial areas, to a Catholic parish. Not coincidently, this school administration was linked to the establishment of municipal governments, something of which most people in Canada had no experience outside spontaneous gatherings or meetings called by the seigneur or township leader. Having an administrative unit that was larger than the school but significantly smaller than the government allowed for much flexibility at the local level. In theory, at any rate, the school municipality would be able to cater to all groups within its boundaries by providing a network of common schools. In practice, however, the many voices within Quebec society with differing, even conflicting, agendas made the universal implementation of a liberal form of schooling very difficult and eventually impossible. It was not that the framers of the 1840s legislation did not understand this reality – indeed, the goal of the legislation was, in many ways, to counter a half century of tension among the various groups. Political changes between the late 1840s and the late 1860s complicated what had been envisaged as the steady advance of liberalism – notably the rise of a conservative Catholic church that opposed anything remotely “liberal,” especially the sort of republicanism that had inspired many French-Canadians in the 1830s. Intellectual liberalism was also closely identified with Protestantism, partly because of the traditional Protestant emphasis on literacy and partly because the long-standing differences between the Protestant denominations had led, paradoxically, to a kind of ecumenism – at least at the level of institutions (a school board, for example) if not of theology. The common school ideal was further compromised, in Catholic eyes, by the association of nondenominationalism with assimilation, an idea that, in the wake of the Durham Report, the Special Council, and the Union of the Canadas, had much to support it. Nevertheless, this liberal ideal for education would persist beyond the time of Confederation, despite the increasing division of schooling along confessional lines. Whatever associations people may have had, the common school was not a Protestant invention and it did not serve the Protestant population exclusively – certainly not during the first decade or so of its implementation. Within a generation of 1840, however, the kind of education resembling that of Ontario and other parts of North America, the kind usually known as “public,” was most visible in the Protestant parts of Quebec.

The public school system that came into effect in 1841 had its roots in the political reform movement of the 1830s. This was an international phenomenon, and the rebellions that ensued in Lower Canada had their parallels elsewhere, insomuch as the battle was, at least in part, over

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without distinction of creed • 53

democratic rights and freedoms. It was also a revolt against British rule, and as such was identified with French Canadians. Although quick to suppress political dissent, the British government was conscious enough of the need for reform, and sensitive enough to the complexities of Lower Canada society, to appoint as the new governor a political liberal, whose task would be to inquire into the causes of the rebellions. This was John “Radical Jack” Lambton, the Earl of Durham, an aristocrat who had nevertheless earned a name for himself in Britain as an advocate of democratic reform. Durham’s report on the situation in Lower Canada contained many recommendations for radical change, including responsible government, civic municipalities, economic liberalization, and public schools.4 It also contained, more famously, the recommendation that French Canadians be assimilated (by uniting the two Canadas in a single political unit and promoting British values) and that Catholic institutions be marginalized as an impediment to social progress. Although French Canadians reacted badly to the suggestion that they were a people without history or culture and therefore ripe for assimilation, many former political radicals were happy with the idea of liberal reforms, including a diminished role for the Catholic hierarchy, which had fiercely denounced the rebellions and opposed the overhaul of seigneurial tenure. Liberal education was promoted by such political reformers as the journalist Charles Mondelet and the physician and former member of the Assembly Jean-Baptiste Meilleur. In 1841, after more than three years of authoritarian rule by the Special Council appointed by the crown, the newly elected legislature passed the first Education Act for a united Canada. It closely followed the legislation creating civic municipalities and made use of its territorial divisions to administer a school system. These divisions were called districts, each to be led by a council, much as the city corporations of Montreal and Quebec were each led by a mayor and aldermen. Although the Education Act created a Common School Fund and a Department of Education with a superintendent to plan the budget, it was at the municipal level that the money was administered: the district councils were charged with distributing operating funds to the individual school boards, according to need. Commissioners for these school boards were to be elected by the inhabitants of each parish or township within the district; regular meetings of these inhabitants (heads of households, normally) were a feature of the new municipal structure. The two levels of school administration proved problematic, however. Commissioners found the district councils unreliable and unapproachable, preoccupied as they were with political factionalism, and as a result operating money from the Common School Fund did not always find its way into the commissioners’ hands on time.5 By 1846 the district councils had been abolished. Boards of

See facing page for caption.

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without distinction of creed • 55

commissioners were then in complete charge of their respective “school municipalities,” whose geographical boundaries more or less coincided with the townships and parishes. These territories were in turn subdivided into school “districts” (not to be confused with the larger administrative districts), each of which was served, or was intended to be served, by a school. The notion of the school municipality as the basic administrative unit of public schooling persisted for well over a century, to be replaced only in the 1970s by large sectoral school boards. These offered efficiency, but came at the expense of the local democracy established during the 1840s. In keeping with the spirit of liberal reform, the 1841 Act made no provision for confessional schools; the assumption was that denominational differences would gradually erode under institutions that were common to all.6 However, the so-called “dissentient clause” allowed religious minorities to establish separate schools outside the control of the school commission. Like the earlier provision that the Royal Institution would not interfere with existing religious schools, the dissentient clause was intended to reassure Catholics and perhaps other groups that religious schools did have a place within liberal society. Unlike the Royal Institution, the Department of Education was made up of francophones as well as anglophones, and its division in Lower Canada was headed by JeanBaptiste Meilleur, a devout Catholic. In a great many parishes, moreover, where virtually all the inhabitants were Catholic, and especially where members of the teaching orders were influential, public education included many aspects that would have struck liberal reformers as decidedly Catholic. Despite this, the notion of common schools did not sit well with the Catholic hierarchy or, for that matter, with much of the Anglican hierarchy, who remained uncomfortable with common, non-denominational institutions throughout the 1840s. For most Protestants, however, the path of liberal reform seemed the only way forward despite – or rather because of – the ethnic antagonisms that had plagued Lower Canada for the half century prior to 1841. The example of the Hemmingford School Commission during the 1840s and early 50s is particularly useful in understanding how many Protestants, and liberal reformers in general, envisaged a common school system, and the many challenges faced at the local level in implementing

Map 5 Hemmingford Township: distribution of schools The dots here correspond to schoolhouses drawn on the map of Hemmingford in the Illustrated Atlas of the Eastern Townships and Southwestern Quebec (H. Belden & Co., 1881). Schoolhouses no.’s 1 and 8 are indicated; the village school was No. 5.

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it. Whereas the Eastern Townships were generally ethnically homogenous during this period7 – Anglican and Nonconformist rivalry notwithstanding – Hemmingford’s population was mixed, including a significant Irish Catholic minority alongside the many Protestant denominations. Because it lay next to the border and along a road network from New York, the township’s earliest settlers had been Americans who practised various kinds of Protestantism, depending on the affiliation of the resident preacher. As was often the case, the village school had doubled as the first “meeting house,” until a separate church building was erected in 1834 to serve both a Methodist and a Presbyterian congregation.8 The Presbyterians built their own church in the village some years later, and it was not until 1842 that the Anglicans were sufficiently numerous (sixtyfive persons, according to the census) to justify a permanent mission, though its church was located some distance outside the village, where the Anglican families were more numerous. Despite their earlier presence, Catholics had no resident priest until the late 1840s and no formal church until 1853. Until mid-century, therefore, religious differences were no more deeply entrenched than they had been in parts of the Eastern Townships. The first school commissioners in Hemmingford were highly conscious of “the diversity of religious opinion existing among the Inhabitants of some of the school districts” and vowed to respect it. “It is highly desirable,” they declared, “that a selection of school books should be made for such districts, which will be suitable to all without giving offence to any.”9 Having made only one unsuccessful petition to the Royal Institution for support in 1828, the people of Hemmingford had turned to the Assembly to help finance several of their schools. During the lean years following the abolition of the Assembly, they survived comparatively well by accepting help from the British North American (bna) School Society, an Anglican missionary organization. In 1842, when the new commissioners took stock of the state of education in their township, they noted that, of the seven schools still in operation, three had teachers whose salaries were subsidized by this society to the tune of £10–12 per year; the rest were paid exclusively by local subscription. The board also noted an additional eight schools that were currently not open, though several had been so until recently, one had closed after sixteen years in operation, and another had been “a good school when the Government allowance was received” – references to past funding by the Assembly.10 That a total of seventeen school districts11 were identified at this early stage in the commission’s existence suggests that the people of Hemmingford were used to having a good number of schools. The overall impression in the board’s survey is of a school system whose solid foundation was at last breaking apart after years of underfunding.

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without distinction of creed • 57 Table 2 The state of Hemmingford’s schools, December 1842

District 1

Teacher John Hood

School in Operation Over 2 years

Funding

Attendance

Teacher’s Salary

Subscription aided by £12 per ann. from the bna School Society

44

£40

State of Schoolhouse

Remarks

Too small and in bad repair

2

None

Good

School has generally been kept during past 16 years

3

None

None

School formally kept in a private house and well attended

4

None

Good

Schoolhouse occupied as a guard house

5

6

William Smith

25 years

None

Subscription and £10 from the bna School Society

45

£50

Not in good repair

None

Formerly a good school when the government allowance was received

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58 • a meeting of the people Table 2 The state of Hemmingford’s schools, December 1842 (Continued)

District

Teacher

School in Operation

Funding

Attendance

Teacher’s Salary

State of Schoolhouse

7

Robert Service

14 years

Subscription

24

£24 with board & lodging

Good

8

Rebecca Duncan

12 years

Subscription

28

£12 with board and lodging

In bad repair

Elizabeth Churchill

1 week

Subscription

20

£15

New

Remarks

9

None

New and good

School occasionally in operation during the last 2 years

10

None

Not completed

School kept occasionally over past year

11

Thomas Sharman

2 years

Subscription

27

£12 with board and lodging

Not completed

12

None

Out of repair

School occasionally kept during past 3 years

13

None

Building

New district

Good

District partly in Russeltown, partly in Hemmingford

14

Hezekiah Arnold

Over 6 years

Subscription and £10 from the bna School Society

45

£35

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without distinction of creed • 59 Table 2 (Continued) The state of Hemmingford’s schools, December 1842 (Continued)

District

Teacher

School in Operation

Funding

Attendance

Teacher’s Salary

State of Schoolhouse None

15

Remarks School kept in Russeltown, particulars not known

16

None

Erecting New district

17

None

None

New district

Source: Minute Books, School Municipality, Township of Hemmingford, 1842

The commissioners set about attempting to rectify this situation with the limited funds at their disposal. Having divided the responsibility for the township’s school districts among themselves, the commissioners made their formal visitations in January 1843. Their objectives were to identify problems with existing schools and to effect necessary repairs, as well as to convince the inhabitants of districts with no schools that it was now possible to build new ones. In all cases it was crucial to “confer with and give general advice to the Teachers and Parents,” remembering always that the commissioners’ oath of office “obliges them to promote education by all lawful means, even under the most discouraging circumstances.”12 What they appear to have found particularly discouraging was the dim prospect of receiving their share of the Common School Fund before the following autumn and the consequent fear that they were making promises to local people that they would not be able to fulfill. When visiting schools, the commissioners stressed how important it was for teachers to keep attendance registers so as to have an accurate head count to present to the district council when it came to distribute the fund. The visitors appear to have met with a fair degree of enthusiasm on the part of residents, who in many cases “set about the organization of schools with great alacrity,” giving every impression that “in the course of the present week, a school will be in operation in every School district.”13 Despite this general enthusiasm, the commissioners’ fears proved well founded. Having filed the necessary report in April 1843 detailing the current state of Hemmingford schools and the total sum raised the previous year (£235.4.9) through fees and donations from the bna School Society, the commissioners waited hopefully for an equivalent

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amount to be provided by the district council.14 There was no response for several weeks and by September it was clear they were to receive nothing from the Common School Fund. After sending letters of protest to Meilleur and to the governor general, in March 1844 the board did receive a token sum of just over £46, which enabled them to begin advancing money to various school districts for necessary repairs. It also became clear that school fees alone could not guarantee enough income for teachers to live on, especially when a bad harvest or poverty made it difficult for parents to pay. With funds at their disposal at last, the commissioners could accord some teachers a “gratuity” to tide them over; Delia Corbin of school district No. 6, for example, was granted £2.10, a sum she was “unable to collect from the inhabitants.”15 At the end of May 1844 the board received almost £200 due for 1843, which, though an improvement, fell far short of the Common School Fund’s technical obligation to match the £305 raised in fees. The following year Hemmingford was overlooked again, because of incompetence and, the commissioners believed, bias on the council’s part. Again, they protested to Meilleur, pleading that “the Teachers who are in a Great Measure dependent on this allowance have in many instances in faith of promptly receiving the same, made engagements which by this default they are left without the means of fulfilling and are Consequently placed in a very embarrassed and disagreeable situation.”16 The Hemmingford commissioners here were showing an uncharacteristically sympathetic concern for the schoolteachers’ predicament; in later years, rural school boards would typically keep teachers’ salaries low and the contracts short, to stretch their budgets. Nevertheless, the unstable situation of the early 1840s meant that the supply of operating funds was hardly an improvement over that of the late 1830s. Complaints of this nature across the province contributed to the eventual dismantling of the district councils. As school visitors, it also fell within the commissioners’ mandate to set guidelines for the curriculum, to determine what books would be used, and generally to evaluate the teacher’s performance. These powers would remain intact through the 1845 and 1846 school acts, but would be undermined by the establishment of school inspectors in 1851. Reporting directly to the superintendent of education, inspectors were intensely critical of the way most schools operated and routinely blamed these deficiencies on the commissioners. As a result, a bias against school boards took shape in the minds of Meilleur and his successors – and of many subsequent historians basing their views on inspectors’ reports – who came to see commissioners as reactionary forces in the battle for education.17 It is true that, despite the loss of autonomy in local communities, having a neutral, standardized inspection

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of schools probably resulted in better quality control, but the Hemmingford commissioners were certainly painfully conscious of their schools’ shortcomings and eager to fix them. They had only good things to say about their teachers (at least in 1843) but complained that they were underpaid and seriously wanting in books, equipment, and even firewood. They added that, where there were enough books to go round a class of thirty to forty-five pupils, these often contained a particular religious slant – Anglican, for the most part – that was fine for overwhelmingly Anglican districts, but in places where “greater diversity exists” was “liable to give offence.”18 Finding qualified teachers for every school district was a priority for the board, and this objective was largely met by the end of 1843. Normally, the selection of a teacher was up to the local residents, whose fees paid their salaries, though the commissioners were keen to intervene should problems arise. Although generally concerned for teachers’ welfare, they were fully prepared to remove teachers whom they found objectionable or about whom they had received complaints from parents. After only three month’s work, James McCormick was told to “make room for a more competent and worthy teacher, and one more Suitable to moral Education in a civilized and Christian Community”; another teacher, unidentified, had to be “dismissed on account of incapicity [sic] caused by insanity which is fully proved.”19 For their part, teachers did not always take kindly to criticism, especially when it came from commissioners who were hardly models of erudition. Samuel Hart of District No. 14 went so far as to post handbills and circulate letters containing “gross and vulgar abuse” directed at the commissioners, who reacted by declaring they could “no longer acknowledge him as a proper person to be entrusted with the instruction of youth”; Hart was forgiven, however, after he issued a “humble and public apology” and declared himself “truly penitent for making such false and slanderous aspersions.”20 Such conflicts suggest a wide variety in the quality of teaching, an impression confirmed by the commissioners’ own assessment of the staff at Hemmingford schools. At the end of 1843 they reported that seven of their nineteen teachers could “teach English grammatically, the rule of arithmetic used in commercial transactions, Writing, Geography and Book Keeping”; another seven could, in addition, “teach Vulgar and Decimal arithmetic, and practical mathematics, as applicable to the measurement of artificers work”; while three others could also “teach Euclid’s Elements, Plane Trigonometry, with the use of Logarithms and practical mathematics in General.” None of the teachers at the time was able to “teach Latin and Greek, so as to prepare young men for entering the university.”21 It is not clear from

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these categories whether or not the families of Hemmingford wanted or needed their children to learn this wide variety of subjects or even whether the commissioners felt they should do so. It would seem that the purpose of this classification was merely to express each teacher’s abilities – a useful yardstick, given the absence of proper training – and not each community’s needs. Only later did boards begin to provide “model” schools for advanced pupils, and consequently require certain teachers to have additional skills. Until then, a teacher’s qualifications and the school he or she taught at were not necessarily related, although the residents of certain districts could clearly pay higher fees than others and so were able to attract teachers with better skills. The distribution of teachers according to gender seemed equally arbitrary; the board hired teachers, male or female, to fill vacancies. Hemmingford’s more highly qualified teachers were, significantly, men, while all but two of the teachers at the lowest rank were women; three additional women – Maria Speck, Ann Letson, and Mary Young – appear to have had no qualifications at all. This variation was reflected in the salaries: the three unqualified teachers received barely £12 yearly between them in school fees, while one of the top ranking men, William Smyth, earned a total of £44. Once a full slate of teachers was in place, the commissioners strove to improve the quality of teaching – an endeavour that no doubt ruffled feathers and may well have led to some of the conflicts already mentioned. Technically, the commissioners always had the final say in all appointments: “Whenever the majority of the inhabitants of any school District shall select a teacher, he or she shall be sent for Examination to two of the members of this Commission, and if they shall find him or her Competent to teach and shall also be satisfied as to such teacher’s character and moral conduct, they are hereby impowered [sic] to make an engagement.”22 Determined to halt the practice of hiring unqualified teachers, the commissioners announced in the autumn of 1845 that all teachers in the township would have to be re-examined the following summer and that “thereafter no Teacher will be returned for the Government allowance who cannot pass such examination.” At least one teacher was dismissed for refusing to submit to this exam.23 With the establishment in 1846 of boards of examiners in Montreal and Quebec City, local commissioners were no longer obliged to oversee this matter in such detail, and as teachers began to graduate from the Normal schools, which opened in 1859, their qualifications could be ascertained by a certificate. This development would eventually allow commissioners to build a network of elementary and model schools, and in some cases academies, and to advertise for the teachers they needed at each level.

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Although a vital part of providing education, the employment of teachers probably occupied less of the commissioners’ time than the matter of building and repairing schools; this would continue to be the case for most school boards over at least the following century. A township such as Hemmingford proved a manageable territory in terms of the distribution of its population for about that period. In 1843 it was easy to see how many vacant school districts needed schools; within a year or so it was also possible to see that some existing schools were badly placed and should be moved to a spot convenient to more families – or, if the residents wished, sold and the money used to build a new school.24 The board also decided to merge some underpopulated districts and to create new ones in expanding areas. This sort of fine-tuning went on with no substantial change in the number of schools until the movement towards consolidation began in the early twentieth century and, in many places, until much later. In most townships decisions regarding the location of schools were made by the local residents themselves, who paid for construction by special assessment if the board were unable to assist them. Residents sometimes argued amongst themselves about where a school should be located. One such case was in Hemmingford’s District No. 8 from whom the commissioners received two contradictory proposals in December 1844: one was in favour of a new school, but the other was for holding on to the old one, even though it was “in such a dilapidated state as to be unsusceptible of repair,” – to say nothing of its location in the midst of a Protestant cemetery used by virtually all the local families, an overlap of sacred and secular that the commissioners found unacceptable.25 The first faction eventually built an alternative school, but the situation remained tense until the spring of 1847, when the majority agreed to build a new schoolhouse at the centre of the district and to allow the old building in the cemetery to be refurbished as a place of worship for Methodists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans alike.26 Such issues underlined how important it was for a school board to be the undisputed owner of school property. Although boards were entitled by law to receive and manage property, the long tradition of farmers donating portions of land for the building of schoolhouses did not necessarily translate into a willingness to cede such land permanently to a public body. It fell to the commissioners to investigate the ownership of school grounds and where necessary to convince farmers to make formal transfers. Such negotiations resulted in the Hemmingford board receiving a deed to the school property in District No. 1 from Edward Shields in April 1844.27 The 1841 Education Act had merely said that properties should be “vested” with the school boards, but the 1845 and 1846 acts were much more emphatic, making eligibility for government

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grants contingent upon the possession of a deed and citing the Royal Institution by name as a landowner from whom the title should be sought. This naturally was of no concern to Hemmingford, which had never received support from the Royal Institution, but many other communities were obliged to write with this request. Some had very little idea that their schools were the property of a corporation based hundreds of miles away. “Having applied for part of the Government Grant to repair the School houses, the superintendent of Education had required us to furnish authentic copies of the Deeds of the Land on which they are built,” complained the New Carlisle commissioners in 1846. “We have been informed that the school[s] … were made over to the R. Institution. If this is the case, we are desirous of having them assigned to [us].”28 It would be three years before the commissioners of New Carlisle had the deed in their hands, however, much to the frustration of parents, teachers, and children. Other communities had enjoyed closer ties with the Royal Institution but still had to ask Meilleur to intercede for the return of deeds. He did so in 1848 on behalf of the commissioners of Argenteuil, whose request of two years before had received no definite reply from the Royal Institution.29 Hassles over property ownership certainly did not make the early management of schools easier. Determining the need was simple enough; it was far more difficult to find the means to meet it. Until 1846, when school boards were given the right to collect property taxes to help pay for building and repairs, such costs were borne by the residents of individual districts. This resulted in inequality, as certain districts were wealthier than others and therefore could afford better schools. The commissioners attempted to offset this tendency by subsidizing building projects in poorer areas, but their actions were always subject to the availability of government grants. Property taxes would allow commissioners to apportion spending where it was needed. For this reason, the Hemmingford board was convinced from the beginning not only that property taxes should be imposed but also that the “non resident proprietors of unoccupied lands would … be compelled to contribute.”30 Even so, allowing boards to collect taxes represented a watershed in public education; not only did it provide much better funding on a regular basis but also it put control of all operating budgets in the hands of locally elected officials. The 1846 Education Act removed many of the impediments that hampered commissioners, but it also created new tensions. Getting people to pay their taxes was no easy matter in the late 1840s. The first task was to determine the value of taxable property. So, following the letter of the Act, in September 1846 the Hemmingford commissioners selected “three fit and proper persons” to “assess this Township for school purposes.”31 At this point, the drawbacks of local empowerment became

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evident: none of the fit and proper persons was willing to go around asking his neighbours how much their property was worth. One, Finlay McNaughton, claimed he could not perform this task owing to a physical infirmity and obtained a doctor’s certificate to prove it. After much deliberation and consultation with Meilleur, the board fined the other two £2.10 each for “neglecting to perform the duty of assessors.”32 Three more local men were appointed; they, too, refused and were fined in turn. It was only in December that a third trio was formed and reluctantly set about completing the first assessment roll, which they submitted in January 1847. Having sent the school rate to the superintendent for approval, the commissioners then announced publicly that these taxes would be payable by the end of March. The people of Hemmingford were, however, no more eager to pay than McNaughton and company had been eager to assess them; the number failing to make their payments on time was high enough for the board to extend the deadline for three weeks. When dues were still outstanding by May the commissioners announced that after the end of the month they would begin to prosecute. Despite their enthusiasm for the new law, the commissioners were clearly not keen to enforce it on their neighbours. Nevertheless, the perseverance of the Hemmingford commissioners in imposing the principle of taxation did not endear them to many of their neighbours. William Barrett, the board’s chair since the beginning, submitted his name for re-election when his term was up in July 1848, but he and fellow commissioner Richard Hayes, who had led the board during Barrett’s prolonged absence the previous year, were opposed and soundly beaten at the polls. The situation worsened considerably by the end of 1849, when a petition was signed by a number of Hemmingford ratepayers accusing some of the commissioners of mismanaging public funds.33 These men had comparatively little trouble clearing their names, but deeply resented the personal attacks and the ease with which their opponents were able to disrupt the board’s proceedings for several months. It was, the commissioners concluded, a move to “injure the cause of Education by deterring others from accepting office” and thus “frustrating the generous intentions of the Legislature in promoting Education in this Province.”34 This verbal attack coincided with more tangible violence in the form of arson, notably the burning of the new schoolhouse in District No. 8, a school widely associated with Barrett and his fellow commissioners. To underline the message, a note had been posted near the ruin “defying anyone to rebuild [the school], and threatening to burn out those who should attempt to do so.”35 This was a direct attack on the school commissioners, who had intervened on several occasions in the district’s affairs against the wishes of at least some of the inhabitants.

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This attack coincided with the eruption of violence in other parts of Lower Canada known as the guerre des éteignoirs, a popular revolt against the imposition of property taxes to fund schooling. These outbursts were interpreted by Meilleur and others as opposition to the whole concept of public education. This violence, however, speaks more to the poverty of most rural people at mid-century and to the shock of being taxed in this manner for the first time than it does to an anti-intellectual spirit.36 The people of Hemmingford and other similar townships had clearly shown a desire for public education, but the shock of taxation was as real for them as it was to the habitants of many Catholic parishes. At the same time, popular resistance took on a considerably different form in townships, where people owned freehold property and did not already feel burdened by seigneurial obligations. Protestant ratepayers, moreover, with a long history of electing their neighbours to manage schools for their children obviously had no fundamental criticism of the system, but they could be merciless if they thought their neighbours were doing a poor job, let alone mismanaging tax money. Similar events in other largely Protestant areas confirm that the anger directed at the Hemmingford commissioners was personal in nature, a reaction to specific policy that upset some members of the community, rather than an attack on public education as such. Given the great difficulties of putting a public school system in place, combined with the news of much violence across the province, it is understandable that commissioners would have the impression that all opposition was intended to diminish the light of learning, but the reality was less ominous. In the township of Melbourne in the Eastern Townships, for example, the commissioners had been equally diligent in enforcing the taxation law. By the autumn of 1850 they had also built a model school, for which a special tax was imposed on the residents of Melbourne village, in keeping with terms outlined in the 1846 Act. The following June a meeting of ratepayers was called, which “almost unanimously resolved that the Commissioners having forfeited the confidence of the town in the erection of a Model School House in opposition to the wishes of the inhabitants, they should be called upon to resign, and that Auditors be appointed to examine the books.”37 Despite the near unanimity of this resolution, the chair of the commission, William Lloyd, blamed a few individuals whose antipathy had stirred up the crowd to the point where some claimed it would burn down the school were the tax imposed. In early July many of the same crowd packed the polls to replace an outgoing commissioner with George Hamel, one of several property holders who had already been prosecuted for non-payment of taxes and who had declared that he intended to oppose the new school

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even if it meant putting together “a sum of money to procure one of the best lawyers in the country.”38 Fearing a riot, Lloyd allowed the vote to take place, but later refused to acknowledge Hamel’s victory, arguing with some justification that none of his supporters had been entitled to vote as they had not paid their taxes.39 Having secured the support of both the superintendent and the governor general (who by default appointed a fifth board member), the Melbourne commissioners proceeded to answer all the charges laid against them. Again, although vindicated, Lloyd and his colleagues were indignant that a “tissue of falsehoods” had been spread by “a class of individuals who are only anxious to put a stop to all education.”40 As in Hemmingford, this identification of the boards’ opponents as “the enemies of education” is partly rhetorical, but it does confirm that the commissioners felt besieged by the forces of ignorance and saw themselves clearly on the side of the angels. No issue proved more detrimental to the cause of public education in the township of Hemmingford than the ethnic antagonism that raised its head in School District No. 1. Despite their varying religious backgrounds – or because of them – the commissioners had striven since the beginning to be neutral and tolerant, insisting that no part of the curriculum in any school should give offence to religious minorities. This attitude displeased many Anglicans, particularly those in District No. 1, where the bna School Society had contributed so much to the upkeep of its school.41 Although Anglicans still constituted the elite in the cities, in rural communities with strong American ties they were newcomers and tended to assert their religious particularism as their counterparts of a generation earlier had done to advance the power of the Royal Institution. But District No. 1 also contained a few Irish Catholic families, who by December 1844 began to complain that their children were being forced to take part in “devotional exercises” and study from religious books that they found objectionable.42 In August 1845 the board sent commissioners McFee and Lalanne to District No. 1 to investigate. They reported finding a hostile crowd who refused to listen to their arguments. They were particularly disgusted to see the Reverend Henry Hazard, the society’s “superintending missionary” in the township, leading the intransigent mob: “He was obviously and actively occupied in promoting the reprehensible feeling of hostility existing in the school district, and indulged in unwarrantable invective, and (especially in a Clergyman) unseemly and opprobrious epithets against the School Commissioners.”43 Barrett wrote to the superintendent for advice, and by the following February a compromise was suggested: that Anglican forms of devotion be permitted in the school in District No. 1, but that Catholic children not be forced to participate. This

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compromise would not seem to have resolved the situation, however, as the board saw the need to reassert its policy of tolerance on a number of occasions during the remainder of the school year. Things had not improved by September and Commissioner Lalanne insisted that the board take action “for the purpose of giving all religious denominations equal opportunities for acquiring Education.”44 The commissioners decided to assert their authority by sending two of their members, Richard Gregg and Jeremiah Ryan (another Catholic, significantly) to the district to “demand possession” of the schoolhouse – which the board had, after all, acquired from a local farmer, Edward Shields, a year and a half earlier. Upon arriving, Gregg and Ryan were “obstinately refused possession” of the school by Shields, who said he would not allow them “to even put their feet upon the said land” and claimed that their deed to the property would not stand in law.45 The board responded by calling in their lawyers to threaten legal action. By April 1846 some of the residents of District No. 1 proposed that they purchase the school building and form an independent school, taking their cue, perhaps, from the faction in District No. 8 that had built its own school when it disagreed with the majority. The commissioners asked the would-be separatists of District No. 1 whether they were prepared to give back all the money the board had spent on repairs to the school since 1842; they were not, and the dispute dragged on.46 The commissioners finally gave the residents and the teacher, John Hood, the ultimatum that if there were no “unconditional surrender” of the schoolhouse, and if Hood were not “placed under our exclusive control,” they would begin legal proceedings. On 30 June 1846, two days before the deadline, John Hood complied, promising not to “interfere … with the religious opinions or feelings of any children who may be committed to his charge.”47 The commissioners responded by immediately issuing him over £4 in back pay, which they had been withholding. Implementing the 1846 Education Act over the following autumn and winter distracted the commissioners from the problems of District No. 1. The Catholic parents appear to have taken Hood at his word and sent their children back to class. If they were unhappy with the conditions they did not make any complaints. In April 1847, however, Hazard submitted a petition demanding that the school in District No. 1 be considered dissentient under the terms of the new Act. The commissioners refused to acknowledge this demand on the grounds that a Protestant group could not dissent in an area that was predominantly Protestant, but this did not stop the Anglicans of that district from acting as though they were independent. The board even resorted to hiring an alternative teacher – Thomas Clancy, a Catholic – for those

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in District No. 1 who were unwilling to send their children to Hood.48 This situation would only be resolved after Superintendent Meilleur intervened the following year and, under the threat of government sanction, the residents of District No. 1 began to come back to the common school fold. After making the demand for dissentient status, Hazard attacked the board from another angle by requesting that he be permitted to use the Hemmingford village school (No. 5) for Anglican services when it was not being used for teaching. This was something that commissioners were always loath to agree to on principle, as it implied a too solid relationship between public schools and Protestantism. Their response was perhaps forgivably blunt: Hazard’s request was “entirely discarded and rejected”; moreover, “as long as this Board is in Office” they would never allow Henry Hazard to preach in any of their schools.49 Hazard left the area towards the end of 1850, but he left a bitter legacy of intolerance and had exposed the relative ineffectualness of the school commission to counter religious tension. Furthermore, with the electoral defeat of Barrett and Hayes, and the replacement of other commissioners, Hemmingford’s Catholics had lost their main supporters on the school board. By the early 1850s the chairman was Henry Nesbitt, who in the past had shown himself to be decidedly in Hazard’s camp. By that time, however, Catholics had a firmer footing within the community with the 1849 founding of the first Catholic mission in Hemmingford, led by the Irish priest Anthony O’Malley. By 1853 the township’s Catholic population had risen to the point where it became the centre of a new Catholic parish, St Romain de Hemmingford. Given this higher status, a number of Catholic families, led by Patrick Corrigan, did what they had probably been considering for several years: submitted a formal request to establish a dissentient school board. This request was turned down on the grounds that the petitioners formed “so small a proportion of the inhabitants professing a religious faith, different from the majority, [that] … the cause of elementary education would not be advanced by granting [the] petitioners’ request.”50 The commissioners’ response shows that, despite everything that had happened, they continued to believe in the merits of non-confessional schooling. A year later, however, a second request was made, and this time more ratepayers were willing to dissent – presumably a higher proportion of the local Catholic population had been convinced of the need to separate. The commissioners complied and the petitioners built a new schoolhouse in the village. But if the Irish Catholic dissenters hoped they would gain autonomy by separating, they were to find they had broken with an

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English-language common school board only to become engulfed in a French-speaking Catholic board as the number of French-Canadian settlers in the area rose steadily over the course of the 1850s and 60s and Catholic schools multiplied. The Catholic leadership in the new parish, moreover, was soon predominantly French-Canadian; from the mid-1850s, the priests of St Romain were francophone.51 While it is reasonable to assume that the Irish Catholic families of Hemmingford were pleased for their children to receive the kind of religious instruction now available to them, it is by no means clear that they could not have continued to be accommodated by the school commission, in their own language, had they remained part of the common school system. From the point of view of a religiously and ethnically diverse community united by a desire for a broad and liberal form of education (if the election of commissioners of various faiths during the 1840s is anything to go by) the departure of Hemmingford’s Catholics was a real tragedy. The actions of one minority had convinced another that their only recourse was separation – something that was not necessarily in their best interest. The common school ideal lived on in the Hemmingford board of school commissioners, though it was essentially Protestant in all but name. As in many townships where Catholics dissented, the board continued to refer to itself without reference to its Protestant constituency; its territory remained the school municipality of the township of Hemmingford. It was only towards the end of the century, when alternative Catholic school municipalities (as opposed to mere dissentient boards) were established in the parishes of St Romain and nearby St Jean Chrysostome, that the Hemmingford commissioners began to use the word “Protestant” in their correspondence. In the long run, given the increasing pressure exerted by the church on local Catholics to define themselves in opposition to Protestants, their departure in 1854 probably made for greater harmony at the level of the schoolhouse. Goodwill soon prevailed in Hemmingford. Barrett was even elected mayor of the town in 1855 and was succeeded in that office by the once-vilified Richard Hayes. This restoration of order suggests, again, that the earlier disputes were essentially teething pains for the Hemmingford school commission, just as the guerre des éteignoirs was for public education in the province, and not, as Meilleur and other progressives may have imagined, a sign that the people of Quebec were intrinsically opposed to learning and indifferent to self-government. The system had survived the religious intolerance and ethnic tension of the 1840s, which were played out at the local level. The checkered history of the Hemmingford school board during its first decade should only underline the fundamental strength of the institution,

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which endured various forms of assault but emerged (almost) intact, able to provide schooling to the township for another hundred and twenty years. Moreover, the denominational common ground advocated by the commissioners for the curriculum would eventually be accepted by all Protestants, even the Anglicans, who by the 1860s could see that the cause of solidarity was more important than ancient battles with Nonconformists.

In 1850 the superintendent of education for Canada East compiled statistics on schools, which were listed by municipality and arranged by county.52 These tables show the array of common schools across the province that had been formed in the wake of the 1840s school legislation. Significantly, confessional status is not indicated, as it would only have been an issue had a minority opted to dissent. Most parts of Lower Canada had few Protestants, if any, so the question of nondenominational schools was less pertinent. In most townships, however, school boards would have been dominated by Protestants and, to judge from Meilleur’s statistics, there was relatively little opposition to the common schools in these areas – at least before 1850. The county of Beauharnois south of Montreal, an ethnically diverse area even before mid-century, was something of an exception: it had three Catholic dissentient boards (Hemmingford’s would make a fourth in 1854) alongside five municipalities dominated by Catholics. But the older counties of the Eastern Townships – Missisquoi, Shefford, Sherbrooke, and Stanstead – were almost devoid of dissentient boards.53 Of the twenty-six school municipalities in these counties, all but three were in the majority Protestant. However, many had large Catholic minorities and in eight the Catholics constituted the single largest denominational group; they also represented almost a third of the total population of these counties. Although the experience of Hemmingford’s Catholics was not an entirely happy one, their rights were upheld by a school board dominated by Protestants. Given the absence of dissent in the four Eastern Townships counties, the needs of local Catholic families would also seem to have been met by the common school boards, at least during the 1840s. The 1850s, however, saw increasing pressure to divide public education into confessional camps, largely by a Catholic establishment fearful of becoming marginal to Lower Canada society. Although it had embraced the notion of publicly funded school commissions and openly supported them during the guerre des éteignoirs, the church remained a bitter opponent of common schools. It was not that the school system envisaged in 1841 was secular – a worrying enough concept for many

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6

Superintendent’s list of schools, 1850: Beauharnois County A region with unusual ethnic diversity and, as a result, a great number of dissentient boards. [Report of the Superintendent of Education for Lower Canada, 1850]

Catholics – but the non-denominational status of township school boards made them far more accommodating to Protestants. The Hemmingford commissioners had certainly insisted on many occasions that the nature of schools and the comportment of teachers should be “Christian.” In practice, however, this meant that, despite considerable squabbling, most Protestants could agree that some sort of Bible study was appropriate for the curriculum. Devout Catholics found this objectionable on doctrinal grounds and also because it hardly helped prepare pupils for participation in Catholic rituals. From 1840 the Catholic church found an effective voice in Mélanges religieux, a publication that passionately argued for separate religious schools to help preserve Catholic values. Over the next decade the array of new religious orders dedicated to teaching expanded rapidly. Nine female and ten male orders established roots by mid-century, including the Jesuits, who returned to British North America after an eighty-year exile.

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7

Superintendent’s list of schools, 1850: Missisquoi, Shefford, Sherbrooke, and Stanstead counties A region with Protestant majorities almost everywhere, though with large Catholic minorities. [Report of the Superintendent of Education for Lower Canada, 1850]

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Map 6 Part of Brome Township, 1872 This fragment from the Belden Atlas shows the central part of Brome Township, with the main village, Knowlton, at lower right. Just west of Knowlton is the crossroads marked “Tibbits,” the location of the Tibbits Hill Schoolhouse (see Figure 8). At the upper left is a school marked “Cath,” one of two Catholic dissentient schools in the municipality. [Illustrated Atlas of the Eastern Townships and Southwestern Quebec, 1881.]

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Ethnic antagonisms increased with the rise of ultramontanism on the one side and the Orange Order and fears of “papal aggression” on the other. In 1853 the visit of Alessandro Gavazzi, who preached against the Catholic church as a suppressor of liberalism, provoked riots and bloodshed in Quebec City and Montreal. While Catholics decried the excessive force used in suppressing the riots, Protestants interpreted the protests themselves as an attack on freedom of speech.54 The violence of this incident and the ensuing differences of interpretation set the tone for the next decade and a half of Protestant-Catholic relations. The mood of mutual suspicion extended to the realm of education. In the legislature, Upper Canadian voices criticized the number of schools in Lower Canada that appeared to them Catholic in nature and therefore private and ineligible for public funds. Protestants in Lower Canada began an uneasy alliance with the liberal Rouges in opposing the government’s move to dedicate the profits from the Jesuit estates, which had been slated to assist education ever since the expulsion of that order, to the cause of higher education. This, they argued, was really a covert attempt to bankroll Catholic schools.55 For its part, the Catholic establishment, led by the Bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget, relentlessly attacked the liberal Institut canadien, an advocate of a broader approach to education whose library enabled ordinary Catholics to read books the church had banned. In all cases the government defended the right of the Catholic clergy to be involved in public education where appropriate. Although by no means ultramontane in religious orientation, the increasingly powerful conservative reformers had come to reject the notion of common schools in favour of a confessional system as a means of appeasing people like Bourget. By the 1860s it was clear that a conservative Catholic church meant to dominate public education in Lower Canada, and those who opposed it were finding their political support dwindling. Because of the link between the Catholic church and ruling conservatives in the legislature, many Protestants in Lower Canada began to worry about the growing involvement of the state in education. In 1853 a government commission under lawyer and politician LouisVictor Sicotte concluded, having listened primarily to inspectors and members of the clergy, that common schools were a failure. Meilleur, who had striven to uphold the principle of common schools in the face of attacks from various sides, but who often seemed lost amid the reality of religious and ethnic strife, resigned as superintendent in 1855 and was replaced by an altogether more political animal, Pierre-Joseph Olivier Chauveau. The overhaul of public education began in 1856 with the passing of an Education Act that created Normal schools, the Council of Public Instruction, and the Journal of Education, a vehicle

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for disseminating government school policy. These measures were intended to make education more efficient and modern, and all generally succeeded, but they were clearly conceived in confessional terms: there were to be two Catholic Normal schools and one Protestant (at McGill), while the council, which would have wide powers in setting the curriculum, was to be composed of eleven Catholic and four Protestant appointed members. When the council began to function in 1859 it became obvious to Protestants that their most pressing problem was no longer how to maintain a liberal form of public education, but how to ensure, at least for themselves, something that was free from Catholic influence. This problem became all the more acute with the all-but-inevitable prospect of Confederation, in which an overwhelmingly Catholic province of Quebec would control education. The Education Acts of the 1840s had provided the framework for public schooling, but they did not entrench the legal right to a particular form of education other than by dissent – and this process remained heavily dependent on the will of the majority in any area. Across Quebec, township school municipalities continued to function as nonconfessional school commissions even into the twentieth century, with Catholic minorities dissenting if they wished. Even so, in a great many townships Protestants had lost their majority by the 1860s and in most the Catholic population was steadily growing to the point where Protestants feared losing control. Elsewhere, Protestant minorities had to resort to the dissentient clause if they felt unhappy with their children’s curriculum; and, even assuming that this recourse were demographically possible, it would often condemn Protestant children to schools that were even less adequately funded than those under a majority board, as chapter 3 shows. Quebec’s Protestants faced the possibility of having no rights to something other than Catholic education if the state institutions on which they now depended proved unable, or unwilling, to help. This anxiety had the effect of uniting all Protestants and of constraining the desire any one denomination may have had to impose its beliefs on the others. The proponents of a general “Christian” curriculum triumphed over the heirs of the Reverend Henry Hazard. At the same time, the liberal conviction that this form of education should be available to all citizens, including Catholics, was all but abandoned in this struggle. However inevitable it may have been, given the circumstances, the legacy of William Barrett, Leon Lalanne, and Richard Hayes was never fully realized in Quebec. In the years leading up to Confederation, Protestants campaigned vigorously to have some sort of guarantee written into the proposed British North America (bna) Act. At the Quebec Conference in 1864 Protestants demanded equal representation on the Council of Public Instruc-

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8 Tibbits Hill Schoolhouse, Brome Township This is an example of a school that was inherited by a school commission in the early 1840s and rebuilt owing to dilapidation. The 1844 school replaced a building dating back to 1812. Tibbits Hill Schoolhouse was restored by the Provincial Association of Protestant School Teachers in the 1960s and is now a museum. [Author photo]

tion, a separate superintendent of education, and control of their own taxes. Their champion was Alexander Tilloch Galt, a liberal politician who for many years had defended common school commissions and opposed Chauveau’s centralizing measures.56 Galt had agreed to join the 1864 government coalition if Confederation could be made palatable to Lower Canadian Protestants and he staked his career on the securing of Protestant demands; when his bill to this effect was defeated in the legislature in 1866, Galt resigned. Protestant educators, including the influential John William Dawson, Principal of McGill College and its Normal school, closed ranks in 1864 by establishing the Provincial Association of Protestant Teachers, which was to serve as a lobby group to secure rights. The association presented a petition to the London Conference, held in 1866 to iron out the terms of Confederation. They called, perhaps with wild optimism, for a “general and non-denominational” form of schooling for all or, failing that, a system that would allow Protestants to direct their school taxes towards “Protestant or non-denominational education.”57 It is clear from the phrasing of these demands that the Protestant ideal was still a liberal system appealing to a wide constituency. Because of Galt’s efforts in London (as an independent legal consultant), section 93 of the bna Act provided the new Province of Quebec (of which Chauveau would become the first premier) with the right to this form of education – that is, for Protestants.

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3

The Dissenters When in any Municipality, the regulations and arrangements made by the School Commissioners for the conduct of any School, shall not be agreeable to any number whatever of the inhabitants professing a religious faith different from that of the majority … the inhabitants so dissentient may … establish in the manner provided with regard to other Schools, one or more Schools … and they shall be entitled to receive from the Superintendent or from the School Commissioners, such sum out of the general or local School Fund as shall be proportionate to the dissentient population they represent. The 1846 Education Act (9 Victoria, cap.27)

Robert Cross was one of six Longueuil school commissioners elected in July 1845, following the passing of the Education Act (8 Victoria, cap. XLI). He was an English-speaking Anglican on a board that was otherwise French-speaking and Catholic. Since the French regime, the village of Longueuil had been an important settlement, commercially and strategically, across the river from Montreal, but it had never operated a public school. During the 1830s a number of schools were set up by the fabrique – that is to say, under the auspices of the parish (St Antoine de Longueuil) for the benefit of the parishioners. As a result, these schools and their teachers were answerable to the local Catholic clergy and were for the most part run by religious orders. By 1839 a number of English-speaking families had also settled in the parish, enough to justify the opening of an English school in the village. The Longueuil parish leaders paid little attention to the 1841 Education Act, but did respond to the 1845 Act, which permitted school boards to receive voluntary contributions from individuals and private groups. An elected board of school commissioners took

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Map 7 Montreal and the South Shore, 1872 This fragment of Johnston’s 1872 map of Montreal and the surrounding area shows the contrast between the densely settled city and the relative sparseness of the South Shore: Longueuil and Laprairie are the only places of any size. The line of the train through St Lambert would spell a rapid rise for that community, somewhat at the expense of its neighbours. [J. Johnston, Map of the Island and City of Montreal, 1872.]

over the running of three schools in the village and another six in the rest of the parish, including one in the area soon to be known as St Lambert, where Robert Cross was a prosperous potato farmer. Cross represented the parish’s English-speaking constituency on this board when it began to meet at the church presbytery in 14 July 1845. This arrangement did not last, however. Cross did not run for office the following year, and by 1848 he and the other Longueuil Protestants had formed a dissentient school board, under the terms of the 1840s legislation guaranteeing the right of a minority in any area to their own form of education.1

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It would seem that Cross’s group of Protestant dissenters felt alienated by the essentially Catholic nature of public education in Longueuil. However, there is no way of knowing exactly why a group of parents chose to dissent from a common school municipality – reasons are never spelled out in petitions. The law did not demand that a request be justified, it merely required a sufficient number of petitioners to support the creation of a separate jurisdiction. Common schools were intended to be open to all local children, but the curriculum was largely set by the commissioners and did not always conform to the liberal ideals of those who had framed the legislation. In the 1840s, as we have seen in Hemmingford, Protestant-dominated townships often strove to downplay the denominational character of the curriculum in an effort to accommodate all groups, including Catholics. In majority Catholic areas such as Longueuil, education was often heavily influenced by the fabrique and various religious orders, leading to an environment in which most Protestants would not have felt comfortable. But it does not necessarily follow that a Catholic parish could not accommodate a Protestant minority, any more than all Catholic families would necessarily have felt marginalized by Protestant majorities.2 When only a few Protestant families lived in an area, they may well have had no recourse but to send their children to schools where the catechism was taught by a priest or nun, but if numbers were at all significant, they would have fought to secure the services of a teacher and a place for classes to be held, much as their ancestors had done in pioneer settlements half a century before. But beyond a desire not to submit to the will of the majority in matters of conscience, the act of dissent was also a mark of cultural identity. Like their counterparts in Upper Canada, Protestants in most townships would have been conscious of their Protestantism only when confronted with someone clearly of another faith. During the early years, at any rate, school commissioners in largely Protestant townships showed little sense in their dealings with the superintendent that there was a world outside their community that was overwhelmingly Catholic and had a very different agenda when it came to what was taught in schools and by whom. In most other parts of Quebec, however, Protestants would have been very aware of being in the minority, in both confessional and linguistic terms. In the early years of settlement, this sense was largely offset by the assurance of living in a British colony with an Anglo-Protestant government, but with the development of more representative institutions after mid-century, and especially with the development of a more interventionist state, Protestants in Catholic areas grew increasingly sensitive to their cultural isolation. Moreover, the proportion of Protestants in rural areas grew steadily

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smaller as Catholic numbers expanded. Eventually Catholics tipped the demographic balance even in the townships, causing municipalities that had been dominated by Protestants to become Catholic in character, and, after a fateful head count, forcing Protestant school commissioners to return as dissentient trustees. The dissentient school board became a fundamental institution for Protestants living away from the cities, the Eastern Townships, and other centres of British settlement. Protestants living in overwhelmingly Catholic regions relied on their schools to provide continuity to communities that were rapidly losing whatever political and economic influence they had once had and were stagnating or steadily dwindling in population. By the end of the nineteenth century Protestant minorities were able to unite with other nearby dissenters to create what were called Protestant School Municipalities, the boards of which often presided over large territories whose schools were few and far between. As such, these boards became crucial to the survival of rural AngloProtestant communities where there was no other forum for promoting their cultural interests. By the second half of the twentieth century, it made little difference to the operation of a school system whether a board had its origins in a majority school commission or a small group of dissenters, as all Protestant communities outside the Montreal area faced the real possibility of disappearance. In earlier years, however, the differences were appreciable: the geographical limitations and general poverty of most areas with dissentient boards provided a contrasting background to that of places like Hemmingford, Melbourne, Brome, or Stanstead. These apparent disadvantages nevertheless caused Protestant dissenters to develop a philosophy of survival and other organizational strategies that have since become part and parcel of Anglo-Protestant existence across the province.

The 1846 Education Act described what was technically a simple procedure: a group of dissenters wishing to separate from a school municipality’s jurisdiction had only to write to the chair of the school commission stating their intention and giving the names of three trustees ready to take charge of a school. To get to this point, however, involved a great deal of work. The process of setting up a dissentient school was a truly grassroots undertaking and required the kind of selfless commitment of time and effort that characterizes all voluntary endeavours. The degree of commitment was clearly enough to deter potential participants, especially given the real possibility of failure and consequent loss of time, money, and even social standing. Dissenters had to find enough property owners willing to make the

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bold move and be sure of an adequate number of children to fill a school – at least fifteen, attending for eight months or more; these families would also have to agree to pay school fees for the teacher’s wages to the dissentient board. To determine how many were willing to take this step, someone would have had to canvas the local residents, going with a petition from household to household looking for signatures, and then to send the petition to the school commission and subsequently handle all correspondence regarding the request. Three volunteers would also have to come forward as potential trustees. From the point of view of morale, it certainly helped to have important names on the list of petitioners, as did the dissenters of l’Acadie, a small Protestant community lying slightly to the west of St Jean sur Richelieu: the signatories of the 1848 petition included the “heirs of the Baron of Longueuil,” one of the British seigneurs.3 But even the involvement of the local elite in the creation of a dissentient board did not take away from the essentially popular nature of the act of dissent. An influential local citizen could greatly facilitate the process of establishing a dissentient board, but could fill neither the petition list nor the new school. Whether or not members of the local elite supported the undertaking, the bulk of the work fell on the community’s rank and file. Trustees had to be willing to see to the operation of the schools, to set fees and collect taxes, to hire a teacher, and (in the early years) to organize examinations and inspections. To finance all of this, trustees were entitled to a share of the taxes raised by the commissioners of the school municipality in which they lived and a share of the Common School Fund allotted to that municipality. This share consisted of an amount proportional to the number of dissenters in the municipality – not the size of the minority, merely the number of people registered as dissenters; a school municipality might well have many Protestants who did not choose to dissent and who would continue to pay taxes to the commissioners, not the dissentient board. These ratepayers would have to have had a good reason not to wish to support their dissenting coreligionists, presumably satisfaction with the schooling their children were receiving from the commission. Quite apart from the widespread opposition to personal taxation during the later 1840s and early 1850s, Protestants were typically very concerned that their hard-earned money should go to pay for services from which they would benefit. Accordingly, while it might not be true to say that all Protestant dissenters paid their taxes willingly, most would certainly have been reassured to receive back some of what they had paid, rather than contribute to a system that they felt did not serve them.

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On the whole, people did not jump to dissent simply because they happened to find themselves in a minority position at the time the Education Act was passed. By 1850 only thirty five school boards out of 430 operating within Lower Canada were classified as dissentient by the superintendent in his annual report. Of these thirty-five boards, at least twenty-five were clearly Protestant.4 Almost all of these were in small Protestant communities in areas that had been densely settled during the French regime: St Eustache and Terrebonne to the north of Montreal, Rigaud and St Zotique to the west, St Athanase along the Richelieu Valley, and Pointe Lévis south of Quebec City. The counties of Beauharnois and Huntingdon, south of Montreal, had an unusually large number of dissentient boards (ten in total, seven of which were Protestant), which is a reflection of the region’s already diverse population. Belle Rivière and New Glasgow were older Protestant communities that found themselves within two new Catholic parishes – St Scholastique and St Lin, respectively – that had been created north of the original seigneurial lands along the river. In both cases, the Protestants soon opted to dissent – an ironic development, as they had operated schools long before there was anyone else in the area. The New Glasgow School is listed as dissentient under St Lin in the 1850 superintendent’s report, even though its origins went back to 1829 when the Scottish residents secured funding from the Assembly.5 One of the oldest British settlements in Lower Canada also dissented because it found itself within a Catholic parish: the village of William Henry, which was separated from the parish of St Pierre de Sorel in 1849.6 A new dissentient board’s biggest problem was acquiring a school. If a municipality’s minority Protestant population were relatively concentrated within a particular district, then the logical move would have been for the ratepayers for that district to dissent and operate the district school separate from the rest. This rarely happened, however. The view prevailed that schools operated by a municipality’s board of commissioners should remain in the possession of that board; if dissenters wished to create an alternative jurisdiction, they would be obliged to create a new school to serve that jurisdiction. Commissioners, after all, were already handing over a share of their revenue, so it seemed unreasonable to have to surrender property as well. For many dissenting communities it was a chicken-and-egg question: having a functioning school was a prerequisite to obtaining government funding, but it was often nearly impossible to build a school without such funds. Dissenters often committed their children to several years of attending classes in rented rooms or other, often incongruous, venues; for example, the Protestant children of Montreal South, a tiny community adjacent to Longueuil, went to school for many years in a disused railway station.7

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9 Schoolhouse, New Glasgow The original one-room schoolhouse dates from 1829, but was expanded into a two-room school early in the twentieth century. The large windows on the left-hand wall offered a good supply of light, albeit the only source. Technically, it was a Protestant dissentient school (for both St Lin and Ste Sophie parishes) but it predated the municipalities from which it had officially dissented. It is now a residence. [Author photo]

Protestant communities with historic links to a particular school had a better chance than most of holding on to it after declaring dissent. The Scots of New Glasgow appear to have had a strong enough claim to the school there not to have been obliged to surrender it to the commissioners in St Lin. Such a link, however, could as easily be an additional source of local conflict, especially when it came to properties owned by the Royal Institution. Of the many school municipalities writing to the Royal Institution over the course of the late 1840s and early1850s to request the transfer of deeds to school properties, most had Protestant majorities, but letters also came in French from such places as St Grégoire de Monnoir, Cap Santé, St Thomas, and St Roch, where Protestants formed only very small minorities. Whatever the original role of Protestants in setting up these schools, they were transferred to school boards dominated by Catholics. In many cases, the requests were made by Catholic priests, who also figured among the names receiving the properties. There was a certain irony in the priest of the parish of St Michel de Lachine, Antoine Duranceau, asking for the return of school property from the Royal Institution, a body he had vilified publicly for thirty years. Duranceau made his request immediately upon the formation of the school commission in 1845, and the

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deed was transferred some months later.8 When the Protestants came to dissent – which they can hardly have waited long to do, given the antagonistic presence of Duranceau on the board – the school was already firmly in the hands of the commission. Protestants often had to make a special case for the return of Royal Institution schools to their hands. Having learned that the school commissioners of the parish of St Joseph de Pointe Lévis had recently applied to the Royal Institution for the transfer of the school, the “trustees of the Protestant population” sent a letter to the secretary begging separate consideration: “As … the donor of the School House now sought to be transferred (Sir Jn Caldwell) was a Protestant and as we under the provisions of the School Act have an equal right with the party claiming such transfer, we most humbly Conceive under all the Circumstances of the Case that we have a prior right and earnestly request that you will do nothing in the premises without duly considering our claim and our right and if a transfer is to be made we hereby pray it may be to us, to whom of right it most justly belongs.”9 This was a passionate statement, but the truth was that the school in Pointe Lévis had never had a significant number of Protestant pupils and had always been taught in French. In September 1850 the school and its grounds were transferred to the control of the school commissioners.10 The Protestants of Sorel had a better case, however: their presence in the town of William Henry and in its school, going back over half a century. Led by the Reverend William Anderson, they were careful to maintain their hold on the village schoolhouse, even after having established a dissentient board. However, to receive government funds with which to effect badly needed repairs to the schoolhouse, clear evidence of the board’s ownership of the property was needed. Accordingly, Anderson wrote to the Royal Institution requesting that the deed be transferred to them and even offered to pick it up on his upcoming visit to Montreal. The school, he argued, was clearly theirs by right, “never having been out of their occupation as a Protestant School House, from its first erection … to the present time.”11 The argument proved convincing and the property was handed over in August 1851. The trustees of William Henry were able to demand their share of the grant from the superintendent of education and to repair the school. Longueuil’s experience illustrates many of the challenges faced by Protestant dissenters in establishing a new school. Although there was an “English school” in the village when the dissentient board was created, the Longueuil commissioners did not relinquish it. Instead, they continued to operate it for many years, even hiring a teacher, John Smith, whose name would suggest he was Protestant.12 This may well have been a deliberate strategy on the Commissioners’ part, as the

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English school stood as an obvious rival to any institution the dissenters might create. Dissent in Longueuil seems to have been undertaken specifically by Anglicans, such as Robert Cross – an irony, given the traditional association of “dissenters” with opposition to the Church of England. It was not long before the dissenters turned to the Colonial Church and School Society, an Anglican organization dedicated to setting up rural missions. By 1858 the society reported that this “excellent” school was attended by over sixty pupils, but added that their parents were “all day-work men” who could not “remunerate the teacher as he deserves.”13 The relative success of this school came at the expense of Longueuil’s non-Anglican Protestants, who had no choice but to send their children to the English school run by the commission. The society’s school operated out of a house located some distance from the village, lent to the dissenters by the Grand Trunk Railway. When the Grand Trunk moved its operations out of Longueuil in 1860, the school was forced to close. After eight fallow years, the dissenters found space in St Mark’s Anglican church, which they maintained for two decades. For a few years after that classes were conducted in rented buildings around town. Only in the autumn of 1903 did Longueuil’s Protestant children have a proper, permanent, purpose-built school.14 The crucial thing was to keep a school open. Although it was rare for a nineteenth-century rural school commission to keep each of its district schools open every year, the very existence of dissentient boards – and, potentially, a community’s existence – depended on the survival of one school. Trustees had to make sure that as many little heads as possible were counted and that the superintendent of education was aware of these numbers. The plight of the dissenters of Belle Rivière is evident from their rather touching letter to Chauveau: “We are sorry to trouble you at the present time, but … [as] we are obliged to furnish you a list of Children belonging to dissentient parents, as well as the children actually attending school at a given time, we have enclosed a form of census numerating the number of Children. We have been in operation going two years, and as yet have received neither Assess monies or government grant. We have hitherto paid … the rent of school house amounting to £4.10 per year raised by subscription which I can assure you comes very heavy upon us as we are but very few.”15 Being “very few” was an all-too-typical problem for rural Protestant dissenting communities, and one that most would never escape. The sense of isolation, of being overlooked and undervalued by official bureaucracy, evident in this letter, was also typical. Despite these efforts, dissentient schools often closed for years at a time, for lack of funds. Belle Rivière was especially hard hit during the economic depression in

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10 Longueuil Episcopal church, Longueuil, 1876 St Mark’s, the Anglican church on the south shore, was for some years the home of the Protestant dissentient school in the parish of St Antoine de Longueuil. Despite a reluctance by most Protestant school boards to allow religious organizations to use their premises, early schools were often held in the basements and halls of Protestant churches. [Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal: II-41979]

the 1870s, and the government warned the trustees that funds would be permanently cut off were a school not in operation for at least four months a year. This sudden attention on the part of the government was the result of a clause in the 1869 Education Act authorizing the dissolution of boards on these grounds. The Protestants of L’Ange Gardien, an isolated community in the Outaouais, also opened a school at this time, even though they had dissented fourteen uneventful years earlier.16

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To offset the effects of poor funding, Protestant dissenters resorted to various strategies, including the cutting of every possible corner. Rural school boards always relied on community involvement, but this was particularly striking in places where the Protestant population could barely support a dissentient board. As in much earlier settlements, trustees were often the ones to provide space in their homes for classes or to donate land for the schoolhouse. While the commissioners of majority municipalities often had small teams of managers to operate the district schools under their control, trustees were more likely to play a direct role in the upkeep of schoolhouses. For example, in 1850 William Shortly, a trustee in L’Acadie, agreed to build a fence around the school, sink a well, and put up a pair of privies.17 Such facilities were occasionally dispensed with; in the 1890s, faced with several crucial choices and a very limited budget, the newly formed dissentient board of Beauport, east of Quebec, opted to repair the school floor and “to look into the matter of the w.c. later on.”18 Conditions were often worse in poor rural areas such as Lochaber, as we will see in chapter 5. Trustees had to incur the wrath of school inspectors, who were justifiably upset by the state of many rural schools, but who were not obliged to raise money from their neighbours, hunt about for available rooms, or wield a hammer to fix a floor or build a fence. At the end of the century Inspector McOuat repeatedly lectured the Longueuil Board about the horrific conditions in their two-room school. “It is simply pitiful to see so many pupils huddled together in such small space repeatedly inhaling the same atmosphere, loaded with impurities from the systems of the pupils,” he wrote. “It is terrifying to me to contemplate the consequences and I would once more beg your board to give the subject of a new building its mature consideration … It is not possible to express in an official letter my utter disapproval of your present provisions for school room space.”19 The suggestion that conditions in the school were not foremost on the board’s agenda can only have been a source of great irritation for them, as the current situation, however miserable, was clearly the best available, given the board’s resources. Sufficient funds to build a new Protestant school in Longueuil were still four years off. At about the same time, the trustees of Joliette in the Laurentians decided to build at what was truly the last possible moment: “The time has come when a new school house should be built on account of the demolition of the building in which the school is presently held.”20 To undertake this project, they were obliged to take out a mortgage on the building that had not yet been erected. One way around the problem of being very few was to pad the school population with outsiders. The trustees of l’Acadie decided very early on to “take in as many scholars from other schools and to teach

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as many Roman Catholic children as will not interfere with the rights of the Protestant Children.”21 This was a perfectly legal move and also a sound one financially, as a board could always set higher fees for outsiders, be they from a different municipality or of a different faith. Most Catholic families would have sent their children to a Protestant school only when there was no other option, but this was rarely the case; even in heavily Protestant areas there were almost always enough Catholics to dissent. In later years, property owners kept one eye on the tax rate that each board set and were often prepared to switch confessional allegiance to get a better deal, but few Protestant dissentient boards in the nineteenth century were in a position to undercut the competition. A fair number of Catholics chose a Protestant school for their children, despite the additional expense and the admonition of parish priests, indicating a considerable constituency that was unhappy with traditional Catholic education. In the early 1850s Wilfrid Laurier was sent to the dissentient school in New Glasgow, ostensibly to learn English although, given the family’s involvement in liberal politics, perhaps also to expose him to Anglo-Protestant values in preparation for taking a degree at McGill University.22 Protestant dissentient schools were often, in effect, alternative schools in largely Catholic areas: the thirty-one petitioners calling for the creation of the L’Ange Gardien board referred to themselves as “Protestants and Inhabitants of this Parish,” a category that would seem to include anyone in a dissenting mood; eight of these petitioners had French names.23 Similarly, the dissenters of Beauport, though all obviously Protestant, made no specific reference to religion in their petition, but instead called upon all “those interested in organizing a non-sectarian dissentient school.”24 A number of dissentient boards were run entirely by francophones, pointing to a growing constituency of French-speaking Protestants, notably Baptists and Methodists; these denominations had the appeal of being disassociated from a specific ethnic group, unlike the churches of England and Scotland. The Joliette board, for example, had several French names on the lists of trustees and the minutes were kept in French for the first dozen years. In 1900 a number of French-speaking proprietors signed “un avis de dissidence” to remove themselves from the control of the parish of St Jean Baptiste de Rouville, on the Richelieu River east of Montreal. They subsequently elected three trustees – Philbert Auclair, Albert Auclair, and Ludger Auclair – all evidently from the same family.25 Although these francophones were later joined on their boards by English speakers, they were the original dissenters and so were most probably Protestant. The same is true for the francophone dissenters of the Outaouais township of Suffolk, which they wrote as “Suffukk”; the board later merged with the municipality of Namur and took on this

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more suitable name.26 Less ambiguity exists about the religious affiliation of the French-speaking dissenters of St Blaise, a community on the Richelieu, south of l’Acadie. It had been heavily influenced by Swiss missionaries and the Feller Institute, a prominent French Protestant school, had stood there since 1840.27 Although the dissenters of Belle Rivière operated what they called the “English discenting school” [sic], several of the trustees were francophones and a number of meetings were held in the local French Presbyterian church. There may have been a separate French “discenting” school in Belle Rivière or in nearby St Scholastique operated by the board.28 The rate of dissent, especially Protestant dissent, rose as the Catholic church grew more vocal in its promotion of Catholic beliefs and values, in its campaign to establish control over the education of Catholics, and in its strict definition of its own constituency. As the Catholic religion and its institutions became strongly identified with the survival of French Canada, outsiders were made to feel marginal or even unwanted in Catholic schools. This attitude would have ramifications by the end of the century, when significant numbers of Jewish children and those of other groups that were neither Protestant nor Catholic began to seek accommodation in Quebec’s public schools. Long before this, Protestants were the group to feel marginal in common schools run by Catholic commissioners. The advent of Confederation and the subsequent division of public schooling into confessional camps made it very difficult for common schools to operate in ethnically mixed areas. Dissent was the first line of defence. The Anglican minister in Paspébiac, George Milne, made little secret of his contempt for the local curé who, he argued, was trying to distort the principles of the common school by imposing “an exclusively Roman Catholic school or schools, with the ceremonies or instructions peculiar to that religious persuasion” and force local Protestants to pay taxes “to support a school conducted on principles of which they disapproved.” Milne also poured scorn on Chauveau for allowing this abuse to take place. Although he “heretofore considered [him] an honourable man,” now the superintendent was, in Milne’s eyes, clearly showing favouritism.29 Whether or not matters were so blatant as these statements suggest (and whether or not Milne, an Anglican minister, was the most appropriate promoter of common schools), the sentiment is probably a fair reflection of Protestant fears. The act of dissent was not always defensive, however. Protestants moving for the first time into largely Catholic areas would have set up dissentient boards as a matter of course, just as they would eventually build a church. By the 1890s Protestants grew sufficiently numerous along Montreal’s “West Island” (the Island of Montreal’s western extreme) for them to set up dissentient boards in old parishes such as

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11 Petition to dissent, Belle Rivière This petition, from 1852, is an example of what many Protestant residents would send to the Department of Public Instruction advising it of their decision to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the local school commission. What is unusual in Belle Rivière (though by no means unique) is the number of French names on the list. [swlsba, Minutes of the Trustees of the Municipality of Belle Rivière, opening pages]

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Pointe Claire and Ste Anne de Bellevue and to open one-room schools. The dissenters in Pointe Claire were led by Otto Frederick Lilly, a Swedish immigrant who started a school in his house, known as Cedar Park, and in 1896 paid for the building of a 20’ by 40’ one-room school on his land. Lilly remained chair of the board of trustees until 1917.30 The Protestants of Ste Anne were fortunate to have their town chosen as the site of one of the province’s great Protestant institutions: Macdonald College, with its School for Teachers and agricultural school. The trustees were able to relocate their school within the college itself when it opened in 1907, and there it stayed for decades. The dissenters of Ste Agathe des Monts in the Laurentians were even more successful: having opened a one-room schoolhouse in 1904, the trustees were able to take advantage of a rich tax base (there were many country homes in the area) to create the region’s principal Protestant school. The Ste Agathe school board would also be one of the very few to remain administratively independent almost to the end of the twentieth century. For most dissenters, however, autonomy was a means to an end – and a difficult means at that. In heavily Catholic rural areas, maintaining a Protestant school over several generations required considerable strategy.

Robert Cross was one of six St Lambert municipal councillors elected in July 1857, following the establishment of this civic municipality. Curiously, the councillors were also de facto school commissioners – an administrative anomaly that would prove consistent with St Lambert’s determination to handle matters its own way. From a rural corner of Longueuil, St Lambert quickly became a town in its own right. It soon replaced Longueuil as the economic centre of the South Shore, thanks to the construction of the Victoria Bridge and the consequent expansion of industry along the rail lines. Protestants were drawn to this new community, and the school commission had both Protestant and Catholic members. The area’s old school from the 1830s was abandoned and a common school, appropriately known as the Riverside School, was built in 1860 on the road running along the edge of the water.31 The school’s first teachers appear to have been francophones, but they were followed by teachers with obviously English names; by 1873 there were two classes, and the commissioners were looking for two teachers, one of each mother tongue but each capable of speaking both. Despite this apparent harmony, the St Lambert municipal council decided in the wake of Confederation to appoint separate commissioners for schools and to raise separate school taxes; they also decided to sell the Riverside School and use the proceeds to build separate schools for

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12 Town hall, St Lambert Built as a Protestant school in the 1870s, this building later became the town hall for the city of St Lambert. This drawing was published in La Presse after the building was destroyed by fire in 1901. [La Presse, 2 December 1901]

Protestants and Catholics. In anticipation of this move, and wishing to establish control over their own school according to law, the Protestant community established a dissentient board and built a school in the village of St Lambert by 1875. More anomalies were to follow. When the Riverside School closed the following year, the Catholic children began to attend the dissenters’ school in the village, whose teacher had been hired with the stipulation that he be able to conduct some classes in French. This arrangement was obviously only intended to be temporary, as the Catholic ratepayers of St Lambert assembled at the end of the school year in 1878 and declared their dissent and their intention to build a Catholic school. Having two dissentient school boards in one municipality made no sense, and led to a head count, which revealed that the Protestant population of St Lambert was in the majority and had the right to elect five

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commissioners rather than only three trustees. It would retain this status during the remainder of its existence as an independent board. The loss of majority status for Protestants would become an all too familiar experience in many of the township boards, but St Lambert proved that the pendulum could also swing the other way. The idea of the head count and the possible reversal of status for minority and majority was the inevitable result of demographic change, but more specifically a result of the increasingly intricate legal structure governing schools in the new Province of Quebec. The terms of Confederation had alerted Protestants to their precarious position within educational circles. Although the guarantees to a separate form of education provided by section 93 of the bna Act were a source of considerable reassurance, they also designated Quebec’s Protestants as a minority. Most Protestants were loath to admit to this position, given that they continued to see themselves not as an ethnic group, but as part of the nation of Canada, which was in turn part of the British Empire. However, with education in the hands of a Catholic-dominated Council of Public Instruction and the new Ministry of Public Instruction (replacing the department) headed by the premier himself, Pierre Joseph Olivier Chauveau, there was every need to establish not only guarantees but also a functional Protestant school system. Such a system had to be something more than the sum of its dissentient parts; a right of access was of crucial importance, but the system to which Protestants had right of access could not be simply a collection of minority ratepayers struggling for a share of the Catholic funding. Legislation under the new province gradually created two school systems that were, though different in size, technically equal in status. Ratepayers were classified according to their religious affiliation and according to the position of their religious group within each administrative area. This measure served to spell out the rights and powers of each school board, but it also made it almost impossible to escape being classified, and as such underlined the confessional nature of Quebec education. Ratepayers were divided into three “panels”; a fourth panel corresponded to people or institutions exempt from taxation, such as monasteries. The first panel included all who paid their taxes to the local school commission and the second panel included those who formed a dissentient board; in this respect a ratepayer was either Protestant or Catholic. The third or “neutral” panel comprised those professing a religion other than Protestant or Catholic (for whose education no provision was made), as well as all commercial properties. Taxes paid to the neutral panel would be collected by the board representing the majority within a school municipality (that is, the commissioners) and a portion then passed on to any dissentient board

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along with the regular taxes paid by dissenters (the second panel). The Protestant dissenters of Longueuil, for example, would have paid their school tax to the Catholic commissioners, and the board would have to wait for the commission to hand over the dissenters’ share plus their share of the neutral panel funds. Aside from the ignominy of having to depend on the majority board, dissenters resented this arrangement, which did not secure them the revenue from all their co-religionists within the school municipality. Quite apart from those families who opted to remain with the majority commission for personal reasons or who lived too far from the dissentient school to transfer their taxes to the dissentient board, many Protestant property owners were not parents of school-aged children, or did not intend to send their children to public school, and their taxes by default supported the majority commission. This was usually also a source of irritation for these property owners, who had no reason to dissent formally but had every reason to want to support Protestant education. In Paspébiac, George Milne reported that the valuable commercial properties of Protestants such as the wealthy Charles Robin were being included within the boundaries of a newly formed school municipality dominated by Catholics. There was no geographical reason to lump them in with the Catholic territory, Milne declared; it had been done merely because the Catholics wanted the revenue and had been willing to resort to gerrymandering.32 The only way around this problem was for Protestants to attain an equal status with Catholics – an aim that was, however impossible in practice, vital to establish in theory. The 1869 Act also established parallel superstructures, taking a cue from the arrangements made for the school boards of Montreal and Quebec City, which provided two essentially equal administrative bodies. Accordingly, the Council of Public Instruction was divided into Protestant and Catholic committees, each in charge of educational issues relating to its respective set of ratepayers. Although far better than having to send a few representatives to an overwhelmingly Catholic council, the Protestant Committee remained under the tight control of the Ministry of Public Instruction. Protestants resented the ministry for imposing what struck them as a standardized curriculum – one that reflected the standards of the province’s majority. The ministry proved short-lived, however, because of its unpopularity within Catholic as well as Protestant circles. The Catholic leadership campaigned for greater autonomy, including the right to appoint bishops to the council. The 1875 Education Act, which abolished the ministry, gave almost complete power over their school systems to the two confessional committees.

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The pursuit of equality drove Protestants across the province to seek something more than dissentient status. Creating a new civic municipality was an effective means to do this, if numbers warranted. In 1874 the municipality of Notre Dame de Grâce had been established immediately to the west of the City of Montreal, but five years later the eastern part, which had the largest concentration of inhabitants, most of them Protestant, separated to form the Village of Côte St Antoine (later Westmount) and elected its own school commission. The western portion of the parish of Notre Dame de Grâce remained rural and largely Catholic, though a Protestant dissentient board operated a school in the 1880s. With the completion of the cpr railway line in the 1880s a small community emerged around the stop at Montreal Junction at the municipality’s western extreme. In 1891 this largely Protestant community decided to seek affiliation with the dissenters of Notre Dame de Grace, but the trustees were not particularly interested. The Montreal Junction delegates suggested a head count for the entire municipality and, although the trustees threatened that this would provoke Catholic anger that might result in the burning of barns, the delegates went ahead and secured the necessary petition. Protestants were found to be in the majority, so a new school municipality was formed in July 1892, to be known as Côteau St Pierre. The former Catholic commissioners at first refused to reduce their number to three trustees, but the new Protestant commissioners wrote to the Protestant Committee. This committee informed the Catholic Committee, who told the former commissioners to submit to the will of the majority. The new board set about building a school in Montreal Junction, which soon became the Town of Montreal West.33 From 1869 on it was possible for contiguous dissentient boards to merge, so that a single school could be built to serve communities on both sides of a municipality’s boundary. This process was relatively easy in the suburban areas surrounding Montreal where the Protestant population was steadily growing. In the twentieth century, communities on the West Island merged their school municipalities to form majority school commissions. In 1917 the old dissentient board of Pointe Claire and the new suburb of Beaconsfield became a single school municipality to serve the Protestants of a large area – by the 1950s this area would have one of the province’s highest concentrations of Protestants outside the city of Montreal. In parts of Quebec where Protestants were more isolated, such mergers were a matter of survival; if there were too few Protestant children in one municipality to justify a school, there might be enough in two or more. This would mean, of course, that such children would likely have to travel great distances to get to school. In the very Catholic outskirts of Quebec City three dissentient boards merged after each of them had proved unable to keep a

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school open; in 1915 the trustees of St Ambroise and St Gerard joined with those of Loretteville to rent classroom space from the Lorette Protestant Mission.34 Equality at the school board level, however, was only made possible in 1888 when a further Act permitted the establishment of Protestant (and Catholic) school municipalities. More than a simple merger of small unproductive boards, a Protestant school municipality was a commission in its own right, a parallel structure duplicating the powers of a majority board. This meant that such a board could collect taxes from all Protestant ratepayers within its jurisdiction, not merely those that were sending their children to a dissentient school. To achieve this status, dissentient ratepayers were obliged to send a petition which, if successful, would result in this sort of official announcement: The Lieutenant Governor has been pleased by order in council of the 28th of June ultimo to erect the town and parish of Longueuil, Chambly County, into a separate school municipality for Protestants only, to be known as “The Protestant School Municipality of the Town and Parish of Longueuil.”35

The term “for Protestants only” was not as exclusive as it sounded; neither Catholics nor people of other faiths would necessarily be excluded; they were often welcomed, as outsiders paying inflated school fees. The term was used to indicate that the school commission did not represent the majority within a township or parish, but did represent everyone professing the minority faith. As well as giving the advantage of additional revenue, having commissioners rather than dissentient trustees would have been a considerable source of pride for the Protestants in an area like Longueuil. The only aspect of having the status of a Protestant school municipality that remained an irritant was not having control over the revenues from the neutral panel. The taxes that the legislation had assigned to this panel would still be collected by the board representing the majority within a municipality, with a portion redistributed to the other board. Protestants often argued that the taxes from corporations should be distributed according to the religion of the property’s owner, rather than according to the number of Protestants in the area; this was, after all, the way taxes from individual property were distributed. Because more commercial properties were owned by Protestants, especially in industrial areas, this was a logical argument for Protestants; if a large percentage of the taxes from a commercial property owned by a Protestant went to the Catholic board, then that Protestant landowner was in effect subsidizing Catholic education – something that would have particularly irked people who had struggled for years to run a dissentient school.

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The boards of Protestant school municipalities and their majority Catholic counterparts often engaged in a kind of turf war – or perhaps even a war of souls – over people who did not fit clearly into either confessional camp. As the legislation did not spell out which other faiths were specifically relegated to the neutral panel, nothing prevented a ratepayer from claiming to be an atheist. Such a status might well be to an individual’s advantage if the mill rate charged by the minority board were higher than that charged by the majority. Such manipulation of the system was limited by the stipulation that all persons of indeterminate religious affiliation were obliged to make a clear declaration one way or another well in advance of the time taxes were due. Within their first year as the board of a Protestant school municipality, the Longueuil commissioners were confronted with a variety of typical problems. One Protestant ratepayer’s taxes were delayed because he claimed he had already paid to the Catholic board as he had done for many years. Taxes on commercial property owned by a wealthy Protestant Montreal family had also been paid to the Catholic board and the Protestant commissioners had to go to court to get the money back, which they did successfully. One ratepayer attempted to avoid paying taxes by claiming he had dissented and would contribute to the dissentient board. One set of children with a Protestant father and a Catholic mother seemed to be very much in tax limbo until it was decided that, as the father did not really live with the family, the payment should be made to the Catholic board. Later cases included a man changing religions after marriage to a Catholic, a family that declared they had renounced the Catholic religion over the summer, a group of children who had been baptized Catholic but were now in the custody of their Protestant grandfather, who felt they ought to go, and had a right to go, to Protestant schools, and many others that regularly occupied the commissioners’ time.36 Whatever the motives of individual taxpayers, Protestant communities were generally bent on providing a Protestant education for their children, and most were willing to pay for it even if that meant a slightly higher mill rate. The establishment of Protestant school municipalities proved an effective strategy to achieve this end and allowed many rural Protestants to build schools and maintain a school system by providing access to a larger tax base. The St Eustache dissentient board expanded its territory in 1901 to become the Grande Fresnière Protestant School Board; even though it was only able to operate one tiny school until the 1940s, its status as a school commission allowed it to become a major centre of Protestant education in a very Catholic region during the post-war years. The town of Coaticook in the Eastern Townships lost its majority status in 1908, but by 1961 it had absorbed some of the territory of surrounding dissentient boards and was reborn

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as a Protestant school municipality. Aylmer, one of the oldest Protestant communities in the Ottawa valley and one that could boast the region’s only Protestant secondary school for much of its history, had lost its majority status in the nineteenth century and was only able to retain its importance by forming a Protestant school municipality along with several adjacent communities in 1952.37 One additional difficulty for Protestant communities was having to contend with school municipalities “for Catholics only.” In 1896, on hearing that the ratepayers of St Romain d’Hemmingford were petitioning the lieutenant governor to create a Catholic school municipality, the Hemmingford commissioners expressed concern for possible dangers: if Protestants should become the minority within the municipality, did that mean the commission would be reduced to a dissentient board? They agreed not to object to the creation of the new board on the condition that it be generally recognized that they should remain the school commissioners for the Township of Hemmingford and not the board of the Protestant school municipality of St Romain d’Hemmingford.38 It was a matter of pride not to appear a mere shadow of a Catholic institution, especially when Protestants had formed a corporation years before Catholics were in a position to do so. The creation of Catholic school municipalities could also result in territorial divisions that were positively Byzantine. On the south shore of the Gaspé, the original townships of Cox and Hope had been joined in the 1860s by the school municipality of Paspébiac – created, as George Milne had pointed out, for the benefit of Catholics, who would otherwise be a minority within each of the townships, and at the expense of Protestants, who were obliged to dissent. When the boundaries were finally agreed upon, the Municipality of Cox, which had a Protestant majority centred in the village of New Carlisle, also took in the settlement known as Paspébiac West, where the commissioners operated a district school. The adjacent Municipality of Paspébiac had a Catholic majority and a Protestant dissentient school, located not in the village of Paspébiac, but in the village of Hope. As if this were not complicated enough, the Catholic school municipality of St Etienne de New Carlisle was established in 1891, comprising territory from both Cox and Paspébiac, and provoking great confusion on the part of the Paspébiac dissenters as to their status. This confusion was not resolved until the 1930s, when the Protestant Committee informed them that the Catholic St Etienne commissioners had been wrong all this time to claim the taxes from certain Protestants in Paspébiac and owed them arrears. It was on such technicalities that the survival of a community often hinged.39 The Protestant Committee proved one of the key defining institutions of the province’s Protestant community and a force for shaping

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Protestant identity.40 In practice, rural Protestants had very little contact with the Protestant Committee and its secretary (later known as the Director of Protestant Education) – no more than they had enjoyed with the secretary of the Royal Institution or with Superintendent Meilleur. The committee was largely made up of influential Protestant educators and clergymen, typically from urban areas.41 The Directors of Protestant Education were educators with university degrees and careers in prestigious Protestant institutions: Elson Rexford, who served in this capacity from 1882 to 1891, had been a teacher at the High School of Montreal; and his successor George Parmalee, who served until 1931, had been headmaster of the McGill Model school and a teacher in the Normal school. Their outlook, like the outlook of the urban school commissioners we will meet in chapter 4, was entirely different from that of the trustees of isolated Protestant dissentient boards. Nevertheless, the symbolic importance of having a governing body equal in status to that of the Catholic population was of great significance. By appealing to the Protestant Committee, rural communities across the province had recourse not only to a voice of authority but also to the (reasonably) sympathetic ears of fellow Protestants. Although the relationship between the Protestant Committee and small rural boards was not always a happy one, its existence meant that even those in isolated Protestant communities could think of themselves as part of something larger – and considerably more than mere dissenters.

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4

Progress and Civilization: The City Boards From 1847 to 1867 the Protestant Board, despite the narrow means placed at its disposal, struggled earnestly, though in vain, to overtake the work entrusted to their care. They commenced operations without a school house, without a competent available teacher, and, for the most part, without sympathy from the public. Report of the Board of Protestant School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, 1871

It is a long way from the rows of workers’ houses amid the railway yards of Pointe St Charles to the slopes of Mount Royal where the Protestant Board of School Commissioners had their offices in the High School of Montreal: a bare three kilometres on foot, but a daunting climb in terms of social class. The Protestants of Pointe St Charles, though perhaps tending more to skilled labour than their Irish and French-Canadian counterparts, consisted of working families whose lives were bound up with the railway and related industries. The duplexes and triplexes in which they lived, and the streets in between, provided a framework for the community, a common experience of congestion and poor sanitation that was made tolerable by strong ties of kinship and neighbourhood.1 The school commissioners that represented them (but whom they did not elect) consisted of three Presbyterian ministers of three prominent churches, and three wealthy and influential businessmen, one of whom (in 1871) was a senator. These men provided schooling to the mass of the city’s Protestant children, but had less appreciation for the needs and desires of individual communities than they did for the cause of

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13 Riverside School, Pointe St Charles, Montreal This school was built in 1876 as a result of petitions from the local Protestant population to the Protestant school board. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c06217]

Protestant education in general. Nevertheless, in November 1871 three delegates from Pointe St Charles made their way up to the high school to present a petition signed by 272 heads of local families. It requested that the commissioners open a school to accommodate over 500 children who had no access to public education otherwise. The commissioners had just completed a school in nearby Griffintown, which they thought would prove adequate for the needs of the whole area, but the Pointe St Charles families begged to differ. The board resolved to look into the matter of an additional school as soon as it had received its yearly income from government grants.2 The close link between families and school boards in rural areas had no parallel in the cities. The experience of the Pointe St Charles petitioners shows that the city school boards, though ultimately responsive to their needs, lacked the mechanisms apparent elsewhere for assessing local problems – and the community lacked a means of ensuring that their demands be considered, apart from the goodwill of the commissioners. The size of the city boards, even in the 1870s, was part of the problem. More significant, however, was the structure of the boards themselves, which fostered a paternalist administration rather than a representative body of peers. Social inequality certainly existed in rural areas and members of the local elite were perhaps more likely than others to be elected to office, but they were elected,

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and had to be re-elected at regular intervals. The city board members were appointed by the government. This arrangement had been specified by the 1845 and 1846 Education Acts, which called for twelve commissioners for each city (Montreal and Quebec City), to be divided into two “corporations,” one Catholic and one Protestant, of six members each. Montreal and Quebec City were the only places in the province where school boards were organized along confessional lines by legislation – at least until Protestant and Catholic school municipalities were established. Official segregation made the success of common schools that much harder – though city schools were nevertheless considered “common” in that they were perfectly entitled to accept students from other faiths. It was the boards themselves that had to be Catholic or Protestant, and the assumption was that the membership would consist, at least in part, of clergymen. These boards were financed, as in rural areas after 1846, partly by taxation and partly by government grants, but in Montreal and Quebec City property owners paid their taxes to the municipal governments, which in turn gave a portion to the school commissions. The result was that ratepayers did not contribute directly to the running of their schools and lacked the sense of having a personal stake in the institution. The centralized administration of the city boards did, however, make sense in another respect: an increasing number of city dwellers – the vast majority by the second half of the nineteenth century – were not property owners and did not pay property taxes. With a taxation system akin to that in rural areas, many working-class parts of Montreal would have had no schools at all, if the landowners were of a different religion from the majority of the residents. Fortunately for Protestants, it happened much more often that landowners were Protestant and the working families Catholic, but this situation was of little comfort to those Protestants who felt that they were in effect subsidizing the Catholic school system. It also was of no importance to the Protestant families of Pointe St Charles, who needed a school but whose petition lacked the weight of one sent by ratepayers. The people of urban neighbourhoods such as Pointe St Charles, or the upper St Antoine ward where wealthy Protestant families concentrated, had a clear sense of community – perhaps even more than the inhabitants of rural townships, whose lives were more isolated. The urban school board was not a true reflection of this sense of community, however, preoccupied as its members were with the collective needs of thousands of children and with the creation of an education system that would serve the needs of the province’s Protestant elite. The success of the High School of Montreal and of McGill University was crucial to the maintenance of a Protestant form of education, and to the lawyers, doctors, clergy, business leaders, and educators it would

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Map 8 The City of Montreal and surrounding municipalities, 1883 From 1883 on the city expanded in size and population by annexing surrounding communities. The dates of annexation given here also represent the years when the Montreal Protestant Board of School Commissioners took over the administration of Protestant schools (dissentient for the most part) in each community. [Source: Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, Annual Reports.]

produce. The Protestant Board of School Commissioners struggled at the political level for these ends and did much to advance the educational rights of Quebec’s Protestants. The board also succeeded in creating a network of elementary schools across the city, each of which served a specific Protestant population – albeit unevenly, given the shifting demographics of industrial urban society. For their part, these communities strove to overcome the political obstacles of not having a recognized voice in school affairs other than being the recipients of a service. The minutes of the Montreal Protestant school commissioners’ meetings contain regular mention of petitions like the one from Pointe St Charles, expressing the need for school accommodation. They are, however, nearly silent on the subject of parents’ feelings regarding the quality of teaching, the discipline of children, and the curriculum – all issues that rural school boards dealt with almost daily.

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14 St Andrew’s School, Quebec This school was built in 1829 next to St Andrew’s Presbyterian church, but unlike many church-affiliated schools it was financed by the Assembly. It was later run by the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Quebec, and then became St Andrew’s kirk hall, which it remains. [Author photo]

Schools in Montreal and Quebec City prior to the 1840s were closely associated with religious organizations, a reality that made the establishment of true common schools all the less likely. The two Royal Grammar schools continued to serve the cities’ Protestant elites, offering a more advanced curriculum that would prepare students for higher studies – not that there was any institution capable of providing higher studies at this time, other than McGill’s Medical Faculty. By the 1830s, however, the Grammar School in Quebec City had lost much of its former prestige, in part because its teacher, Robert Burrage, had taken over from Mills as the secretary of the Royal Institution and also divided his time between a number of other government and diocesan posts. From 1829 on the Protestants of Quebec City had an alternative in the form of St Andrew’s School, located just beside St Andrew’s Presbyterian church in a building backing onto the manse, now designated a “Kirk Hall.” (All three buildings survive and are in regular use).3 The church officials received funding from the Assembly for the construction and maintenance of this school, and so it would seem to have been intended for Presbyterians;

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however, given the drop in attendance at the Grammar School, it is likely that the student body included Anglicans and other denominations. At any rate, St Andrew’s School outlasted its older rival, which closed in 1836 when public funds dried up. It remained open through the rebellion and Special Council periods, and was eventually taken over by the Protestant Board of School Commissioners and run as a common school. Montreal’s Protestants were fortunate in having as teacher of its Royal Grammar School Alexander Skakel, a Scottish educator whose local career had begun at the turn of the century at the Classical and Mathematical School, which he himself had founded. He brought to the grammar school curriculum the Scottish tradition of classical rigour and a spirit of scientific inquiry, reputedly devoting half of the class time to the study of the classics and dividing the other half between English, scripture, and mathematics.4 Although a popular teacher with both pupils and the public at large – to whom he gave evening classes on practical science – Skakel began to complain by the later 1820s that a Presbyterian institution was drawing students away from his school.5 He must have been referring to the Montreal Academical Institution, a school taught by Henry Esson since 1822, which within a few years could boast of having seventy-eight students. Esson was minister of the St Gabriel Street Presbyterian church, but as he was known for his liberal theology and rational approach to matters spiritual, it is reasonable to suppose that the Montreal Academical Institution was not exclusively Presbyterian. In 1831 the St Gabriel Street congregation split, one faction opting to support a more evangelical minister, Edward Black, and to establish a separate church, St Paul’s. Black’s congregation also built a school adjacent to the church,6 which attracted many boys from the city’s prominent Protestant families – not all of whom were evangelical Presbyterians. Black himself was the head teacher and he had at least two assistant teachers, as well as his daughter Eliza who was, in the words of one alumnus, “the idol of the boys.” This former student also recalled that he “never knew [Dr Black] to be absent from his desk during school hours. His discipline was of the strictest, and he could lay on the rod vigorously when occasion required it. A noted feature of the school was the daily drill in Walker’s Dictionary and no one in Dr Black’s Academy could spell badly or speak ungrammatically.”7 Although this was clearly a private school – there would be a growing number in Montreal over the course of the century – Black comes across as the very model of an early nineteenth-century Scots schoolmaster, such as could be found in many a rural schoolhouse and village academy.

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15 St Paul’s church, Recollet Street, Montreal, c. 1865 The minister of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Edward Black, ran a school up until his death in 1845. It lay behind the church, and the building can be seen at the extreme left of this photograph. The church fronted on St Helen Street in the old town. [Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal: mp-0000.363]

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When it came to schooling, the children of the urban working class appear to have fared less well than their rural Protestant counterparts, who in most areas enjoyed a range of district schools at mid-century. By the 1830s the National schools in Quebec City and Montreal had been taken over by the Anglican Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and tended to cater to children from poorer families, though their religious affiliation suggests an agenda of sorts. The Montreal school reputedly enjoyed an average attendance of 170, though in 1839 enrolment was 260, fifty-six of whom were francophone; 156 were boys and 104 were girls.8 The only major institution in Montreal that could claim to be truly non-denominational was the British and Canadian School – the Canadian of the title referring to the local francophone population – established by the British and Canadian School Society, whose mandate was to promote “the education of the labouring classes of the people of every religious persuasion” and “to train up and qualify young persons of both sexes to supply well-instructed teachers.”9 One of the society’s directors was William Lunn, a moderately successful businessman who dedicated his time and energies to the cause of public education in Montreal for over half a century. The school, built in 1826, opened its doors to a student population of 275, 196 boys and seventy-nine girls; nearly half the student population was Catholic. The non-denominational character of the British and Canadian School was echoed in the program presented by the Society for the Promotion of Public Education, formed late in 1836 by citizens of both religious and linguistic groups. Their object was to encourage “moral and religious education” through a system of publicly funded schools – an added benefit being that “crime will be diminished and vice essentially repressed.” This society advocated a vision of moral and religious education that would haunt the framers of curricula in Quebec over 160 years later: “The slight differences arising from opinions on the forms of Church government, or the more philosophical distinctions inculcated by various denominations, may be safely entrusted to the Ministers of each faith, while the teacher of the common school, who has a more varied and more extensive duty to perform, establishes the general foundation upon which those distinctions are subsequently erected.”10 This program followed the defeat of the Assembly’s seven-year experiment in funding public education. Considerable enthusiasm remained in Montreal for a system to replace it, and clearly many felt that such a system should provide a real alternative to the existing schools organized along denominational lines. Within a few years, however, this approach to education would prove impossible to imple-

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16 British and Canadian School, Montreal Built in 1822 as a bilingual charity school for the city’s poor, the British and Canadian School was taken over by the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal in 1866. It was closed in 1896 and the building was given over to commercial use. It is now part of a restaurant in Montreal’s Chinatown. [Author photo]

ment, thanks to the climate of mutual suspicion arising with the spread of political violence. By 1839 enrollment in the British and Canadian School had fallen as a direct result of the rebellions: “since the troubles commenced, several of the Canadian children have not continued to attend.”11 They may have been lured away by a number of new Catholic institutions that began to be established in Montreal in the late 1830s: teaching orders such as the Christian Brothers, the Oblates, and the Congregation of Notre Dame joined the Sulpicians, who had operated the College de Montreal for many decades. The presence of these new schools helped to solidify the division of education along confessional lines. A disenchantment with the idea of non-confessional schooling did not mean that the Montreal elite was any less eager to promote some sort of public system. Writing in that year, Baptist minister Newton Bosworth complained that, despite the many opportunities for education in the city, “large numbers of children … are suffered to grow up without availing themselves of its benefits.”12 He added, significantly, that the situation was especially bad for Catholic children, whose

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parents did not seem to value schooling the way those of British origin did. Although fairly typical of the attitude of nineteenth-century Protestant commentators, Bosworth’s views also speak to a widespread concern for the consequences of inadequate schooling. In the wake of the rebellions, public discourse showed that many were afraid that large numbers of children – boys, for the most part – who had no school to attend consequently “waste their time in the street … obstructing the side-walks to the great annoyance of the citizens of Montreal.” One answer to this problem came in 1838 with the founding of the School of Industry, a charitable institution intended to house twenty to thirty boys over the age of seven who could “earn their daily bread” while implicitly contributing to “the moral improvement of Canada.”13 The revolutionary potential of idle youth may have been exaggerated, though, as we shall see in chapter 8, it would raise its head again a century later in the context of World War II. Nevertheless, fear did serve to convince the city’s leading citizens of the need to create a school system for the urban masses. At the same time, their experience of political violence did not inspire much faith in the prospect of democratic reform such as was advocated in the Durham Report and subsequently implemented across the province in 1841 with the creation of municipal governments and common school boards. Prominent families were also preoccupied by the need to enable their own sons to gain access to secondary education and even university. Upward mobility was linked to institutions as much as to money, and it was vital for Protestants to have an educational stream of their own rather than send their children out of the country or rely on existing Catholic structures such as the College de Montreal. The cornerstone of the Protestant educational stream was to be the High School of Montreal, founded in 1843 as a private institution by a number of prominent citizens, including William Lunn and James Ferrier, the latter being a wealthy businessman and politician who would become President of the Royal Institution and, like Lunn, would serve on the Protestant Board of School Commissioners. Many of these leading families had begun to feel that Skakel’s Royal Grammar School would not give their sons adequate preparation for McGill College, which had just begun operations in a new building on the mountainside.14 At Skakel’s death in 1846, the high school absorbed the students and staff of the Royal Grammar School and moved from a private house to a new building in the St Antoine ward, slightly down the hill from the new college. The high school would later be taken over by the college itself, and administered as a McGill department, thus further streamlining the path from elementary to university education – essentially, if not exclusively, for Protestants.15

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17 McGill Normal School, Montreal The building that became the McGill Normal School began life in 1845 as the High School of Montreal. With the creation of Macdonald School for Teachers in 1907, the Belmont Street building reverted to its original role as a school. It also contained the offices of the Protestant school board until 1929. [mua: pr008306]

The 1841 Education Act, which called for the creation of common schools open to children of all faiths, applied everywhere. City dwellers of all religious persuasions had every opportunity to establish a common school commission early in the 1840s. In densely populated Montreal, however, education had become the subject of fierce competition between the Protestant and Catholic elites, especially at the level of higher learning. What in rural areas was a matter of conscience became political in the cities, where institutions dominated the townscape and each confessional group wished to establish its recognizable mark. This rivalry frustrated the efforts of many who called for the creation of a school system to counter urban society’s evils. Having on previous occasions lamented the “absence of a Sound moral and religious education among the lower classes,” members of the Grand Jury decried the fact that, by the late autumn of 1841, no effort had been made to form a school board. They were “of the opinion that three fourths of the

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children of this District are at the present day growing up to manhood uneducated and they would express their earnest wish that the law enacted by the late Session of the Legislature for the instruction of common School education will be successful in its operation.”16 In the current climate, however, the desire to build a public school system that would produce a moral nation was undermined by the fears of urban elites. Between 1841 and 1845, while common school boards appeared across the province, city dwellers were obliged to continue to rely on their inadequate network of charity and church schools. The problem of how to establish public schools without opening the door to confessional disputes and possible demagoguery was solved by having a special administrative structure legislated into existence. In 1845 and then again a year later when the law was revised, Lower Canada’s Education Act called for a school commission with two “corporations,” Protestant and Catholic. In December 1846 the six men appointed by the government as the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal met for the first time, as did their counterparts in Quebec City. The clauses in the legislation governing the cities were essentially a compromise between the reformers’ need to create public schools and the conservatives’ fear of giving power to the urban masses. For the elites to maintain control over popular education the school commissioners would have to be appointed, not elected, and for the elites to do this without mutual suspicion two confessional boards were required. The Education Act allowed each city’s Protestant elite to create a unified system out of the disparate array of church and charity schools, as well as (eventually) both the British and Canadian School and the High School of Montreal. Similarly, it enabled an increasingly conservative Catholic church to consolidate its hold on a public school system that might otherwise have been influenced by the likes of the Institut canadien. In keeping with the confessional character of these school commissions, membership included a large number of clergy; the rest came from the business world. In Quebec City, the Protestant board had representation from the ministers of the three major congregations: Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian. The last of these, John Cook, the minister of St Andrew’s church, was easily the most experienced, having served for many years on the board of the Royal Institution, as had the school board’s first chairman, the Honourable A.W. Cochran. The Royal Institution had moved its headquarters to Montreal in 1845 and was now managed by businessmen, most prominent of whom was James Ferrier, one of the founders of the High School of Montreal and currently the city’s mayor. The Quebec City school board symbolically took over where the Royal Institution had stopped, assuming the administration of small independent schools.17

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In Montreal, by contrast, where many of the city’s business leaders were involved in the administration of McGill College (now the Royal Institution’s main charge), the Protestant school board attracted far less attention. As one commissioner later put it, the board began life “without a school house, without a competent available teacher, and, for the most part, without sympathy from the public.”18 There would seem to have been little confidence that an appointed body of men from wealthy families, whose time was already committed to the operation of McGill, the high school, and many charitable institutions, would be able to implement an effective public school system. As in Quebec City, the board was represented by three ministers and three laymen, few of whom appear to have had much initiative. Curiously, instead of seeking the city’s most representative clergymen, the government chose to appoint the Anglican Charles Bancroft, who had no fixed congregation; Caleb Strong, minister to the American Presbyterian church; and John Mockett Cramp, president of the Baptist College in Montreal. Of the laymen, John Dougall might have proved an educational powerhouse, but he did not remain on the board for long. As editor of The Witness newspaper, Dougall blasted the Catholic church for what he saw as intellectual tyranny and promoted Protestant-style moral education. He had been a member of the Society for the Promotion of Public Education back in the 1830s, and his strong views on temperance helped shape the prevailing desire to keep children off the streets and away from temptation.19 The guiding force behind the school board in the early years, however, was William Lunn, who took office as secretary-treasurer in December 1846 and only retired from that post in June 1875. The chair at that time, John Jenkins, praised Lunn’s dedication and perseverance at a time when the rest of the board had been “too listless or too much engaged in transacting their own business, to attend the meetings.”20 This accusation is borne out in the board’s minute books, which show that until the latter part of 1866 the commissioners met at best two or three times a year and many meetings were cancelled for want of a quorum. Montreal’s Protestant School Commission was in many ways like the boards that ran most urban charities, and the nature of its membership would resemble that of other government-appointed boards to social welfare agencies for at least the next century. At one time or another, over the board’s first quarter century, most of the city’s denominations were represented in the three clerical commissioners. The commission’s chair was by tradition a clergyman, and the leaders of St Paul’s Presbyterian church, attended by much of the city’s elite, seem to have been preferred: Robert McGill (chair from 1848–56), William Snodgress (chair 1861–64), and John Jenkins (chair 1868–84) were all ministers of St Paul’s.21 Many of these men also served, at the same time, on the

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Protestant Board of School Examiners, the forerunner of the Protestant Committee of the Council of Public Instruction, which would determine the province’s school curriculum for over a century. They dominated this board, such being the importance of the Montreal congregations. To the extent that they were community leaders, their presence at the helm of education was on some level appropriate. The three lay members of the Protestant School Commission, however, were hardly representative of the people they served. While a number of them were involved in other aspects of education, this did not make them particularly skilled at renting space in industrial suburbs to hold classes. They were men who wore many hats and not elected officials whose sole public concern was the business of teaching children. The school board was not a charity, of course, and funds could not be raised as they were for specific charitable projects. At the same time, because they could not collect school taxes, the city boards had little sense that they were responsible to their fellow citizens and should serve their needs. Away from the cities, school boards provided educational services according to what the community could afford – neither more nor less, lest they be subject to criticism from neighbours and electors. In Montreal and Quebec City, by contrast, the commissioners were forced to rely on grants from provincial and municipal governments, which left them with minimal funds to spend and only a vague obligation to spend them. Although the amount they received was supposed to reflect the relative number of Protestant inhabitants within the city limits, only token sums found their way into the boards’ hands during the first years of their operation. The Montreal Protestant board received only a grant from the city during the 1846–47 season and payments from both sources were irregular until the 1850s.22 As there was no possibility of actually building a school with these meagre resources, the commissioners decided to distribute the money they had ($558.05) to several private schools. The boards’ lack of accountability eventually led to a decision to publish an annual report: “Agitation is threatened,” Chairman John Jenkins wrote the Minister of Public Instruction in July 1871, “if the Boards refuse to make known the uses to which they put the money with which the Public commit to their trust.”23 It was not that the commissioners were an untrustworthy lot, but the city’s Protestants set great store on getting value for money and were wary of a system that kept them in the dark. This was especially the case once the public had begun to feel that the board was to create a network of schools that would serve the city’s Protestant population – and this did not happen during the first two decades of its existence. Indeed, “the Board gave signs of life” (to use its own words) only after a concerted effort was made over the course of three meetings held in December 1849. Having spent £85 subsidizing existing schools, the com-

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progress and civilization • 115

missioners were finally able to establish a school of their own by renting space in the St Ann’s ward from the Baptist mission there and hiring a master at £75 year.24 The Ann Street School, as it was known, differed from a charity school only in that the commissioners charged each pupil five cents a week, although they waived the fees altogether in certain cases, at their own discretion. Having opened a school in a working-class area at the western end of town, the commissioners then leased space for a second one in Papineau Square, at the eastern end, in an industrializing area (St Mary’s ward or Quebec Suburb). Two schools were a considerable improvement over a year before, but it was still not much to show for over a decade of work, if one considers the apparent enthusiasm for public education in the later 1830s. The school situation was much more impressive in Quebec City, where by 1850 the commissioners had given a total of slightly over £380 to fourteen private institutions and spent almost £360 on building four schools, located in the faubourgs of St Roch and St Jean Baptiste (the latter near the city’s Protestant cemetery) and one each in the upper and lower towns.25 Until it experienced a sea change at the time of Confederation, under the leadership of John Jenkins, the Montreal board was principally engaged in maintaining its existing schools and looking about for others to take over. Its east-end school was destroyed along with much of the city in the 1852 Great Fire and another site nearby had to be leased. The commissioners assembled enough money in 1853 to purchase the school building on Ann Street, and by 1859 they acquired land in the Quebec suburb on which the city’s first purpose-built Protestant public school, the Panet Street School, opened late the following year.26 This undertaking proved to exhaust the board’s resources for some time. In 1865 and again a year later, petitions from the congregation of Trinity Church on St Denis Street to have their school brought under the board’s control were rejected, at least until the commissioners could pay off their incurred debts.27 William Lunn then negotiated with his fellow directors of the British and Canadian School Society, who by 1866 agreed formally to surrender the operation of its school to the Protestant board.28 In doing so, they would not have been obliged to alter the school’s policy of admitting children of “every religious persuasion,” as there was technically nothing prohibiting non-Protestants from attending one of the board’s schools, providing they paid an additional fee. The city’s Protestant community now had three public schools, serving the east, the west, and the centre of town. Although barely adequate, this system did enable the commissioners to claim that the board represented the Protestant community just as the Catholic board represented the city’s Catholics. With negotiations underway over the terms of Confederation, it was vital for the Protestant commissioners to feel they enjoyed institutional parity with that of the new province’s majority.

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Map 9 Schools run by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1870 The wards indicated here represent communities with significant nineteenth-century Protestant populations. As of the 1880s, the city’s immigrant families would concentrate along St Lawrence Street, the first of the arteries running north to the east of Mount Royal.

Table 3 Schools run by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1850–70 School

When and How Acquired

Subsequent Developments

Ann Street

Rented 1850–1853 Purchased 1853

Building sold 1872 School opens in new building nearby

Quebec Suburbs (Papineau Sq.)

Rented 1850

Destroyed by fire 1852

Quebec Suburbs (Colborne Ave)

Rented 1852–1860

Replaced by Panet Street School 1860

Panet Street

Built 1860

Enlarged 1870 Closed 1891

British & Canadian

Acquired from trustees 1866

Enlarged 1873 Closed and sold 1894

Source: Report of the pbsc for the city of Montreal, 1871

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The board that oversaw the transition period was unusually dynamic. In addition to the continuing competent presence of Lunn, Jenkins proved a natural leader even before he assumed the chairmanship in February 1868. A Methodist preacher in Montreal during the late 1840s and early 1850s who then spent a decade working in the United States, Jenkins was invited in 1865 to succeed the Reverend Snodgress as minister of St Paul’s Presbyterian church and as school commissioner. His ability to appeal to people of different denominations would serve him well in later years when he was a member of committees that sought to bring about the unification of Canada’s Presbyterian churches. Also involved in this movement was Donald MacVicar, another Presbyterian minister who was appointed to the school board at the same time as Jenkins and who would succeed him as chair. A particularly useful person on the board was a member of Jenkins’ former Methodist congregation, James Ferrier, who became a senator under the new federation. Finally there was Hector Munro, a contractor and builder whose role as a commissioner was to inspect potential school sites, and who later served as the board’s architectural consultant when the board was actually in the business of constructing schools. If these men were not representative of their constituency, they were at least dedicated to the cause of Protestant education in Montreal, and by extension in the entire province of Quebec. Arguably, a properly funded public body, comprising the best-qualified people around, was the surest means of advancing the cause of education – more effective in the urban context than a democratically elected group of politicians. The trick, of course, was to be properly funded. It was clear to the Protestant board that the major impediment to providing adequate schooling was the inadequacy of its income, which, although somewhat improved in recent years thanks to cash from the city council, remained sorely wanting. What struck Protestants as particularly unfair was the division of the city’s total education grant according to the relative size of the two communities. In 1867 this distribution resulted in an income of only $2,759.60 for the Protestant board versus $7,045.88 for the Catholics. Far more reasonable, Jenkins et al. argued, would be to divide the total according to the proportion raised from each religious group. This would have meant a far larger income for the Protestants board, given that the city’s predominantly Irish and FrenchCanadian working class were not property owners and therefore not taxpayers.29 This argument sounds decidedly unfair and unreasonable to today’s democratic ears, but must be understood in the context of the principles upon which public schooling was based. One of the many assumptions made by the framers of the 1846 Education Act that would later cause practical difficulties was that schooling would be

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financed by taxing property owners, an arrangement that had the advantage of making school commissioners accountable. In most parts of Lower Canada nearly everyone was a property owner on some scale, thereby implicitly giving even humble farmers the feeling that they had a say in educational matters. By nineteenth-century reckoning – the argument pertained equally to hospitals and cemeteries and would, of course, colour the development of social welfare – what one derived from a public system depended largely on what one had contributed. For Protestants not to receive all the income from Protestant taxpayers meant that, in effect, they were subsidizing Catholic schools. This was the same complaint often made by prospective dissenters in rural areas when they felt their taxes were being used to pay for schools whose policies they did not approve of. In January 1868 the commissioners joined with the members of the Catholic board in petitioning the new Quebec legislature to establish a special municipal tax for the improvement of Montreal schools. Far from being seen by the citizens as a burden, it was argued, such an increase would “be received as a benefit and as a certain pledge of the ever growing prosperity of the great city of Montreal.”30 The Protestant commissioners were also willing to couch their demands in terms of constitutional rights, arguing that the province’s Protestant minority should have the right to its own form of education as stipulated in section 93 of the bna Act, which implied a separate system of taxation.31 Ferrier went to Quebec and secured from the new Minister of Public Instruction a promise to increase its grant to both Montreal boards and subsequently to introduce a bill that would guarantee Protestants’ rights and privileges in matters of education. Accordingly, the government grants were increased, so that in 1868 Montreal Protestants enjoyed an income of $8,975 versus the Catholics’ $24,211. The following year, legislation was passed fixing the distribution of funds derived from municipal property taxes according to the amount each group paid, rather than to population. Revenues in each municipality would now be put into four “panels,” depending on the religious affiliation of the ratepayer: Catholic, Protestant, and neutral (other or undecided), and a final category for charitable properties, which were exempt. The city would then hand over the total of the first two panels to their respective confessional boards and divide the third between them according to their relative numerical strength. By 1869 Montreal’s Protestant board derived more funds from the city council ($16,643.66) than the Catholic board ($15,163.14), although the government grants, still distributed on the basis of population, brought the Catholics an additional $10,303.92 versus $2,772.89 for the Protestants. Even so, the Catholic board’s $25,467, a very slight

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increase from the previous year’s income, was hardly sufficient to provide schools for the city’s large Catholic population. This would be a subject of complaint for many years. By contrast, the Protestant board’s $19,415.55, a huge increase from the previous year, completely transformed the nature of Protestant public education in Montreal. The board’s ability to improve its schools and to build new ones was an obvious advantage. Even more important, however, was the prestige that the additional $10,000 brought and that the legislation implicitly bestowed upon Protestants by acknowledging their collective dignity as taxpayers. The board was now on a more even footing with its Catholic counterpart and could claim jurisdiction over the entire city. Until that time, its three schools represented east, west, and centre only in a general way; now the board could think of the city as an organism and its schools as wells of learning from which the population could draw sustenance. A real school system, which the Catholic board already enjoyed, could now be implemented. It now fell to the board to improve its schools. The school inspector for Protestant Montreal, S.P. Robins, outlined the need for improvement in his report to Jenkins submitted following the introduction of the new tax regime. Robins confessed to feeling “ashamed and grieved” at the “meanness and insufficiency” of the city’s Protestant schools, especially when compared to the situation in other great cities of North America. In this comment Robins was perhaps not entirely appreciative of the complicated nature and checkered history of political and cultural institutions in Montreal. Nevertheless, he was right on the mark when he added that the city’s Protestant schools “had been established under various influences, and being no part of a general scheme had no mutual relations.” This state of affairs must be improved, he argued, by “endeavouring to frame a comprehensive scheme of organization, to which they should be brought ultimately to conform.”32 Robins’ use of civic pride as an argument for improving schools echoes the language of the board’s appeal to the legislature at the beginning of 1868. The board also raised the spectre of unfavourable comparison with other North American cities when it concluded its first annual report with an appeal to the citizenry for their increasing financial support. That Protestants represented a minority of the urban population did not bother them in this context; the standard had been set by Toronto, Hamilton, Boston, and Philadelphia, all cities with deep Protestant roots. Implicit in their argument is the notion that the success of Montreal depended on the success of its Protestant population, and by extension, of its schools: The Commissioners appeal to all classes of their fellow-citizens, and among them and chiefly, to the City Corporation on whom the responsibility largely

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120 • a meeting of the people rests, and urge the immediate inauguration of an adequate educational policy for Montreal. This wealthy and populous city will deserve to be a reproach and a by-word in the land, if through the selfish views of tax-payers, it be allowed to fall behind its sister cities … Parks may be laid out in the environs of the city, contributing to its beauty and to the health and recreation of its inhabitants; lines of Railway may be projected and constructed so as to augment its commercial prosperity; but there rests upon Montreal a higher duty than the provision, of a scheme of Common and Superior Schools equal to the wants of the whole population. For the inauguration of such a scheme the Protestant School Commissioners again and earnestly plead in the name of true Progress and Civilization, and not less in the hallowed name of Religion.33

The final appeal to religion implies that the advantages of Protestant education should not be disputed by any civic-minded (and godfearing) person of any faith. With the board’s vastly improved resources, the commissioners set to work on a building and renovation campaign that lasted through the 1870s. The Panet Street and British and Canadian schools were significantly enlarged. To provide further space for east-end children a primary school was built on De Salaberry Street, around the corner from the Panet Street School, which would house the higher elementary grades. A new school, Royal Arthur, was built in the increasingly populated St Joseph suburb to the west of the old town. The board also decided to replace its oldest school, on Ann Street, with a new building nearby, which was expected to serve the entire Griffintown area and Pointe St Charles, most of which lay within a three-quarter mile walk.34 This expectation proved wrong, however, when the school’s 600-pupil capacity was soon filled and the area’s Protestant residents petitioned the board for an additional school. This demand was relieved, first by seeking space in two local church halls and then by building a new school in Pointe St Charles with a capacity of 450. The small children living near the mouth of the Lachine Canal, who would have had to cross railway tracks to reach either of the area’s two new schools, were provided with a classroom on Mill Street in what had previously been a building to hold immigrants after they got off the boat. 35 New schools were also built in the St Laurent and St Louis wards in the northern part of town: on Sherbrooke Street just across from the girls’ reformatory school of the Soeurs du Bon Pasteur (a juxtaposition that could not have been lost on local residents) on Dorchester Street (specifically targeting French Protestants), and a primary school on Ontario Street.

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progress and civilization • 121 Table 4 Schools opened by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1870–78 School

When and How Acquired

Subsequent Developments

Royal Arthur

Built 1870

Remodelled 1888 Destroyed by fire 1909

De Salaberry Street, Primary

Built 1870

Closed 1892

High School of Montreal

Burnside Hall purchased 1870

Moved to new building 1878 Burnside Hall sold 1883

Preparatory

Built 1870

Closed 1884

St Lawrence

Rented 1871–74

Replaced by Sherbrooke Street school 1874

Ann Street

Built 1872

Destroyed by fire 1907

Grace Church

Space lent by church 1872–76

Closed 1876

St Matthew’s Church

Space lent by church 1874–92

Closed 1892

Sherbrooke Street

Built 1874

Closed 1896

Dorchester Street

Purchased 1874

Closed 1894

French Protestant

Rented (?) 1875–76

Closed 1876

Mill Street, Primary

Rented 1875–87

Building expropriated 1887

High School for Girls

Rented 1875–78

Moved to new building 1878

Pointe St Charles (Riverside as of 1887)

Built 1876

Rebuilt 1894 Enlarged by 8 classrooms 1908

Ontario Street, Primary

Rented 1876–86

Replaced by Berthelet Street school 1886

Senior

Rented 1877–78

Moved to Burnside Hall 1878

Senior

Occupied Burnside Hall 1878–84 (last year renting)

Burnside Hall sold 1883

St George’s

Space lent by church 1878–86

Closed 1886

High School of Montreal and High School for Girls

Built 1878

Destroyed by fire 1890

Source: Report of the pbsc for the City of Montreal

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1870–1909

1878–1886

1850–1872 1872–1907 1872–1876 1887–1892

1874–1892

1887–1946

1875–1887

Map 10 Protestant schools in St Ann’s Ward and Pointe St Charles, 1850–1946 This area, the most highly industrialized part of town in the later nineteenth century, saw a rise in the Protestant population that the school commissioners were at first ill-equipped to handle. After resorting to church halls and a disused shed, the board eventually met the local needs by building Riverside, Britannia, and Lorne schools. [Source: Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, Annual Reports.]

The board’s great coup, however, was the taking over of the High School of Montreal, now run by McGill College and located in Burnside Hall. The initiative came from the college governors, who could not help noticing the recently enhanced status of the school board. They wondered whether the board might not wish to make an annual grant towards the upkeep of the High School. The commissioners had no wish to make such a grant, but did suggest that “in the interests of Protestant education … the Superior and Common School Institutions of the City” should “be merged into one general system under one governing body.”36 This suggestion was well received. McGill itself had undergone considerable modernization since the 1840s when it was under the principalship of the fiercely Anglican Reverend John Bethune. It was now promoting itself as a liberal-thinking and scientifically oriented public institution with a broader student population than the Montreal Protestant elite.37 It was a radical, but logical, move to transfer custody of secondary education to the hands of the now respectable

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18 Old High School, University Street, Montreal, 1870 Burnside Hall was built on University Street in the 1850s to serve as the arts faculty for McGill College (the arts building was still incomplete) but the university soon shared space with the High School of Montreal. Montreal’s Protestant school board acquired the building from McGill when it took over the running of the high school. After the creation of the new high school on Metcalfe Street, Burnside Hall became the home of the Fraser Institute Library, the city’s first free public library. [Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal: mp-0000.1762]

public school board. John William Dawson, principal of McGill College, the High School of Montreal, and the Normal School, was very much in favour of this arrangement, seeing it as a means of integrating the primary, secondary, and post-secondary streams. Two years later, Dawson himself was appointed a school commissioner. Ferrier, a member of the board of the Royal Institution, negotiated the transfer of the High School and the property on which it stood to the school commissioners for $6,000. This was completed in September 1870.38 In purchasing Burnside Hall the commissioners received much more than a fine school building: the transfer meant that the board could now claim to operate a public school system that served the whole of the Protestant community, not merely the poorer families who might, or might not, have been able to pay the five cents a week. The High School student population would, of course, continue to come largely from the wealthier families, though the commissioners did lower the yearly fees from $56 to $42 in deference to those of the middle ranks and created a number of scholarships for a handful of deserving pupils from the common schools. Having achieved this, the commissioners felt there was now “no Protestant boy of ability, no matter how

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humble in life, or however straitened in their circumstances his parents may be, who may not obtain free, and yet with honour to himself, an education equal in all respects, because gained at the same institutions, to that which is given to the sons of the wealthy.”39 Exactly where Protestant girls of ability fitted into this picture was a wrinkle that would not be straightened out for some years, although the commissioners were very conscious that a public school system should be open to girls as well as boys, even at the secondary level. Nevertheless, the expense of providing adequate space proved a convenient reason for inaction on the commissioners’ part. Were there only an increase in taxation, they argued, to allow for $20,000 to be spent, then “it would afford an opportunity of promoting from the Common Schools to the privileges of a higher education, girls who might, by good conduct, by talent, and by proficiency in their Common School studies, prove worthy of such advancement.”40 This remote-sounding possibility was, however, almost inevitable given the increased expectations of middle-class families. In the spring of 1874 the commissioners bowed to public pressure and made the decision to search for a suitable site for a new building capable of accommodating senior girls and boys on separate floors. This was to be the board’s biggest undertaking yet. By the following year the commissioners had found a huge open lot (240’ by 160’) between Peel and Metcalfe streets, in the St-Antoine ward, which they purchased for $10,000. The structure erected would provide room for boys and girls on different floors, leaving a third floor for an assembly hall.41 Despite this convenient arrangement, the Girl’s High was considered a separate institution from the High School of Montreal until the 1960s. It was significant that the new High School, like its predecessor in Burnside Hall, was located in the upper part of the St Antoine ward, a neighbourhood that the city’s Anglo-Protestant elite (both lay and clergy) had long since called home. Not surprisingly, St Antoine was also the part of town that paid the highest Protestant school taxes, having the highest number of Protestant property owners: the ward accounted for over $15 million of the $36 million total Protestant property evaluation in the city in 1875.42 The community stood in increasing contrast to the rest of the city, especially to the working-class area that had spread south and west with the railway and the manufacturing centres along the Lachine Canal, comprising Griffintown and Pointe St Charles, and also to the commercial centre at the edge of the old town. The St Antoine suburb provided a safer and quieter environment for high school students than any other part of the city, to say nothing of a more respectable milieu for adolescent girls. As such, the school was one of the suburb’s own institutions, but outside students

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19 New High School, lower Peel Street, Montreal, c. 1890 The first purpose-built high school in Montreal opened its doors to boys and girls (each on separate floors) in 1878. It burned to the ground in 1890 and was soon replaced by a larger building. [Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal: mp-0000.834.1]

could certainly say they had come up in the world when they attended the High School. The new school also provided space for the board to have a proper head office, something that no other Protestant board had ever enjoyed. That this office lay surrounded by the homes and other institutions of the city’s Protestant elite would have been of no small importance to the commissioners. The board office would remain in this area for another eighty years. When the McGill Normal School moved out of its Belmont Street location in 1907, and with space in the High School at a premium, the board moved to acquire the building for itself; the office was to move again only in 1929, to McTavish Street, further up the mountain. Yet despite their claim that the High School was open to all, the commissioners were fully aware that the Protestant school community was made up of two classes of students, and no amount of scholarships was going to change that. Even before the transfer of the High School was complete they had been talking of dividing the secondary curriculum into “classical” and “commercial” streams, the latter being more suited to business than to professional careers.43 For those pupils clearly cut out for higher studies, the board opened a preparatory school in a building

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20 Victoria School, Montreal Built in 1887 to serve the upper western part of the city, Victoria School is one of the few Montreal Protestant schools to survive from the nineteenth century. It is now part of Concordia University. [Author photo]

they put up next to Burnside Hall; it eventually became used simply for the primary grades of the High School – in all but name a private institution. In any event it was not counted among, and stood apart from, the common or districts schools established around the city by the Protestant board, including the fine Victoria School built in 1888 in the western part of the St Antoine ward. To cater to those pupils wishing a more advanced education than elementary schools would allow, but perhaps not willing or able to attend the High School, the board opened a senior school in 1877.44 It resembled the model schools that were beginning to appear elsewhere, although by providing an alternative stream it also took on the characteristics of a vocational school. The 1902 prospectus described its mandate as “giving a good business and English education to pupils who have completed the Public School Course,” for which it charged one dollar per month for the first year and two dollars for subsequent years, “payable in advance”; the fee structure itself appears to have provided something of a business education.45 The school found a home in Burnside Hall, and remained under the wing of the High School until 1906, when it was expanded into a secondary institution in its own right: the Commercial and Technical High School. This institution was located at the corner of Sherbrooke and St Urbain streets, well to the east of the High School of Montreal, on a site surrounded by a population that was increasingly working class and immigrant.

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progress and civilization • 127 Table 5 Schools opened or acquired by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1884–95 School

When and How Acquired

Subsequent Developments

Hochelaga

pbsc inherits one-room schoolhouse when municipality of Hochelaga annexed 1884

Closed and sold 1890 New school opens 1890

Preparatory & Senior

Built 1884 next to new High School

Senior school moved to Berthelet Street school 1887

Berthelet Street

Built 1886

St Jean Baptiste

Municipality of St Jean Baptiste annexed 1886 School in rented building 1886–89

Moved to new building 1889

St Gabriel

pbsc inherits school when municipality of St Gabriel annexed 1887

Closed 1892 Replaced by Lorne school

Britannia Street

Built 1887

Closed 1946

Grace Church (Primary)

Reopened in church hall 1887–92

Closed 1892

Victoria

Built 1888

Enlarged by a gym and sloyd and cookery rooms 1911

St Jean Baptiste (Mount Royal as of 1894)

Built 1889

Enlarged 1894 Enlarged by 12 classrooms 1906 Enlarged by 2 classrooms 1907 Assembly Hall converted into 4 classrooms 1911 Closed 1949

Hochelaga

Built 1890

Destroyed by fire 1907

Lorne

Built 1892

Assembly Hall converted into 3 classrooms 1907 Enlarged by 12 classrooms, sloyd and cookery rooms, and gym 1921 Enlarged by 2 classrooms 1925

Lansdowne

Built 1892

Enlarged by 6 rooms 1906 Destroyed by fire 1937

High School of Montreal and High School for Girls

Built 1892

Closed 1914 New building 1914

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128 • a meeting of the people Table 5 Schools opened or acquired by Montreal’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1884–95 (Continued) School

When and How Acquired

Subsequent Developments

Berri Street

pbsc inherits school when municipality of Côteau St Louis annexed 1893

Closed 1911

Boulevard

pbsc inherits school when municipality of Côteau St Louis annexed 1893

Closed 1908

Dufferin

Built 1894

Enlarged by 9 rooms 1904 Assembly Hall converted into 4 classrooms 1909 Closed 1928

Aberdeen

Built 1894

Enlarged by 12 rooms 1906 Assembly Hall converted into 4 classrooms 1908

Baron de Hirsch pbsc takes over administration 1895

Closed 1907

Source: Reports of the pbsc for the City of Montreal Note that virtually no school building occurred between 1878 and 1884.

Beginning in the 1880s the board began to systematically replace its array of ad hoc schools located in rented spaces and church halls with permanent new buildings. Furthermore, over the course of the subsequent two decades, most of the older schools, including the British and Canadian, Panet, DeSalaberry, Sherbrooke, and Dorchester, were closed. Lacking precise demographic statistics, the board relied on petitions from local people requesting that schools be built to determine their optimum location. Although in a dense urban setting the availability of suitable sites was limited, by the end of the century the board had created a network of Protestant schools across the city, each serving a defined district. New schools were Aberdeen, Lansdowne, and Dufferin in the central and eastern parts of the city, Britannia south of the canal, and Victoria and Berthelet Street on the slopes of the mountain. The older schools that were retained were expanded and modernized: Riverside in Pointe St Charles, and Ann Street (now known, appropriately, as William Lunn). The board’s territory had also expanded as Montreal began to annex surrounding civic municipalities; when this happened, the Protestant board for the City of Montreal took over the work of local trustees and

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progress and civilization • 129

managed their schools. In the 1880s Montreal gained the territories of Hochelaga to the east, St Jean Baptiste to the north, and St Gabriel to the west; the board acquired three new schools, each of them old wooden buildings of only one or two classrooms.46 Already insufficient for the numbers of students (a problem that made most of the trustees grateful for being taken over by the city board) these schools had to be replaced almost immediately. Mount Royal and Lorne schools were the newer, larger versions of the schools inherited from St Jean Baptiste and St Gabriel. The same was true of the new school in Hochelaga that was, sensationally, destroyed by fire in 1907.

Montreal’s Protestant schools were the product of a particular vision that went beyond the rural communities’ desire for basic literacy. In addition to teaching a specific curriculum, these urban schools sought to provide a place for youth to be usefully occupied during the day and to create an appropriate moral environment there. Apart from the improvised classrooms, these schools were all large, usually numbering several hundred pupils. In the mid 1870s, the British and Canadian School regularly had over 500, while the school on Ann Street had as many as 600; each had a teaching staff of fourteen, which translates into goodsized classes, larger than the average attendance at most rural oneroom schools.47 By the turn of the century most of the city schools could boast these numbers, and some, such as Aberdeen and Lansdowne, had over 800 students. These schools were large, multi-roomed buildings, typically on three or more floors; in the early twentieth century many of them would be enlarged by the addition of as many as twelve classrooms, plus gymnasiums and other facilities, as we will see in chapter 11. The rate at which the city schools filled suggests that large numbers of students were ready and willing to be accommodated and confirms the impression perceived at mid-century that the number of schools was woefully inadequate. The plentiful petitions for additional schools right through the board’s teething period from the late 1860s through the 1890s is further evidence of a widespread desire for education. The initiative taken by the Pointe St Charles residents and the subsequent high enrolment in schools along the canal shows that this desire was as strong for working-class families as it was for their wealthier counterparts up the hill. This is not to suggest, however, that attendance was equally high in all schools or that the reasons for wishing to attend were the same everywhere. Studies of Montreal’s working-class families indicate that, although schooling was seen by some as a means to acquire useful skills, it also served as a form of daycare. In either case,

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21 Burning of Hochelaga School, Montreal Schools were often damaged or destroyed by fire, and much care was taken to ensure the safety of pupils. In the case of the 1907 Hochelaga School fire, the commissioners were criticized for having put the kindergarten classes on the top floor, from which it was especially difficult for the smallest children to escape. [Montreal Star, 26 February 1907]

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schooling represented a considerable investment of money for working families, for whom even the moderate school fees represented a financial burden, especially given several children attending school over many years. The cycle of industrial labour was in many ways similar to that of agriculture, at least when it came to how long children stayed in school; although less subject to the demands of the growing season, working-class children were often withdrawn from school for varying lengths of time to perform household chores or to fill in if there were sickness in the house. They were also likely to leave school by the age of twelve (the end of elementary school) to begin work in factories or at home. As the board put it, “85 ½ per cent. of the children in attendance leave School before attaining 13 years of age, partly through stress of poverty and partly through imperfect appreciation of the advantages of education. It is clear that every effort must be made to give, before that time, the rudiments of an English education.”48 This effort appears to have paid off, as nearly all the Protestant school children of the St Ann ward were reportedly able to read and write in the later nineteenth century, more so, statistically, than their Catholic counterparts, which speaks to the quality of education in Protestant schools, or at any rate to the disinclination of Protestant parents to appear illiterate on the census forms.49 All classes of pupils were exposed to a disciplined and well-regulated world within the schools they attended. The large number of students under the board’s jurisdiction and the centralized nature of its rule made it expedient for the commissioners to issue Regulations for City Schools, which spelled out what was expected of both pupils and teachers. These regulations were published in 1877, inspired in part by some confusion over the circumstances in which a child could be punished and the degree to which a teacher had the right to inflict the punishment, as well as how much to heed the differing views of parents as to whether they wished their own children to be punished at all.50 In rural one-room schools it was generally up to the teacher to decide such matters and live with the consequences, but the Montreal board’s decision to draw up these regulations saved the commissioners a great deal of trouble and helped establish the chain of command within these large schools. Most school staffs had a clear pecking order, which contributed to the atmosphere of discipline. Traditionally, city schools were taught by men and this was continued into the twentieth century. The assistants, however, were increasingly women, in keeping with the growing preference for women as the nurturers of children. This arrangement meant, in effect, that schools had male headmasters, figures of authority who commanded respect from the students and a large salary from the board. The

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classes, however, were actually given by “lady teachers,” who might make $240-$300 annually compared to a headmaster’s $900 or more. Even the preparatory school, in which boys and girls were taught separately, had “lady teachers” and a male headmaster. The first to hold this office was S.A. Robins, a former instructor at the McGill Normal School and the same man who had advocated reforms in his capacity as school inspector.51 Before the 1870s the board did not necessarily employ fully qualified teachers; at one point Principal Dawson recommended one Miss Dougall, a graduate of the McGill Normal School, to teach at the new Royal Arthur School, but the board decided that Miss Dougall would command a higher salary than they could afford.52 With Dawson on the board as of 1872, a Normal School certificate gradually became required to teach in Montreal Protestant schools. The close association between the board and the Normal School meant that graduates tended to find positions within the city’s schools and that salaries were considerably higher than those in rural areas. Indeed, the “Montreal scale” soon became the standard against which teachers in other parts of the province measured their salaries. It was also traditional for teachers to live in the schools, an arrangement that allowed the board to pay them lower wages, though it also made teachers responsible for general maintenance. This was occasionally an onerous charge: Mr Williamston of Ann Street School complained in 1866 that he needed books, slates, pencils, pens, ink, paper, maps, charts, and firewood, and that much of the school’s woodwork had to be painted and the windows repaired. The board provided Williamston with much of what he requested, including brushes and paint; luckily, the repairs were effected by the board’s own master mason, Hector Munro. Some years later, Williamston confessed that “in consequence of the great increase in the prices of the necessaries of life, he cannot afford to pay an assistant teacher at £50 P. annum,” but felt with “much embarrassment that his daughter … could with himself be able to maintain the school in an efficient manner.”53 The board agreed to this unorthodox proposal, but came to realize that the increasing presence of “lady teachers” posed serious problems when it came to their living arrangements. This matter was brought to their attention in 1867 when a Mr McManus, who had come highly recommended to the position of headmaster at the Panet Street School, agreed to occupy part of the “dwelling in the school house” while the assistant teacher, Miss Henry, occupied the other part. A year later it came to the board’s attention that McManus “had proferred serious charges against the character of Miss Henry, strongly impugning her veracity,” charges that the commissioners “found to be frivolous and without foundation.” A subsequent accusation by McManus led to the unanimous res-

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22 The funeral of Sarah Maxwell Sarah Maxwell’s heroism in rescuing many children from the 1907 Hochelaga School fire earned her a grand funeral. [bnq: Albums e.z.Massicotte, b-16-f]

olution that his services were no longer required.54 Whatever the exact nature of this incident, teachers of the opposite sex sharing living quarters did not add to the moral climate the board wished to create in its schools. Newer schools did not contain apartments for teachers. The moral integrity of the “lady teacher,” to say nothing of her selfless dedication, gave her considerable status within the urban community – one that may almost have made up for her low salary. The notion of a teacher who placed her charges ahead of her personal life was an effective Protestant counterweight to the image of the nun and her religious vocation, albeit one that was subject to the ever-present possibility that a young woman might decide to marry and give up teaching. Sarah Maxwell was thirty-one years old at the time of her death in the 1907 fire that destroyed the Hochelaga School, an age that contemporaries might have assumed meant she was planning to devote her life to her profession, which, as it turned out, she did. Miss Maxwell’s dedication, however, went far beyond denying herself social pleasures: “Miss Maxwell could have escaped,” an eyewitness recounted, “but she went to the top floor to rescue the little ones. She did rescue about thirty of them, and died while attempting to save more … [She] handed the children to workmen who had put ladders up to the windows. The firemen only rescued two children.”55 The pupils in question were from the kindergarten class, sixteen of whom “suffocated.” Public appreciation of this act of courage was matched only by the horror of the tragedy itself, which left newspapers pointing accusing

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fingers at the school authorities, who had placed the youngest children in the highest and least accessible rooms.56 The commissioners were no doubt grateful that such accusations were largely forgotten in the public effort to celebrate Sarah Maxwell’s heroism by giving her a grand funeral in Montreal’s Christ Church cathedral and a touching monument in Mount Royal Cemetery dedicated “in loving memory” to the teacher herself and to “the little ones who perished with her.” The cost of the monument was raised by the Montreal Star, which set up a “children’s testimonial” to collect donations of ten cents or more from children across the city: “I send you 25 cents for ‘Sarah Maxwell Memorial’,” one little girl wrote. “Mamma cried when she read about her in the Star.”57 The rebuilt Hochelaga School was given the name Sarah Maxwell Memorial and when the school was closed after World War II a new building in the northern part of the city took the name, thereby retaining a reference to this model teacher. In many ways, Montreal’s Protestant schools, with their carefully articulated regulations and sense of moral discipline (Mr McManus was, perhaps, the exception that proved the rule) formed an ideal of what modern public education should be. As we will see, these schools were later seen as models for ambitious school boards elsewhere in the province. The network of school districts also seemed to serve the city’s Protestant population adequately, especially as it appeared to have reached a plateau at the turn of the century. There were more Protestants (some 48,000) than there had been three decades earlier (29,000 in 1871) but the city had expanded considerably since then, bringing to its ranks Protestants that had hitherto been dispersed in outlying villages.58 Attendance records even showed a slight decline in each school’s population between 1895 and 1902, with the exception of Aberdeen and Mount Royal schools, which served working-class and largely immigrant neighbourhoods. These statistics worried the board a little, but not enough. The demographic changes that the twentieth century would bring would completely upset the comfortable system the board had fashioned and the board itself would prove singularly illequipped to deal with them. An elected board would have swiftly grown sensitive to the shifting nature of its constituency and a board that was not expressly designated as Protestant might have been more open to the challenges. The community would have to wait until the 1960s before the school board began to reflect the city’s ethnic makeup and until the 1970s before commissioners could be elected. What the boards had not foreseen was immigration. The slight increase in population seen in the Aberdeen and Mount Royal school districts by 1902 would become a veritable boom over the next ten years, and the numbers would continue to rise right through the 1920s. Few

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Map 11 Montreal’s Protestant school districts and their populations, 1895 and 1902 By the 1890s the school board had established a network of Protestant schools, each with a defined district. Relative stability is indicated by a comparison of the population of each school between 1895 and 1902. The need to accommodate immigrant families would severely distort this arrangement by World War I. [Source: Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, Annual Reports.]

of these new families were Protestant – the majority were Jewish, with some Greek Orthodox – but most sent their children to Protestant schools, which soon resulted in serious overcrowding.59 They were also overwhelmingly renters, not owners of property, and therefore essentially a liability for the board. Even so, the commissioners felt morally obliged to educate their children, partly because such large numbers had few alternatives when it came to schooling and partly because these immigrant families generally supported the Protestant school ideals of “progress and civilization,” ideals that they identified with British democracy and the Protestant tradition of intellectual tolerance. This was, however, a difficult standard to live up to when forty or more children were competing for space in one small classroom and when little money was available for more facilities. As a result of their efforts to accommodate these outsiders, the commissioners, and Montreal’s Protestants as a whole, found themselves forced to confront serious questions about their community and its identity.

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5

Local Matters: Protestant Boards and One-Room Schoolhouses A progressive school must have the sympathy and cooperation, not only of the school officials, but of the whole community, not the latent sympathy and cooperation, but the active, wholehearted, friendly, and generous help. It must not be neglected in any of its needs or comports, and lastly it must be taught, not kept. Inspector A.L. Gilman1

When Miss Grace Simpson resigned as teacher of the Lochaber Bay School in July 1905 to return to her home in Ormstown to care for her ailing mother, forty of the local citizens gathered to bid her farewell. They sang, dined, played games, and made speeches in tribute to her worthiness as a teacher and as a friend. At the end of the evening, the chairman of the board of school trustees presented Miss Simpson with a gift – a gold ring set with pearls, and a gold bracelet – as a token of the community’s esteem and their appreciation of her teaching skills. “It serves to prove that you have won the respect of your pupils and the confidence of their parents,” the chairman declared. “After having rendered your services for the past three years in the capacity of teacher, we do not hear one word of adverse criticism, only expressed commendation and approval. It is a record that you have every reason to be proud of. We know of no words which could so eloquently portray your fitness for the high calling which you have chosen in life.”2 From the school board’s perspective, Miss Simpson could have served

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23 Grace Simpson and her students, Lochaber The beloved teacher from Lochaber Bay (at centre) surrounded by pupils of every age. [Photo courtesy of Anne Gagné]

as a prototype of the “lady teacher,” and her relationship with the Protestant community of Lochaber Bay represented an ideal partnership between teacher, school trustees, and parents. Thus her departure was a particularly sad occasion, given that teachers like Grace Simpson only came along once in a while. Far more typical was the teacher who left at the end of the year, or part way through it, because she found better work elsewhere, or the work environment proved unbearable, or the school board did not renew her contract. The high turnover of rural schoolteachers was normally a source of frustration for parents, even though their own behaviour did not always make the teacher’s job easier. Equally, although it was the school board that often caused teachers to leave by keeping their salaries low and not adequately maintaining their work environments, trustees had the unenviable job of having to keep schools operating with minimal resources and despite tensions, both within the community and between the board and the government. In the nineteenth-century most Quebec children were educated in a one-room schoolhouse, as were a surprising number in the twentieth century. While this form of schooling has been much romanticized in the popular imagination, it has also been much maligned, especially by school inspectors and the officials who received their reports, who

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repeatedly declared it unsanitary and inefficient. Despite considerable pressure from the Protestant Committee to consolidate in the name of progress, one-room schoolhouses remained a key feature of Protestant education until the 1940s and, in some places, even later. Many rural school boards stubbornly resisted the march towards consolidation, and this has earned them much scorn from historians who have read the inspectors’ reports and echoed their verdict. School trustees and commissioners are often portrayed as fiscally driven, conservative, and prominent men of the local community, more interested in balancing the books than in bestowing a good education upon local children. Such a view served the interests of the Protestant Committee, who by the end of the nineteenth century saw the school board as peripheral to the provision of local education and in places even an impediment to good schooling as they saw it. This one-sided view does not take into account the desire of many local school authorities not to submit to reforms imposed from above. A more careful understanding of how communities work suggests that commissioners and trustees, though not immune to bias and poor judgment, were nevertheless keenly interested in education and had at least as much insight into the needs of the community as the inspectors and officials. Similarly, inspectors (and consequently historians) have characterized parents in rural communities as apathetic about the quality of their children’s education, the suitability of the schoolhouses, and the importance of regular classroom attendance. Again, the local records suggest the reverse, though admittedly few parents had the resources with which to improve matters. Teachers usually emerge in a much more positive light in inspectors’ reports, unless of course their methods left much to be desired or they were clearly unqualified or unsuited to the job. Even so, the whole tenor of the official campaign against one-room schoolhouses implied that no teacher, no matter how skilled, could properly instruct a group of children of varying ages within the confines of one small room. The memoirs of numerous rural teachers for whom the experience was a cherished one would suggest that the one-room scenario was perfectly acceptable, if highly challenging. It was certainly a flexible system, allowing a good teacher with a relatively small class to enable pupils to learn at their own pace, and even, given the presence of one or two older students to monitor the work of the younger ones, to pay extra attention to those with special needs. Children from large rural families probably found the experience of attending a one-room school not all that different from their lives at home and certainly more comforting than having to be bused to a consolidated school far away. On the other

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24 Lochaber Bay school students An informal pose, but perhaps more indicative of typical behaviour than most group photos. [Photo courtesy of Anne Gagné]

hand, for a poorly trained teacher or a teacher in a room with forty or more children, the one-room experience could be nightmarish. Even so, it is by no means clear that the fault lay with the institution itself, as poor heating and sanitation, inadequate books and equipment, and even antipathetic parents and trustees were problems that had their roots in larger social and economic circumstances, which the inspectors do not always seem to have appreciated.

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School boards’ resistance to educational reform most often stemmed from poverty. Whatever the benefits of consolidated schools, many rural boards were often unable, or felt they were unable, to effect the change required of them by the Department of Public Instruction. This dilemma was especially difficult for small Protestant communities, many of whom were spread very thin across the rural landscape and most of whom had little in common socially with the reformers in the city. Although their necessary connection with the Protestant Committee did give them a sense of being part of a system, rural school boards saw their schools primarily as local institutions; schools embodied local aspirations to literacy and knowledge, rather than abstract notions of education. They were important features of the landscape, reflecting the efforts made by Protestants in their communities, from the generosity of individual farmers, who consented (or offered) to have schoolhouses built on a section of their land, to the hard work of managers, parents, and teachers – to say nothing of the pupils, whose scholarly achievements could be a source of enormous collective pride. Moreover, it was in their institutions – churches, clubs, organizations, and especially schools – that Protestants’ identity was both forged and fortified. For its part, the school board ensured that schooling was grounded in the precepts of Protestantism, and as such, it played a key role in preserving community identity. Elected by their fellow citizens, commissioners and trustees volunteered their time and energy to oversee the building and maintenance of local schools, to solve problems as they arose, to engage teachers to conduct their schools, to provide the basic tools needed in the classroom to promote teaching and learning, and to set the mill rate to pay for all of the services. These tasks were rendered significantly more challenging if a school board had to manage its expenses out of a severely limited tax base, and in most cases trustees proved quite creative in their strategies to get around this problem. When this was achieved, rural Protestant children were provided with at least a basic education.

Lochaber Township lies on the Ottawa River just east of Buckingham and to the west of the Montebello seigneury. Its original Scottish inhabitants had been drawn to this region with the intention of establishing farms, but the rocky soil and rugged terrain made all but subsistence farming difficult. The timber industry soon became the motor of the local economy.3 The Scots were soon joined by Irish and French families, who by the 1880s had brought the population up to 2,700 – a figure that did not rise by very much over the following decades. The village of Thurso, with the township’s greatest concentra-

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Map 12 Lochaber and Buckingham Townships Of Lochaber’s four districts, the front two (Lochaber Bay and Thurso village) were decidedly more prosperous than the back ranges of Silver Creek and Gore of Lochaber.

tion of residents, was the area’s commercial, service, and (after the arrival of the train) transport centre; by the latter part of the century it could boast Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Catholic churches. This was not, however, a case of the Protestants being concentrated in the village, as pockets of them could be found throughout the township. But away from the water, away from Thurso and the settlement at Lochaber Bay where the more prosperous residents lived, Protestants led a rough, backwoods existence. The poverty of a township such as Lochaber stood in considerable contrast to the relative prosperity of many parts of the Eastern Townships, where by the later nineteenth century schools were plentiful and generally well maintained. This degree of poverty would take its toll on the ability of the Lochaber trustees to provide adequate schooling. But even in the Eastern Townships, problems of transportation, climate, and general isolation still prevailed, and the relationships between school boards, teachers, and families were complex. Having discovered themselves to be in the minority, members of the local Protestant community formed a dissentient school board in 1863. As in most rural areas, the trustees generally hailed from Lochaber’s

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25 Silver Creek School, Lochaber Township The schools in the back ranges of Lochaber Township were generally more poorly funded than their counterparts nearer the river, such as Lochaber Bay. The building on the left was the original school, replaced by the marginally grander one on the right. [Photo courtesy of Willard Smith]

prominent Protestant families and therefore represented the social elite. Their first meeting was held in Thurso at the home of timber baron John A. Cameron.4 The first school to specifically serve the local Protestant children was housed in Thurso’s Presbyterian church, and would continue in that location for eight decades. The building would eventually cease to be a church. Surprisingly, given their Scottish origins, by the latter part of the century most Protestant families in Lochaber had become Baptist. The second school had more traditional origins: a family by the name of Lamb donated land to the west of Thurso, near the Protestant cemetery, inland from Lochaber Bay. By the 1880s the board had opened two additional schools in the back ranges, in the settlements at Silver Creek and Gore of Lochaber. There is some evidence that the trustees favoured the two schools at the front part of the settlement, near the water, where the local elite had their farms, over those of the back country. Nevertheless, the trustees were aware that Protestant families from all corners of the township desired schools. After opening these schools, the trustees quickly secured the services of teachers, either by hiring the best-educated daughters of local families or by advertising in newspapers such as the Buckingham Post. The practice of hiring the relatives of board members was widespread in Protestant Quebec – an indication less of rampant nepotism than of the likelihood of educated women coming from the same few families as did the trustees.

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As in most parts of rural Quebec, the schools in Lochaber township (save the one in the village) were isolated, standing in the midst of forest or field and beyond the sight or hearing of all but the nearest farm. They were plain wooden buildings, with large windows serving as the main source of light. Schools were typically heated by a wood stove, which had to be lit every morning, often by the teacher herself, with wood that she was obliged to carry in from a pile outside unless, as was the custom in some communities, the older boys were delegated these jobs, just as the older girls were in charge of keeping the school clean.5 Teacher and pupils drew water from a nearby well and hauled it to the schoolhouse. Whatever the season, they made use of an outhouse, which was not always located next to the school building itself. To save money, pupils wrote on slates rather than paper. Attendance at school was sporadic; children went when they were not needed at home, which discounted much of the planting and harvesting seasons.6 The school year often did not begin until October or later. Winter, however, also proved a particularly difficult time to hold school, as storms and sickness seriously reduced student numbers; in a particularly bad winter, schools could close for weeks. Some children did not attend on certain days because they lacked adequate clothing for the walk to school. Boards sometimes agreed to requests from parents that the vacation period be held in the winter months rather than in July and August, to take advantage of a time when more children would be available to attend school.7 Spring was often little better when rain and poor road conditions made it very difficult for pupils to get to school, either on foot or in a horse and cart. In the light of these natural limitations, the cheery prescription for school improvement given by the superintendent of education in 1880 seems more than a little simplistic: “If now the school house be spacious and airy, if the furniture, desks and seats are appropriate, if the garden be well kept, the children will be delighted with school; instead of inventing excuses of absence, they will love to attend regularly every day, and we shall witness, at length, the disappearance of the grand complaint made by inspectors in all their reports – irregular attendance in the country schools.”8 The accusation that absences were invented, though no doubt true in certain cases, seems especially unkind towards rural families. In any event, the problem took its toll on teachers, who were normally paid by the month, or even the week, and would be expected to keep track of such anomalies, knowing they would not be paid if the school did not open. Some school boards took these local conditions into consideration when they negotiated contracts of engagement: one board stipulated that a teacher for a school far up the Gatineau River should “begin on August 10th, and continue until the snow or the bad

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state of the roads prevented her and the pupils from attending, and then to start again in April the following year.”9 Until the end of the nineteenth century the school year followed the weather as much as it did the calendar, and although a full term of schooling was generally taken to be ten months, it was rare for teachers to be contracted for that long; many were engaged for only six months, some for considerably less. School reformers eventually began to promote a standard calendar, with short vacations at Christmas and Easter and a longer one in the summer, making one-room rural schools conform to a pattern already established in urban areas. Nevertheless, it was well into the twentieth century before a full ten months became the norm for rural children; this development would depend on the universal appreciation of a teacher’s syllabus and the need for classroom continuity. As late as 1929 Inspector Hunter congratulated the Barnston school board for having “a uniform term of 9 months throughout the municipality this year. The growing youth are worth the expenditure. The French schools have 10 mo terms, the school terms in the other Provinces are 10 mos, why should our English speaking children of Barnston be offered less opportunity to obtain education?”10 The expenditure in question was, of course, the teachers’ extra month of salary. Low salaries (“ridiculously low” was how one teacher put it in her otherwise happy reminiscences11) were part and parcel of the teaching experience in rural areas. However much a community might value its teacher for her personal manner, her intelligence, and her dedication, the labour of a very young woman with little or no training or experience did not carry much weight. Good teachers may have been at times hard to find, but usually plenty of women were willing to teach. School boards relied on this supply of inexperienced women as part of a strategy for keeping the costs of education down; although few communities would have actually abandoned the ideal of a well-paid and experienced instructor (preferably a man), the reality was that places like Lochaber simply could not afford such a person. If a teacher did not “give satisfaction,” as the phrase went, she could be replaced at the end of the year, or even sooner if circumstances required it. Being rehired did not necessarily entail an increase in salary. Indeed, trustees even opted not to renew contracts, if the act of doing so implied that the teacher’s success warranted a raise in salary. Such tactics did progressive harm to the teaching profession over the latter part of the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth, but they afforded school boards considerable flexibility in managing rural schools. Boards tended to resist attempts to peg teachers’ salaries at a higher level, especially at the “Montreal scale,” as this would have removed their ability to control one of the key variables in their budget. Higher

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salaries would have had to come out of the pockets of local ratepayers, who already contributed 80 per cent of the costs of educating their children through taxes and school fees; the remainder came from meagre government grants.12 Most teachers appear to have taken the salary situation in their stride. To be making any money at all was exciting to some, such as eighteen-year-old Maurella Hingston from the Pontiac, who later recalled the thrill of being able to purchase Christmas presents for her family and friends with her wages.13 For such women, raised on farms and educated beyond the elementary level at a local academy or high school, pay would have been merely a part of gaining independence and recognition as a teacher. Of much greater concern for a novice would have been the difficulty of settling into a new community, getting along with the family with whom she was boarding, and above all confronting the children under her care.14 Many teachers met these challenges with considerable success, but others found them highly intimidating. Much depended on a teacher’s ability to gain the trust of the community, which invariably expected a great deal of her. These young women were obliged to be simultaneously role models, caretakers, collectors of monthly school fees, leaders in the community, representatives of the provincial education system, and educators.15 A rural school teacher lived in a fish bowl, subject to censure from all sides for her behaviour and for the friendships she might make. She also had to be skilled in diplomacy, caught as a teacher so often was between the conflicting interests of trustees and parents. If she fitted in, as Miss Simpson certainly did, a teacher was accorded a degree of respect and status that had a direct bearing on her classroom experience. The most significant arena was, of course, the school itself. Women with no special training were often overly optimistic when it came to imparting their own knowledge to children, quickly discovering that it was not enough simply to have a love of learning. Pedagogically, a great many were ill prepared for the task. Often the only formal guidance came from the Teacher’s Manual, with its firm instructions as to lesson plans and complex timetables that could have little practical bearing on a teacher’s daily needs. It was ironic – and counterproductive – that the majority of rural teachers were just beginning their careers in a job that required a high level of skill and maturity. A number of them proved to have difficulty organizing a daily teaching schedule, let alone dealing with a multigraded classroom of pupils whom they also had to supervise at recess and lunch.16 Even those teachers for whom the job came naturally often feared the visit from the school inspector. Maurella Hingston had known Inspector Honeyman as a child in the tiny community of Yarm, and recalled always having enjoyed his

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26 Hyatt Schoolhouse, Milby With consolidation, most one-room schools were demolished, but some were put to other uses. For example, the schoolhouse in Milby (originally Ascot Township), which dates back to at least 1822, was for many years home to the local chapter of the Women’s Institute. When it became too expensive for this organization to maintain, the building lay derelict until it was acquired by the local branch of the United Empire Loyalists. It has been painstakingly refurbished for use as a community centre and museum. A local millstone is on display on the lawn. [Photo courtesy of Bev Loomis]

visits to her school, yet the sight of him at the door of the school where she had just begun teaching in Waltham filled her with anxiety; she was convinced she had not covered enough material even in the several weeks she had been at the task, and quickly noted with embarrassment that she had forgotten to train the children to stand at attention when the inspector entered. “To begin the morning he asked me to teach a class in Arithmetic,” she noted in her memoir. “A lesson in Grammar or Geography I might have managed creditably even in my uptight state, but Arithmetic teaching was never my strong point. He made no comment but I could sense his disapproval of my method, or rather lack of method. Instead of criticising me he took over the lesson, and in that and a later lesson in Literature I learned some important rules of good teaching.”17 Not all school inspectors were as helpful; some were not above reducing a teacher to tears in front of the children, an action that could seriously undermine her authority.18 Teachers had reason to fear parents even more than school inspectors. Parents usually held the teacher responsible for problems at the schoolhouse, whether deservedly or not, and took their grievances directly to the board. While trustees could ignore inspectors’ reports if

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27 Interior, Hyatt schoolhouse, Milby The schoolroom has been restored to its original appearance, with manikins for colour. [Photo courtesy of Bev Loomis]

they felt unable to effect the recommended changes, they were obliged to take complaints from parents very seriously. To review such allegations they would hold special meetings, to which all parties involved would be invited to give their side of the story; they could even form ad hoc committees to investigate particularly delicate cases. Teachers dreaded such investigations, knowing that it was always easier for a board to replace them than to risk angering ratepayers and neighbours. One early case from the 1860s, which involved charges that the board felt could not be substantiated, nevertheless resulted in the agreement that the teacher “be replaced … tomorrow the tenth instant at nine o’clock forenoon.”19 Boards were not always so willing to accept parents’ complaints, especially if they smelled of local jealousies rather than of genuine criticism. In 1918 eleven mothers in the community of McMasterville signed a petition asking the school board not to rehire the teacher, whom they accused of exhibiting “favouritism, discourtesy, and poor judgement” toward the children and their playmates where she boarded. After a thorough investigation, the board expressed confidence in the teacher.20 The question of punishment was especially likely to cause controversy. A teacher had to apply just the right amount of discipline – never too little or too much – and failure to do so was a familiar grievance. Parents in the Pontiac complained that one teacher was either unwilling or unable to discipline her class, and demanded that if she did not

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impose order amongst her unruly pupils, the board should ask her to resign; she did not, and they engaged a new teacher.21 Teachers that erred in the opposite direction were also swiftly punished. When she hit a pupil on the head with her blackboard pointer, Miss Nora McCrea was sentenced to a week in jail for assault.22 Boards learned to be sensitive to the difficulties of sorting out the truth when the principal witnesses, and alleged victims, were children. A teacher in Megantic County was accused by one pupil of hitting another, and some of the parents drew the issue to the commissioners’ attention. In language that would seem every bit as confused as the testimony on which it was based, the investigation concluded that, considering that all the Scholars agree in their evidence, and are positive that Miss Lord did not strike Rachel McVetty on the head, except the said Rachel McVetty & her sister Elsie McVetty who say that the teacher did strike Rachel on the head, but considering that the evidence of the two sisters does not agree, this Board is fully convinced that Miss Lord did not strike Rachel McVetty on the head & they further consider that there was no foundation for the complaint & it should not have been brought & is dismissed with costs amounting to $3.11. [Miss Lord] … was perfectly justified in all she has done in this matter & the scholars in the School must be made to understand that they must implicitly obey the Rules & Regulations of the School & the Teacher is to have full authority to enforce the rules & to enforce obedience & be mistress of the School.23

The commissioners did find that the teacher was wrong to have suspended the scholar – presumably Rachel McVetty, whose suspension may well have prompted her and her sister to fabricate the assault – without having first notified the parents; even in this, however, they did not blame the teacher as they realized that the board had never given her a copy of their regulations. But despite having received the board’s backing, Miss Lord’s position in the schoolhouse and the community cannot have been a comfortable one. During the nineteenth century, most teachers at rural schools had spent at least a year at one of the independent academies across the province, though a great number were local young women, themselves mere products of one-room schools. By the last quarter of the century, however, the Protestant Committee began striving to standardize the training of teachers, gradually asserting the primacy of the McGill Normal School curriculum, and later that of Macdonald Teachers College.24 This led to a sharp division between certified and uncertified teachers and to increasing pressure on school boards by inspectors and

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the Protestant Committee to hire only the former. As certified teachers could expect to be paid up to twice as much as those without a diploma, the prospect was an expensive one for most boards. In prosperous parts of the Eastern Townships, commissioners were often quite diligent: as early as 1879 the board of Barnston Township instructed the district managers to make sure that all teachers had diplomas.25 But however well this reflected on the commissioners’ intentions, reality was different. More than a generation later, Inspector Hunter advised the board that it was not desirable to hire teachers with less than a Grade II academy education (the equivalent of Grade 10), “though they do honest work.” He also commented on the challenges of a particularly difficult class, one that “needs a strong hand, a firm discipline. I plead with the Board to secure a strong experienced teacher for this school. Privately, to the Board, I state that Miss H is a beautiful, gentle spirit, but that school, tho’ not large, is too hard for her.”26 The Barnston board took steps over the next decade to ensure that its teachers were certified, including sending those that were not to Macdonald College for training. By 1916 Hunter congratulated the board for having a “staff of teachers of such high literary standing and efficient training.”27 It would be another ten years, however, before he could echo these sentiments in his comments to the commissioners of nearby Hatley, who had only then succeeded in securing certified teachers for all their district schools.28 In poorer regions, school boards were much less eager to pursue this policy. Hiring certified teachers required a serious investment of cash, which was beyond the means of many small communities; instead, they continued to rely upon young, untrained, or inexperienced women who taught at paltry salaries in buildings that were often neglected and rundown. School inspectors railed against this ongoing practice, although many were sensitive to the limitations suffered by some isolated Protestant communities. In 1907 the school board in Matapedia, a community at the head of Chaleur Bay near the New Brunswick border, attempted to comply with the Protestant Committee’s regulations by advertising for certified teachers, but when none replied the commissioners closed two of their schools. For this they were reproached by Inspector J.M. Sutherland, who told them they should have hired uncertified teachers rather than not open the schools.29 Few inspectors were willing to deviate from official policy, however. Lochaber’s Protestant board proved particularly defiant of the regulations concerning hiring, and continued the practice of not renewing contracts – much to the fury of inspectors. Grace Simpson’s three-year tenure in Lochaber came at the end of a long period of rapid teacher turnover typical of

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nineteenth-century rural schools, but it was then followed by the same phenomenon for over three decades. Teachers in the four Lochaber schools rarely lasted more than a year and it was not uncommon for the board to have to replace teachers more than once over the course of a term. In 1926–27 a succession of four separate teachers moved through the village school, and throughout the 1920s the back-range schools still frequently (as much as a quarter of the time) opened late in the autumn, closed early in the spring, or remained closed after a holiday period, because a new teacher could not be found or the old one had left unexpectedly.30 School inspectors blamed the trustees for not being willing to hire better-trained teachers, but they were even more critical of the failure to make improvements to the schools themselves. In more prosperous parts of the province, one-room schools were repaired regularly or replaced by state-of-the-art buildings whose designs conformed to the standards set by the Protestant Committee. Elsewhere, schools were neglected because of a lack of funds. Nineteenth-century conditions persisted: drafty, cold rooms heated with a single wood-burning stove and without electricity, indoor toilets, or running water, where pupils shared a common wash basin, soap, and towel. Such conditions hardly encouraged teachers to stay beyond the terms of their contracts. When one teacher requested that repairs be made to her school, the Lochaber board notified her that her services would not be needed at the close of the term unless the inspector gave her a favourable report and the ratepayers agreed to comply with her demand.31 They did not, and she left. In this case, the board had read the wishes of their constituents correctly, although some years later it was the ratepayers themselves who called for a new schoolhouse. Their petition made the connection between neglected schools and the high turnover: “Last term we had an excellent teacher but she found that the location and condition was not the proper place to have children and would not sign for another year unless some other arrangements were made.”32 The petition had no effect. Thirteen years later the school was condemned by the Department of Health as unfit for habitation: “There is no cellar; the ground floor is only a couple of feet over the level of the ground, i.e. on a rock surface. There is no current water in the school. The children have to carry water from a neighbour; they use two outside dry privies set also on the rocky formation. The ground floor of the present class-room and the attic floor have heaved; the stairs are unsafe and it has been necessary to anchor at both ends 3 or 4 steel bars through the two longitudinal walls in order to keep them from opening up.”33 That a class of thirty pupils was still being taught in this school is testimony to an exceptional degree of rural poverty.

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28 Standard schoolhouse design, 1898 One of several basic designs for new schools issued by the Protestant Committee, prior to the consolidation movement. This one features an upstairs apartment for the teacher. [Quebec Sessional Papers, vol. 30, part 2, 1898]

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In general, inspectors failed to appreciate the reluctance of rural school boards to increase the burden of school taxes on impoverished ratepayers who were also fellow residents of the community. As one historian of rural schools puts it, commissioners and trustees were not “remote politicians, meeting in some downtown boardroom” but parents and neighbours who met at the school to conduct the business of managing local education. Knowing that their neighbours would foot the bill, school boards had to justify any increase in the school tax.34 Boards also had to decide what they could or would do about delinquent ratepayers. Most were loath to force members of the community to sell their homesteads to pay school taxes and, if legal steps had to be initiated, they were sure to give plenty of time and repeated warnings before acting. Boards demonstrated a great deal of compassion, especially during the Depression; in some cases they would accept firewood as payment in kind.35 Boards often forgave the obligation of parents in special circumstances, such as extreme poverty or widowhood, and in households whose heads were on active duty during the two world wars. Fiscal responsibility and compassion notwithstanding, school boards such as that of Lochaber were caught in a kind of vicious circle. The low tax base that prevented boards from offering good salaries also served to rationalize their dependence on unqualified female teachers whose contracts they would not renew so that they could engage others at equally low wages. In other words, the trustees operated their schoolhouses on the backs of women teachers. In many cases, the children also suffered, as the Lochaber ratepayers had observed. It is not clear whether or not ratepayers realized that to build a new school would mean raising the mill rate; the trustees do not appear to have asked them. The official argument was that the mill rate could not be raised because people were poor. At times it seems that rural school boards did not grasp the repercussions of their conservative strategy: raising funds to pay teachers more and to improve their working conditions would have made for a better environment for the children. Failure to make this connection was typical of rural areas prior to the 1940s; during the war and the post-war period governments were more assertive and less fearful of deficit spending. The conservative strategy also fostered stereotypes: female teachers came to be seen as transient and unreliable, while male inspectors were associated with management and a commitment to teaching as a profession.36 School boards contributed to women’s transiency in teaching: they refused to hire married women; treated young, single teachers as temporary personnel who would marry at the first opportunity; and paid female teachers lower salaries than their male counterparts. This had far-reaching effects on women. Teachers sought out higher wages

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and improved working conditions, often in the cities or towns of Quebec and Ontario, and they left their posts whenever better opportunities arose. Those who made a life-long commitment to teaching remained dedicated and hard working. Even the existing body representing teachers’ interests, the Provincial Association of Protestant Teachers (papt), was dominated by professional educators – urban, university-trained, and male – until after World War I. The utter lack of job security, however, led the women teachers of the one-room rural schools to join the papt and gradually reform it into an organization that answered their needs. By the late 1920s the papt president was a woman. She (Jessie Norris) presided over the formation in 1929 of the Gatineau Protestant Teachers’ Association, the kind of organization that would have attracted local rural teachers – at any rate, those with some degree of qualification.37 This body helped convince school boards of the need to send unqualified teachers away for better training and petitioned the government to set a minimum salary for all Quebec teachers. In time, many school municipalities – especially those relatively close to Montreal – adopted the “Montreal salary scale” to attract teachers to their rural schools. At the same time, parents and other community groups were also organizing, out of a desire to effect improvements to rural schools. By the 1930s, many communities could boast a Women’s Institute, and in time a number would join the Home and School movement. The keen interest in education felt by such groups would eventually help to improve relations between boards, teachers, and the wider community across rural Protestant Quebec.

The cause of progressive schooling got into full swing at the turn of the century when Quebec’s new, reform-minded Liberal government managed to secure, against much Conservative opposition, the passing of a bill allowing for school consolidation and the public conveyance of children.38 In 1902 the Protestant Committee undertook a survey of school conditions across rural Quebec and called in a Scottish educator, John Adams, to prepare the report. Adams concluded what the Protestant Committee had believed for some time, that there were simply too many schools, each with too few pupils, taught by too many underqualified teachers. Among the many reforms Adams proposed was the consolidation of local education; one-room schools should be closed and new “consolidated” schools built to accommodate all the children within a board’s territory. The argument was essentially one of efficiency: apart from modern facilities, the new schools would offer specialized teaching for each grade, which would challenge each pupil

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to compete with peers, rather than with much older or younger children.39 The curriculum should be standardized, enabling pupils to pass from elementary to secondary grades and beyond, if desired, and the quality of teaching should be improved. Consolidated schools would require rural children to travel greater distances, although this would be offset by grants to school boards so that they could hire someone to transport the pupils. Despite the tone of efficiency, Adams was also sensitive to the need most communities felt for a degree of autonomy, and argued that consolidated schools would actually increase a sense of local identity. This view had much validity: most school municipalities had a village at their heart where Protestants tended to concentrate, even in largely Catholic areas; equally, most schoolhouses, though convenient to pupils, were removed from other aspects of community life. But this did not take into consideration the pride many communities felt for their schoolhouses, not merely in the villages but across the countryside. School boards and managers had worked hard to build them and keep them open, and even if all graduates did not look back with pleasure on their school days, they would have acknowledged the efforts taken on their behalf – especially in a world that placed great emphasis on a basic education. In heavily Catholic areas, Protestants would have been particularly conscious of what the dissentient school represented. There were also more practical concerns: even if it stood at the edge of a field, a one-room school was the focus of much attention from local people, especially parents, who could expect to pass by it with some frequency – which could not be said for a school in the village. Teachers may have found it unnerving to live under so much scrutiny, but for parents it was highly desirable to be able to keep a collective eye on their children. Most parents in rural areas objected strenuously to their children having to travel far to get to school. Moreover, it was not altogether clear that schools were under-attended, at least not in places such as Lochaber, where the problem was one of finding enough room for children in dilapidated schoolhouses. In general, rural Protestants seem to have been happy with the idea of one-room schools – which is not to say that they liked ruined buildings, a lack of equipment, and incompetent teaching. Most rural communities would have pointed to inadequate funding as the major problem, rather than the superfluity of schools. The reluctance of the Lochaber trustees to raise the mill rate to pay for repairs and the willingness of many boards (money permitting) to help unqualified teachers become qualified, speaks to an obvious course of action on the government’s part. People clearly wanted better schools, but not necessarily bigger ones; for them, the Protestant Committee’s policy of consolidation was like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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The funding for the survey of Protestant schools came from the pockets of the province’s leading Protestant philanthropist, William Christopher Macdonald, the tobacco magnate who was dedicating much of his wealth to the promotion of progressive institutions. Although he claimed to spurn organized religion, Macdonald in many ways typified the values of post-Victorian Protestantism: austerity, practicality, curiosity, good health, and a belief that the application of all these things could improve society, as well as the self. Fresh from having financed McGill’s new science facilities and Canada’s first crematorium at Mount Royal Cemetery, Macdonald turned his attention to the Protestant school system. In the light of the Adams Report he agreed to set up a fund to which school boards could apply to help defray the expenses of consolidation. In 1904, to set things in motion, he offered to build a consolidated school to serve as a model for the rest of the province.40 The Protestant Committee set about finding an appropriate site for this institution, and finally settled on Ormstown – in some ways an odd choice, given that it already had an academy offering instruction at all grade levels. The Macdonald Consolidated School seems to have been intended as a showcase for all the advantages of the proposed new system, including a full array of classrooms, one for each grade. The Ormstown school board was delighted with the prospect and resolved to have the new school ready by September 1905. The parents and ratepayers of Ormstown, however, were not so sure; one even brought a lawsuit against the board to halt construction. This was not resolved until the spring of 1906, by which time Macdonald and the Protestant Committee had dropped the project.41 Macdonald shifted his attention to the new college for teachers at Ste Anne. The committee continued to promote consolidation, making the same argument for efficiency that Adams had done: lower costs, better buildings, better equipment, better teaching, and, significantly, “closer supervision by officials,” though obviously not by parents. It also added some curious arguments, claiming that consolidation was conducive to “better health and morals,” would help to keep boys likely to drop out at school, and would relieve “mothers anxious about their girls” who were “liable to remain at home because of vagabond tramps or large bodies of unemployed men in certain localities.”42 Whether or not this last point was of real concern to rural mothers, the dangers of travelling long distances by vehicle seemed much greater to most people than the dangers of walking to a local school. To improve their chances of success, the committee decided to conduct the first experiment in consolidation in a community already ripe for change: Kingsey, a township on the St Francis River just below Richmond. Kingsey had enjoyed over half a century of co-operation between Protestants and

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Catholics, but demographic shifts suggested that Protestants had become a minority and needed to assert control over their own education. The consolidated school was therefore also a dissentient school. Most of Kingsey’s Protestants accepted consolidation along with the political benefits of establishing a new board. Even so, a minority instigated a lawsuit, which had to be resolved before building commenced. The province’s first consolidated school opened in September 1905. It was more or less state-of-the-art: two large classrooms equipped with books and maps and modern blackboards, a basement with a furnace, an attic playroom, and a large outhouse at the back with a separate cubicle for boys and girls. There was also a stable with ten stalls, and it was the duty of the oldest pupils to look after the horses and carts and drive the smaller children to and from their homes.43 Thus was the problem of conveyance addressed. The consolidation movement lost some of its momentum after its success in Kingsey, mostly because so much effort was now going into the building of Macdonald College. When a number of boards jumped at the prospect of government grants for establishing new schools, they found that the necessary fund had not yet been set up. In 1905 the Hemmingford commissioners expressed “the great desirability of consolidating 6 or 8 of the Hemmingford schools but [they] feel that the additional expense is too great for them to incur at present, but would be willing to accord to the upmost of their ability any help that might be had from the McDonald [sic] fund for that purpose.”44 Such monies would only become available in 1914, by which time it was clear that most Hemmingford ratepayers were hostile to the idea of losing their local schools. Other boards were willing to take funds for consolidation, but this did not mean the disappearance of one-room schools. Barnston, one of the first communities to respond to the Protestant Committee’s program in 1914, had already closed most of its original twenty-seven district schools, but it made no particular effort to hasten the demise of the remaining ones. The building erected with these funds was a model school, offering instruction at the higher grade level. By virtue of its having more than one room, it qualified as consolidated, though in reality it was no different from many nineteenth-century district schools with an additional room for the model grades. By 1930 Barnston Township still operated six one-room schools, although four of these had fewer than ten pupils each; a fifth, in Barnston village, had seventeen pupils – a number it would retain, more or less, over the next few years; and the sixth school, in Baldwin Mills, would see its population of fifteen rise to twenty-nine by 1935, surpassing even that of the model school in Way’s Mills. In nearby Hatley five of the original district schools remained when the consolidation grant was received

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local matters • 157 Table 6 Consolidation of Barnston schools, 1927-37

Year 1927

District #1 3

District #5 4

1

District #9 (Way’s Mills) 30

District #10

District #12

District #18

District #27

11

6

10

5

7

15

2

3

1930

4–5

6

30

17

1931 (January)

5

5

15 – 25

16

9

7

20

1931 (June)

9

6

24

18

11

7

18

1932

8

8

23

14

10

7

22

1933

11

10

closed

18

5

7

26

1934

13

12

closed

17

14

10

29

1935

closed

10

closed

16

na

10

29

1937

closed

10

closed

8

10

7

25

10

Source: Minute Books, School Commissioners, Township of Barnston 1 Includes “2 Jews, 1 French” 2 Includes “2 French” 3 Includes “4 French” The number given for each school district represents the average attendance for the year.

(1927) and it would be a number of years before all but one of them closed. The school board may have made much-needed improvements to the survivor, the school in the village, but as only eighteen pupils attended in 1934 – the total number attending school within the entire school municipality – it would seem that the Depression had taken its toll and that the other district schools had simply died a natural death. Despite the enthusiastic reviews from officials such as Percival four decades after its inception, Adams’ program of consolidation was never systematically implemented. When a community did consolidate its schools, it was very often a case of necessity: some schools had to close because they were falling apart or had only a handful of students, and the consequent overcrowding at the remaining schools eventually required them to be rebuilt. Consolidation also happened when a municipality opened some sort of superior (or secondary) school. Of the fiftyseven schools that Percival labelled “consolidated” during this period, few really conformed to the Protestant Committee’s original objectives.45 Most were new model schools or high schools, or else older buildings that were obliged to accommodate extra pupils when other

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158 • a meeting of the people Table 7 Protestant schools of Leeds Township, Megantic County, in the 20th century School

Years of Operation

Pupils Moved To

No.1, Leeds Village

early–1896

Leeds Model School

Leeds Model School

1896–1923

Kinnear’s Mills Consolidated

No. 2

early–1905 1918–19 1930–39

Kinnear’s Mills Consolidated

No. 3

early–1917

Leeds Model School

No. 4, Leeds East

early–1912

none

No. 5

early–1940s

Kinnear’s Mills Consolidated

No. 6

early–1944

Kinnear’s Mills Consolidated

No. 7, Kinnear’s Mills

early–1923

Kinnear’s Mills Consolidated

Kinnear’s Mills Consolidated School

1923–59

Thetford Mines

Source: Barry, A History of Megantic County: 234–9

district schools closed. Demographics, rather than policy, determined the rate at which so-called consolidation took place. There were exceptions: in the township of Leeds, for example, several schools were closed in 1923, including the model school in Leeds village, and a consolidated school opened in the more populous village of Kinnear’s Mills. The new school was, however, really a relocated, graded model school with a fancy new name. Although some one-room schools were still badly overcrowded, most were closed over the course of the 1920s and 30s owing to a shrinking rural Protestant population. Those that remained tended to be jealously guarded by local families. Hemmingford had been steadily closing its schools for some time, but in 1940 at least three were still open; even so, many children had to be conveyed some distance, and the task of transporting them, by car or horse and cart, often fell to individual members of the board, as it did in a number of municipalities. In that year, the commissioners wrote to Percival explaining the growing problem and asserting that they were extremely loath to raise the mill rate. Over the next three years they negotiated with the Department of Public Instruction and, with the assurance of enough funds to enlarge the model school in the village and possibly to build a new school in one of the outlying districts, they announced the closure of the remaining schoolhouses. At the beginning of June 1943 a delegation of parents, whose children were finishing what appeared to be

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their last year at these schools, confronted the board in bitter opposition to this plan. The commissioners responded by declaring that, as the parents “have opposed our honest endeavours to meet the requirements of the Department and to advance the Educational advantages of the children, we feel that it is better that we should resign. We therefore tender our resignation to take effect the 25th of June.”46 The commissioners could see that the writing was on the wall for these schools and, having worked hard to make improvements without additional expense to ratepayers, they were not about to back down. It would seem that the parents came to see this too, despite their fears about conveyance and their loyalty to the old buildings; before their resignation took effect, the commissioners were back at work implementing consolidation. Their bluff had worked. One-room schools persisted even longer in areas such as the Pontiac, where the Protestant population was spread over a great many small isolated settlements. Clarendon Township only began to consolidate after World War II; pupils were bused into Shawville and the old schools were auctioned off in the spring of 1954.47 The Thorne school board just north of Clarendon kept several schools open until 1955, when an intermediate school was built in the village of Ladysmith.48 In even more isolated areas there was no question of Protestants attending anything but one-room schoolhouses, as it was all they could do to fill these. One Protestant school in the Beauce had only six pupils in 1940; it was the sort of statistic that infuriated the Protestant Committee, but there was little else anyone could do except send the children to a Catholic school.49 Extremely remote Protestant communities, such as those along the Lower North Shore (many of which are still not connected by roads), did not even have this option, as getting to any other school required a trip in a boat. The same was true for parts of the Magdalen Islands, especially the community on Entry Island, which remains a forty-minute ferry ride from the “mainland” Magdalens; the one-room school in Entry Island was still in use in 1962, when it burned down and was replaced by a new building with three classrooms. The schools in other Islands communities such as East Cape and Grindstone only closed in the late 1950s, while the Old Harry school remained open until 1973, after which the students were transferred to the six-room high school in Grosse Ile.50 Elsewhere, where two or more Protestant schools lay within any reasonable distance of each other, one or the other was bound to close. Four remote communities north-east of the Gatineau River managed between them to operate two schools, one of which was held in a church hall; in 1948 they agreed to join and form the Protestant school municipality of Poltimore and, with help from the department, to build

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a new three-room school.51 Lochaber was a prime candidate for consolidation by the 1940s given the state of several of its schools, although the trustees continued to argue that the ratepayers could not support the cost of a new building. By this time, however, the Protestant Committee under Percival’s guidance had become much more interventionist in its dealings with school boards, in keeping with the attitude, born of the Depression and World War II, that the state had a role to play in improving people’s lives. When he became aware of the appalling conditions in Lochaber, Percival threatened the trustees that, unless the Silver Creek schoolhouse was replaced, they would cease to receive any government funding. When the board protested, Percival countered that “this action is not in accordance with the principles of democracy or the school law.” He was prepared, however, to meet the trustees halfway, and managed to locate an additional source of funding – implicitly proving the school board’s basic argument that the real issue was money. The following year, the teacher and children of Silver Creek moved into a newly constructed school house.52 Given the needs of isolated Protestant communities, one-room schoolhouses continued to be built throughout the 1930s and 40s, and even later. The village of Wakeham, some miles inland from the town of Gaspé, opened a one-room school in 1935; the community of Grand Entry in the Magdalen Islands built one the following year. At about the same time, Lamaque Gold Mines Limited, a company that had created the mining community of Bourlamaque near Val d’Or in northwestern Quebec, hired a Protestant teacher to educate the children of its mostly Northern European workforce; she did so in a one-roomed log cabin.53 Otter Lake, a small community in the northern part of the Pontiac, built a one-room school in 1943, while the school trustees of Loretteville, on the outskirts of Quebec City, put up a brand-new oneroom school in 1958, after the old one had been destroyed by fire.54 Recognizing the need for such schools, the Protestant Committee took pains to ensure that new construction met with government standards. As of 1943, all proposals for new schools, including one-room schools, had to be submitted to the Department of Education. As it had done at the turn of the century, the department even issued standard plans, supplied free to school boards to serve as guides, though variations were possible if local conditions required them.55 The department tended to insist on features that Protestant inspectors had been recommending for decades: schools should be built on dry, preferably elevated ground, with a good supply of water, and should be oriented to provide natural light through a bank of windows on one side only; they should be heated to a minimum of 68°F, by means of a furnace located in an excavated basement; and artificial lighting should be from electric lamps,

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or if possible fluorescent lights, hung from the ceiling. Not surprisingly, the cost of such one-room schools could be twenty times greater than that of half a century earlier.56 Nevertheless, in very isolated places the physical condition of these newer schools does not seem much better than that experienced in Lochaber and other such places a generation or more earlier. A teacher in a new one-room school in a remote area of northwestern Quebec described a building that, despite its supposed modern architecture, differed little from its nineteenth-century counterparts. The school had an inadequate heating system, and no electricity or running water. The teacher taught twenty-one pupils in six grades from 1957 to 1959. In winter she and her pupils wore their winter coats and huddled around a wood stove. Despite repeated letters to the board, the language of which grew increasingly acrimonious over time, these circumstances did not change, and the exasperated teacher finally exclaimed, “Teachers are human beings you must know, and it would be nice to be treated as such now and again.” She resigned her position by simply leaving the school without informing the school board.57 At the school in St Télésphore de Montjoy, west of Montreal near the Ontario border, pupils were still using a septic toilet in the same year that they attended Expo 67, and at the request of the school trustees Bell technicians finally installed a telephone in the schoolhouse at the beginning of 1968.58 Conditions in this last one-room school have significantly improved; children are still in full-time attendance at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The prolonged use – in at least one case, the ongoing use – of oneroom schools suggests that the institution was relatively successful, at least as a means of educating children in isolated areas. Indeed, the survival of the Soulanges school in St Télésphore was entirely due to the efforts of parents and children who successfully resisted the Lakeshore school board’s 1995 claim that a one-room school was “a luxury that can no longer be afforded.” They countered that, far from being a luxury, the school represented the lifeblood of the local English-speaking community.59 A century earlier, especially given the problems of rural transportation at the beginning of the twentieth century, most Quebec schools outside of the larger towns probably fitted this category. On the whole, there were not “too many schools,” as the Protestant Committee believed – or if there were, the school boards closed them down and sent the pupils to the next schoolhouse down the road. By the 1940s in some places, and certainly in every part of rural Quebec by the 1960s, a lack of pupils would result in the closure of a great many Protestant schools and even in the demise of entire school boards. But the fundamental demographic problem of small Protestant

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communities was not solved by simply closing one-room schools and may well have been exacerbated by it. The issues that school boards and parents had with teachers, and the considerable difficulties of teachers in rural schools, were not the fault of having one-room schools or of failing to have graded schools, but rather were systemic to life in small communities. The needs of these communities might have been better served by additional public investment in “infrastructure,” so that boards such as Lochaber’s would have been able to keep their schools in good repair. This was the sort of investment that a number of school boards had in mind in 1920 when they signed a petition addressed to the Liberal government: The Government is very properly devoting large sums of money in aiding Agriculture, Colonization, the Timber Industry, Good Roads, and other branches of provincial development … [and] has this year increased its grants largely for the development of special branches of higher education, and … it is known that the education of the children in the common schools throughout the province, especially in the rural districts, is greatly hampered by lack of funds … [and] it is a fact that well educated children are the most valuable asset of the Province … we petition the Government to vote not less than one million dollars this session to Common Schools.60

The government, however, was channelling its investment in schools through the committees of the Council of Public Instruction, and it was the policy of the Protestant Committee to improve the level of schooling in rural areas by improving the training of teachers and standardizing the curriculum. Had more money gone directly to school boards, places such as Lochaber could have afforded to send more of its teachers to Macdonald College and then pay them higher wages. The opening of Macdonald College in Ste Anne de Bellevue in 1907 represented a veritable revolution in teacher training for rural Protestant school boards. The School for Teachers’ farmland setting at the extreme westerly point of the island of Montreal was no small advantage when it came to making scholars from rural areas feel at home and the spacious residences, available at reasonable rates, meant there was no need to resort to boarding houses, which had been a major obstacle for many rural scholars wishing to attend the McGill Normal School. Macdonald College provided young rural women with new opportunities to pursue a career in teaching and hence to be independent. Parents were less fearful for their daughters’ physical, emotional, and, especially, moral safety in this pastoral environment just far enough from the temptations of the city. Generations of teachers have owed their livelihoods to the existence of the School for Teachers, and generations

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29 Macdonald College School for Teachers, graduating class 1925 A sizeable minority of the women in this class came from the Gaspé coast, an indication of how useful Macdonald College was for training teachers from remote regions of the province. [Photo courtesy of Joan Dow]

of students have owed their education to the products of this school. Eventually, the standards established by the Protestant Committee would apply almost everywhere, making it very hard for school boards to hire unqualified teachers simply to save money. In the long run, it was worth turning this variable in a board’s budget into a constant, which is not to say that school boards did not continue to negotiate carefully, even stubbornly, over teachers’ salaries, or that inequalities no longer existed. Some boards continued to rely on unqualified local women to teach their schools; as late as 1960 the school board of St Dunstan, near Quebec City, was willing to hire a young woman to teach provided she pass Grade 11 – which she did not do, so the school was obliged to close its doors.61 Such cases aside, proper teachers’ training has been all but mandatory since World War II. Before the war, however, teachers often gained work experience at one-room schools prior to attending the School for Teachers. Maruella McCagg (formerly Hingston), who taught at Waltham in the Pontiac in 1927, recalled that it was quite common for young women without diplomas to teach in rural schools as a means of making enough money to be able to attend Macdonald College.62 Qualified teachers even went back to the college to improve their skills and thus demand higher salaries. Grace Simpson was one such teacher, as matters turned out.63 Having returned to Ormstown from Lochaber Bay in the summer of 1905 to care for her sick mother, she applied the following spring to teach model Grades II and III at the local academy. The Ormstown board hired her at a salary of $300, but this figure quickly rose as she was re-engaged year after year. By the

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autumn of 1911 she was hired as a French specialist at the academy, and the following summer the board paid for her to take the appropriate course at Macdonald College. Aparently on two occasions she was offered a teaching position at the college, but she refused, preferring to remain in Ormstown to be at her mother’s side. For the next eight years she taught French there, her salary having reached $750 by World War I – far more than the other three teachers, though considerably less than the male principal. In the spring of 1919 the board did not increase her salary at their regular meeting, but then called a special meeting three days later to redress this wrong, and put it up by an additional $50; this would certainly suggest she was a highly valued member of the academy staff. In late February 1920 Grace Simpson caught pneumonia and died within three days. It was with much regret that the board advertised for a replacement. Miss Simpson left behind a “French & English & English & French Dictionary,” which some felt ought to be retained for use in the classroom but which Grace’s mother wished to keep. The board made the following decision: “As there was no name nor date on the Book it was doubtful to whom it belonged, so it was unanimously agreed … that the Chairman hand over the Book to Mrs Simpson.”

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6

Central Places: Protestant Communities and Secondary Schools School Commissioners … may, if they think proper, allow a sum not exceeding twenty pounds yearly for the support of any Superior School or Model School, at the most thickly settled place in the Municipality, over and above the share which would otherwise come to such School. Education Act (1846)

The Academy [shall] be constituted a graded school, with Primary Intermediate and High School Classes, to be conducted according to the plan of graded schools, and that the said graded school is calculated to supply the requirements of that part of the Village of Coaticook formerly designated as Districts No. 1 and 2 as regards to Education purposes. School Commissioners of Coaticook, 18771

In 1913, when the school commissioners of the Township of Cox decided to rebuild the school in New Carlisle as the first Protestant academy in the Gaspé, they found it a hard sell. While the government had agreed to fund two-fifths of the $25,000 projected cost, the rest would have to be raised from taxes. Ratepayers were generally uncomfortable with having to pay for something that did not directly benefit their district, and the residents of what had been District No. 1 (the village of New Carlisle) did not relish having to foot the entire bill themselves. The commissioners stressed what had become widely accepted elsewhere in Quebec by 1913, that the academy would be “of general benefit to all the ratepayers,” and that the old custom of taxing each district “for the building of its own schools … should be changed, and that all school houses, including the new Academy … should be built and maintained by all the Districts within this school municipality.”2 By these means, not only were the taxes equitably raised but also a sense of community was reinforced, one that recognized the advantage

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30 Charleston Academy and the Hatley Anglican church One of the earliest Anglican churches in the Eastern Townships (1828) sits beside one of the province’s first academies (1829), separated by a cemetery. This juxtaposition is surprising only in that most early academies grew up in opposition to the school system advanced by the Anglican Royal Institution. Both buildings stand on a village green, generally recognized as a sign of New England influence. The academy building now serves as the church hall and the local library. [Author photo]

of specialized teaching and access to higher learning. If the residents of these isolated fishing and farming communities along the shores of Chaleur Bay were slower than most to appreciate the benefits of having an academy in their midst, in time they became acutely aware of how much they stood to lose, culturally and economically, by having an inadequate secondary school system. They also learned how difficult it was to maintain an institution whose constituency was spread out in a line nearly two hundred kilometres long. Nineteenth-century Protestant communities placed a great deal of emphasis on basic schooling, but access to a more advanced education was not of paramount importance to most farming families. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the majority of young people were expected to complete high school, and not until 1964 that attendance at high school was made mandatory in Quebec. The desire for higher learning has a long and complex history, going back to the numerous independent academies of the Eastern Town-

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ships, which strove to present an alternative to what their supporters perceived to be a privileged system dominated by the Royal Institution. With the eventual success of a public school system, the pursuit of secondary education was driven by the rising standards and expectations of increasing portions of the population. Much of the literature on this phenomenon has focused on the role played by government bodies: beginning in the 1860s, the Protestant Committee worked to bring independent academies into line with the goals of public education and from the turn of the century on, by regulating the training of teachers through the McGill Normal School, it strove to develop a network of graded schools taught by specialized instructors.3 While the heavy hand of the Protestant Committee cannot be ignored, the impetus to teach higher grades at the local level often came from the school boards and, even more, from parents themselves. The desire for education beyond the level of the one-room school had a great deal to do with civic pride: communities grew progressively more aware of the benefits of having well-educated people among them who did not have to come from outside. In time, quite apart from the expectations placed on individual children, communities expected to be able to provide some sort of access to all academic grades: primary (or elementary) through “model” (or intermediate) through academy (or high school), and in some cases even beyond. This network of graded schools took shape over the course of the later nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, although many longestablished communities were only able to open proper high schools in the 1940s or even later. It was a long and difficult process. As in New Carlisle (if not quite on that scale, for the most part), for their children to have access to higher education, rural Protestants were uniformly faced with long distances and inadequate resources. Not all municipalities could afford an academy, but by the early twentieth century most had at least one model school, and could send scholars from there to an academy in a more fortunate community nearby. In calling for superior schools in “the most thickly settled place” within school municipalities, the 1846 Education Act anticipated what geographers refer to as “central place” theory, the tendency of certain locations to acquire greater importance as suppliers of goods and services to smaller settlements. New Carlisle was one such central place, in education as in many other domains, but in areas with larger Protestant populations the network of primary and secondary schools was more concentrated. Isolated Protestant communities were often obliged to develop strategies – from making use of existing train lines to encouraging institutionalized boarding of older children – to ensure access to secondary education for their communities. In so doing, these communities were

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also establishing crucial lifelines. Maintaining a primary-secondary network that would assure rural Protestant children access to the social and economic advantages of higher education was essential to a community’s survival.

Academies existed in Lower Canada well before common schools, their origins lying in the same desire for education that had prompted Protestant communities to seek help from the Royal Institution in the 1820s. Significantly, the earliest academies appeared in areas that had not been friendly with that Anglican-dominated body in its heyday. The rival petitions to the governor by the citizens of Stanstead and Charleston (later Hatley) emphasized the shortage of schools in the area and the desire to create an institution that would provide both advanced studies and training for elementary school teachers. By 1829 neither community was above turning to the Anglican bishop (and former Rector of Hatley), the Reverend Charles Stewart, for patronage – though, true to their Nonconformist background, they insisted that their institutions be non-denominational – and the Charleston Academy was even built next to the Anglican parish church.4 Both it and the Stanstead Seminary (the name held no religious significance) were conceived as superior schools, but with funding from the Assembly during the 1830s they functioned essentially as local schools with somewhat pretentious names, though they appear to have had higher academic standards, or at any rate have received higher praise from contemporaries.5 Over the course of that decade they were joined by similar institutions in several other, largely American, communities in the Eastern Townships, such as Sherbrooke, Cookshire, and Waterloo. The 1840s legislation allowed for government funding of these academies to continue, and a number were established as alternatives to the emerging system of common schools.6 For the most part, however, Protestants opened academies in the late 1840s and early 1850s with the intention of providing “superior” education to graduates of the common schools. This task was undertaken, not by the commissioners of school municipalities, whose job of maintaining a school in each district was challenging enough, but by separate slates of trustees whose sole responsibility was the academy. Given the very different constituencies of these two types of schools – attended by children of all ages and social backgrounds, except in the case of the older academies – it made sense for them to be run by different boards. This is not to imply that the members of these boards necessarily came from different classes or backgrounds, any more than the trustees of the High School of Montreal were socially distinct from the members of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners.

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31 Granby Academy Built in 1847, the academy and its board of directors flourished alongside the school commission until it was absorbed by it in the 1870s. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c00653]

The first of these institutions established following the 1846 Education Act was in Granby, a township whose school commissioners were operating a dozen or so one-room schoolhouses at that time. The academy was obviously intended to be a more prestigious school than any of these. To begin with, it was to be led by a master, whom the trustees instructed to “conduct himself both in and out of school in such a manner as becomes a teacher of a High School.” Furthermore, its three-year program, conducted in three annual terms of twelve weeks each and comprising the “higher branches of English, French language, Geography, use of the globes, linear drawing, elements of mensurations, and Composition; also all the branches of Classical Education,” was clearly beyond the expectations of the vast majority of local farm children.7 Nevertheless, the suprising number of academies established in the Eastern Townships during this period indicates considerable confidence that a sufficient number of local pupils would go beyond the primary years. By 1856 the region boasted over two dozen representing roughly the same number of townships with majority Protestant populations within the counties of Missisquoi, Shefford, Sherbrooke, and Stanstead, and in Durham Township in the County of Drummond. Academies and school municipalities did not, of course, dovetail neatly. Many townships had no academies and some had two: Barnston and Eaton had additional academies in the villages of Coaticook and Cookshire respectively, each of which was rapidly becoming the local commercial hub and would eventually form separate school municipalities.

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Away from the Eastern Townships, academies were fewer and farther between. Their origins lay in the desire to provide additional instruction to the gifted few and, depending on the benefits it might afford, to the wealthy few. The pursuit of wisdom would appear to have motivated Thomas Henry, the Presbyterian minister in the village of Lachute, who gave classes to older children in his home, and later, when numbers grew too large, in the church basement. Recognizing the popularity of these classes, the villagers held a public meeting early in 1855 and voted to turn this impromptu after-hours school into an academy. Once this institution was duly incorporated, a proper building was erected. It soon attracted over two hundred pupils. Henry was given two male assistants, one of whom also served as secretary to the trustees of the academy. The course of study consisted of “Latin, Greek, Natural History, Chemistry, Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, English Grammar and Composition, Geography, Elementary Astronomy, Drawing, Design, and French,” making it distinct in nature and degree from the elementary curriculum.8 At about the same time, academies were established in Aylmer and Huntingdon, which served the Protestants of the Ottawa valley and the region to the south of Montreal respectively. Clearly, the Eastern Townships had little short of a monopoly of this sort of institution, born as it was of American and Nonconformist tradition. Some communities were even more ambitious, offering the rural equivalent of the High School of Montreal’s close connection with McGill University. Sensing that their town was becoming a railway hub, the residents of Richmond saw bright prospects, including the real possibility of supporting a college of their own.9 By 1854 a charter of incorporation was passed through the British parliament, trustees were chosen, a building erected, and professors engaged, but the most significant accomplishment was affiliation with McGill. In 1858 the curriculum of St Francis College was brought into line with that of McGill and its students were permitted to write exams set by the McGill board of examiners, which included representatives from St Francis. In Quebec City, Morrin College, a decidedly Presbyterian institution with St Andrew’s minister John Cook as its first principal, was established in 1862 and soon found a home in the old prison building facing St Andrew’s church and school; it too secured affiliation with McGill University.10 It had a rival of sorts in the High School of Quebec, which like its counterpart in Montreal was considered the equivalent of a classical college.11 In 1865 the High School of Quebec found a permanent home (at least until 1941) in a neo-Gothic building on St Denis Street facing the citadel. In Lennoxville, Bishop’s College, which had been deliberately created in 1851 as an Anglican alternative to a now more secular McGill, enjoyed no degreegranting relationship with its Montreal rival, but did benefit from a greater degree of autonomy than the colleges in Richmond and Quebec.

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32 Old High School, Quebec Like its counterpart in Montreal, the high school in Quebec had its origins as a private school before being taken over by the city’s Protestant Board of School Commissioners. Despite its somewhat remote location in a corner of the old town, the building served Quebec’s secondary students from 1865 to 1941, when a grand new high school in the suburbs was built. It has since been subdivided as condominiums. [Author photo]

As Quebec’s public education system became more structured in the years leading up to Confederation, the Protestant Committee sought to standardize the array of secondary institutions. To turn academies into public secondary schools the government gradually cut back their funding, forcing them to turn to local school municipalities for assistance. The 1869 Education Act further alienated academies, just as it improved the financial situation of colleges and regulated the administration of school boards.12 When the Protestant Committee was given complete control over Protestant education in 1875, academies were forced to close or to seek affiliation with the public school system. This policy brought dividends to many school municipalities struggling to provide higher grades of instruction for their pupils. In the wake of the 1869 Act, the trustees of the academy in Granby decided to “divest themselves” of that institution “in favour of the Board of School Commissioners for the village of Granby,” who were pleased to take over its administration, provided they receive from the government the same grant as before, however modest, for its upkeep.13 The trustees of the

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Sherbrooke and Waterloo academies soon followed suit, surrendering control of their institutions to the local school commissioners and thereby automatically providing a graded system for these municipalities.14 As was so often the case, the transition was not necessarily smooth or immediate: it was only in 1888 that the Waterloo commissioners declared that “the course of study for Elementary and Model Schools and Academies as approved by the Protestant Council of Public Instruction [must] be strictly carried out.”15 In 1876 the school municipality of Danville was separated from Shipton, for the purpose of administering the Shipton Academy (henceforth known as the Danville Academy), which since 1854 had been the only functioning secondary school in that part of the St Francis valley. The commissioners’ first tasks were to examine the building they had inherited and effect any necessary repairs, and to decide on the teacher’s salary.16 Despite these expenditures the arrangement was a windfall for the residents of Danville, but was much less advantageous for the rest of Shipton Township and the nearby communities of Richmond and Melbourne, whose pupils would attend the academy as outsiders, paying higher fees. Richmond would resolve this problem some years later by establishing itself as a separate school municipality. In 1898 the directors of St Francis College, which had been experiencing many financial difficulties, transferred its control to the Richmond commissioners, who proceeded to operate it as a high school.17 This prestigious institution now diverted a major portion of the students who would once have attended the Danville Academy. In that same year, the Danville board advertised its Academy in the following manner: Situated upon the side of a fertile valley, Danville is noted for the salubrity of its atmosphere, the purity of its water and freedom from all forms of malarious diseases. The attractiveness of the natural scenery, the facilities for invigorating exercise and the general morality of the place all combine to make Danville one of the most desirable places for educational purposes to be found in the Province. The academy is beautifully situated, commanding an extensive view on every side; in the foreground especially, the country presents a pleasing variety of hills and valleys at once enchanting to the eye.18

Such pastoral imagery, seemingly far removed from what was essentially a community high school, reflects a distinct strategy. The rich academic legacy of its Richmond rival might easily be forgotten after reading this breathtaking description of the Danville Academy and its lush setting so obviously conducive to good health and the nourishment of the spirit. This evident competition between the two secondary

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institutions suggests a wider constituency than the local Protestant population. The marketing of Danville Academy appears to have been directed, at least in part, to an urban elite for whom its views and bracing air would have been key attractions. Stanstead Seminary became integrated with the public system in a much more roundabout way. Instead of divesting themselves of their academy, the trustees orchestrated its rebirth in 1872 as the Stanstead Wesleyan College, an institution modelled after those in Richmond and Quebec but with – at least theoretically – a narrower, religious constituency, making it eligible for government grants.19 In practice, the college accepted pupils of all denominations, as well as a number of local Protestant children, at nominal fees. In 1895 the trustees suggested to the nearby school boards of Stanstead Plain and Rock Island that they consider closing their district schools and transferring their taxes to the college, which would then educate all the children in the area.20 Both sets of commissioners refused to consider this proposal, but seven years later the former principal of the college, the Reverend A. Lee Holmes, came back with a new offer: to fund the building of a model school that local Protestant pupils could attend. The Stanstead Plain board remained aloof, but the Rock Island commissioners were enthusiastic, and even welcomed Holmes as a member of the board. By 1906 Stanstead Plain had noted how well served its neighbour was by the Holmes Model School, and agreed to an arrangement by which the education of Stanstead children would be handled by a committee made up of two representatives from each school board, two from the college, and the college principal.21 The two school boards were joined in 1926 by the commissioners of Stanstead Township (from which the other two had separated in the nineteenth century), who also agreed to contract the college for the teaching of elementary and intermediate students from several of their districts.22 The college continued to provide high-school education to older students from these communities, as well as schooling at all grades to children from across the province, who boarded on the campus. For its part, the Lachute Academy had always had a close relationship with the local schools, drawing Protestant children from across the large municipality of Argenteuil; but this municipality was soon mostly Catholic and the village school was operated by a dissentient board in the 1870s. The town of Lachute, with a majority Protestant population, was incorporated in 1885, and the Protestant commissioners of this new school municipality were pleased to take over control of the academy and turn it into the town’s one integrated school.23 This seems to have been the model followed in Protestant communities that were concentrated in villages and surrounded by a largely Catholic

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rural population. The Buckingham and Aylmer academies were each vested with the local dissentient boards of trustees.24 Because of the dwindling Protestant population in the Aylmer hinterland, it would remain the principal school under the trustees’ control until a larger Protestant school municipality was created for the area in the 1950s. It was also the only secondary institution for Protestants in the region until the 1930s when schools in Hull and Gatineau began offering senior grades. In these large areas served by only one academy or high school, pupils would naturally be obliged to travel long distances. Prior to the 1920s, attendance normally required pupils to board close to the academy.

Inheriting an academy was a stroke of fortune for a public school municipality, but most Protestant communities had to make special arrangements to provide higher grades. Despite the provisions made in the 1840s legislation, superior schools were next to impossible to establish for a great many years. Boards that attempted to put up additional buildings to house a model school were often taken to task by ratepayers for what was seen as an unnecessary expense; we have already seen an example of this in Melbourne. However, the administrative reforms of the 1860s and the drive for professionalization of teachers gave much impetus to the development of model schools in the “most thickly settled” parts of townships. It was during this period that the people of Hemmingford, having been conscious from the beginning of the superior facilities in nearby Huntingdon, strove to improve their own educational situation; as early as 1861 the ratepayers of District No. 5 (Hemmingford village) were asking the commissioners to provide a model school. Nothing came of this until 1868 when the commissioners advertised for a “competent Male teacher” for the village school, a sign that they intended it to take on additional status. They did not seek model status, however, until 1874, and were not able to put up a building suitable for holding model classes until 1883, at which point they could formally advertise for a model teacher.25 It was this building that served as the Hemmingford “English” school until after World War I, when it was condemned by the Department of Public Instruction, which threatened to take away its model status if the commissioners did not replace it; they did, by 1920.26 The procedure in Lennoxville was similar: the newly established Protestant school commission met in 1873 to discuss the state of two village schools under their control (formerly part of the Ascot township board) and agreed that a new model school was needed to serve the community. It was also needed to relieve space. They noted that, in one

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33 Model School, Hemmingford This was Hemmingford’s village school, rebuilt and upgraded to model status. It was eventually replaced by a modern multiroom school, which for some years was the local high school. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c00733]

of the schools, “by moving the present seats nearer together there will be room for seven more seats and by removing the teacher’s desk and putting a table in place it would make still more room, therefore they would think it advisable to have the school continue in the school house for the present.”27 Official approval and funding for the model school were not forthcoming, however, and a decade later the existing facilities were so overcrowded the commissioners were forced to ask for space in the Town Hall. A purpose-built school was not opened until 1912, so for nearly three decades teachers and students made themselves at home in the Town Hall, which was recognized as a model school by the Department of Public Instruction in 1889.28 Model (and later academy) students and teachers occupied three rooms on the ground floor and one on the second, leaving the rest of the second floor and all of the third for municipal offices, and the basement for the caretaker’s apartment and the town jail.29 In these and other cases it is clear that communities desired institutions of superior education long before they were in a position to establish them. It was the same as it had been with basic schools earlier in

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34 Lennoxville town hall and academy Like many early academies, Lennoxville Academy shared space with local municipal offices before it was given a home of its own. The building survives, much altered, on the main street of town. [Lennoxville and Ascot Historical and Museum Society: p 37 sch]

the century: where facilities were lacking, people made do. If a need was strong enough, model grades did not absolutely require a separate school. Any capable teacher in a one-room schoolhouse could give advanced work to the older pupils, preparing them for entry to an academy. When the Protestant Committee began to promote consolidation at the turn of the century, they frowned on this practice, which they felt allowed rural boards to avoid building modern model schools. It was eventually outlawed, although many schools with low attendance continued to keep Grade 8 pupils and send only the older ones to the nearest academy.30 In places like Lennoxville and Ormstown, building a model school did effectively mean the consolidation of rural schools, but both were villages with school boards separate from the rest of the township, and therefore operated only one or two schoolhouses. Most rural boards were eager to open model schools if and when it became feasible and eventually, if possible, to convert the model school into an academy. Neither step necessitated the consolidation of district schools.

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Giving model status to one district school usually meant hiring one teacher to handle the higher grades (later called Grades 6 to 8) and another, usually less qualified, teacher to teach the primary grades; in other words, the district with the model school still had what was essentially a one-room school with an additional room attached to it. This subtlety was significant, given that school districts not blessed with a model school were often resentful. In 1879 the commissioners of Clarendon Township in the Pontiac were faced with a district (No. 1, by the river, the first range of settlement) that wished to pay its teacher considerably more than those of other schools – an indication that the residents intended to provide a superior level of instruction – and threatened to separate from the municipality were this request not met. The commissioners called a public meeting in the Town Hall at Shawville, and asked the residents of the township whether they would prefer two schools or one, meaning did they prefer that the district in question to be allowed to improve its school or that an additional school be built; the majority present opted for an additional school. This school was given model status in 1896, on which occasion the commissioners were careful to make sure it was “distinctly understood that the schools will be treated alike in the matter of expenses,” and that the model school teacher would be paid “her salary out of the fund belonging to no one division.”31 The sensitivity of each district to its status was one reason why the Shawville Academy, the Pontiac’s main secondary school, had been established under a separate school commission, like the earlier academies, even though it was opened in 1880 after most of those institutions had closed or been absorbed into the public system. Shawville itself was the most thickly settled part of Clarendon Township, but it was not at the time the largest village in the county. Having the region’s sole academy reflected its residents’ autonomous spirit and sense of importance. By the early twentieth century, however, the academy’s role as an independent school had given way to that of a public high school. In 1911 the Shawville board decided that a new building should be put up and that it was only proper that the entire community pay for this improvement: “Shawville is the only place in the county having an academy and having a population of nearly 800 and being surrounded by a thickly settled farming community and there being fifty Protestant Elementary schools in the county dependent on Shawville Academy for higher education … If such a building is erected that Shawville will be the Educational Centre of the county and that outside pupils will as well as resident pupils be in a better position to qualify themselves for a higher grade of education.”32 Rivalries may once have existed between private academies and common schools, but now both were seen as

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35 Model School, Leeds This, the original model school for the Township of Leeds, has now been moved to a heritage site in the town of St Jacques de Leeds. It is open to visitors. [Author photo]

integral parts of a graded Protestant education system. This sort of cooperation also occurred in areas with shifting centres of population. The village of Barnston had ceased to be the most thickly settled part of Barnston Township by the 1880s, and soon opted to close its academy; the town of Coaticook had become the area’s nerve centre and had its own academy. St Andrew’s, the original heart of the Anglican parish of Argenteuil, was no longer its most populous place by the end of the century and had closed its own academy; Lachute would henceforth boast the region’s principal Protestant secondary school. Inverness Township, one of the last of the Eastern Townships to be settled, is an example of a community able to establish an integrated school network almost from the beginning. The school board was one of the first in the province to open (not acquire) a public academy. This institution found a permanent home by 1890 in a two-storey brick building with four class rooms, located at the centre of the village. The village itself, conveniently, lay in the middle of the township at an important crossroads, and the township stood roughly in the centre of Megantic County. The academy classes were given by a teacher, Mr Moore, and the primary classes were taught by an assistant, Minnie Lord. Some years later the lower grades were divided into “elementary” and “model,” each with its own teacher. The graduates of Inverness’s dozen or more district schools could attend the academy, but it also attracted children from the surrounding municipalities of Leeds, Halifax, Ireland, and Thetford, who would board in the village.33 The county, it would seem, could only really afford one academy. In 1896 Leeds village had a model school, but it was closed in 1923, as were a number of district schools, and replaced by a consolidated school in

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Kinnear’s Mills, another village within the same municipality.34 This school, which taught up to Grade 9, and others in the region, continued to depend on the Inverness Academy for the senior years – at least until the rapid industrialization of Thetford Mines and the establishment there of a large high school in 1937. In areas with no tradition of district schools, or where Protestants were very much in the minority, establishing a graded system was particularly challenging. Inevitably, the community was widely scattered with few, if any, areas populous enough to justify a schoolhouse. Ironically, if a dissentient board had expanded or merged with others to create a Protestant school municipality with a larger tax base, the consequent increase in size often made it harder to provide convenient schools for the whole population. Such boards typically operated but one school, which they upgraded as soon as possible into a model school and, with luck, into an academy. This school would not be located in the most thickly settled part of the municipality – Protestant dissentient schools were usually in villages or towns already – but rather wherever the board could find a site. Most communities that were able to establish a superior school were also able, eventually, to build “branch” schools to serve the elementary pupils in the more remote parts of the municipality, given sufficient demand. Others, because of financial difficulties or geographical isolation, continued with solitary schools, even solitary academies, in increasingly Catholic landscapes. The Montreal region’s South Shore saw several Protestant communities struggling to establish school systems in a large geographical area whose population fluctuated, but constantly expanded, because of industrialization. In such an environment, rivalry between municipalities played a considerable role in the development of graded schools. The town of Longueuil, the original centre of population in the area, had reason to envy its newer and wealthier rival, St Lambert, which by 1896 already boasted a very successful Protestant academy. As the school municipality of Longueuil’s large but sparsely populated territory virtually surrounded that of St Lambert, it seemed predestined that all roads would lead the pupils of Longueuil into its more central and tightly knit neighbour’s secondary school. The Longueuil school board, however, was determined to establish its own system and set its sights on turning one of its two one-room schools into a model school to serve both the town of Longueuil and the nearby village of Montreal South, which also lay within its jurisdiction. In an attempt to show the school inspector that they were on the road to improvement, the commissioners purchased “a copy of Webster’s unabridged Dictionary, and Globe mounted with full meridian lines at a cost of $15.20 and also

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Map 13 Parish of St Antoine de Longueuil The parish of Longueuil was significantly larger than the town and, by the early twentieth century, also comprised the communities of St Lambert, Montreal South, and Greenfield Park. The Protestant School Municipality of Longueuil, created in 1896, comprised all the territory within the Catholic parish apart from St Lambert, but it would lose ground as separate municipalities like Greenfield Park were established. [After a rsba document.]

had the blackboards done over with excelsior slating, a solution specially got up for the purpose at a cost of $2.10.”35 Inspector McOuat was not impressed by this lavish expenditure: the two schools did not yet even have permanent homes, let alone the makings of a model school. The commissioners struggled for another six years before securing from the federal government the lease of a piece of land, on which they built a three-room school in 1902. By 1911 a third player entered the South Shore Protestant school scene: Greenfield Park, created from a small portion of Longueuil’s territory well to the south and far removed from the town’s population base near the river. Although not yet much of a competitor for the minds of Longueuil children, the new municipality prompted the Longueuil board to subject their model school to a “thorough renova-

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tion,” to make it “the equal of the best in the Province. Parents and guardians are assured that there is no need to send children outside the school municipality to obtain an education when such excellent facilities at a very moderate cost are provided at home.”36 The emphasis on Longueuil’s sufficiency rather suggests a growing sense that the needs of its children were not being met. In the absence of an array of common schools, the commissioners faced a constant challenge in providing instruction to a scattered but expanding population. Over the next few years they received regular petitions from parents to build branch schools, notably in parts of Montreal South, which were closer to the St Lambert Academy than to the Longueuil Model School, and in the eastern part of the town of Longueuil, where an industrial plant established at the beginning of World War I was causing rapid population growth.37 The threat of parents sending their children outside the municipality provided some of the impetus for opening more schools; it also came from the school inspector, who refused to authorize the upgrade of the model school to an academy. The problem, he said, was serious overcrowding, which squeezed too many elementary pupils together and left “no special room for Academy pupils”; either an extra wing would have to be built or additional schools opened.38 By the end of the war, the commissioners had rented accommodations in both Montreal South and Longueuil “East.” These consisted of a Methodist church hall and space within the private home of a Mr Shingsby, who built the necessary desks and chairs himself and allowed the pupils “the use of [his] spacious bathroom at $12 a month.”39 Despite the ad hoc nature of these branch schools, their existence did enable the commissioners to provide a little more space in the model school for the older children, with the result that by the spring of 1916 its status was upgraded to that of academy. This was good timing, as it meant that the board could advertise the school accordingly for the following September and “retain some scholars who would be inclined to go elsewhere for academy instruction.”40 A year later the academy became the Longueuil High School – the change in name being largely a formality, as it was everywhere, but indicative of a desire to appear modern. By the end of the war, however, the commissioners were acutely aware of the school’s shortcomings and the continuing need for space. Over the years additional classrooms had been added or carved out from larger spaces, but they were more crowded than ever and their arrangement was “neither fair to the teacher nor conducive to the best results … the only policy for the board to follow is to develop eventually a twelve or sixteen roomed central school. This will do away with the doubling of grades under one teacher and tend to a more efficient and economical system.”41 In 1919 the Longueuil board adopted

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a “comprehensive and progressive school program” (modelled after the one recently devised by St Lambert) that involved streamlining the curriculum and distributing the classes in the interests of an efficient graded system.42 After the St Lambert board opened two modern branch schools, the Longueuil commissioners decided it was high time to establish permanent schools of their own. Over the course of the 1920s they built the four-room Caroline School in the eastern part of Longueuil, William White School (two rooms) in Montreal South, and a one-room school in an area known as Côte Noire (later Mackayville), which even took pupils from Greenfield Park. Ratepayers, who do not seem to have appreciated the changes affecting this urbanizing area, often protested the expenses involved, which they considered unnecessary; they were particularly alarmed by the board’s plans for Montreal South, which by the late 1920s was slated to be partly eradicated with the building of the Jacques Cartier Bridge.43 The commissioners, however, were listening to the continuing pleas from parents, who were loath to let their young children travel great distances to school. One family even arranged private tutoring and tried to bill the school commissioners, who refused to pay.44 But even with the additional schools and with an addition of four rooms to the high school, including chemistry and physics laboratories, overcrowding was so great that by 1929 the board was forced to send all pupils in Grades 10 and 11 to St Lambert. Although Longueuil would periodically re-open its senior grades over the next decade, any hopes of building a new high school were dashed by the hardship of the Depression. While the South Shore struggled to provide sufficient space for its booming Protestant population, more isolated communities feared for their children’s future. By the early twentieth century it was no longer sufficient simply to provide primary instruction to the majority of pupils. Quite apart from the economic advantages of higher education to individuals, rural communities came to see that producing educated children was important for their own survival. With no educational opportunities at home, the brightest minds (typically from the wealthiest families) would drift elsewhere and almost certainly not return. In 1911 the trustees of the dissentient school in Joliette were conscious of the dangers facing pupils who were forced to look outside the community for higher learning: “There were young people in our Protestant community who could not receive the instruction they needed unless they were sent to Catholic institutions or else sent out of town away from Parental supervision.”45 This was to be the curse of isolated Protestant communities. The solution was to build a second classroom and hire an additional teacher; in this manner, a generation of Joliette Prot-

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estants were given instruction up to Grade 9. In Ste Agathe, a somewhat wealthier Protestant community, but also isolated, a four-room model school had been established in 1913, which over the following decade and a half was enhanced by a tennis court, a library, and facilities for manual training. By the 1920s a small but persistent number of parents were demanding that the school offer Grade 10. The board’s solution was a practical one: rather than force the teachers to add the higher grade to their workload, the existing curriculum would be overhauled “to bring our school up to the Montreal standard” and graduating pupils who wished to continue beyond Grade 9 would be sent to Montreal.46 Despite the inherent moral dangers, this was the solution most isolated Protestant boards chose during the first half of the century. A case in point was Nathan Rosenberg, who graduated from the one-room school in Ste Sophie, did his Grades 8 and 9 in nearby New Glasgow, and then went into Montreal to complete high school, boarding with cousins.47 The long-term effect of this solution, however, was to bring business to the boarding houses of Montreal and Quebec with no economic or social return for the home communities. Public transport made it easier for children in some communities to attend urban high schools. Montreal’s West Island had been gradually developed as a commuter zone thanks to the cpr train line. In the 1890s the francophone and Catholic villages of Pointe Claire, Beaurepaire, and Valois were transformed into largely Anglo-Protestant suburban municipalities. Local dissentient and later majority Protestant school boards operated one-room schoolhouses, but when faced with the need to provide higher grades they could not ignore the benefits of a nearby train. A halfhour ride took pupils from Beaconsfield or Pointe Claire into the city. The West Island boards made arrangements chiefly with the commissioners of Westmount, whose high school, built in 1914 in the landscaped grounds of Westmount Park, lay only a few blocks from the train station. By the 1930s West Island families had an alternative in the new high school in Montreal West, which stood even closer to its station, the second down the line from Montreal. There was also Macdonald High School in Ste Anne de Bellevue, in the other direction, at the western extreme of the island of Montreal; train schedules, however, generally made it more convenient for pupils to travel eastwards. The Protestant community around St Eustache also found itself on a train line after World War I, when the Canadian Northern Railway dug a tunnel under Mount Royal and ran tracks up through Laval to Lac des Deux Montagnes. The Protestant school municipality of Grande Fresnière operated one school in St Eustache, located in a church hall, which nevertheless took in children from a large area, including the western part of Laval. By the 1940s, with high-school attendance

See facing page for caption.

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36 cpr railway station, Valois The village of Valois on Montreal’s West Island became a commuter suburb with the arrival of train service in the twentieth century. Many secondary students in the area relied on the train to reach the high schools they attended in Montreal, Westmount, or Montreal West. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c05584]

becoming the norm in urban areas, parents began to express concern that no proper Protestant facilities were available in the Lac des Deux Montagnes area. The school inspectors also complained that the rented hall was badly overcrowded and that a large graded school should be built immediately.48 The board relieved the pressure somewhat by securing additional classroom space in, of all things, a local country club, but set to work at once negotiating government grants and bank loans to fund the building of a new Protestant school in St Eustache sur le Lac; this community (later known as Deux Montagnes), which lay a short distance from the old village of St Eustache, had grown up as a residential suburb near the train station. By the end of World War II

Map 14 Communities on and around the Island of Montreal The train lines indicated here were key to gaining access to secondary education for many Protestants in the Montreal area prior to the 1950s. Students from Beaconsfield and Pointe Claire would take the cpr trains into Montreal West and Westmount, while those in St Eustache would travel by cnr to the Town of Mount Royal.

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nearly all pupils under the board’s jurisdiction were accommodated here up to the end of Grade 7. Older pupils took the train into the Town of Mount Royal, a comfortable suburb planned around the commuter line, just north of the mountain tunnel; the high school there had been opened recently and was convenient to the station. This was a happy arrangement for many years, marred only by the occasional complaint from Town of Mount Royal commissioners about the behaviour of some St Eustache pupils while at the station.49 By 1951 the St Eustache school was offering Grade 9, and was given the status of an intermediate school, roughly the equivalent of a model school. Encouraged, the board undertook a six-room addition (plus a gym), and opened branch schools in Laval West and the village of St Eustache. Within two years the intermediate school was permitted to teach grades beyond nine, and began to call itself the Lake of Two Mountains Protestant High School.50 The continuing expansion of the Protestant population in the area meant, however, that some of the high-school classrooms had to be turned over to the elementary grades and many secondary students still had to take the train into Montreal. Only with the building of a new elementary school in St Eustache in 1959 was the pressure on the high school eased. By that time, high schools had been built in Ste Agathe and Joliette. The Ste Agathe Academy (as it was styled, somewhat anachronistically) served a large Protestant population, albeit one scattered over a huge area. By contrast, the school board in Joliette felt obliged to build the new five-room school simply to stop families from leaving the community because of the lack of facilities.51 The Gaspé coast experienced a very different sort of isolation. Unlike Ste Agathe or St Eustache the area had a large Protestant population with deep historical roots. The local economy depended on the sea and the soil, affording an even but not prosperous existence. By the beginning of the century, apart from the train (which connected New Carlisle with Quebec City and Montreal from 1902 on), industrialization had barely touched the area. The population, moreover, was strung out along a thin line next to the sea – the Protestant population particularly. New Carlisle had been the administrative centre of the peninsula and remained so for the English-speaking residents along Chaleur Bay; it was a logical place to build a high school. No academies had been established in the peninsula, although since the turn of the century a number of model schools had been opened; in 1913 the school municipality of Cox operated two, in New Carlisle and in the village of Paspébiac, some ten kilometres to the east. The first of these was upgraded to an academy and within two years the school was rebuilt to

Map 15 South coast of the Gaspé Peninsula The north shore of Chaleur Bay was a major centre of Protestant settlement and still has many English-speaking or bilingual communities.

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accommodate four classes with one teacher for the academy grades, one for the “model department,” and two elementary teachers. The commissioners were proud of their pioneering role in providing higher education to the Protestants along the coast, but equally conscious that the population base could not really support another secondary school. They were happy to welcome older pupils from all parts of the peninsula – partly because of the outsider fees, but more importantly because this helped to maintain levels of attendance that justified keeping the high school open. These pupils had to be housed, of course, which soon put a strain on New Carlisle’s providers of room and board. In 1921, at a meeting with the school inspector and representatives from the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the board devised a solution that would advance the cause not only of the high school but also of the whole region’s Protestant population: a School Home. Costs for this institutional boarding house were to be met by the church, as long as the commissioners would provide tuition at the high school for all secondary pupils from all Protestant denominations in the counties of Gaspé (the north and east coasts of the peninsula) and Bonaventure (the south coast). For its part, the Department of Public Instruction pledged an annual grant of $1,500 (later $2,000) to add to the teachers’ salaries, an increase deemed essential if a sufficient number of qualified instructors were to make their careers in this remote spot. Rarely had so many bodies agreed “to make a special effort in the advancement of Education in this District.”52 In September 1924 the School Home opened its doors to the peninsula’s senior girls, whose comportment away from home was of great concern to parents and community alike; boys were to board privately. Within a few years it was agreed that the home was “a great asset to education and also a moral and material benefit to the High School.” Furthermore, “the rate of board charged is quite reasonable, [the school] is equipped with modern conveniences and has been in charge of competent and experienced matrons whose administration has been to the entire satisfaction of the clergy and all others interested in the welfare of the High School both as to the personal care of the pupils housed there, supervision of study and moral influence.”53 As a result of this success, the commissioners proudly noted, many boys (who could make full use of existing boarding facilities) and girls from the entire coast were able to attend the high school and later enter “the teaching profession, university or business.” This would ultimately serve the interests of the whole region, as long as these young people remained in the Gaspé. The commissioners also noted that, having a recently installed sewage system, the school was the only one on the coast with modern sanitation.54

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37 Academy, New Carlisle Built in 1913, the academy in New Carlisle was for decades the only Protestant secondary school on the Gaspé coast and, as such, it was a vital institution to both town and coast. The School Home can be seen in the background. [Photo courtesy of Carol Gilkin]

38 School Home, New Carlisle The School Home was a residence for young women attending the academy (later high school) in New Carlisle, enabling the school to serve students from along the coast without taxing the limited boarding facilities in town. Although run by the Presbyterian Church, it took students of all denominations. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c04130]

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New Carlisle’s School Home provides a rare instance of a school board being directly involved in the moral welfare of pupils outside the confines of the school. The commissioners set rules for the home that reflected clear moral standards. The young ladies were to be in the residence by seven in the evening, with the exception of Fridays, when they could return at 10:30 pm providing they had their parents’ written consent. Naturally, they were not permitted to “sleep out,” or to have outsiders sleep at the residence. They were also expected to “attend the Sunday services of their respective churches.”55 Although these could hardly be seen as unreasonable restrictions for the time, many girls chose to board privately. That parents allowed their daughters this option suggests that the cost of the School Home was higher than many could afford. Young women could board with extended family or family friends; they could also offset the costs of boarding by working part-time in the town or by doing chores in the houses where they boarded. This practice of boarding privately was of great concern to the commissioners; not only were these girls living outside the supervision of the official chaperones, but they were limiting the number of places where boys could board, which would have the ultimate effect of discouraging attendance at the high school. The board took the awkward step of refusing to admit senior girls from outside the municipality who did not agree to board at the School Home.56 The link between the success of the home and the survival of the high school was very clear in the commissioners’ minds, especially given that “there being no other high school in this district, boys and girls of the Gaspé coast and New Carlisle in particular will be deprived of the privilege of obtaining the essential qualification for entrance to Macdonald College … University Matriculation which will be a great step backward educationally on the coast.”57 They were also very concerned that a number of intermediate schools in the area were offering Grade 10 rather than have their pupils sent to New Carlisle; this practice, they argued, could also lead to the closure of the high school and ran counter to common sense, given the superior educational and sanitary facilities available there.58 In 1931 the board succeeded in having the Department of Public Instruction stop issuing Grade 10 permits to intermediate schools. By that time many communities along the coast were consolidating their one-room schools, and the new multi-room schools concentrated on providing elementary education. In 1940, with wartime shortages and competing demands on public funding, the School Home was forced to close. But despite the commissioners’ previous concerns – or, perhaps, because of them and the consequent efforts they took to improve the building – the high school continued to thrive. Secondary students were now bused in from surrounding mu-

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nicipalities, and their numbers swelled so that by 1950 the board was obliged to undertake a major extension to the building.

As some historians have noted, the dissolution or conversion of the old academies and the official promotion of graded public schools did limit the supply of uncertified teachers – teachers who, however difficult their work environments and however underqualified some of them may have been, nevertheless kept large numbers of rural Protestant children at school until well into the twentieth century. The Protestant Committee’s insistence on its own sanctioned methods of training teachers and its bias in favour of hiring male principals and, increasingly, male specialists in high schools, often made it difficult for boards to secure a sufficient number of teachers without deviating from the guidelines. As late as 1948 the New Carlisle commissioners were obliged to write Percival requesting permission to hire “three available women who have had five years experience in teaching,” but who presumably had insufficient qualifications to teach secondary school. Percival replied that it was not for him to decide such matters.59 Such limitations notwithstanding, most Protestant school boards really wanted qualified teachers to run their model schools and academies, and by the 1890s it seemed to them that self-taught men of learning and even graduates of independent academies were not up to the task. The McGill Normal School was not an institution that rural scholars could attend easily, or at any rate cheaply, given the need to board privately in the city. Its ranks, like those of the Protestant Committee itself, came mostly from the urban middle classes, who were usually unfamiliar with the problems of rural schools. Nevertheless, its graduates were highly sought after by small Protestant boards to lead their model schools and academies and to serve as specialists in emerging departments such as French or music. The trouble that the people of Inverness had with their academy’s teacher shows a world on the brink of change. Indeed, the incident seems like a throwback to the days of the Royal Institution, when men with failed university careers, or those who would rather have been living the life of a student in the city, took their frustrations out on families in small rural communities. In the summer of 1892 a number of Inverness residents complained to the school board that the teacher, Mr Moore, not only abused alcohol but also had been seen drunk in public, shouting that “a man had to be a God damned hypocrite to teach the Inverness Academy.” On another occasion a parent of a boy whom Moore had recently disciplined encountered the teacher “on the public highway,” and when he raised the subject of the child’s

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punishment was verbally assaulted by Moore. As the board rather cattily put it, “Mr Moore took the name of God in vain, and swore bitter and profane oaths, and this when Mr Moore was sober.” Moore’s defence against the last charge was that there had been no witnesses, but to the charges of intoxication he claimed that he had, in fact, been drugged.60 The commissioners convinced Moore to make a public apology, and then, with what must have been considerable diplomacy, got the parents to drop all charges. A page had clearly been turned a few years later when the board decided to advertise for a principal for the academy, and two teachers (not assistants) for, respectively, the model and elementary departments. This was another case where the change in nomenclature had little practical significance, but it did imply a more modern understanding of the distribution of work within the school and a higher status for all staff members. Although Macdonald College did not actually give certificates in secondary school teaching, it did provide specialized instruction in the teaching of such advanced subjects as nature study, household science, and manual training, all of which would become features of secondary schools.61 The reputation of a Macdonald College education was soon established, and boards began to seek out graduates for their model schools and academies. As early as the summer of 1911, for example, the Shawville board was asking the college to recommend someone for the job of academy principal.62 Technically, a graduate of the School for Teachers had no place running a secondary school; however, the exact nature of an “academy” was still somewhat ambiguous, as traditionally the term could refer to schools that were independent of the common school system as well as to institutions of higher learning, occasionally with college-level aspirations. For most school boards, what was good enough for up-to-date elementary and model schools was good enough for rural high schools. Macdonald College graduates also provided a convenient and relatively inexpensive means of being in a position to offer higher grades. Boards would often arrange to send their teachers to Ste Anne for a year in hopes that they would return with the proper qualifications and enhance the status of the school. The Joliette board’s need for a model school in 1911 was met by asking the teacher “Miss Broadhurst if she could possibly secure a Model Diploma and take charge of the higher grade.”63 This request suggests that they were loath to lose Miss Broadhurst, who could as easily have been replaced by someone already certified. The existence of Macdonald College allowed boards this sort of flexibility. A teacher might also be allowed time at the college to acquire a specialization, as the example of Grace Simpson in chapter 5 suggests: Miss Simpson was paid by the Ormstown board to attend a summer course in 1912 and she came back qualified to head the high school’s French department.64

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School boards generally preferred men over women to teach the higher grades. Board members, all men, were imbued with the idea that men were more competent to teach sciences and to discipline older and bigger male students. Ironically, young female teachers in rural schools often had such students in their classrooms, but no one questioned their ability to maintain discipline and they were criticized when they did not. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was Protestant Committee policy to put a male teacher at the head of each academy and a female teacher at the head of each model school.65 In practice, however, boards were quite willing to give the top jobs to women, at least while the graded system was evolving, largely because women principals, like women teachers, could be paid less than men. When they wished to replace the intemperate Mr Moore, the Inverness board hired a male principal at an annual salary of $500, but after three years with a man in this position, they engaged Miss Mary McQuaig, at considerable savings, for $350.66 But penny-pinching was not the only factor: the common notion that women were more suitable primary-level teachers than men extended to the administration of institutions that were in their infancy. Just as the first model-school education was often given by elementary teachers to older scholars under their care, so were the first academy grades often the responsibility of model-school teachers. Boards typically chose women to head the academies that were recently upgraded model schools, such as the one in New Carlisle, where Caroline Blampin was hired as principal in 1914 at a salary of $1,000. Her tenure, however, was relatively brief, given the number of complaints by parents about her methods of discipline, which appear to have bordered on cruelty. Miss Blampin’s alleged offences included giving thirty blows of the strap to a pupil who “would not stand in line properly”; beating a child until she fainted for not bringing an excuse after several days’ absence; and holding a child while the principal beat her for not having a hat and mitts (and attempting to return home to fetch them).67 Although this experience might well give the lie to the idea that women teachers were necessarily more nurturing, it was an exception that proved the rule so far as the general perception was concerned. Nevertheless, to have a male principal for a high school was an essential part of the process of creating modern, graded school networks. As such, it represented a serious limitation to the careers of women teachers and prolonged the stereotypes about them. Sooner or later, boards would put men in control of secondary schools, and for almost all new high schools a male principal was hired. In 1911 the decision by the Lennoxville commissioners to rebuild the academy as a “modern and up to date school building … providing the best educational

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facilities” coincided with the resignation of Miss Veaudry, who had been principal since 1903 but who was forced to apologize for the “unsatisfactory results obtained by Grade III Academy” brought about by her own poor health and some confusion over the supply of textbooks.68 She was replaced by a male principal who presided over the opening of the new academy. With the establishment of science in the curriculum and laboratories in the high schools, the job of teaching these courses typically fell to the male principal or, in some cases, required that a male principal be hired.69 By the 1930s a principal’s role was becoming more that of an administrator than of a teacher, and boards began to accommodate this trend by lightening the principal’s teaching load.70 Wisdom had it that highschool students needed a father figure of sorts, and male principals came to espouse the culture of a school in a way that was very hard for a woman to do. Having hired a series of female principals for a year or two at a time, the trustees of the Ste Agathe Academy gave the job to a man, James Jacobsen, in 1930. Jacobsen remained at the academy’s helm until his death in 1964, at which time the trustees paid him the following tribute: “Jacobsen developed the school premises from a small rural school-house to one of the finest buildings in the Protestant school system … [the] school has enjoyed a splendid record of attainment under his direction … the whole Ste Agathe community owes to his memory its profound gratitude.”71 Some years later, the community’s gratitude took the form of renaming the academy the James H. Jacobsen High School – the ultimate compliment to a man who personified all the attributes desirable in a male head of a secondary school: authority, respectability, permanence.

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7

Honorary Protestants: Jewish Pupils and the Protestant Boards The admission of Jewish citizens to the electorate, and as a consequence, of Jewish representatives to the membership of the Board, would immediately involve the destruction of the Christian character of the administration. The employment of Jewish teachers would logically follow, and as a result the religious instruction of Protestant children would, in certain cases, be placed in non-Christian hands. It seems scarcely necessary to characterize such an innovation as undesirable. H.J. Silver, Secretary of the pbsc of the City of Montreal, 27 March 19091

The Protestant Dissentient School Board of Ste Sophie was established at a gathering of thirteen local landowners in July 1914. A rural community lying some forty kilometres north of Montreal at the foot of the Laurentian mountains, Ste Sophie originally formed part of an area known as New Glasgow, which had been settled by Scots in the 1820s, though over the course of the following half century it had seen its Protestant population dwindle and Catholic settlers become the majority. In the 1830s the Scots operated a school in the village of New Glasgow, which later came under the jurisdiction of the school municipality of St Lin; Sir Wilfrid Laurier was its most famous graduate. By 1850 it was a dissentient school. A separate municipality of Lacorne – later Ste Sophie de Lacorne – was established in 1855, with a separate Catholic school commission; the village of New Glasgow now fell within its jurisdiction. The Ste Sophie trustees elected in 1914 did not, therefore, constitute the area’s first dissentient board, as their counterparts in New Glasgow, a few kilometres down the road, had a

Map 16 Ste Sophie, New Glasgow, and St Lin The distances between these communities can be seen in this fragment of a national topographical map of 1934: New Glasgow lies barely 3 km from Ste Sophie. The Scotland School, just south of the village of Ste Sophie, is indicated by an “s” at lower left. [Canada, Surveys and Mapping Bureau, National Topographic Maps, 1934.]

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history going back to the late 1840s. Even so, the board in Ste Sophie represented a distinct constituency and its school served a much more broadly based community than did the one in nearby New Glasgow. This community was Jewish and the trustees of Ste Sophie’s Protestant Dissentient Board – Messrs Fineberg, Gray, Kahansky, Shimkin, Zaritsky, and Shaposnick, the chair, – were Jews. As far as the law was concerned, however, at least for educational purposes, they were regarded as Protestant. Ste Sophie represents a unique example of a Jewish community virtually co-opting the school-board structure to meet its own needs; elsewhere, Jews were obliged to make arrangements with existing Protestant boards. In Montreal and the surrounding area, but also in Quebec, the Eastern Townships, and the Laurentians, Jews enjoyed a curious relationship with Protestants in the matter of education – one that was fraught with considerable tension but brought benefits to both sides. For Jewish families not wishing to send their children to religious institutions, public school was a welcome alternative and a few minutes daily of Protestant scripture seemed a reasonable compromise. Virtually all of them felt that the Protestant curriculum could accommodate them better than that provided in Catholic schools; some found that Catholic boards were distinctly unwelcoming towards them, even hostile. This is not to say that Jews were always treated fairly by Protestant boards, and certainly not to argue that Jewish pupils were always well received in Protestant schools. The interests of Jews often conflicted with those of Protestants, given that each was a minority community, and this conflict came to a head at the school-board level. The Jewish community continually debated their role within the public school system, and at times differing attitudes led to, or exacerbated, internal divisions.2 For the Protestants’ part, the presence of Jewish pupils in their school system proved challenging, especially when sheer numbers threatened to undermine their autonomy and distort what was perceived as the very nature of Protestant education. Resentment sometimes took the form of open hostility towards immigrants, and even anti-Semitism. At the same time, the need to accommodate this community of outsiders eventually spoke to the Protestant tradition of inclusion, suggesting that the provision of schooling might be of greater value than the preservation of partisan interest.

By the time of Confederation, Quebec’s Jews had established an uneasy alliance with the Protestant community, partly out of fear of ultramontanism and partly because most prominent Jewish families had origins in Britain. (The congregation was known as the “Spanish and

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Portuguese” because of the Iberian origins of the Sefardim – despite their having lived for generations in Britain or the United States.) The population was hardly large enough, however, for it to figure in the bna Act’s clause protecting minority rights to education, and synagogues had affiliated schools that seemed adequate to the community’s needs. But with the creation of the taxation panels in 1869, Montreal’s Jewish property owners found themselves obliged to support public education, and the two confessional boards became rivals for control of this potential revenue. The British and Canadian School, with its long tradition of religious neutrality, had an obvious appeal to the Jewish community, who agreed to pay their taxes to the Protestant Board of School Commissioners in return for the employment of a Hebrew teacher there. This arrangement worked well until a dispute arose in 1886 over a teacher’s appointment, and the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, which included most of the city’s Jewish property owners, withdrew their support. They struck a deal with the Catholic board whereby the congregation would collect the tax, pay it to the board, and receive 80 per cent of it back to fund their religious schools. This action amounted to a betrayal of the majority of Jewish families, who were not ratepayers, by the well-to-do congregation. It also proved critical for the Protestant board, who were obliged to educate their 172 children with only $600 per year, as opposed to the $1,700 that the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue was able to spend on its thirty-five children.3 The situation was resolved only in 1894 when the Spanish and Portuguese ratepayers agreed to close their school and once more direct their taxes to the Protestant panel; in return, the Protestant board would hire a Hebrew teacher and subsidize the new Baron de Hirsch school for disadvantaged Jewish children, which would then fall under their jurisdiction.4 In the course of their negotiations with the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, the Protestant Committee began to argue that, for taxation purposes, the term “Protestant” should mean “not Roman Catholic.” Not surprisingly, this argument infuriated Catholics, and led to a serious deterioration of relations between the two committees. Securing the support of the Jewish elite represented a considerable financial windfall for Montreal’s Protestant board, as well as a moral victory over their Catholic counterparts, who had never shown signs of desiring to teach Jewish pupils despite accepting funds for that purpose for eight years. The much-promoted tolerance of the Protestant commissioners would soon be tested, however, as their schools began to fill with Jewish children from working-class, non-taxpaying immigrant families who began to arrive in increasing numbers in the late 1880s. The city’s Jewish community expanded to nearly 7,000 by the turn of the century from some 400 three decades earlier, and the newcomers

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39 Baron de Hirsch School, Montreal Built as the headquarters of the Baron de Hirsch Institute, the school was operated by the Protestant School Commissioners from 1894 to 1907. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c08073]

were generally Eastern European, having little in common culturally with the relatively assimilated Jews of the older congregations.5 They tended to settle in the central and northern parts of the city, especially along and just off St Laurent Boulevard, known as The Main. With only yearly enrolment figures to go by, the Protestant commissioners took some time to notice this growth and the shrinkage in their traditional population base. In 1901 they counted only 6,776 resident Protestant pupils in their schools, down 590 from the previous year. However, an increase in the number of non-resident Protestant pupils (those who came from outside city limits), as well as of Jewish and Roman Catholic pupils, put total attendance at 144 higher than the previous year. “It would appear that the Protestant population is shifting more and more from the city to the suburbs,” the commissioners noted. “On the other hand the loss in numbers thus occasioned is nearly countered by the very considerable increase in the number of resident Jews.”6 Although the decline of the core population within city limits was cause for concern, the board was even more worried about the impact of these non-Protestants in their midst.

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As in 1869, Protestants came to feel that they were subsidizing the education of outsiders, which was essentially the case, despite the payment of higher fees by non-Protestant residents and those from outside Montreal. Conscious of its rising deficit and increasingly crowded classrooms, the board resolved not to automatically accept these outsiders into their schools if ratepayers or, more significantly, needy Protestant children, had a better claim to their services.7 At this juncture one of the scholarships offered by the commissioners was won by Jacob Pensler, a Jewish student whose parents were not ratepayers; on these grounds, the commissioners refused to award the scholarship, as if to reinforce their assertion that Jews attended Protestant schools by the grace of the board and not by right. The Pensler family sued the board and, as bad feeling mounted, the commissioners decided to withdraw their subsidy of the Baron de Hirsch School until they could be assured that the Jewish community would continue to support them.8 In early 1903 the courts decided that Jews had, in effect, no rights within the school system. To protest this verdict, a mass meeting was held, at which “for the first time the whole Jewish Community of Montreal was represented,” where it was decided to appeal to the legislature to modify the Education Act so as to give recourse to Jewish families.9 A deputation led by the lawyer Maxwell Goldstein met with the Protestant commissioners, who proved fairly amenable to the idea of legislative change. They recognized “that this glaring anomaly and injustice which deprive so large and respectable an element of our population as the Hebrew people, of their rights as regards elementary education should be removed.” They also had some important reservations: “At the same time we must call the attention of our Protestant constituents to the danger there is that their rights may be imperilled while the wrongs of the Jews are being rectified.”10 They were chiefly concerned with how the board would afford to educate Jewish pupils should the law oblige them to do so. The 1903 Act resulting from these meetings granted Montreal’s Jews the educational rights that Protestants enjoyed, effectively equating the two communities “for school purposes.” It also required that Jewish ratepayers pay their taxes to the Protestant panel. The prevailing feeling among Protestants was that the Act righted a serious wrong and that it was to the credit of their system that these people could be accommodated. For liberal immigrants such as Goldstein, the Act promised to provide the sort of sound, practical, and – given a “conscience clause” that allowed Jewish pupils not to partake in Bible scripture lessons – secular education they had hoped for in the New World. Others, however, were more sensitive to the realities of Quebec education, and feared that public schools would never successfully accommodate Jew-

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ish pupils owing to the confessional nature of the system. However welcoming the Protestant system might seem, while Catholics insisted on teaching their religion in the classroom, Protestants could be expected to insist on their own rights.11 Most early twentieth-century Protestants had no desire to receive a purely secular education and the school board had no intention of providing one as long as its primary responsibility was to the Protestant community. For this reason, the Jewish promoters of the 1903 legislation had assured them that its terms would in no way diminish the Christian character of Protestant schools. Many Protestants, however, were uncomfortable with the implications of being equated with Jews on any level. This attitude, the result of long-seeded prejudice, was nevertheless usually expressed in veiled terms. For example, many Protestants were concerned that the presence of a sizeable number of Jewish pupils in a class would make learning scripture difficult, while some even feared that their own children were acquiring foreign accents.12 The commissioners as a body were also divided as to the wisdom of including Jews in the Protestant camp, as they had been in the late 1880s when the subject of merging the two panels had been raised. They regularly commented on how the costs of schooling the Jewish community always exceeded available funding, a reference that belied the acceptance of equality between the two groups and yet, because it was technically true, was more likely than other complaints to give offence to Jewish families. The board also had limited tolerance for requests that Jewish holidays be acknowledged, a concession that promised not only to complicate the planning of the school year but also to undermine the nature of the Christian calendar. The presence of Jewish teachers within the system was also a source of much ambivalence, even overt prejudice. Jewish graduates of the Protestant Normal School, which McGill had been producing since the turn of the century, found it difficult to find employment in the public system, apart from at the Baron de Hirsch School. This problem was generally attributed to covert prejudice on the board’s part, although many Protestants, including a number of the commissioners, felt it was genuinely inappropriate to have non-Protestant teachers in charge of Protestant pupils.13 Protestants and Jews rubbed shoulders in classrooms throughout the central part of Montreal, especially after the board closed the Baron de Hirsch School in 1907 and transferred its more than 600 pupils to regular public schools: above all, to Aberdeen, Dufferin, and Mount Royal. This move was in keeping with the concept of equality, which did not seem to justify a special school for Jews, though it did leave many pupils with limited English no alternative but to struggle amidst

See facing page for caption.

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native speakers and second-generation immigrants.14 Even so, the great concentration of Jewish families along the Main meant that in many of these schools the majority of students were Jewish by the time of World War I. In these schools, the fears of some parents that the classroom demographics interfered with the teaching of Protestant scripture were partly justified. As time went on, however, segregation in all but name became the rule, as the schools along the Main grew overwhelmingly Jewish, while Jewish pupils were barely represented in schools elsewhere. What remained ominous for the commissioners was that this virtual Jewish sector within the Protestant system appeared to be constantly expanding. The new schools opened during this period to accommodate immigrants – Strathearn, Devonshire, Fairmount, Edward VII, Bancroft – were soon filled to capacity with mostly Jewish pupils. At the secondary level, the Commercial and Technical High School had been built in 1906 in the heart of the immigrant quarter as a workingclass alternative to the High School of Montreal in the west end. In 1922 the latter’s Jewish population was significantly reduced with the opening of the Protestant board’s second mainstream high school, Baron Byng. Located on St Urbain Street, near the Main, Baron Byng came to serve the bulk of the city’s Jewish secondary students, who soon constituted 97 per cent of its population.15 The Protestant commissioners were willing enough to provide school accommodation for these immigrants, but they were firmly opposed to any Jewish representation on the school board. Since 1903 the Jewish Map 17 Enrolment in Montreal’s Protestant elementary schools, 1925 The network of Montreal Protestant schools changed considerably from the 1900s to the 1920s. Many more schools were built to accommodate the ballooning immigrant population of the central and northern sections. In this map, the large figure in each district represents the total school population in 1925, while the smaller numbers indicated by “J” and “G” represent the numbers of Jewish and Greek Orthodox pupils, respectively, within each school. In many cases Jews constituted the vast majority of students. Moreover, these schools – especially Strathearn, Devonshire, Mount Royal, and Aberdeen – also had extremely large populations. Elsewhere, however, the Jewish population is much smaller, notably in well-to-do districts such as Victoria and Belmont, and in older workingclass districts such as Lorne and Riverside. Curiously, the number of Jewish pupils is also much smaller in William Dawson district; east of St Denis street, the area now referred to as the Plateau saw very little settlement by Jewish families. [Source: Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, Annual Reports.]

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community had felt that some sort of representation was only just, given that they were supposedly on equal terms with Protestants, and they did not see that it would in any way affect Protestants’ constitutional guarantees to a particular form of education. Nevertheless, Protestants reacted badly to their demand, interpreting it as a desire to undermine one of their key institutions. The commissioners were especially hostile to the attempts by liberal members of the legislature to bring democracy to Montreal’s school boards. One such attempt in 1909 proposed doubling the number of commissioners on the Protestant board to twelve, four to be appointed by the government and the remaining eight to be elected by Protestant and Jewish ratepayers.16 This was an attack on two fronts: challenging the exclusively Protestant nature of the board and threatening to open up the orderly pattern of government appointment – which many saw as the best means to ensure the respectable presence of clergy at the helm of public education – to the will of the broad electorate. It was not clear which danger worried the board more. The language used by some commissioners in opposing this bill struck Goldstein as unusually anti-Semitic: the Reverend James Barclay, for example, declared that he, for one, would not entrust the education of his children to a thief – which was both a general denigration of Jews and a specific accusation that the demand for inclusion was tantamount to theft of something Protestants had created for themselves.17 Like other attempts to reform the city school boards, this bill did not pass, but in resisting it, the Protestant commissioners had revealed much latent hostility towards their Jewish constituency. An even lower point in Protestant-Jewish relations came in March 1913 when a sixth-grade teacher in Aberdeen School made a disparaging remark about her Jewish pupils, and the students reacted by calling a general strike. They marched to the Baron de Hirsch Institute and to the offices of the Keneder Adler, a Jewish newspaper, demanding that action be taken against the teacher unless she apologize. With students picketing outside, Aberdeen’s principal refused to make a statement, deferring the matter to the commissioners. Under pressure from the board and the institute, the teacher “expressed her regret for having made inappropriate comments which were misunderstood by the children.”18 While this did not constitute an apology as far as the students were concerned, they did agree to go back to class while the board and the institute representatives discussed what was to be done. The students’ action, remarkable in itself, also inspired a segment of the Jewish community to reconsider their relationship with the Protestant school system – not, significantly, because they felt the Protestants were inherently objectionable but because it seemed clear that Jewish dignity could never flourish in any mainstream institution.19 For their part, the

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40 Aberdeen School, Montreal This Protestant school on St Denis street had a large Jewish population, and was the site of the students’ strike in 1906 over a teacher’s comment that was perceived to be racist. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c06069]

Protestant commissioners came to feel that they, too, had lost a degree of dignity as a result of the strike. In the wake of their negotiations with the Baron de Hirsch representatives they made a very conspicuous point of hiring a number of Jewish teachers for the following school year; within a decade the board was employing over seventy, hardly enough to go around all the schools on the Main, but a definite improvement over the situation at the beginning of the century.20 This concession did not satisfy the growing number of voices calling for a separate Jewish school board. By the early 1920s this option began to appeal to many Protestants as an answer to the “educational problem,” as it came to be known. For years Protestants had argued that their school board was happy to share with the Jewish community “the splendid educational system and equipment which has been built upon the sacrifices of half a century,” but they resented the attempts to unseat Protestants from its helm.21 More than ever, Anglo-Protestants were jealously guarding their institutions, having seen their involvement in provincial and municipal government diminish as the century progressed. They were also fearful of the tide of immigration: the great expansion of the Main continued after the war, bringing seemingly endless numbers of Jewish families into the system. Protestant schools, which had accommodated some 1,500 Jewish pupils at the turn of the century, served over 12,000 by the early 1920s.22 Schools with heavy

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Jewish populations were also terribly crowded: the average number of pupils per classroom in Mount Royal School was forty-two, and the average was nearly as high in other schools further to the north, such as Fairmount and Bancroft.23 Although the board had expanded many of these schools during the first two decades of the century, by the 1920s the commissioners had all but ceased to make improvements to schools along the Main. Immigration projections predicted that Protestants would soon be outnumbered by Jews in Montreal, a situation that would make the school system inoperable. The concentration of so many Jewish families along the Main made the idea of a separate Jewish school board all the more feasible. The issue of separate boards and of segregation by room or school within the Protestant system was hotly debated. Both ideas were met with strong opposition, and not only from those within the Jewish community who were fearful of losing the little ground they had gained in 1903. Canadian nationalists found they had much in common with liberal Jews when it came to their vision of a country steeped in tolerance and “British fair play.” Goldstein had spoken for many across the religious spectrum when he “expressed a preference for National Schools with religious teaching excluded,” but admitted that given “an overwhelming French Roman Catholic majority it was desirable that Jews and Protestants should work together, perhaps they could be given equal rights in the schools, each having its own religious teaching at a common hour.” He maintained that “a separate Jewish panel with separate schools for children of Jews is not in the interests of the Community nor in the interests of the Jewish population.”24 This compromise on the question of religious instruction did not detract from what was essentially a liberal view, one that would be echoed throughout the inter-war period in the face of political radicalism, ethnic prejudice, and religious fundamentalism. Many Protestants, however, saw a religiously based education as a vital defence against an increasingly secular world.25 For them, the only acceptable alternative to a separate Jewish board was complete segregation within the Protestant system. “The Christian teacher teaching the elements of the Christian faith to a class half Protestant and half Jewish is very much handicapped,” they argued. “It is only in the classes one hundred per cent Protestant, with a Protestant teacher, that the Protestant faith can be taught openly as we wish it to be taught to our Protestant pupils.”26 This argument closely resembles those advocated by the Jewish Community Council. Established in 1922, the council gave a voice to many who rejected the claims of Goldstein and others to speak for the community. Although divided on the question of religious education, the council came to promote a separate school

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board as a means of avoiding assimilation and asserting the Jewish identity. Such a board would be unique in the Western world, as were Quebec’s existing confessional school systems. In 1921 the Protestant Committee began to push for the repeal of the 1903 Act, claiming that the financial situation made it no longer feasible. A year later a new act, which returned the taxes of Jewish ratepayers to the jurisdiction of the neutral panel, was passed; this meant, in effect, that Jewish families were obliged once again to contribute to public education as outsiders. The Protestant board no longer gained any advantage by securing revenues from Jewish ratepayers; if the rank and file wished to attend Protestant schools in all their vast numbers, they would pay by the head. The question of Jewish rights within the system remained and became a matter for the courts. After many decisions and appeals, and much passionate debate, the Privy Council ruled in 1928 that the 1903 Act was ultra vires – that Jews had, in effect, no right to education within existing school systems and that to equate them with Protestants even for educational purposes was in violation of section 93 of the bna Act guaranteeing the existence of a Protestant form of education. This ruling gave the upper hand to the proponents of a separate Jewish board, who secured the passing of legislation to this effect early in 1930. In April a Jewish School Commission with seven appointed members was established, to be funded by taxes from Jewish ratepayers and a share of the remaining neutral panel. The new board had the power to create a system of Jewish public schools or, if that should prove difficult, to make a deal with one of the established boards. The latter seemed the more likely option, and the Protestant board the obvious partner, given the array of schools in the central and northern parts of Montreal that were already Jewish in all but name. Despite the reservations of much of the Protestant community, the creation of a third confessional board promised financial relief and posed no threat to Protestants’ distinct status. Similarly, on the Jewish side, some voices mourned the death of the 1903 accord and others claimed the legislation had not gone far enough, but most acknowledged that separation was far preferable to segregation by class or school. The Jewish School Commission did find, however, that it had a powerful enemy in the Catholic church. Montreal’s Catholic commissioners had stood by for thirty years while the Protestant board crossed swords with the Jewish community over their rights to a public education – rights that the Catholic board virtually refused to extend – and while Protestant clergy, parents, and teachers earned bad press for their insensitivity. Catholics had escaped the critical eye of the Jewish elite during the debates over reforming the city boards by couching their opposition in terms that were conspicuously free of anti-Semitism –

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unusually so, given that much contemporary rhetoric was full of racial slurs.27 However, the expansion of the Council of Public Instruction to include Jewish representatives was something that touched the leaders of the Catholic school system directly, and they protested. This issue, moreover, proved to be a political red flag for the province’s extreme right. Over the course of 1930s, the long-dormant Conservatives and fledgling Fascist parties were galvanized by the idea that Jews could be granted their own rights and institutions; to accord them that, they argued, was the first step towards full equality – to say nothing of the road to social and moral ruin.28 Sensing political fallout, the Liberal government began to exert pressure on the Jewish school commissioners to commit themselves to the Protestant camp, which, given the vociferousness of Catholic antiSemitism at the time, seemed by far the lesser of two evils. By the end of the year the Jewish and Protestant boards had negotiated a contract by which Jewish children would attend Protestant schools and be treated the same as Protestant pupils with no fear of segregation; Jewish teachers could be hired by the Protestant board and not be penalized for taking Jewish holidays; Jewish ratepayers would pay taxes to the Protestant board. In the light of this arrangement, the government passed further legislation that all but revoked the powers granted the year before to the Jewish School Commission. The commissioners resigned as a block in protest and were not replaced – though the board itself remained technically in existence for another forty years.29 Despite the absence of a body with which to continue negotiations, the Protestant board upheld its side of the bargain. It was left, however, with serious questions unanswered. For Jewish families, the Protestant school system obviously provided a form of public education, but how was the board to reconcile this with its curriculum, which included religious instruction? On the other hand, were it to eliminate this part of the curriculum, what would remain that was recognizably Protestant? Would such a step mean the abrogation of its rights under the bna Act? Montreal’s Protestants would not be in a position to answer these questions for some years, but it was the presence of Jewish pupils in their midst that forced them to be asked. The Protestants of the 1920s and 30s were not prepared to accept a definition of “Protestant” that included Jews or any other ethnic group, but it was clear that the term was a work in progress.

Jewish settlement away from Montreal consisted of a number of small, scattered communities, most of them in English-speaking areas. Apart from the original congregations in Quebec City, these communities

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were principally Eastern European immigrants who for various reasons found themselves not on the Main but in Trois Rivières, Sherbrooke, Hull, or the Laurentians. They tended to find their place within the Protestant school system more easily than those in Montreal, perhaps because of their limited numbers. In Sherbrooke, which had the largest Jewish community (over 350 people) outside of Montreal and Quebec City by the end of World War I, ratepayers secured the use of a classroom in the central school for the teaching of Hebrew, as well as for what the Protestant commissioners referred to as “Sunday School.” For this privilege they were charged $10 a month, with the proviso that the Hebrew classes should take place after normal school hours.30 Within a few years Hebrew was being taught five days a week from 4 to 6 pm, in two classrooms, at double the rent. For the rest of their education, Jewish pupils attended the central and other schools operated by the Sherbrooke board. The commissioners appear to have had relatively little problem hiring Jewish teachers at this time. Although they told Clara Echenberg that “there were no suitable vacancies” when she applied for a teaching position in the summer of 1918, only to give a job to Mary Savage a few days later, they hired Rebecca Echenberg, Clara’s sister, for a full-time position the following year, and employed another sister, Bertha, as a substitute at another school. Three decades later the board was still granting space for Hebrew classes – as well as the Old Testament and Jewish history, taught by the rabbi – and hiring Echenberg women as teachers.31 The region to the north of Montreal was home to a large number of Jewish families by the 1920s and would later attract thousands more during the summer months, a great many of whom became property owners. Ste Sophie, established towards the end of the nineteenth century, was the province’s first Jewish settlement outside the cities. Fleeing Eastern Europe, several families took up farms in the parish with the assistance of the Jewish Colonization Association and the federal government.32 Poor soil made anything more than subsistence farming very difficult, but these families proved highly resourceful: instead of tobacco, which many of them had grown in Russia, they raised chickens, dairy cows, grains, and vegetables. By the time of World War I, a number of these families decided to open their homes to Jewish urban dwellers from the Main yearning to breathe free and to put on weight with a solid diet of farm produce. Over the course of the 1920s, Ste Sophie’s Jewish population grew to over 200 and the already complex economy diversified further as hotel-keeping became the principal industry. (These so-called Kosher hotels served the Jews of Montreal, who were unwelcome at other Laurentian resorts.) Jews also established their own institutions. Like Quebec’s first rural Protestant

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settlers a century earlier, the Jews of Ste Sophie worshipped in private homes until the schoolhouse was built just outside the village. It then served as the official synagogue, though some factions within the community preferred to continue holding services in houses in the village. The school site itself was a point of discussion, although here the question was who should have the right to donate land and advance the important cause of education. The Simpkin family won this honour, and the school was raised by communal effort in the summer of 1913 on a corner of their farm.33 While the school was being built, the farmers of Ste Sophie strove to establish their status as dissentients within the public school system – their intention was to provide both traditional Jewish schooling and a modern, English-language education. As there were virtually no Protestants in Ste Sophie and as Jews and Protestants were equal for school purposes, it seemed logical merely to dissent from the municipality’s Catholic majority. The would-be dissentients assumed, of course, that Ste Sophie and New Glasgow were two distinct districts, whereas in fact the village of New Glasgow lay within the parish of Ste Sophie. As George Parmalee, director of Protestant education, was quick to point out, the Protestant trustees of New Glasgow constituted the dissentient board of the school municipality of Ste Sophie: “That Protestants reside chiefly at one end of it and the Roman Catholics at the other does not change this relationship,” he explained. He recommended that the Jews of Ste Sophie turn to the Protestants of New Glasgow for support, even though this idea was unpopular with both parties.34 They did agree to consult with the Protestant school inspector for the region, J.W. McOuat, who visited Ste Sophie in early December 1913 and spoke with both the Jewish farmers and the New Glasgow trustees. McOuat came to appreciate the geographical situation and its importance to the issue: the L’Achigan River, which ran near the village of New Glasgow, was really a more natural territorial division than the boundary between the parishes of Ste Sophie and St Lin. New Glasgow had natural links to St Lin, having once been part of its parish, and the Protestants of both areas were currently united under a single school board. The inspector wrote Parmalee recommending that the Protestant Committee agree to consider the Ste Sophie Jews as dissentients, and included a sketch plan of the area to help illustrate his argument.35 In the wake of McOuat’s visit, the “Jewish Farmers and Settlers” of Ste Sophie proceeded to hold a meeting on 25 December 1913, at which Shaposnick and four others were elected school trustees.36 Parmalee was not entirely happy with the legal ramifications of the Ste Sophie arrangement and nor was he comfortable with the prospect of a Protestant board comprised entirely of Jews. Nevertheless, sensing

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Map 18 Inspector McOuat’s sketch of Ste Sophie and New Glasgow Although the boundary between the municipalities of Ste Sophie and St Lin lay to the east of New Glasgow, McOuat suggested that the Achigan River was really a more natural division, and that the heavily Protestant New Glasgow should more properly be considered within the territory of St Lin, while the Jews constituted the dissenters of Ste Sophie. [After a sketch in McOuat’s letter to George Parmalee: anq-q, e-13, no. 2065, 11 December 1913.]

that they were determined to be autonomous, he recommended that the Jewish farmers of Ste Sophie make a formal petition requesting the right to form a new school municipality “for Protestants only” – the irony of which cannot have been lost on the Department of Education bureaucrats.37 This status would mean that any Jews who later acquired property within the territory of this new school municipality would automatically contribute to this board and to the operation of the new school. It may have been Parmalee’s conviction that the

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41 Scotland schoolhouse and synagogue, Ste Sophie For three decades this building served the Jewish community of Ste Sophie as school, synagogue, and community meeting place. Although the school closed in 1949, the other functions continued. The synagogue is still used for the high holidays by a handful of locals and their families, most of whom now live in the Montreal area. [Author photo]

government would never sanction the establishment of a school board “for Protestants only” for Jews, but to the community itself he was as helpful as possible. He even recommended that the new school receive a grant from a special fund designated to help poor rural municipalities. He drew the line, however, at the suggestion that this new school municipality should be described as “Jewish.”38 The name “Scotland” was eventually adopted, a reference to the earlier Scottish presence in the area. The petition was drawn up by a notary in St Jerôme and sent to the government in May 1914. It contained thirty-six signatures from taxpayers whose properties were collectively valued at $25,100.39 The Scotland school municipality was created by Order-in-Council in July, in time for the inhabitants to elect their trustees, legally. The Scotland School had two storeys (the second was really only an attic). Children were taught downstairs in English and upstairs in Yiddish and Hebrew, in two classes that would switch locations after lunch. The English teacher was usually from Montreal, typically a Jewish graduate of the Protestant Macdonald School for Teachers in Ste Anne de Bellevue. The Hebrew teacher usually served as the community’s shoichet (the official in charge of the ritual slaughter of animals) and sometimes

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42 Class, Scotland School, Ste Sophie Taken around 1940, this class photo shows the teacher, Mary Zaritsky, at top left; the shoichet, David Zwick, is at top right. [Photo courtesy of Mary Zaritsky]

as its rabbi. In most other respects, the school functioned like any oneroom schoolhouse, and the school board’s role was that typical of a rural community: the trustees had to set the mill rate and collect school taxes, cajole recalcitrant ratepayers and if necessary seize their property, intervene when complaints were raised about a teacher, and speak to the parents of children who misbehaved. They met regularly and kept minutes in a style that conformed to what was expected of all school boards. Although some later minute book entries are in Yiddish, the first board made a special effort to live up to their affiliation with the Protestant school system and kept books in English. The trustees handled all other work involved in the running of the school themselves, largely because of the prohibitive cost of hiring a janitor but also because of the close-knit nature of the community. One of the trustees regularly supplied the wood for the school and another went in to light the stove in winter. Both tasks involved a small stipend. At one point it was decided that Mr Kahansky “should get $25 for having the honour of cleaning out the toilet since he was chairman” – a job that, perhaps more than any other, speaks to the trustees’ sense of duty, and frugality.40

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The Ste Sophie dissentient board was utterly unlike others, however, in that the range of issues that came before it exceeded the normal scope of school trustees. As the Jewish residents’ only public body, its members found themselves dealing with matters affecting the whole religious community, including the management of the cemetery and the hiring of a rabbi and shoichet. Trustees were, in their own words, “authorized to act in all matters affecting our community, whether financial or moral.”41 The school board regulated the religious laws pertaining to kosher meat, determined the rate the shoichet was to be paid for slaughtering animals, established rules of conduct, and fixed penalties if the edicts were disobeyed. If the shoichet left Ste Sophie without informing the board he was liable to a large fine of $500. If Jewish families allowed someone else to kill farm animals, their children could be dismissed from school.42 The Hebrew teacher was also fined if, in the view of the trustees, he did not carry out his responsibilities – one teacher was penalized $27.50 for sending the children outdoors in January.43 The strict enforcement of rules governing the slaughter of animals had significant social repercussions for farmers, as a Mr Starkman discovered. Until he agreed to meet with the board “to explain himself about certain arguments,” the shoichet was prohibited from killing any of Mr Starkman’s animals and anyone who brought any of Mr Starkman’s chickens to the shoichet for him would be “banished.” Despite the solemn tone of this edict, the trustees were careful to observe that it had been made by consensus, to avoid any ill will: “It must also be mentioned that most of the members were present, and everything was agreed upon and although some of the members were excited they all departed as good friends and everything was forgiven.”44 As an indication of this goodwill, the board gave the shoichet permission to resume killing Starkman’s chickens, but because both Mr and Mrs Starkman had publicly insulted one of the trustees and sold meat that was not kosher, the board fined them $15, to be paid to the school.45 Such were the trials of public life in a small rural community. As Ste Sophie’s hospitality industry expanded, so did the board’s level of involvement in civic affairs. By the 1930s non-Jewish families in the area were also taking in Jewish vacationers from the city, many of whom required the services of the shoichet, and the board insisted that such families pay a $10 tax for this privilege.46 This caused the first real altercation between the school board and the wider community, and relations between Jews and Catholics would deteriorate over the next decade, as they did in Montreal. Many felt that the municipal council was exacting unusually high taxes on Jewish properties, and in 1945, when a local farmer, Willie Rudy, attempted to counter this by running for a seat on the council, the Catholic mayor declared that he

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would never allow a Jew to serve under him.47 However Rudy not only served as alderman for over two decades but also was the mayor of Ste Sophie for eight years in the 1960s. Relations with the small Protestant community during this period were much better, especially given that the board sent its older pupils to New Glasgow, whose Protestants continued to operate the two-room schoolhouse there for Grades 1 through 9. In 1949 the board closed the Scotland school and sent all local Jewish pupils to New Glasgow. Three years later both boards merged with another in St Jerome to form the Laurentia [sic] Protestant School Board, to which the Jewish ratepayers of Ste Sophie paid their school taxes.48 Willie Rudy served as a commissioner on this board, and later as chair. The hotel business had become a major industry throughout the entire area north of Montreal by the 1930s. This was true even for Jews, although their patronage was restricted to a number of Jewish-owned enterprises because most resorts refused to serve them. Ste Agathe soon had the largest concentration of seasonal visitors in the Laurentians, but for those who could not afford to travel so far, Plage Laval, on the Mille Isle River opposite St Eustache, was a cheaper alternative.49 Although holidaymakers obviously had no need of schools, resorts were taxable properties, and the Jewish owners of resorts were responsible to local school boards. In Plage Laval, the small number of Jewish pupils in the school belied the value of property owned by Jewish ratepayers, as the local Protestant commissioners realized in the autumn of 1941 when they became aware that the Catholic board had been collecting the taxes from Jewish ratepayers. By appealing to Percival and the terms of the 1931 Act, they were able to have this situation reversed.50 The 1940s saw the appearance throughout the Laurentians of vacation homes, many of them owned by Jewish families; these properties brought a steady income to the Ste Agathe Protestant board, which would otherwise have had a fairly modest tax base. The trustees argued for funding to build a new high school in Ste Agathe on the grounds that such an institution would draw many Montreal families to the area, year round.This claim proved to have some merit in that the population of the new school rose from 138 in its first year to 211 a decade later. Many of these students were Jewish, enough for the board to agree to regular “Jewish instruction” classes to be held after school from 4 to 6 pm.51

The questions that had been left unanswered in Montreal following the signing of the 1930 contract – and that, rather conveniently, the Protestant board would leave unanswered for over three decades – would be

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raised some years later in what would prove a watershed in JewishProtestant relations: the Outremont School Question. In 1931 the Protestant trustees of Outremont had signed a contract, similar to the one between Montreal’s Jewish community and its Protestant school board, providing for accommodation for Jewish pupils in its schools and for the hiring of Jewish teachers. Although the Montreal board did not appear perturbed at the end of the war by the approach of their fifteenyear contract’s expiration, the Outremont trustees were very concerned. By early 1944 they were demanding that the provincial government devise a plan to relieve them of the burden of educating so many Jews.52 Although they claimed their motives in this matter were pragmatic – financial solvency as well as a dedication to the cause of Protestant education – the trustees’ handling of their “Jewish problem” provoked an organized opposition and earned them the scorn of both parents and the wider community. Outremont’s transition from idyllic countryside to leisured suburb was slow, more so even than Westmount’s, because of its relative isolation. The Protestant character of the area was established by the time it was incorporated as a village in 1875; most of the major landowners were Protestant, including the Mount Royal Cemetery, whose administrators became prominent citizens of Outremont and would remain influential well into the twentieth century. The cemetery, famed for its natural beauty, set the tone for the physical appearance of Outremont, which by the end of the century was a virtual garden suburb; even after anglophones became the minority, it was clear that Protestantism had left a lasting impression on the landscape, with its romantic architecture and ordered green spaces, protected by rigorous building codes and regulations to preserve trees. The early school commissioners were Protestant, but the population was mixed and not large enough to justify more than one school, which shared space with the municipal council and was sometimes used for religious services. In 1893 the commissioners sold the building to the council and leased the necessary space from them, but a few years later a dispute arose and the council – which was still largely Protestant and might have been expected to have the school’s best interests at heart – refused to allow the school to reopen for some time. For these two public bodies to do battle like this was a bad sign. The commissioners proved equally contentious in their dealings with a local hospital for diseased cattle that was being built next to the school; they referred the matter to the Board of Health and, when its reply was clearly unsatisfactory, took the government to task until it agreed to press the hospital authorities to build elsewhere. Clearly not afraid of a battle, the Outremont commissioners were also acquiring something of a siege mentality.53

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43 Strathcona Academy, Outremont Outremont’s Protestant high school had a particularly strong record of academic success, though its prominence was somewhat eclipsed with the opening of a new Outremont high school in 1955. The building is now part of the Université de Montréal. [Author photo]

The school board’s dignity was further affronted at the turn of the century when a census revealed that Catholics were now in the majority in Outremont, forcing the commissioners to become trustees of a dissentient board.54 They turned at once to the matter of building a new school for Outremont’s Protestants. With the patronage of Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona), one of Montreal’s major Protestant philanthropists, and the talents of Alexander Hutchison, architect of McGill buildings and Protestant churches, the trustees created a school that would regularly top the lists for academic achievement across the province. Strathcona Academy could boast excellent study, laboratory, and sports facilities (including a swimming pool), providing for a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, in good Protestant tradition. As if this were not enough for any public high school, the board periodically invited guest speakers, including professors of Canadian history from McGill, to address the students.55 Not surprisingly, as one of Quebec’s leading Protestant education institutions, the academy exhibited a particularly high level of involvement in patriotic activities during World

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War I. The trustees had clear ideas as to what it meant to be a good citizen as well as a good Protestant and how a school could foster these values. They were equally promoted in Outremont’s two Protestant elementary schools, built shortly after the war: Alfred Joyce, named after a local mayor and school benefactor; and Guy Drummond, named after a young soldier, from a prominent Montreal family, who had been killed in battle. The trustees were also extraordinarily concerned with the image their teachers projected, especially the women, who they saw as role models. They made it very clear that married women would not be employed in Outremont’s Protestant schools, and were quick to disapprove of fashion trends, such as the bobbed hair of the 1920s, which they prohibited.56 Academic excellence and an atmosphere of discipline attracted a large number of students from beyond the limits of Outremont, especially to the academy, where a quarter of the school’s population was from outside the municipality as early as 1916. The existence of the academy, along with the quiet streets and idyllic hillside setting, may well have been a factor in drawing new residents to the town. In any case, the population grew rapidly during the first decades of the twentieth century – francophones especially, but also a great many upwardly mobile Jewish families from the nearby streets around the Main and the northern parts of the City of Montreal. As early as 1924, no doubt with one eye on the situation downtown, the board began to express concern as to how it would finance the education of these pupils with its limited Protestant tax base. Already more Jews than Protestants lived in Outremont and very few, even the wealthiest among them, were ratepayers. There were sufficient numbers of Jewish pupils at Strathcona Academy for the principal to ask what should be done on Jewish holidays; the trustees replied that Jewish children who chose not to attend school on these days should be counted as absent. With the 1928 court ruling against the equation of Jews and Protestants for school purposes, the trustees anticipated an end to their burden with the creation of a separate board. The 1931 contract answered most of their concerns by guaranteeing financial assistance from Outremont’s Jewish families and ratepayers, in return for assurances that Jewish pupils would not be forced to study Protestant scripture or be penalized for staying away on religious holidays. These concessions still required considerable effort from school administrators, as by this time the Jewish population of the board’s schools was 60 per cent of the total.57 The patriotic fervour that characterized Outremont at the outbreak of World War II was embraced by all students; Jews took part in the cadet corps, fundraising, and other aspects of the war effort alongside Protestants. The academy sponsored a guest lecture, “The Rise of Fascism,” which was well attended. In keeping with the objectives of Prot-

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estant boards across the province, the Outremont trustees accepted thirteen British guest children into their schools and even agreed to supply them with free books. They refused, however, to extend the same consideration to a number of Jewish families who had fled Europe during the 1930s and were now living as guests in Outremont. Many voices suggested that these children fitted the category of “resident” according to the terms of the contract, but the board argued that as “refugees” they did not. The trustees were also unsympathetic to the request from a Mrs Tracy – a Protestant resident of Outremont and the temporary guardian of a Jewish girl whose refugee father was working in Huntingdon – that the girl not be charged the extra school fee as a non-resident. In 1943 the board reacted with a great deal of skepticism to the proposal by a number of parents, both Protestant and Jewish, for the formation of a Home and School Association in Outremont. They argued that it was not an appropriate moment for such a timeconsuming enterprise, with the teachers’ free time occupied as it was with the war effort. They added, rather pointedly, that they would be willing to support this group in the future as long as it should be essentially Christian in character. This observation was consistent with what was emerging as the board’s long-term agenda: when the contract expired at the end of 1945, the Protestant schools of Outremont should close their doors to Jewish pupils. By this means, they argued, the original character of Strathcona Academy could be restored and its classrooms turned over to the comfortable accommodation of Protestants.58 A December 1944 article in the Montreal Gazette about the board’s decision not to renew the contract provoked angry protest from the Jewish community, one of whom declared that the trustees’ action was reprehensible in the light of “the present conflict” (the war). Mrs Brownstein, whose husband was fighting overseas, asked the board what they would suggest she say to her daughter when the teacher informed her she and the other Jewish children would not be able to return the following September.59 The chair of the board, John Roy (who was also the manager of the Mount Royal Cemetery), tried to reassure the Jewish community that the trustees were acting purely out of financial necessity and would certainly not deprive Jewish pupils of an education. Having mollified public fears somewhat, the trustees proceeded to make arrangements with the government to sell them one or more of their schools to be used only for Jews.60 News of these negotiations leaked, the government waffled, and the trustees had to make a public statement that they had simply been trying to hammer out an acceptable deal. In early June 1945 the government promised legislation to resolve the problem if the board would accept Jewish pupils for another school year. The board was reluctant to

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comply, stating that “circumstances entirely beyond its control demand that some decision be arrived at before the end of this month,” but it really had no choice.61 A bill was passed the following January dealing with the financial insolvency of school boards; in effect, it removed from discussion the board’s argument that their only real problem with accommodating Jewish pupils was paying for it.62 Exactly how these pupils would be accommodated was a matter of negotiation that took up most of the following two years. The board’s insistence that segregation was their best option began to earn criticism from the wider community. With the end of the war and the return of teachers who had been serving overseas, the Outremont Home and School Association was finally established, though the trustees discouraged teachers from attending meetings. One of the association’s first actions was to invite Roy to give an address on “Current Educational Problems Confronting the Outremont Protestant Schools,” an offer he politely refused.63 Several of Outremont’s Protestant clergy reported that members of their congregations were concerned about the deteriorating relations between the board and the community.64 The trustees were convinced, however, that they had the support of the majority of Protestant parents and pupils, who, they claimed, felt “displeasure” at the great numbers of Jews in their school – and it was not difficult to find individuals who would agree that “the unchristian views of the Hebrews tended to exercise an unhealthy influence on Protestant children,” as one minister put it.65 This was a curious line to argue – to say nothing of distasteful – given the evidence of wartime atrocities against the Jews of Europe that were widely publicised at this time. Even so, it was clear that public opinion, even Protestant public opinion, was against the board. A survey conducted by the Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations (qfhsa) in March 1947 revealed that, citywide, most Protestants sided with the Jewish community in opposing the Outremont trustees’ stance.66 The Montreal-based Interracial Committee for Democratic Action accused the board of discrimination. When Dr Astbury, a respected citizen of Outremont, was approached with an offer to fill a vacancy on the board, he refused, and made a public statement claiming he saw “so wide a divergence between my own views and [theirs on] … fundamental principles on which there can be no healthy compromise” that his presence would be useless.67 In June the trustees learned that the Canadian Legion had set up a committee to investigate the Outremont situation, not from a legal but from a moral point of view. They resisted the request to meet with two Legion representatives until October, when they were forced to grant the interview and listen to a lecture on the importance of democ-

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racy and good fellowship.68 Most damning of all was a resolution passed by the Anglican synod in the spring of 1947, with clear reference to Outremont: “This synod … believing that racial discrimination in any form is utterly at variance with Christian principles and productive of hatred and strife, hereby affirms the equality before God of all men without distinction of race, colour, or nation; and calls upon all members of the Church to repudiate racial animosities and to promote in every possible way the spirit of harmony and good-will among all classes and groups in the community.”69 Two generations – and two world wars – after the Reverend James Barclay said that Jews were thieves who wanted to steal the Protestants’ school system, the Protestant establishment had turned one hundred and eighty degrees in their religious outlook. The Outremont trustees were clearly out of touch with the rest of the Protestant community and with much of the Western world. Their steadfast defence of what they saw as the Christian character of their schools is laudable, but their vision was narrow and outdated. Furthermore, it is not always evident that they were defending this vision so much as their own ability to do so; after a history of opposition to the town council, the Board of Health, and the Catholic church, the trustees were not about to concede on the question of Jewish pupils simply because the weight of opinion was against them. They repeatedly denounced the media for exaggerating the problem. They complained that the Legion’s inquiry had constituted “unwarranted intrusion” into their affairs.70 When even the Duplessis government stated its opposition to segregation, the trustees expressed a fear that it was not acting in the best interests of Protestant and Jewish pupils alike.71 But all the while they were negotiating and making concessions. Having opened the doors of their schools to Jewish pupils in September 1946 – albeit with largely segregated classes – and then again in September 1947, the trustees finally signed a contract with the government that set the terms for the future: Jewish pupils would be treated in the same way as Protestants; they would not be forced to take part in any religious exercises their parents objected to; and they would not be counted absent on Jewish holidays.72 The trustees even agreed to hold school dances on Saturday nights instead of Friday, without admitting that this would have the effect of respecting the Jewish Sabbath. The qfhsa became an effective watchdog over the next few years, monitoring how well the trustees respected the terms of the contract and promoting the entrenchment of rights that would eliminate the need for any sort of contractual arrangement.73 Public hostility toward the board waned only gradually, but once it began to do so the trustees themselves relaxed their grip and a level of normalcy was achieved.

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At no time, however, did the trustees concede on the importance of their schools’ Christian character. In post-war Canada this was a moot point, and even under Duplessis the current of intellectual thought in Quebec ran counter to any policy of exclusion. There was every need to build a civil society and promote moral values, and every reason to avoid sectional antagonism. The Anglican synod had nicely set out the new objectives of Christian activism. The qfhsa had taken the argument one step further and advocated truly non-denominational schools: “The only real guarantee of equality in education for minorities is an amendment to the existing legislation so that the Protestant schools may become the recognized “common” school for all non-Catholic children, democratically controlled and operated. Social custom and tradition have already done much toward converting the Protestant school system into a Common School for English-speaking people. A more conscious effort to achieve this would accomplish much in correcting the defects inherent in our present law.”74 Much political water would flow under the bridge before such sentiment became policy in Protestant schools, especially in Outremont. Throughout this period, however, and despite lingering doubts about their future treatment at the hands of the board, Jewish pupils attended Outremont’s elementary schools and the Strathcona Academy, and continued to do credit to these institutions. Furthermore, despite the trustees’ convictions, there is very little evidence that Protestant pupils resented the Jews in their schools, though some may well have been irritated by the makeshift arrangements for accommodating the Protestant minority during Jewish holidays. Indeed, very little was made of the needs of these Protestant pupils during the Outremont school question, apart from the lip service to their pastoral care given by the board and some members of the local clergy. In all the discussion, provincewide, about how Jewish pupils were to be accommodated within Protestant schools, almost no one suggested – save perhaps for the qfhsa – that the Jewish presence might be a good thing for Protestant children.

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8

Daughters of the Empire, Soldiers of the Soil: Protestant School Boards, Patriotism, and War Any boy who “does not like drill and military exercises … is not a boy and has been put into pants by mistake.”1 Lt Col. William Hamilton Merritt

The last year of World War I saw an unprecedented buzz of activity at St Lambert High School. A mood of general tension prevailed, caused not only by the continuous news of the war’s progress – which could at any moment include word of the death of a loved one – but also by the war effort at home, which occupied much of a student’s time both in and out of school. As in most of the province’s Protestant schools, a parade of charitable groups organized fundraising for a variety of patriotic causes: the Red Cross, the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (iode), and the South Shore Patriotic Fund – the latter helping the St Lambert pupils make a major donation to the relief of the suffering children of Belgium. Government representatives spoke in the assembly hall on the importance of avoiding waste, particularly of food; inspired, the children organized a shipment of chocolate, which they stoically gave up, to the soldiers overseas. Boys continued to “serve” in a cadet corps, which had been started before the outbreak of war, and

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44 Monument honouring the war dead, Richmond Many communities across Quebec – especially, but not exclusively, Protestant communities – erected monuments to local men killed in action. Typically they featured a statue of a soldier and were located in a prominent spot at the centre of town. [Author photo]

many answered a call from the Department of Education to go out west during the summer to help out on the nation’s farms. The need to be prepared to fight that lurked behind this quasi-military activity was also linked to a greater awareness of the need for all-round fitness; this outlook had recently prompted the construction of a gym for the school, and would lead to the development of extramural sports programs.2

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This flurry of activity was intimately connected to the war, but such patriotism had been central to Protestant schooling since at least the late nineteenth century. Identification with British values, always a hallmark of Protestant institutions, developed into a fascination for the British Empire and all things imperial that greatly coloured the way communities reacted to the two great twentieth century wars. At the same time, war – or the rumours of war – played a significant role in shaping the Protestant identity in Quebec, making patriotism more than merely an attitude about the state but also a defining aspect of culture. In a time of war, Protestant Quebec would rally behind King and Country and the British flag, while Catholic Quebec downplayed the imperial connection and sometimes even refused to fight. In 1917 a federal election was decided on the question of conscription and the anti-conscriptionists lost, dramatically; the issue divided Canadians from coast to coast, but nowhere more than in Quebec. Naturally, this division was played out in the schools. Readiness for war pervaded all aspects of life, as the example of St Lambert illustrates. Militarism (inseparable from patriotism at such times and, indeed, throughout the early part of the century) lent itself to every sort of school project as well as to extracurricular activities. It also reinforced gender roles in its emphasis on manliness, fitness, and self-control, and its implicit scorn for weakness and emotion. By the time of the Depression and especially by World War II, militarism would serve as an antidote to fears that young people, especially adolescent boys, were morally adrift against a backdrop of radical social change. It was in their use of patriotism as social glue that school boards were most overtly Protestant.

The end of the nineteenth century saw a marked increase in patriotic fervour in Canada as a result of both political and economic developments. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was the impetus for much celebration of things British, and this was swiftly reinforced by Britain’s victories in the Boer War. The dawn of a new century was also expected to bring great things for the Empire, and for Canada in particular. Prime Minister Laurier confidently asserted that the twentieth century would be Canada’s – a statement that may have been largely sound and fury but as a concept was earnestly felt and eagerly embraced. The sense of history that prevailed in English Canada was coloured by pride in its ties to Britain as the guarantor of liberty, even (or especially) to French Canadians.3 The imperial presence was reinforced by the celebrations surrounding the tercentenary of Quebec City in 1908, a reminder not of the province’s distinct history but of its revered place within the Dominion.4 But Canadians were also reacting to un-

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precedented social change as a result of industrialization, urbanization, and massive immigration – all grounds for concern, given the consequent challenge to traditional ways of doing things. In practice, patriotism served as an antidote to multiculturalism, a means of asserting the culture of the mother country over that of any upstarts. And although the Empire was ultimately victorious, the Boer War did offer some evidence that Britain should not take its mastery of the world for granted. One could not praise the British Empire and its achievements often enough, and one could not overlook the need to maintain a population that was fit, trained, and ready to defend it. Instilling patriotic values in the schoolroom was a means of inculcating students from immigrant families with Anglo-Saxon values and a love of Britain. Although we know almost nothing of how these students and their families reacted to this cultural onslaught, there is reason to suppose they approved, both because they generally wished to integrate with mainstream society (Protestant society, for the most part) and because the symbols and activities were often wonderfully compelling. In a world where certain symbols went unquestioned and were reinforced daily, it would have been difficult for the parents of children attending public schools to provide much of a cultural counterweight that was attractive or even convincing.5 In classrooms throughout the province it was customary to hang a photo of the British monarch – a practice that continued well into the 1960s. Teachers were armed with history and geography lessons (from expressly nonAmerican text books!) that reinforced British institutions and a British way of life, as did children’s literature in general. Schools were often named after British royalty or their representatives in Canada: in late nineteenth-century Montreal four of the commissioners’ twelve Protestant schools were named after governors general (Aberdeen, Dufferin, Lansdowne, and Lorne) and three made clear reference to the Empire (Britannia, Royal Arthur, and Victoria). At school assemblies, the Union Jack was prominently displayed, and drill, pledging allegiance, and singing the British anthem and other related songs were regular features of the school day. One of the most anticipated yearly events in the school calendar was Empire Day, an Ontario invention that was emulated in many parts of Protestant Quebec. In 1907 the Granby school commissioners agreed to co-operate with Miss McKenzie, a teacher in the academy, to help make the holiday a success.6 Held on the school day immediately prior to the Queen’s birthday in May, Empire Day was intended to emphasize Britain’s past glories as well as its great imperial future – a broader and more pragmatic focus than the affectionate reverence for the Queen on the 24th. Though they may well have lapped up the patriotic sentiment, chil-

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dren also welcomed the break from schoolwork.7 The impetus for Empire Day celebrations often came from organizations such as the iode, a national body that nevertheless took its imperialist agenda to small towns. The iode was generally critical of public schooling in Canada because it was not sufficiently devoted to the formation of character. To counter this imbalance, these women sponsored essay contests that required the candidate to celebrate Canada’s role within the Empire; they also offered scholarships to students they considered the most promising. The iode donated library books with similar themes and sold gramophone records to schools; appropriately, they also sold them gramophones. They advocated a national education program and devised “Patriotic Programmes for Use in Schools the Last Friday of the Month,” which was a sufficient imposition on the regular curriculum but enough to advance their goals.8 Although school boards were generally wary of giving such groups too much prominence within their schools, they appreciated the benefits to the community that iode activities brought. Boards were also not above organizing their own essay contests to encourage patriotic zeal, with obligatory titles such as “The Union Jack: Its Origins, Uses, and What It Means In School” and “Why I Am Glad That I Am a British Subject.”9 Nearly two years before the start of World War I, life in the Longueuil model school took on something of a military atmosphere. The board applied for funding through the Strathcona Fund, a private charity intended to promote patriotism and physical education, and started a cadet corps for boys and a “physical drill” for the whole school. They also changed the form of the “opening exercises.” In the autumn of 1912 the commissioners announced: “The bell rings at about five minutes before 9 o’clock as formerly, and the pupils instead of marching to their respective class rooms, as before, assemble in the downstairs hall when all pupils and teachers join in the Lord’s Prayer. Pupils then march off quietly to their several classrooms.”10 While the saying of the Lord’s Prayer was hardly unusual in Protestant schools, its sudden introduction as a communal act suggests a certain anxiety to get up to speed. The cadet corps, formed in January 1913, was composed of the older male pupils and a number of youths drawn from outside the school to “bring up the number to the minimum.” By the spring the corps was armed with thirty-five rifles, a “sub-target machine gun,” and three boxes of cartridges. At the end of the school year a new Union Jack was raised above the school, with “appropriate ceremonies.”11 A year later the instructor, Major S.H. Hill, expressed satisfaction with the cadets’ work, though it was noted that the sub-target gun was too heavy to be used and that some of the boys were having trouble even with the rifles. With the outbreak of war in August 1914, their activities soon had a parallel in the town’s Rifle

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Association, formed with the purpose of “preparing the male population for possible emergencies in view of the European War situation.” The board decided to provide space in the basement of the school for target practice, and they arranged to hand over the larger guns to this adult group on the understanding that they would get new and more appropriate weapons for the boys. The cadets received their uniforms in October, thanks to a donation from the Fourth Division Militia.12 Over the course of the war, the cadet corps presented a host of problems for the commissioners, from making sure that no real ammunition was being used – it was needed for combat and should not be wasted in practice – to the security of the guns themselves. Although they were locked up in strong cupboards protected by iron bars, some rifles were stolen, which must have raised fears of criminal or subversive elements making use of them.13 These headaches notwithstanding, the cadet corps was more than justified by its significance in the production of potential young soldiers. As far as the federal militia department was concerned, the cadet programs served to develop a “standing army in waiting”; indeed, many graduates of cadet training programs would enlist when war was declared in 1914.14 Enthusiasm for the cadets and the military training they stood for came from all sides: from school boards, militia officers, and even from Protestant clergy. Equally significant, however, was the way that cadets came to represent the ideal adolescent male, one who exhibited all the desirable qualities of virtue, discipline, and preparedness. This ideal arose as an answer to growing fears that boys were weak – not only physically but also morally, having lost their will power in the face of all the corrupting influences of urbanization and social change. It was widely felt that boys were suffering from excessive exposure to women – female teachers as well as their mothers – and not enough time spent at manly pursuits in the company of men. The number of volunteers for the Boer War who had to be rejected owing to poor health pointed to the debilitating effects of industrialization and city living, as well as to the need for an alternative to restore a sense of masculinity: fitness, self-reliance, and courage, but also good manners and strong moral character. The cadets personified all this, and so did the Boy Scouts and the youths who took part in athletic events; all such pursuits led to the transformation of boys into men.15 These patriotic activities and new definitions of manliness made a whole generation of (Anglo-Protestant) Canadians enthusiastic about the declaration of war in 1914. Armed with a mantra of “Christian virtue, patriotism, military struggle in righteous cause, and heroic sacrifice,” Canada was ready and eager to fight.16 Men enlisted, imbued with romantic visions of war and valour; the schools had taught them

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to be good citizens through participation in cadet corps and the Boy Scouts, and through military training in the curriculum. These programs also gave volunteers a sense that war was to be an adventure, a test of their own manliness as much as an opportunity for the Empire to prove its mettle. The Boy Scouts had systematically prepared them for this sort of test. If there was any doubt about the military intentions of Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement, it was put to rest when he advised scouts around the world to help in the war effort by doing what they did best: guarding, patrolling, signalling, guiding, collecting information, providing relief measures, and setting up first-aid posts and soup kitchens.17 The campaign to rediscover manly virtue took effect primarily in Montreal and its surrounding area, where the negative effects of urban conditions and industrialization were keenly felt. Such concerns were obviously of little or no importance in rural areas where there was virtually no “idle youth” and no discourse regarding the decline of masculinity. Arguably, the war was also more keenly felt in the city, where streams of departing soldiers and special wartime industrial production were daily sights. One of the more curious war-related activities would have had minimal appeal in rural areas: the recruitment of “soldiers of the soil,” high school boys who went to work on farms in Western Canada to help feed a nation while freeing hired hands to join the forces.18 Another, more subtle reason that urban authorities, including the school boards, strove to spark young imaginations with patriotism was that it was seen as a good way of channelling energies that might otherwise be spent on less appropriate activities – the temptations for which were plentiful in cities. Urban boards made special concessions during wartime: with the threat of losing loved ones hanging over everyone’s head, the Longueuil board decided not to take fees or taxes from the “families of those who had volunteered to go to the war.” When news came that a former pupil had been killed overseas, a memorial tablet was erected in his honour.19 Few communities in Protestant Quebec did not feel the effects of the war acutely. In small rural areas, the loss of a local soldier overseas may well have had a greater impact on the community than it did in the city, though no less tragic for family members. Peter MacLachlan, a local boy who had graduated from the Lochaber Bay school and gone on to study medicine at Queen’s University, was killed in France in 1918 while serving as a military physician.20 That he had been one of the few from this community to have pursued and achieved an advanced degree made MacLachlan’s death all the more poignant to the people of Lochaber. Monuments to the war dead appeared across Quebec, testimonials to the sacrifice of young men, most of whom were graduates of rural one-room

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45 Plaque honouring former pupils killed in action, 1914–1918, Montreal West High School In the entrance hall to this high school (now Royal West Academy) two plaques facing each other list alumni killed in action in each of the two world wars. This, the earlier plaque, includes Osmond E. LeRoy, a former principal. The plaque across the hall lists “former students of Côteau St Pierre schools who gave their lives in World War II.” [Author photo]

schools. By the 1930s most Protestant schools had also erected some sort of memorial to fallen war heros from World War I, which provided a compelling model of behaviour, especially for boys. The terrible cost of that war – over 60,000 Canadian soldiers died – served to bring a degree of sobriety to the sort of patriotism expressed before and during the war. Patriotism did not diminish, though the emphasis on militarism, in the inevitable form of parades and Armistice Day ceremonies, took on melancholic overtones. Although military preparedness was presumably unnecessary in the wake of the war to end all wars, the cadet corps remained a socially appropriate extracurricular activity well into the 1930s, as did the Boy Scouts.21 Their continuing popularity stemmed from their success at creating model young men; if such people were not needed as potential soldiers, they did serve as an example of gainful occupation for youth. During the economic downturn following the war, and especially during the Depression, Protestant communities looked on patriotism more as a chance to be inspired by ideal behaviour than as a way to help out a noble cause

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46 Gaspé schoolchildren in Montreal, 1939 Many Protestant schoolchildren were brought to Montreal in May 1939 to take part in the royal visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. A contingent coming from as far away as the Gaspé peninsula testifies to the excitement surrounding this event within Protestant Quebec. [Photo courtesy of Carol Gilkin]

– in other words, they did not ask what they could do for the Empire but rather what it could do for them. The 1933 funeral of Sir Arthur Currie, the hero of Vimy Ridge, proved to be one such occasion. The ceremony was held at Mount Royal Cemetery and in Longueuil and other communities schools were closed for a day so that teachers and pupils could make the trip into the city, indicating the tremendous admiration for Currie and his wartime achievements.22 It also speaks to the need to counteract the effects of scandal; Currie’s last few weeks were spent defending his name against accusations of misdeeds while in command overseas. Having seen one of its cherished symbols under attack, the Protestant community showed crucial solidarity at his funeral and at his grave side, where a striking monument with a huge cross was created at a prominent spot in the cemetery. Patriotism of a far less complicated kind was a feature of the 1939 visit of the King and Queen to Canada, which was an occasion of seemingly universal exaltation. Plans to attend royal events in Montreal preoccupied Protestant school boards, rural and urban, during the spring of 1939. Two years before, twenty lucky Protestant children (along with twenty even luckier Catholic children) had travelled to

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47 Rebecca Echenberg being presented to the King and Queen, 1939 The honour of being presented to the royal couple while their train stopped briefly in Sherbrooke was a high point in the career of Rebecca Echenberg, long-time teacher in local Protestant schools. Rebecca’s pursuit of acceptance by the Canadian establishment was not shared by all members of her family or by all of Sherbrooke’s Jewish community, some of whom saw it as assimilation. [Photo courtesy of Myron Echenberg]

England to attend King George VI’s coronation and had even been allowed to write their high school leaving exams, which they would miss, at the end of the summer.23 Now, however, everyone had a chance to see the royal couple in person and school boards were ready and willing to make arrangements, including the decision that on the day after the event school would be held from noon to four o’clock “as the pupils will be so tired from the King’s visit.”24 On the day, May 18th, fourteen thousand children from Protestant schools were packed into McGill’s Molson Stadium to greet the royal motorcade with resounding cheers.25 This sort of patriotic celebration also served as a mark of achievement for people of non-British backgrounds who had not always been made to feel adequately Canadian. Rebecca Echenberg, for example, who had served many years as a teacher in Sherbrooke’s Protestant schools, was delighted to be presented to King George and Queen Elizabeth when their train stopped briefly in that city.26 With the outbreak of World War II, the interest in patriotic activity was revived. From the early days of the war, urban Protestant schools

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emphasized loyalty to the nation and to Britain, with patriotic symbols, songs, readings, drills, and the celebration of Empire Day. And if schoolchildren had any doubts about the importance of defending the Empire, the St Lambert school board put them to rest in 1941 when it purchased 1,000 copies of There’s An Empire Back of the Union Jack.27 When it came to war, children were well aware of the rhetoric about love of country, the glory in fighting evil, and the necessity of sometimes having to make the supreme sacrifice. Though too young to participate directly in the war, every pupil knew someone who had enlisted: a father or brother, an uncle or cousin, a neighbour, or a teacher. A death on the battlefield touched a child’s life through the loss of a family member or someone in the neighbourhood. Children worried as they coped, first with the separation from their fathers and then with their own grief, alongside their mothers’, when fathers did not return. Another side of the horror of war was brought home to many pupils who attended school with “guest children” from Britain, who had come to Canada to escape the bombings. In the summer of 1940, Percival sent a letter to all of Quebec’s Protestant school boards announcing the imminent arrival of these children and seeking offers of accommodation. He made it clear that no money was available to help pay for board or tuition and that a considerable burden would be placed on teachers, pupils, and community alike. Nevertheless, he felt “that no more patriotic obligation faces school boards than that of providing proper educational facilities for the young who are thus being entrusted to our care. They are likely to develop into the type of immigrant that our country would like. The Protestant Committee is anxious that school boards shall extend all the facilities possible to these guest children in the spirit of true patriotism.”28 A great many Protestant boards rallied to this request, including those of such relatively out-of-the-way places as Joliette and Shawville.29 As Percival had noted, taking in guest children was not easy for most communities, particularly given the demands on household budgets. The arrangement often generated tensions for evacuees and their host families. Canadian children competed for parental attention and Canadian parents were uncertain as to their role. These tensions were exacerbated by the evacuees’ own anxiety over separation from their parents and about the safety of their relatives in Britain.30 Even in relatively prosperous Stanstead County the school commissioners debated their “responsibility in the case of the English school children who desire to come to Stanstead College for the purpose of continuing their education … If the children in question belong to parents of the Protestant faith, the College would make no charge on account of tuition. [We should

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make] a thorough canvass of the community to ascertain if accommodation can be obtained in local homes for these guest children.”31 Protestant pupils, therefore, did not need much encouragement to participate in the war effort – indeed, they embraced it enthusiastically. At school, children collected scrap materials for wartime production, saved magazines to be sent to soldiers overseas, bought war savings stamps and victory bonds, raised funds for the benefit of soldiers and their families as well as for charities like the Red Cross, and consistently donated money to a variety of other causes. School dances usually served the dual purpose of entertaining adolescents and of soliciting funds for war relief. At the beginning of 1942 the Quebec Committee for Allied Victory issued a plea to several school boards in the Montreal area that the war effort could be “greatly intensified” by establishing victory clubs in each high school. These clubs would “stimulate recruiting for the armed forces … [and] participate in the purely civilian duties of the Red Cross, the Salvage Campaign, the buying of War Savings Certificates, and so on.”32 In working-class Verdun, the response to the war effort was particularly exuberant – all the more remarkable given the high level of unemployment and poverty that families there had endured during the Depression. As the war revitalized the Canadian economy and unemployed men and women in Verdun found work, their school-aged children put enormous energy into the war effort. Between 1941 and 1945 they bought $89,672.44 in war savings stamps and certificates, and their teachers alone donated nearly $1,000 to the Canadian Red Cross.33 Across the province, pupils formed school clubs, such as the Junior Red Cross, and adolescent girls knitted garments for soldiers and refugees, and raised funds for specific projects. Senior students in Outremont’s Strathcona Academy even amassed money to establish a dental clinic for Allied prisoners of war in Germany.34 However, it was not enough to keep pupils occupied with the war effort. Many community groups expressed concern for the way older children, especially boys, occupied their leisure hours, especially when they had very little parental supervision because fathers were away and mothers were at work. H.C. Patterson of the ymca put the matter to Superintendent Hatcher of Lachine as follows: “With the prospects that hundreds of the fathers and elder brothers of our Lachine children will be going to war it would appear that the children in these homes will be under fewer restraints than previously. We feel that the ymca and kindred organizations have now a greater responsibility for the leisure time of the teen age boys and girls of the community.”35 The implication was that with only mothers as figures of authority (and, as became the case, many mothers would be working at fundraising or

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48 Rubber salvage, Sawyerville, 1942 Part of the war effort was collecting materials that could be recycled. Here, high-school students in Sawyerville pose at the weighing station atop a pile of rubber tires and other scrap they had gathered. [Educational Record, April-June 1942]

war production) boys would form gangs and turn to lives of crime, while girls would become promiscuous.36 In the belief that “what boys do, during the hours when they have nothing to do, largely determines their character,” the ymca sought to provide plenty of wholesome distraction. Hatcher allocated Patterson space to run programs in Lachine’s Central Park School two evenings a week: Mondays from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm for boys aged from nine to twelve, Wednesdays at the same time for thirteen- to fifteen-year-old boys, and the evenings from 8:30 pm to 10:00 pm for “young men” and “young ladies” respectively. With the help of people like Hatcher and various local churches, the ymca ran vacation schools during the summers, where children were instructed in swimming, hobbies, and Bible study.37 In nearby Lasalle, it established craft projects for younger pupils, both boys and girls, which offered an eight- or nine-week program that spanned the summer. Such programs always involved gender-specific activities: girls were taught art, dressmaking, cooking, hooking and

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49 Cooking class, Girls’ High School, Montreal Preparing students for their lives ahead went beyond “vocational” education as it was traditionally understood, and conformed to post-war notions of gender. High school girls were trained to be not only cooks but also homemakers and hostesses. In some schools, classes were fitted with a formal dining table so that girls could practise setting places, serving, and using the right cutlery. [mua, pr018508]

braiding rugs, dramatics, and music appreciation, while boys were taught art, notch and soap carving, woodwork, lino cutting, and model-plane building.38 These activities would soon find their way into the curriculum of virtually all Protestant schools across the province, the gender division encompassed by the phrases “industrial arts” and “home economics” (or “domestic science”). The war effort, of course, undermined this gender division as unprecedented numbers of women joined the industrial workforce. For all young people the prospect of wartime production became a tempting alternative to attending school: an abundance of employment opportunities with good wages began to draw a great many out of school and into the labour force. The desire to keep children in school during the war years was one of the factors contributing to the legislation passed in 1943 making education compulsory for all children up to the age of fourteen. Forcing children to remain in school was also a way of keeping an eye on them. Nor did this necessarily hinder the war effort: the

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50 Building model airplanes, Montreal, 1943 The war touched all aspects of the curriculum – even industrial arts. High school boys practised building model airplanes, in preparation for the real thing. [Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, Annual Report, 1943]

development of manual training courses took on a new impetus during wartime, often in partnership with industry. Boys in Montreal high schools were even involved in building engines and other parts for airplanes. In 1943, in the interests of advancing war production, the Dominion Bridge Company recommended that a technical school be established in Lachine: “As the needs of technical ability is [sic] becoming more and more vital in industry and will reach even greater importance in the post-war years, we feel that … technical training for our youth should be … put into effect without undue delay if the community and the surrounding industries are to maintain their present prominent position.”39 This was a recipe for community survival as well as for keeping young men gainfully occupied. Outside school hours, the most successful way to occupy boys was still the cadet corps, and the Boy Scouts. Many boards agreed to revive the cadets in their schools, though often with a degree of hesitation because of the expenses and administrative complications

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51 Cadet corps, Longueuil High School, 1940 The cadets were a popular wartime activity for boys, one that often met with success during peacetime as well. [Photo courtesy of James Charnley]

involved. Some boards, of course, were completely enthusiastic, as in Outremont where the trustees were “of the opinion that it might be advisable in the inculcation of patriotism generally owing to the British Empire being engaged in warfare most serious and widespread – and having regard to the indication of subversive tendencies – to go into the question of the formation of a Cadet Corps at the Academy composed of boys of the High School Department.”40 Two hundred and twenty Strathcona Academy boys asked to join. For such recruits, boards issued cadet uniforms and reorganized the curriculum to incorporate military subjects such as navigation; they also built shooting ranges on school properties. In Westmount, they were even willing to give high school leaving credits for “work covered by them in the course of training.”41 An alternative to the cadets was the Boy Scout movement, which found a home in Protestant schools during and after the war. The initiative often came from the school: in 1943 the principal of the Shawville Academy asked the school commissioners to help co-ordinate a troop.42 With its military accoutrements and activities, the scout movement was clearly linked with war – indeed, one of the founder’s main goals was to prepare male youth for war. Quebec scoutmasters were driven by similar aspirations, which included instruction in using firearms. Boy Scouts expressed their loyalty to empire and nation in a number of ways, including selling

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buttons for the Patriotic Fund and poppies on Armistice Day. In Protestant schools across Quebec, scouts were steeped in the values of virility, chivalry, self-discipline, patriotism, Christianity, and nature, and, by being transformed into an important national symbol, linked to notions of sacrifice and dedication.43 On a humbler level, boards actively promoted organized sports as a way of letting young people blow off steam. Often at the initiative of school principals, they would hire specialists in certain types of sports, usually from the ymca. When one St Lambert teacher asked that boxing be introduced at the school, the commissioners authorized the purchase of two sets of boxing gloves.44 Some time later, parents expressed satisfaction that their boys were sparring at school. Senior students solicited funds from school boards to run extramural sports programs, which proved an excellent way to build morale. This enthusiasm for organized sports as a means of marshalling the otherwise undisciplined energy of students would continue during the post-war years and was echoed by the expansion of the ymca across Quebec. Some voices asked whether sports were not at times distracting students from their school work, just as they had been raised over the amount of time taken up with cadets; but on the whole the social importance of sports was not questioned. One gym teacher, Mr Cooper, made the startling claim at a public function that sports could overcome all kinds of social division: “Physical Education Programs involve and benefit all age groups and while aiding all of the body system, principally foster personal discipline, social attitude and social understanding.” He gave as an example “the current Southern problems of colour discrimination as an area where the inter-mingling of sports participation can help by the bringing together and the establishing of mutual respect and understanding. In local areas, sports are bringing French and English youngsters together at events in Quebec by inter-team play.” Cooper also noted “that the Two Mountains team may play in Vancouver, thus effectively bringing together the East and the West.”45 This sort of talk helped to justify an expensive sports program, but it was also the product of an age of optimism and was, to say the least, naive in its understanding of focal problems. By getting youth involved in the war effort, training boys in underage soldiering, and organizing recreation programs, communities and their schools developed a structure to intervene in the lives of children while fathers were away at the front.46 Whether or not these interventions succeeded in warding off misbehaviour, they gave the reassuring impression that action was being taken. Such action relieved anxiety about absent fathers, adolescents, and working mothers and, in the process, reinforced the traditional gender roles that the war appeared

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to have upset. Following naturally on these wartime initiatives, the post-war curriculum would continue to emphasize girls’ future roles as wives and mothers and boys’ as heads of households and breadwinners. The horror of World War II – the physical and emotional disruption, death, and social dislocation – gave birth in the post-war period to an unprecedented conservative focus on home, family, and domesticity. If Mr Cooper epitomized the male teacher, raising the status of boys’ team sports to the level of diplomacy, then his female counterpart would have to be the domestic science teacher hired by the McMasterville school board in the 1950s: Mrs Barefoot, whose very name suggests volumes about the motives for teaching girls how to cook.47 But if the measures taken by school boards and community groups during the war led to the triumph of socially conservative values in the years following, this does not mean that the youthful urge to rebel had been suppressed, as school administrators were soon to find out. Patriotism continued to be a feature of Protestant schools during the decades following the war, but it gradually took a different focus. Veterans were given unprecedented respect and their role in helping save the democratic world (not merely King and Country) was duly celebrated. Remembrance Day had very real significance for most families. There were no more war heroes, but many children were given the day off in 1947 on the occasion of the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten.48 A number of new schools were given the name “Princess Elizabeth” around this time. The royal visit in October 1951 generated an enthusiasm that recalled the excitement over the Princess’s parents’ tour twelve years earlier. McGill’s Molson Stadium was given over to the psbgm, which arranged for a day’s entertainment for the royal couple, and for seating for 20,000 children, 17,000 of whom came from Montreal; the rest were bused in “from Sorel and Shawinigan Falls, from Sherbrooke, Magog, Huntingdon, Ormstown, Lachute, Brome County, Shawbridge Boy’s Farm, and from the more adjacent areas of St Lambert, Longueuil, and Pointe Claire.” Students displayed their school colours “in pennants, streamers, rosettes, or small flags,” and the stadium itself was decorated with shields, banners, and ribbon. The only adults in the stadium were board chair W.E. Dunton, representatives from local boards, members of the Protestant Committee, teachers from the sixty participating schools to supervise, a selection of caretakers, physical education specialists, a St John’s Ambulance team “to ensure the well-being of the children,” and, of course, the Princess and her retinue. The Princess was greeted with a full rendition of “The Maple Leaf For Ever” as her car circled the stadium. She alighted at a central podium and was offered “loyal homage” by the senior prefect of the High School of Montreal and his

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52 Princess Elizabeth visits the Molson Stadium, 1951 The future Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Canada in 1951 was a much celebrated event within Protestant schools, whose ranks filled Molson Stadium. [mua: pr039941]

counterpart from the High School for Girls – no representation, significantly, from Baron Byng High School – in the name of Protestant schoolchildren of Quebec.49 In contrast to the previous royal visit, the occasion here was less a celebration of Empire and more an expression of admiration for what the monarchy had gone through during the war and an appreciation of the future queen as a youthful symbol of post-war optimism. Apart from this reverence for the royal family itself, by this time the imperial link was all but severed in the Canadian imagination. Even so, not everyone was pleased to see the consequent abandonment of the trappings of imperialism and many were wary of the increasing importance given to Quebec symbols. In 1961 a parent protested at a school board meeting in Matapedia that by not flying the Union Jack local children were being deprived of part of their heritage: Being a veteran, the wife of an overseas veteran and a mother of 2 children attending this school I feel very strongly that since my 2 children have been

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53 Katimavik: Central Canadian Pavilion, Expo 67 By 1967 Canadians were far more caught up with Canadian nationalism than with the British Empire, as evidenced by Quebec Protestant schoolchildren’s interest in visiting Expo 67. The world fair became a symbol of modern Canada and the inverted pyramid known as the Katimavik, whose entranceway sported photographs of the many ethnic groups among Canadians, stood for the multicultural values of a new age. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c02761] taught to salute the Union Jack during their primary grades that it still should have its place of honour during their high school years. If your board sees fit to introduce the Quebec flag into the school I suggest you give the Union Jack or the Canadian ensign the first place of importance since so many Canadians fought under the flag during the recent conflicts in our Canadian history. Is there a Union Jack in every class room of the school? The recent controversy concerning the flag has damaged the esprit de corps of the High school students which is so necessary in these times.50

Regardless of what children had been taught in the past, for the younger generation on the horizon the Union Jack would have no meaning at all. The 1960s glorified an autonomous Canada, free from imperial ties with Britain and (or so Canadians liked to think) the United States. Empire Day gave way to Dominion Day, eventually to be renamed Canada Day out of a desire to sever even this reminder of the country’s former subservient status. Although it was born largely out of a defensive spirit, by way of asserting Canada’s differences from the two nations with which it enjoyed strong cultural ties, Canadian nationalism has played a similar role in accommodating immigrants to that played

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by a sense of Britishness at the turn of the century. It would also, in time, clash resoundingly with the persona of French Canada; Quebec nationalism would renounce federalist efforts to promote unity in the same tone that their ancestors had once rejected the call to fight for Britain. This tension was, however, barely a blip on the horizon in that heady summer of 1967 when Canada made its mark on the international stage by holding Expo 67 in Montreal. A number of boards organized trips to Expo, even from as far away as Coaticook where the local Home and School Association collaborated with the Oddfellows Lodge to provide $1.50 per pupil for a day in Montreal.51 The mood was no doubt as joyous as it had been for the children back in 1939 – only instead of going to gaze at the Queen they climbed to the top of the Katimavik.

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9

Pillars of the Community: School Boards and Social Welfare No class of people more than the school trustees is apt to understand the value of education in promoting progress in any pursuit. For this reason, the Superior Board of Health, desiring to spread the important knowledge of hygiene, respectfully ask for your cooperation in educating our population in this most humanitarian science, and have thought of asking you to have the teachers under your jurisdiction distribute to the families of your locality, the pamphlets we are mailing to you. Superior Board of Health, Province of Quebec, 19201 Democracy will not survive if the school does not extend its activities to all who need them, especially those who, through economic pressure, would otherwise be debarred from educational advantages and could never be expected adequately to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. This applies particularly to the most densely populated districts. H.G. Hatcher, Superintendent of Lachine schools, c.19382

The Medical Officer of Health sent his report for the previous school year, dated 5 October 1918, to the Protestant school trustees of Lachine.3 Dr Baudouin had made weekly visits to the homes of children absent from school, and recorded the total number of visits for each month. These ranged from only 13 in September and 17 in June to 94 in February and 158 in January; sickness was naturally more common in winter. Of these absences, 17 were due to toothache, 98 to “diseases of the respiratory tract,” and the remaining 525 to other causes. The report listed the various contagious diseases found in the homes of Lachine schoolchildren: four cases of diphtheria; six of impetigo; one of german measles; six of scarlet fever; eleven of chicken pox; one of ringworm; one of whooping cough; and two of mumps. Dr Baudouin was pleased to note that of these thirty-two cases of infectious disease, fourteen “were already under control while eighteen were discovered and controlled only through these visits” – figures that, he argued, “show the necessity of keeping up this work more eloquently than a whole

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54 Fingernail inspection, Montreal Good hygiene had been advocated for some years, but it became a passion by the time of World War II. Protestant school boards systematically undertook to intervene in the health and welfare of the children under their jurisdiction. [emsba: events file]

volume.” Of some concern was that the total number of visits, 672, marked an increase of over 20 per cent from the previous year. The doctor also felt that the many respiratory problems could easily be avoided if only families did not overheat their homes and if only teachers would explain as much to their pupils. Finally, though he acknowledged the matter was “not in my province,” Baudouin felt that far too many of the 525 “other causes” were not related to sickness at all. All in all, the report was optimistic that improvements were being made: carrying out systematic visits had even resulted in “the saving of closing out the schools even in epidemics.” Dr Baudouin was justified in this conclusion given the unprecedented wartime concern for public health. He may also have bitten his tongue two weeks later when schools rapidly began to close owing to the outbreak of Spanish influenza that rocked the whole world and killed more people than the four years of war combined. Protestant school boards were more than mere vehicles for delivering a certain type of education. As members of a community they had a

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vital interest in its welfare – a concern that ranged from how to handle a disruptive student to how to contain an epidemic. At least up until the mid-twentieth century, all school boards concerned themselves regularly with issues of discipline, truancy, and indigence, which they handled case by case, with varying degrees of sympathy. Contagious disease was a more serious problem, both because it required decisive action in the face of great fear and confusion and because it underscored the poverty and congestion that helped epidemics spread faster and made them harder to prevent. Because of their contact with children and their role within the community, school boards naturally became important players in this struggle for improvements in health and welfare. In this challenge they were helped, and spurred on, by a wide variety of charitable and community organizations promoting children’s health. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu) believed that alcohol was a major cause of poverty and that education was a key tool to dispelling its evil. With their co-operation, a number of schools included in the curriculum a course on “temperance and science” which, for all its emphasis on liquor, instilled a sense of good general hygiene into hundreds of children who normally paid it very little attention.4 Similarly, the Women’s Institute, the iode, and, slightly later, the Home and School movement were instrumental in administering programs to alleviate poverty and prevent disease. Like the school boards to whom they provided these services, they were all direct products of the Protestant community. Protestant boards were also caught up in the priorities and agendas of the times in which they operated. As Protestants, they could not help being influenced by the movement for social reform that pervaded all of English Canada and, indeed, much of the Western world. The educational changes brought about by the Protestant Committee at the end of the nineteenth century were part of this movement, but it was much broader in scope: reformers driven by the “Social Gospel” campaigned for improvements to working conditions and political rights that laid the foundations for modern Canadian society. As with much else, it was in the context of World War I that many advances in social welfare took place, including the sort of visit undertaken by Dr Baudouin to prevent contagion and to investigate absences. World War II was an even greater catalyst, especially as it created a climate in which government-run health and welfare programs could be implemented during the post-war years. The 1940s and 50s saw less overall concern for physical health (which could be said to be gradually improving despite some horrors, such as polio) than for “mental hygiene,” which was born of the same fears about idle youth that we have already discussed,

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coupled with a growing fascination for psychology. The earlier attention given to discipline and the “other causes” for absence became the work of a variety of specialists who found a home in the school system: social workers, psychologists, and guidance counsellors tackled the problems of modern society in the bud, at school. These services eventually became an integral part of Protestant education and an increasing preoccupation of Protestant school boards.

Disease was one of the principal preoccupations of school boards, especially with the rise of larger and more centralized schools where infection was easily introduced and quickly spread. Although sickness was a major cause of low attendance during the nineteenth century – occasionally requiring the temporary closing of entire schools – it was only gradually seen as a problem that could be remedied through public intervention. School boards were often initially worried that it was their schools that were causing the spread of disease. In 1884, having disinfected the school in Pointe St Charles after an outbreak of diphtheria, the Montreal commissioners noted that children were still coming down with the disease. They sent a sanitary inspector to give the building a thorough check and were relieved to learn that “he found every corner of the building scrupulously clean and free from all suspicion of unhealthiness arising from drain gas or other causes and that the prevalence of diphtheria must be attributed to the defective drainage of the neighbourhood and not to the school.”5 The social conditions in Pointe St Charles being what they were, this was not altogether surprising, but what did begin to sink in was the realization that, when it came to contagion, schools and their communities had a symbiotic relationship: it was in the school’s best interest that the pupils’ families be sensitive to the problem of disease control, as well as the other way round. The commissioners concluded that the Pointe St Charles pupils who had had the disease, or who came from a house where someone had the disease, should not be admitted back to the school “without medical authorization.”6 This policy was to serve them well the following year when the city was struck by the infamous smallpox epidemic: the rule was applied not only to children who had clearly come into contact with the disease but also to those living within two houses of a case. Moreover, any student who had attended the funeral of someone who had died of smallpox was not to be readmitted to school for a period of twenty days. The Board of Health was also entitled to remove any sick person living in a house adjacent to a school to the hospital, and to have that house thoroughly disinfected.7

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Small rural schools regularly closed for a variety of reasons, but it was a more serious event when scarlet fever shut down the Lennoxville Model School for a week in 1898 and when the Cookshire Academy was forced to close its doors in 1897, also for a week, owing to an outbreak of diphtheria.8 The nature of infection was sufficiently understood by this time for school boards to order these schools to be scrubbed before letting the pupils return. This operation could be difficult if there were no janitor: the Clarendon board had to hire someone specially to disinfect the school, who later presented a bill for “sulphur.”9 The methods used to disinfect differed considerably, and if it is clear that boards were willing to take action, there is less evidence that they knew what action was best for what disease or, at any rate, what to call it: schools were often “fumigated” after an epidemic of diphtheria, chicken pox, or scarlet fever, and a Granby school officially burnt books, maps, and globes to remove any traces of disease.10 Disinfecting the school remained the boards’ standard response to epidemics into the 1920s. During the month of February 1925 the St Lambert principal was kept on his toes – as was, presumably, the janitor – fumigating the rooms of the high school after bouts of “Mumps, Influenza, bad colds, one case of Diphtheria and two of Scarlet Fever,” which must have been something of a record.11 Gradually, however, appreciation for the advantages of prevention over simple containment was growing. The 1885 smallpox epidemic had revealed the strategic importance of vaccination: it was noted that the death rate among Catholic families was far higher than among Protestants, who generally espoused vaccination and were scrupulous about monitoring the spread of the disease. When they re-opened, Montreal’s Protestant schools required a certificate of vaccination from all students, whereas Catholic schools required the certificate only from families with afflicted children.12 In the wake of this horrendous epidemic, boards of health issued school boards with increasingly complex information regarding the treatment of various diseases, notably how long the incubation period was for each and under what circumstances children should be readmitted to school.13 The notion that contagion was more of a problem in dirty, congested parts of town led social reformers to campaign for better living conditions for the city’s poor. These conditions, they soon realized, were particularly outrageous in Montreal, a city with one of the highest death rates in the world and virtually the highest rate of infant mortality in the world with the possible exception of Calcutta.14 But the solution of adopting public measures to improve sanitation was poorly received at all levels of government. Without the immediacy of an epidemic, public health was simply of no great concern.15

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pillars of the community • 249 Table 8 Montreal Board of Health guidelines for contagious diseases, 1893 Disease

Incubation Period

Contagious Period

Typhus

21 days

3–4 weeks

Enteric

28 days

4–6 weeks – till diarrhea ceases

Cholera

10 days

Throughout attack – greatest during height of disease

Scarlatina

7 days

8 weeks – end of desquamation

Measles

14 days

3–4 weeks – end of desquamation

Smallpox

14 days

3–4 weeks – until every scab has fallen off

Chicken pox

10 days

4 weeks – until every scab has fallen off

Diphtheria

12 days

3–8 weeks – until all discharges have ceased

Influenza

2–7 days

14–21 days

Whooping cough

14 days

6 weeks or longer

Mumps

14 days

3–4 weeks

Erysipelas

8 days

Until end of desquamation

Source: pbsc for the City of Montreal, 18 March 1893

Smallpox nevertheless remained a problem in the early twentieth century for many disadvantaged children, despite the long-standing availability of a vaccine. Boards of health were promoting it, but municipal governments were on the whole dragging their feet, though a few were unusually conscientious. In 1901 the Protestant school board in Longueuil received instructions from the city to ensure that every child be vaccinated and obtain a certificate to that effect.16 Such an order proved very difficult to enforce: as boards of health had discovered years before, vaccination was beyond the means of many families, and commissioners were loath to insist on something that most people considered to have little immediate purpose. A decade (and another epidemic) later, municipal governments were instructing the school boards of Longueuil and other communities not to admit pupils that had not been vaccinated, and the boards would send notices home with the children advising parents of the situation.17 By this time the advantages of a public health movement were harder to ignore, and after 1914 school boards could bring the moral weight of the war to bear on their campaign. But the devastating Spanish flu of October 1918 weakened public confidence in the ability of vaccination to prevent disease and

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the subsequent decade saw a mounting struggle between health officials and parents, with school boards often caught in between. The vaccine against diphtheria was a medical breakthrough of the 1920s, but it involved the application of what was often graphically referred to as the “puncture method” – the hypodermic needle.18 Unwilling to impose this ordeal on the children of Sherbrooke, the school commissioners waived the need to be vaccinated for all pupils who could produce a doctor’s note saying their health did not permit them to receive an injection. When the Board of Health found out about this leniency, the commissioners were told they would be liable to a fine of nearly $1,800 if they did not insist on certificates from every pupil.19 The Longueuil Board attempted to avoid the issue by declaring that medical matters were under provincial jurisdiction, but when the Board of Health began to exert pressure, the commissioners announced that admission to their schools would depend on the presentation of a certificate. They also agreed to help circulate a leaflet explaining the advantages of vaccination and outlining the procedure. In 1932 the board undertook to co-operate with the City of Longueuil in providing free vaccinations for all children – a telling measure of the desperation of the Depression years and of how deeply the schools were implicated in the social welfare movement.20 The following year a similar cooperative venture was arranged between the City of Verdun and its Protestant board, which allowed vaccination to take place on school premises.21 Lacking a co-operative municipal government, the St Eustache Protestant Board went straight to the Montreal Board of Health with “the idea of procuring a supply of diphtheria toxoid at cost price for immunizing the pupils of our school and children of the families of our Protestant community.”22 With the outbreak of World War II, the government made this vaccine available to school boards. The Sherbrooke commissioners considered purchasing a supply, but then decided against undertaking a “general inoculation.”23 The need for school boards to take direct action to prevent disease had its origins in the concern for children’s physical condition expressed during World War I. Boards began to receive statistical reports on the condition of their pupils: at the end of the 1915–16 school year, Lachine’s medical officer presented the Protestant school trustees with the results of 1,135 examinations (of which 252 were re-examinations, suggesting that 883 pupils had been tested); he found the following “percentage of defects”: Defective vision – 12.5 per cent; Defective hearing – 1 per cent; Enlarged tonsils and adenoids – 23 per cent; Decayed teeth – 26.9 per cent; Unvaccinated children – 10 per cent; and Pediculosis (including nits) – 15 per cent.

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The last of these afflictions, the doctor was happy to add, had been “greatly diminished through repeated examinations of the offenders.” For all these defects he blamed poor heating in the classrooms and the lack of a gymnasium in the high school.24 Despite this doctor’s apparent lack of sympathy for these offending children, his conviction that regular examination was the key to improvement set the tone for further intervention. The Victorian Order of Nurses made frequent visits to schools during the war years and the post-war period to carry out such exams. The school boards (and the doctors) were especially grateful to have nurses undertake the inspection for lice and nits.25 By the 1930s community groups such as the iode were pushing boards to hire school nurses. After a brief epidemic of scarlet fever in 1933, the Granby board engaged Miss Eliza Simpson as a nurse for the entire school year, at $80 per month. Within six months the board agreed that her work was much appreciated by the school population and by “the community at large,” suggesting that parents were happy to have this service.26 Some communities were fortunate in having a doctor willing to lend his services to the school. St Lambert’s Dr Mitchell, one of these, was committed to ongoing health care to the extent that he devised a system of cards showing each pupil’s medical record for easier consultation.27 Dr F.L. Phelps had a particularly close relationship with the school trustees of Ste Agathe, where the local tuberculosis sanitarium was one of the Protestant community’s largest employers (and would later provide the land for the new high school). Not only was the doctor on the staff at the sanitarium but also he was a member of the school board for twenty-nine years. Thanks to his influence, pupils received free vaccinations through the 1920s. The Ste Agathe board was also one of the first, in 1937, to impose mandatory X-rays for the teaching staff for the prevention of tuberculosis; this practice would become common by the 1940s.28 In the 1930s, emerging Home and School associations were instrumental in arranging for free medical examinations in many smaller communities, such as Coaticook, where two doctors agreed to offer their services at the school free, thanks to the combined efforts of parents, teachers, and trustees.29 The willingness of school boards to provide community service was limited, however, when it interfered with the school day. The Sherbrooke commissioners appreciated the interest taken by the Children’s Welfare Clinic in the well-being of the pupils, but felt that the plan to set aside an entire day “for the examination of children’s feet and legs … would seem impossible with the present arrangement of study hours.”30 A school, after all, was a school.

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55 Tuberculosis sanitarium, Ste Agathe The sanitarium in Ste Agathe was a close ally of the Protestant dissentient school there, especially because a resident physician, Dr Phelps, was on the school board. The present school was built on land donated by the hospital. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c01938]

On the whole, however, schools became important venues for the administration of social welfare during the Depression. The iode and the Womens’ Institute had a long tradition of providing milk and crackers to “indigent” children in urban areas, and they redoubled their efforts when the numbers of the needy increased. The Protestant boards in Sherbrooke and Verdun allowed soup kitchens to be installed in empty classrooms to provide hot meals for disadvantaged pupils; even in the relatively affluent Pointe Claire the commissioners discovered needy children and helped supplement their diets.31 Few areas, however, were hit as hard as working-class Verdun, although few communities were as well organized to deal with crisis. The Verdun United Unemployed Workmen’s Association appealed to the school trustees to take into consideration the economic difficulties of unemployed parents when they asked them for money to fund school activities. The association was also quick to criticize the school board for what they felt was discrimination against the children of unemployed parents. Despite their unenviable role as tax collectors and general figures of authority, trustees did their best to continue providing education during a difficult time. Verdun teachers even organized fundraisers to help out the pupils of unemployed families.32 In 1933 the Longueuil Protestant Board was approached by the municipal government for help in finding accommo-

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56 Medical inspection by a visiting doctor, Montreal Part of the effort to improve the health of schoolchildren was a visit from the doctor, an event much more likely in Montreal than in rural areas until the 1950s. Here, children are lined up to receive a basic eye, ear, and throat inspection, and perhaps to be weighed. [emsba: events file]

dation for four homeless families. The board possessed an old building on Chambly Road, which had previously housed the school now built on land immediately behind it, and they were pleased to put it to good use, provided the town pay the costs. This did not prove a happy arrangement, however, as the children of these families disrupted the classes with their noise and in general annoyed the local residents. When the city took steps to evict them, these tenants proved very difficult to move.33 The disenfranchised, understandably, had little sympathy for how hard a public body like the school board was working to provide education on a very limited budget. But despite this hard work, many whom the system was supposed to serve were still falling through the cracks. At the height of the Depression, the commissioners of the relatively prosperous municipality of Cookshire were obliged to write the following letter to the parents of a girl who had not been attending school: It has been brought to our attention that you are keeping your child out of school because you cannot afford to pay her school fees. We are very sorry

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254 • a meeting of the people indeed to know this, as we feel that no child should be deprived of schooling. You realize of course that we couldn’t have a school at all if the citizens did not co-operate to defray the necessary expenses, as no school can be carried on without money, and that money has to be raised in each community by taxes and school fees. A citizen of Cookshire has volunteered to pay your daughter’s fees for this term, if you are unable to do so, rather than see her deprived of an education. Your fair co-operation will be appreciated. We trust that you will send your daughter to school and, if you cannot afford to pay these fees, kindly let us know and we will arrange accordingly.34

Had there been no generous citizen, this girl would not have attended school, and it is not clear from the letter that the parents would even accept this charity. The frustration of officials like the Cookshire commissioners would only be lessened after the start of World War II when, in the spirit of wartime co-operation, legislation (7 George VI, c.13) addressed some key reforms that had long been championed by community groups, notably the provision of free textbooks and the elimination of school fees. Ideally, this meant that poverty was no longer a barrier to schooling. Until this time the toll of unemployment was a constant worry, as was the haunting prospect of social and political catastrophe resulting from the apparent failure of existing institutions to meet society’s needs. Many social-minded groups and individuals advocated that the school play a role in advancing the cause of community cohesion. They included one of the Protestant school system’s staunchest critics from within, H.G. Hatcher, the Secretary-Treasurer of the Lachine Board of Trustees and Superintendent of Lachine schools. Given the tendency of most school boards not to rock the political boat, Hatcher was an anomaly: a champion of various left-wing causes who publicly faulted the apathy of leading citizens towards the Depression’s victims and privately blasted the Protestant Committee and W.P. Percival for having no vision to effect change.35 Nevertheless, he spoke for a widening body of opinion when he said: The expensive school plant is not giving the community all the services to which it is entitled, and that school facilities should be extended to meet the recreational, social, vocational and cultural needs of the community’s present and prospective citizens. This demand … is quite in keeping with the broader conception of education, and it is not only desirable but highly essential that the activities of all citizens of a community, both old and young, should be the concern of the educational authorities … Hence, there devolves upon the school, an institution supported by public funds, the responsibility of providing adequate recreational opportunities, and education in the social sciences for all, as well as a training in the rudiments of learning for those hitherto deprived of it.36

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This was a vision of the school as cultural centre and of the school board as guarantor of the community’s health. School boards might think they were extending themselves considerably by providing hot lunches and medical inspections, but for Hatcher this was the bare minimum. He called for a “comprehensive and expanding programme” of extracurricular activity that would touch the lives not only of schoolchildren but also of adults who were hungry for “vocational training, literary and artistic development, and above all, clubs for civic education and discussion of current events. These provide an opportunity for the development of an individual’s creative instinct; a means for the talented person to distinguish himself; and a source of interest and enjoyment for persons of all ages.” In the United States and Europe, “statistics collected from communities where such schools have been in operation show that juvenile delinquency and accident mortality have been reduced to a very marked degree, and discontented adults have been moulded into happy, useful, competent citizens.”37 The same motives spurred more conservative voices, only they were inclined to promote patriotic activity to fill the void rather than self-fulfillment through learning and recreation. School boards were eventually willing to allow all kinds of activities to take place on their premises in the interest of community well-being. Traditionally, boards were disinclined to provide space within schools to outside agencies, mostly because so many were overtly religious in orientation and it was felt keenly that church and school should not overlap. By the 1930s, however, boards found themselves accommodating a wide variety of charitable groups and social clubs. The organizations that provided the most productive relationship for both school and community did not so much work through the school as grow out of it: the Home and School associations. Whether the impetus came from a school’s principal, teachers, or parents, the end result was a co-operative association of all three, working in the interest of pupils and the wider community. These organizations were usually non-denominational in orientation (and so only distantly related to the Social Gospel movement) and involved men as well as women. In addition to providing hot meals to children who lived too far away to go home for lunch, or whose diet might not normally include a hot meal, Home and School associations were instrumental in setting up sports, art, and music programs in schools, and in establishing the appropriate facilities. Whereas the older charitable groups recruited local membership, Home and School associations were composed entirely of local people – of parents – who provided most of the labour for all projects undertaken in and around the school: “Last year we converted a coal bin into a lunch room complete with kitchen unit and picnic table-benches to seat forty children,” reported the West Island community of Valois in June 1950. “The conversion took some

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300 man-hours of work donated by our willing Home and School male members. This project continued to operate during the past winter months and some 2,000 bowls of soup were served by our lady members to children living at too great a distance to go home for lunch.”38 This example of co-operation illustrates the enthusiasm with which Home and School associations could tackle a problem. After it had organized as a federation at the provincial level in 1944, the Home and School movement quickly established an activist health and welfare agenda. The formation of this new body meant that while local associations established programs in accordance with the particular needs of their constituencies, the federation pushed for a comprehensive program around themes already established by member associations. The focus on health paralleled social changes brought about by the wartime realization that children’s well-being, or the lack of it, had broad ramifications. Healthy children were considered assets to society; sickly ones were liabilities. The federation quickly established a health committee to assess and promote the health needs of its young constituents. Its motto, “healthy children make better citizens,” was based on the idea that emotionally and physically well-adjusted children enhanced citizenship.39 Some of the health committee members were physicians, thus strengthening its effectiveness in developing and initiating policies. In 1946 the committee published a booklet, Control of Communicable Diseases, which was distributed to member schools.40 The committee promoted the establishment of uniform medical examinations, including tb tests and x-rays, dental exams, and tests for hearing, speech, and vision problems; it also advocated health education programs aimed at both students and parents, and the introduction of sex education in schools.41 Over the following decades, the Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations (qfhsa) worked to promote compulsory immunization and medical exams, the fluoridation of water, and an awareness of the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. Their efforts to improve the well-being of school children dovetailed with the growth of the welfare state, implemented by the federal government since the war. Its relations with the Quebec government were usually less harmonious, at least until the 1960s. Unwilling to endorse most public welfare measures, the Duplessis government often targeted Home and School programs: it was all the federation could do, for example, to stop the closure of the free dental clinic at Montreal’s Fairmount school, which had been established during the war.42 School boards, however, proved very amenable to these measures and strove to implement (or continue) programs with the co-operation of local Home and School associations. By the 1960s the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal

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57 Medical exam in a school clinic, Montreal Here, the intervention is much more elaborate, with a staff of nurses in a room equipped with beds. [emsba: events file]

(psbgm) employed nine nurses, who paid regular visits to schools, and eleven doctors on a part-time basis; it also provided dental clinics with the assistance of the Junior Red Cross, and conducted regular tests of children to determine hearing, vision, and speech problems.43 The progressive spirit of the 1960s eventually led to universal health insurance, which resulted in great improvement in general levels of health. Nevertheless, governments, boards, and schools continued to rely on parents and other members of the community to help implement these measures. A nurse may give the actual injection, but it takes dedicated volunteers to reassure frightened children beforehand and comfort them (often with lollipops) once the trauma is over.

It took considerably longer for Protestant communities and their school boards to recognize the importance of good mental health, despite a long-standing preoccupation with bad behaviour. The concern for idle youth and the dangers of sex that we have seen (for which the favoured remedy was distraction with organized activities) did not translate into an enthusiasm for psychological treatment. For all the popular interest in Freud since the 1920s, educators did not jump to apply such theories to schoolchildren to explain errant behaviour. This reluctance may have stemmed from a traditional Protestant tendency to

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dismiss factors that cannot be overcome by hard work and good character. Hatcher was no exception: always ready to look beyond superficial matters at the underlying social causes of problems, he showed no particular interest in the ability of psychologists to uncover personality disorders. The rather gingerly language of a letter from the Psychological Institute to the principal of Lachine High School in 1942 suggests that specialists were by no means confident that the services they had to offer would be well regarded: “In your daily contacts with pupils many problems undoubtedly have come to your attention,” wrote psychologist Frances Alexander. “There may have been instances in which you felt a psychologist could have assisted in adjusting the pupil … Very often family relationships and conflict are carried over into the school institution and militate against progress of the pupil. The Psychological Institute has been engaged in private consultation work for the last five years. The enclosed announcement summarizes the scope of our work with children … I should be glad to visit you at your school and give you any further information you may desire with regard to our guidance program.”44 The writer may well have come across to the school board as yet another of those hard-working women whose paths crossed theirs every few days and who filled the ranks of the still largely amateur field of social work. Nevertheless, World War II saw considerable advances in psychological research and a more aggressive campaign by specialists to increase public awareness of what became known as mental hygiene. In Montreal, the Mental Hygiene Institute launched an appeal to various public bodies to work towards the “prevention of mental ill health, antisocial conduct, family breakdown and social failure,” as well as the promotion of an adequate state of well-being for everyone in the community. It was felt that this could best be achieved by broadening its base of operations and taking advantage of the close working relationship which the Mental Hygiene Institute had built up over a period of many years with the social agencies, health organizations, and educational institutions in Montreal.45 At a public lecture in 1947, one psychologist claimed that teachers and parents could prevent mental disorders such as manic-depressive psychosis, caused by “faulty behaviour patterns,” by providing a balance between school work, play, social activities, relaxation, and sleep.46 The qfhsa was greatly impressed by this take on children’s problems and printed enthusiastic articles in its newspaper about the relationships between psychology, education, and child care. When parents and teachers began to voice concern over how best to manage children with personality and behavioural difficulties, staff at the Mental Hygiene Institute encouraged teachers to intervene with communication and behavioural techniques

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at school.47 Educators and parents expressed similar consternation about the management of hyperactive children and the effect of family breakdown on student behaviour.48 For school boards of the 1940s and 50s the crucial problem was attendance, or the lack of it. Now that going to school was compulsory (following wartime legislation to this effect) staying away for reasons other than poor health was an offence. Boards began to employ attendance officers, who would visit the homes of children who repeatedly missed days of school. Although this was essentially what social workers did, school attendance officers, who were usually men, brought with them an air of discipline. However, it became clear that the reasons for non-attendance were many and complex, as were the reasons for poor academic performance or bad behaviour within schools. By the mid 1950s the psbgm had a department of “social work” that had only partly to do with assessing children’s material welfare, though the board was also careful to keep track of welfare cases.49 Professional school social workers – men as well as women, especially in high schools – became fixtures of school life and in some cases of individual schools, interviewing and keeping files on “problem” children. In many cases, social workers intervened only enough to be able to make a referral for medical or psychiatric help. At times, however, these inhouse specialists were sympathetic faces to whom troubled children could turn when parents were hostile or absent, when a principal was dismissive, and, as was increasingly the case, when a minister was unknown. A guidance department was a slightly later creation for the psbgm, its role being to advise on students’ career prospects; but that could easily extend to a discussion of personal problems. In 1962 the board obtained the services of a “consultant psychiatrist” in co-operation with the Montreal Children’s Hospital; this meant that “the problems of the deviant child have been better appreciated … and the whole educational programme for the individual and the school improved.”50 Outside the city, boards were slower to address psychological problems. In 1958 the Two Mountains board was concerned with the widespread presence of “idlers”: “There are pupils who refuse to take advantage of their opportunities but who persist in idleness, jeer at serious-minded pupils and take up valuable time of the teacher … [They] can be identified quite early and should be referred to the Principal for consideration.” The board’s rather ominous conclusion was that idlers should be “eliminated.”51 One obstacle to introducing psychological (let alone psychiatric) services may well have been a Protestant reluctance to admit to problems. Rather in the manner of Miss Alexander, who had approached the Lachine principal two decades earlier, Miss Nora McCardell offered her services as a clinical psychologist in early

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1964 to the Sherbrooke board, wondering whether they might wish to hire her to evaluate any problem children. The board’s first response was to refer her to the Sherbrooke Hospital who “may possibly have need of her services,” but then the local medical officer reported that he thought it would be very good to have a school psychologist. Through the agency of the local Home and School Association the Protestant boards of both Sherbrooke and Lennoxville agreed to share the cost of Miss McCardell’s salary. A year later she reported that the board was “not ready to instigate a complete guidance program,” but this would soon come, as it was part of the mandate of regional boards to have the responsibility for guidance services delegated to them.52 One of the chief advantages of regional boards (which are discussed in chapter 11) was that they provided access to such services without obliging local boards to venture out into the murky waters of child psychology. Psychologists and guidance counsellors were, moreover, considerably more expensive than librarians. Putting the full range of social services to work in the interests of schoolchildren was of crucial importance by the later 1960s when delinquency began to acquire a particular edge. While communities had always been concerned about teenage behaviour, the popularity of smoking, alcohol, and especially drugs had raised the bar somewhat. The qfhsa’s initial take on marijuana was surprisingly lenient; it called for its decriminalization, but added, significantly, that the government needed to fund research into its effects.53 Six months later, the federation modified its stance, placing the emphasis on the need for stiff penalties for drug pushers and more education on the subject. The psbgm was also inclined to see drug use as a behaviour problem, rather than a health risk: “There seems little doubt that some of the pupils enrolled in the Board’s high schools do use drugs on week-ends and out of school hours. The realization that this problem had reached Montreal and vicinity prompted the Board to set up a committee of its own to investigate and report on the matter.” The result was an intensive training program for teachers and the production of kits to be circulated in the schools to promote drug awareness.54 By the 1970s the view that drug use among teens was a moral issue had changed as the medical ramifications of drug abuse became more apparent. The same shift can be seen in the federation’s attitude towards smoking. For decades it had been socially acceptable for adults to smoke, but for children to do so was associated with defiance of authority. In the late 1960s, the qfhsa was inclined to be tolerant of high school students having the odd cigarette, seeing this as a rite of passage into adulthood. The Pointe Claire Home and School Association had even arranged for a smoking area in John Rennie High School.55 By the later 1970s Que-

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bec had the highest incidence of teenage smoking, adult smoking, and smoking-related diseases in Canada.56 The permissive view of smoking had become completely outdated; health advocates worried about the effects of secondhand smoke and condemned tobacco advertising that targeted teens. In 1943, in a general discussion about juvenile delinquency and bad behaviour among local youth, the Pointe Claire school commissioners, along with representatives from the Boy Scouts, the United Church, the iode, and similar organizations, asked themselves what the root of the problem was, and many suggested it was sex. The Reverend V.C. Rose argued for the introduction of sex education in the schools, and volunteered to circulate some pamphlets on the subject. Mr Scott, who was in charge of the local Sunday School program, suggested that films on venereal disease should be shown. Others, including the school principal, felt that the “sex problem” was no worse than it was elsewhere, and that the right course of action was to get children involved in various organizations and especially in sports. The real culprit, they all agreed, was the war itself.57 This conclusion put an end to the discussion, but over the course of the 1960s and 70s sex education came to form part of the Protestant school curriculum – ultimately as part of the Human Awareness program. Not all parents were happy about this and many complained, but opposition was never sufficient to have the material removed. The qfhsa, which had been instrumental in establishing sex education programs, also sought to ensure that teenagers got the help they needed for addictions and venereal diseases; it led the controversial campaign to give minors access to medical treatment without parental consent.58 In the 1980s, it advocated high-school birth-control clinics where students could obtain advice and free contraceptives to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.59 The willingness of school boards to accommodate these needs has proved an even greater source of controversy, but they remain crucial issues affecting the youth of any community.

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10

Riding the Catholic Bus: The Decline of Rural Protestant School Boards To what grade is this Board going to obligate itself to educate children throughout this County? Is [sic] there to be different limits for different parts? Can you in fairness educate children in one part of the County to Grade 9 – in another to Grade 11 – in another to Grade 7? How can this be equalized? By Bus? By direct financial assistance? By Boarding? Secretary of the Stanstead County School Board, 19471

Rural areas provide the Province with the basic necessities of life, and are therefore of equal importance to the provincial and national economy with urban centres, they therefore must logically have educational opportunities equal with those of urban centres. Matapedia Home and School Association, 19642

During the last seven years of its life, the school board of Inverness Township’s principal task was running a bus service. Since the 1940s it had been conveying pupils of all ages by bus from outlying parts of the township to the village, where the Inverness High School was located, but by the 1960s, with fewer and fewer pupils, it became clear that the board would have to cut back on the number of teachers. At the end of the 1961–62 year the board’s secretary wrote to his counterpart in Thetford Mines, an industrial town some thirty kilometres away, to ask whether a small number of Inverness pupils could attend Grade 10 and Grade 11 there; the Inverness commissioners would, of course, pay the tuition of these students, from taxes raised from Inverness ratepayers for their children’s education. A deal was soon worked out and announced before the beginning of term. Parents could send their children to other institutions, but tuition would have to come out of their own pockets. The board, which already spent $1,800 yearly on transportation, was obliged to hire another driver at $1,220 to take the few

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58 School bus, Morin Heights, c. 1950 Buses carried lots of children, but they ran into difficulty in many parts of rural Quebec. The Laurentians had especially bad roads in winter and spring, and regular struggles such as these soon gave rise to the adoption of snowmobiles. [Morin Heights Historical Association]

students into Thetford Mines. In the spring of 1965 the commissioners decided to negotiate a more extensive arrangement with the Thetford board, and took out a $7,000 loan to finance the purchase of a school bus. In July they announced that they would “close the doors of the school for one year and all pupils [would] be conveyed to Thetford High School.” By the following year they decided that the eighty-yearold school in Inverness should be “permanently closed and disposed of.” They wrote the Richmond Historical Society asking whether it would be interested in purchasing the school as a historic building.3 The fate of the Inverness board in the 1960s was essentially the fate of rural Protestant Quebec. In much of the Eastern Townships, the Chateauguay valley, the Pontiac, and the Gaspé, Protestant communities retained control over their local schools, but even there the population was steadily thinning and the existing network of buildings was becoming unwieldy. A great many of the model and consolidated schools built to replace the old one-room schoolhouses were operating with too few children. In more remote areas, rural Protestant communities withered, closed their schools, and sent their children on buses to faraway towns. Some, like Inverness, retained their school boards as long as they could, seeing in them a vital expression of local identity.

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59 Inverness Academy Built in 1889, the academy was the last remaining school in Inverness Township at the time of its closure in 1965. It is now a residence for senior citizens. [Author photo]

For many small Protestant communities, the school board was the only public institution that spoke to their needs. Other rural boards disappeared. If by the end of the 1960s they had not already merged with a neighbour or surrendered their powers to a larger board, they were forcibly abolished in 1972 under Bill 27. The answer to rural disintegration in this period was the same as that touted in the 1940s and at the beginning of the century, with the consolidation movement: the units of measurement must be bigger, boards must be bigger, schools must be bigger. The Protestant drive for efficiency and clarity clashed with the complex, highly fragmented character of the province’s education system, but reformers typically saw the problem as one of order versus chaos, or modernity versus backwardness, rather than in terms of community survival. The consolidation movement had been launched in Quebec without a real appreciation of the Protestant minority’s isolated position in many rural areas. Schools in central places may have been efficient, but they hastened the demise of (Protestant) places that were not central.4 The campaigns for central boards in the 1940s and regional boards in the 1960s were similarly focused on efficiency at the expense of community. Officials of the Protestant Committee were, like Quebec’s Anglo-Protestant

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business elite during much of the twentieth century, seemingly unaware that Protestants were a minority and that the majority posed any kind of a threat other than as a force of reaction. The educational reforms of the 1940s and 1960s made a good deal of sense in a world where distances were shrinking and services multiplying thanks to technology. Unfortunately, Protestant communities were also shrinking, and would shrink even faster in the 1970s. By that time, the majority was not only in control, but had adopted the Protestant zeal for efficiency with even scantier regard for community. Had small school boards survived, they would have helped to preserve the Protestant presence across rural Quebec. Despite the administrative improvements, the central and especially the regional boards served largely to accustom Protestant schoolchildren to travelling long distances regularly.

Walter Percival began his term as Director of Protestant Education at the beginning of the Depression, when much public discourse was devoted to the question of how to help people in desperate circumstances. One of the acknowledged problems of providing systematic relief was that provincial and federal governments placed this burden on the shoulders of the municipalities, most of which were unable to handle the demand. The Depression also took its toll on school municipalities: many boards could not pay their teachers a decent wage without raising taxes – a fruitless prospect in most rural communities, where even ratepayers were often destitute. The obvious remedy for this situation seemed to be a more efficient administration of schools, services, and taxes. In the autumn of 1937 the Protestant Committee decided to undertake a comprehensive survey of Protestant schools in the province, hoping it would result in a viable proposal for action. Percival submitted a memorandum outlining his own assessment of the system and giving recommendations for its improvement, based not on a systematic study of schools and regions but on his own work experience, backed up by careful statistics.5 He noted that of the 346 Protestant school boards in Quebec, 335 lay outside Montreal and served only 25,000 of the 74,000 children attending Protestant schools. Moreover, the size and capabilities of these boards varied widely, their territories were awkwardly drawn, they set different mill rates, and they had different incomes. Some were township boards (many, like Inverness, still technically “common” school boards), some were dissentient boards, and some were Protestant school municipalities. As a result, the quality of a child’s education differed widely even within the same region. Percival felt this situation could best be resolved by the creation of “central” boards with local representation, which could handle all financial

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matters (thereby achieving equalization), including the payment of teachers; one secretary-treasurer could therefore serve several local boards. He recommended the county as the unit for central boards. Eighteen counties outside Montreal had large Protestant populations. In November 1937 a sub-committee was appointed to undertake the Protestant Survey, and once again an educational expert from Scotland was placed at its head: W.A. Hepburn. Like John Adams at the beginning of the century, Hepburn crossed the province, assessing the situation on the ground. Like Adams, he also acquired a much better sense of Quebec’s physical and geographical problems than he did of its cultural and demographic ones. The report, presented at the end of 1938, advocated an array of reforms. Many met with the Protestant Committee’s clear disapproval, including the democratization of the Montreal school board and the Protestant Committee itself and the opening up of school-board membership to women.6 Hepburn also recommended the creation of central boards, but suggested ten districts of which the Island of Montreal, including the South Shore, constituted one. The Protestant Committee felt that these units were much too big, especially the one serving the entire Gaspé peninsula. The report called for each district to have one director (and secretary-treasurer) to oversee financial matters and to appoint teachers, who nevertheless would, technically, be hired by the local boards. With some reservations, the Protestant Committee accepted the notion of central boards, but chose Percival’s idea of eighteen counties – or rather seventeen, as they decided Terrebonne had an insufficient number of Protestants. Each county would appoint five commissioners, according to a prescribed distribution; larger communities would have the right to one or two representatives, smaller ones would have to decide amongst themselves on one member. County boards would not, of course, cover the entire province, so the plan left a number of Protestant communities to their own devices, but they were much more manageable units than those Hepburn had proposed. It now remained to draft legislation that would permit the creation of county central boards. The Hepburn Report was given considerable publicity, and Protestant school boards were quick to respond. Almost all the reaction was hostile. Longueuil was upset that the South Shore could be lumped in with Montreal, something that St Lambert, with much more direct rail and bridge connections, was promoting. Although it soon became clear that the Protestant Committee had abandoned this idea, the Longueuil Board still objected to equalization: “In view of the variations in the liabilities of the various boards … it would hardly seem equitable that those boards who have maintained a balanced budget should be assessed in order to equalize matters for the whole. This would appear to

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be an injustice to the taxpayers of those districts where a balanced budget has been maintained. It is further feared that the rates in our municipality might have to be raised and the standard of our schools be lowered.”7 Such is the all-too-frequent consequence of bureaucracy. Having survived the Depression thanks to careful management, Longueuil was not happy at the prospect of being forced to subsidize boards that had been fiscally less responsible. Other communities saw little need for a central board or felt that it would prove much more expensive than was suggested. The Sherbrooke commissioners astutely noted that their revenue had been showing “a steady decline each year.” They also noted, as did many boards, that the proposed system of representation on the central boards was unfair: Sherbrooke would provide the “largest share of taxes” in the county, and yet control only a minority of the seats on the central board.8 The commissioners in Barnston added to this argument that to take away so much of their power would render local boards superfluous: “no self respecting man of ability,” they said, would act on such a board. They also spoke from experience on a key question: “The benefits derived will be much less than the discomforts that will be suffered, for example carrying pupils to consolidated schools in rural districts where long distances are found, and vans are horse drawn, where it is impracticable to keep roads open for motor traffic.”9 The most telling comment came from the commissioners in Brome Township, who felt that it was impossible for a central board to be “as conversant with local problems and [as] able to carry out the duties and obligations” as the local boards.10 Matapedia agreed when it suggested that the idea “be the subject of longer and closer study particularly with regard to local conditions.”11 Two counties, however, proved amenable to the idea of central boards, at least by 1942. In the spring of that year, representatives from several Protestant communities in Megantic County met in Inverness to discuss the possibility of forming an informal association of school boards. This was intended as a voluntary, co-operative association, its role being that of a forum for airing grievances and discussing problems of common interest, and that of a co-ordinator of the county’s Protestant school network. The Megantic County Central School Committee, whose members took office at the end of July 1942 under the chairmanship of Andrew Johnson of Thetford Mines (after whom the high school would later be named), was born of an awareness that this particular region had a strong history of co-operation in school matters, and yet was composed of many small and rapidly dwindling Protestant communities. Some additional level of policy-making and administration was clearly needed as a buffer between the Department of Public Instruction and the local boards.12 Like the proposed central

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boards, this committee was concerned with hiring teachers and improving buildings, but it had no interest in equalizing tax rates. Its main achievements over the course of its brief life were the consolidation of most district schools and the provision of transportation.13 This led to some attempt to consolidate school boards, especially the array of small dissentient boards in areas with Catholic majorities. For example, the trustees of St Pierre Baptiste, a tiny community in the northern part of Halifax Township, were asked to merge with the Inverness board; they declined, preferring to continue running their school. They would do so for another ten years, at which point they somewhat reluctantly agreed to close down operations.14 The other county that warmed to the idea of a central board by 1942 was Chambly, on the South Shore – in many ways a surprising development, given Longueuil’s opposition to the Hepburn Report. But the Longueuil board’s previous concern had been over the management of tax revenue, and the intervening years had brought a new problem that underlined the future importance of inter-board co-operation. Longueuil, whose high school had been in considerable difficulty for many years, now faced the real possibility of losing it altogether when the government land on which it was built was needed for the war effort.15 Unlike Megantic County – indeed, unlike most of rural Quebec – the South Shore was rapidly expanding, and already had much more in common with Montreal than it did with the Eastern Townships or the Chateauguay valley. But if St Lambert was willing to cast its lot in with the city, Longueuil and the newer Protestant municipalities of St Hubert and Chambly Richelieu were much keener on forming an autonomous unit. Representatives from these boards, and from those of St Lambert and Greenfield Park, met over the summer and autumn of 1942 to pool information regarding the number of schools and pupils, how far each community was from a high school, and the financial situation of each board. Organization of an actual committee like the one in the Megantic was delayed because of the reluctance of both the Pinehurst-East Greenfield board, which feared that outlying areas would suffer in an arrangement that relied on transport, and St Lambert, which feared that its high school would become responsible for too many secondary students.16 The Chambly County Protestant School Committee was formed in August 1943 without participation from these boards; its chair, significantly, was a woman, Ethel Dixon. One of the committee’s first tasks was to organize the sale of the Longueuil High School to the federal government. The Chambly committee’s promoters had envisaged a highly centralized board with extensive powers to co-ordinate Protestant education within a vast area that comprised commerce and industry, government

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land, agricultural properties, working-class neighbourhoods, and middleclass suburbia. In the diversity of this area, as well as in the related desire for central control, the emerging Chambly central board differed from any of its potential counterparts across Quebec. The Central School Board Act, which was finally passed in June 1944, did not, in fact, allow for the kind of control the Chambly committee might have wanted. Amendments, made in part out of a sense that rural communities had, at best, mixed feelings about the powers of a central board, resulted in a much less binding piece of legislation. Central boards were not empowered to equalize taxes or to dissolve local boards that would not comply with their agenda. No provision was made for central boards to receive and manage property, which caused problems for the Longueuil commissioners when they realized that the Chambly committee had had no authority to arrange for the sale of their high school. A less authoritarian board did mean that St Lambert and some of the other local boards willingly came under the umbrella of the Chambly County Central School Board in November 1944; furthermore, the St Lambert commissioners agreed to continue accepting Grade 10 and Grade 11 pupils from surrounding municipalities, at least until a new county high school could be built.17 Because the Education Act did not make the creation of central boards mandatory, they were not formed in all counties. The kind of board that was made possible after 1944 did not appeal to the Megantic, and its pioneering enterprise petered out. Many counties did not form central boards for some time: Stanstead did not do so until 1946 and the Pontiac County Protestant Central School Board was only established in 1948. A number of Protestant boards had no access to central boards, or, if they did, chose not to become affiliated. McMasterville, which lay down the Richelieu River from Chambly but at not a much greater distance from St Lambert, fell outside the boundaries of Chambly County, though its commissioners were approached with the offer to join the new collective body and declined.18 St Eustache agreed to join the Argenteuil central board in the summer of 1946, some six months after it had started up, and within a year the commissioners were arguing that it should have its own seat, given “the growth and importance of this school district”; as things stood, it shared one seat with St Scholastique, Terrebonne, and several other small Protestant boards to the north and west of Montreal.19 The 1944 Act did not even make it compulsory for all boards within a county to join the county board, which could be the cause of considerable headaches – as was Rock Island’s determination to remain aloof from the Stanstead county board because of its relationship with Stanstead College. For the most part, however, it was rare for one to hold

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out for long; most participants in a Protestant central board scheme found the experience of co-operation satisfying, even if there were no clear economic benefits. In areas where Protestant communities were relatively isolated, central boards often proved a very effective means of implementing better services. The Argenteuil, for example, had always had a particularly high number of small boards, even after a concerted campaign through the 1930s to consolidate many of the one-room schools. In preparation for joining the central board, prior to its first meeting in January 1946, most of the small dissentient boards amalgamated. The central board dedicated itself to further consolidating schools, providing transportation (with either buses and snowmobiles, or financial concessions to parents who lived away from any route), building and upgrading schools, hiring competent teachers, revising the curriculum, and equalizing the tax rates. By June 1952, having reformed an unwieldy structure with what seems to have been considerable sensitivity to local interests, the central board commissioners decided they had fulfilled their mandate and wished to be dissolved. Informed of this decision, a bemused Percival wrote them to say that the Education Act made no provision for dissolution of central boards. The board then voted to hand financial control back to the local boards, after having first arranged to pay all their debts. Although the county commissioners continued to meet as a collective for some time, the central board really existed only on paper after 1955.20 This unusual situation serves as an interesting example of compromise between the conflicting needs of efficiency and of community. Central boards played a much less useful role in rural areas where the Protestant population was more densely settled and they were often resented for being interfering and insensitive to local needs. The commissioners of Stanstead Plain felt that their participation in a central board was particularly inappropriate given their circumstances: “Stanstead Village is in a unique position in Canada,” they argued. “We hire a private institution to administer our education. Under such conditions the Central Board is superfluous, and may lead to duplication of supervision and severe conflict. The erection of a new school is jeopardized because of the withholding of Rock Island from the Central Board, which makes the ownership, financing and government of such a building almost impossible.”21 The conflict that ensued was over the replacement of the aging Holmes School on Stanstead College property, which was attended by pupils from Stanstead Plain and Rock Island. In 1945 the college had offered to lease a piece of land known as Sunnyside to the Rock Island board, on which the two sets of commissioners were to build a school that the college would operate for local elementary pupils. Ratepayers petitioned to this effect as well. Plans were

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postponed, however, in the summer of 1946, while the central board was being established. Stanstead Plain joined this new body reluctantly, but Rock Island refused, fearing that the central board would veto its lease of the college property.22 These fears soon proved justified. The Stanstead County Central School Board moved quickly to build a new high school in the village of Ayer’s Cliff in the northern part of the county and to force the consolidation of rural schools in the township of Barnston, whose pupils would then be bused to Ayer’s Cliff or Coaticook. It seemed clear to the residents of Rock Island and Stanstead Plain that the central board was uncomfortable with their relationship with a private institution and favoured the construction of new public schools.23 They subsequently learned that, while a grant from the Department of Education would cover up to 40 per cent of the cost of building the new Sunnyside School, if the boards undertook to build a school that was not on college property, the department would fund two-thirds.24 The central board was promoting such a project: a large school in Rock Island to which they would bus the elementary pupils from Beebe Plain, a village four kilometres to the west. In due course, this could become a high school serving all the pupils in the southern part of the county. The department promptly withdrew their approval of funding for the Beebe Plain commissioners, who wished to build their own intermediate school. The commissioners naturally objected, although they did say they were prepared to send their Grade 8 and Grade 9 students to Sunnyside if the central board would help fund the building of a new elementary school in Beebe Plain.25 The central board agreed to authorize a new elementary school, but it insisted that Sunnyside School be built without the involvement of the college. Rock Island finally agreed, and made plans to join the central board.26 Dr A.R.V. White, who was both a school commissioner and a college trustee, as well as the chair of the Sunnyside building committee, saw this development as a threat to the survival of the college and, by extension, to that of the community. He expressed his deep concern in a letter to the commissioners: “I don’t think that the ratepayers have even an inkling that what is planned … would mean a complete break from Stanstead College in elementary education. It is this point which weighs so heavily on my conscience and I feel duty-bound before we go on to have everyone realize what this break would really mean to the children of this community … I don’t think the ratepayers realize that we can never go back to a working agreement with the College because Rock Island becomes a member of the Central Board on July 1st and that board would have full control of the school thereafter.” White also suggested that, in future, the Department of Public Instruction and the

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Map 19 Part of Stanstead Township The villages of Beebe Plain, Stanstead (Plain), and Rock Island can be seen at the bottom of this fragment of a map from the Belden atlas. Beebe Plain lies some 4 km from Stanstead College. At top left is Fitch Bay, a community that lost its school in 1961 despite much local resistance. [Illustrated Atlas of the Eastern Townships and Southwestern Quebec, 1881.]

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central board should “respect local autonomy and local ideas to a greater extent.”27 In the end, it was the college that gradually withdrew its services and forced the central board to scramble to educate the local high-school students. In 1955, not long after the two elementary schools had been built, the college decided it could now accept only Grades 10 and 11 from the surrounding communities; the central board had to authorize an extension to Sunnyside to accommodate the Rock Island and Beebe intermediate pupils. Three years later the college announced it would close its doors to all outside students in September 1959. The Stanstead-Rock Island and Beebe Plain boards decided to amalgamate and together arranged for another extension to Sunnyside for the senior grades. Some residents of Beebe Plain felt that their village should have its own high school, but even in this relatively prosperous and populous Protestant area the time for such autonomy had long passed.28 As it was, Sunnyside brought the total number of high schools within Stanstead County up to five; the others were Ayer’s Cliff, Coaticook, North Hatley, and Magog. Over the course of the next decade these high schools absorbed all Protestant pupils from the middle parts of the county. Some communities held out: Fitch Bay, for example, opposed the central board’s decision to force its school’s intermediate pupils to go to Magog and, when September 1954 rolled around, several parents refused to send their children. A petition was sent to Percival demanding that Grade 10 be taught at the Fitch Bay school. Percival appears to have relented, for it was only in 1959 that it was announced once again that the intermediate grades were to commute to Magog. By the following year Fitch Bay had only two teachers and by the next the school had closed; the commissioners of Stanstead Township found a new purpose for it as a community centre.29 Resistance to consolidation stemmed from a fear of children travelling long distances – much as it had in the early part of the century, except that the distances were now much greater and the local schools were often themselves consolidated schools offering several grades in three or more rooms. Even so, in an area like Stanstead County, with larger and more modern schools relatively close to hand, it was as hard for boards to find teachers willing to work in small villages as it was for those in more isolated parts of the province. The commissioners of Barnston at first refused to close the school in Baldwin Mills, citing “the bad roads in spring and long distances to travel” as the principal reason; by 1954, however, they realized that the only alternative to conveying pupils into Coaticook was to hire a “qualified teacher at a much higher salary than we have ever paid before.”30 Until it merged with the new Protestant school municipality of Coaticook in 1961, the

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Barnston board existed principally to raise taxes to convey local children to a more central place, as did increasing numbers of their counterparts across rural Quebec. The methods of conveyance depended on the numbers of children involved and the nature of the route. By default, the earliest conveyance had been horse and cart – the hack, as it was popularly known – but this was still the preferred vehicle at mid-century for many rural communities despite advances in technology. The bad state of roads, especially in spring, made it almost impossible for cars to travel on them. In 1943 the Hemmingford commissioners considered purchasing a “horse drawn covered express wagon” for $35, but decided instead to hire local people with their own vehicles – cars if possible, but with the option of a horse and cart when the roads were bad.31 Greater numbers of pupils meant that boards had to turn to larger vehicles, though it was not an easy thing to get a hold of a bus; many boards turned instead to the growing number of farmers with “motor trucks” who were willing to drive local children to school for a sum of money that was, though considerable, usually less than the cost of keeping one-room schools open. Even so, for a board to acquire a bus of its own was the preferred option, given the difficulty of co-ordinating several local horse, car, or truck owners and the unreliability of many local drivers. The problem of mass transit during the winter was solved for many boards by the advent of the snowmobile, essentially a bus on treads that could go where no bus would dare – at least, not until the overhaul of the province’s road system in the 1960s. This development clearly hastened the pace of school consolidation. The snowmobile, authorities boasted, “should serve to solve the problem of pupils rising at too early an hour in the morning, being driven slowly over difficult roads by horse teams and returning by the same means at a late hour in the evening. Moreover, it will result in the conveyance of pupils over much greater distances with a consequent alleviation for pupils of difficult weather conditions.”32 As such, it was very much in the interests of the Department of Education to encourage small boards to acquire these vehicles. School boards also benefited from the lingering spirit of wartime thrift and co-operation: in 1945 the commissioners of Clarendon in Pontiac County asked Percival if he could provide them with a snowmobile and a bus from the “war assets corporation,” and he obliged them by arranging for a contract to be signed with the Bombardier company.33 Even in the early 1950s the trustees of the tiny Gaspesian community of St Laurent de Matapedia (who had been trying in vain to secure a horse and cart) were pleased when Percival arranged for them to receive a used snowmobile, free of charge, that the Argenteuil County board no longer needed.34

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60 Snowmobile, Escuminac, 1944 The Gaspé coast claims to have been the first part of Quebec to be served by school buses and snowmobiles – which is understandable, given the distances involved and the quality of the roads (though these were just as bad in many other parts of the province). In winter, the snowmobile was by far the most versatile vehicle. [Educational Record, April-June 1944]

The Gaspé coast was one of the first areas to make systematic use of buses and snowmobiles – not surprisingly, given the distances to be covered. Reportedly, the “first bus built expressly for Protestant schools” was delivered to the community of Matapedia early in 1944, driven by Howard S. Billings, an officer in the Department of Education (and future Director of Protestant Education) who presumably was encouraged to do so for public relations purposes. Obviously enjoying the sensation the bus caused, Billings arranged to take “the mothers of Matapedia” for a short ride; according to the Educational Record, these women were “enthusiastic about the conditions under which their children can be expected to proceed to and return from school.” No doubt this reaction was a direct result of having actually gone for a ride, and one the Department of Education had deliberately striven to produce; for decades, most parents in the province had been fearful of putting their children on a bus for a long daily journey. The Record’s description of the bus also seems calculated to reassure the

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61 Interior, school bus, Matapedia, 1944 This, the “first bus built expressly for the conveyance of Protestant pupils,” is the one that Howard S. Billings drove into town to offer rides to wary mothers. The interior appears to have impressed the skeptical, although the safety of these buses was limited by the reliability of local drivers. [Educational Record, January-March 1944]

skeptical: “The bus is modern in every respect. It has seating accommodation for thirty-eight pupils. The chassis is a new Ford two-ton truck. The bus body is made of best quality hardwood reinforced where necessary with steel. The roof and exterior walls are completely covered with steel securely fastened to the frame. The floor is of hardwood covered with two layers of heavy asphalt-impregnated, waterproof, felt paper over which is laid a heavy grade of battleship linoleum.” In addition, the right front door was “manually operated by the chauffeur” and could not be locked from the inside. At the rear was an emergency exit door. Front and back windows were shatter-proof. Finally, a sign over the windshield expressly warned the driver not to exceed twenty miles per hour when carrying children.35 Certainly the impression given was of a modern, durable, safe means of transit to which anyone ought to willingly trust their children. Even so, finding a competent driver for buses and snowmobiles was not always easy. Finding one, moreover, often paled in comparison with the problem of getting rid of a driver who was felt to be incompetent, especially one that was also a neighbour and ratepayer. Having se-

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cured their snowmobile, the board in St Laurent de Matapedia hired a local man to drive children to the consolidated school from MacDavid’s Mountain, a backwoods range of isolated farming families who had voiced their approval of the transport arrangement. It was not long, however, before complaints began to be made that the driver was using “intoxicating beverages” – but as he was Stanley MacDavid, a member of a prominent (such as it was) family in the area, the board did no more than remind him of his duty. The accident that was waiting to happen occurred in early March 1956. Parents complained that MacDavid “was operating the vehicle under the influence of intoxicants, that he had put the vehicle off the road on the gulch and that the children had to walk the remainder of the way home.” The board quickly found a new driver.36 The problem of drunk and incompetent bus drivers arose frequently in rural areas, but diminished considerably as boards gained access to professionally trained drivers and could sign contracts with liable companies. But the maze of rural routes could plague even experienced operators, especially when the points of reference were not numbered roads but farms and other landmarks with names known only to locals. The following description of a route in the Hemmingford area must have given a stranger pause: Start at Wm Hawkins on Roxham Road, along this road to Glass Monte road, east on this road to Alberton Road, north on this road to Mr Archie Specks, turn here and go back to Roxham Road, then direct to Intermediate school by Route #52 … From Intermediate school along North Road to Williams Road, east to Kenney’s Store, turn, then along Derrick’s Road to Kyle’s corner, turn west along Fisher Road to North Road, then direct to School.37

With every new child reaching school age and with every change in a board’s area of jurisdiction, a route would be modified slightly, so it is no wonder that there were frequent complaints from parents whose children had not been picked up. This was often another source of conflict: “Mr King requested that the school bus call at his gate for his children. He complained that the school bus drove past his boy, would not wait for him, etc. This was denied by the driver who added that Mrs Flynn and the pupils could prove that he did not drive past the King child, nor did he refuse to wait a reasonable time.”38 Central boards often provided useful guidelines to help local boards establish a balance between the convenience of parents and the limits of a bus driver’s duties: “There will be no set distance which children will be required to walk to meet a bus but it shall be a principle that no child should be required to travel more than a mile to meet a bus. In cases

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where children do live more than a mile from the bus route the Board should … arrange for the bus to go to the child’s gateway on the nearest public road or to provide an allowance to the parents … where it is impossible or impracticle [sic] to provide such conveyance.”39 The driver’s job was made even more complicated by the need to remember which children were Protestant and which were Catholic; in many areas boards of each religious confession operated overlapping routes. In many rural areas with shrinking Protestant populations, it was a sure sign that communities were in trouble when Protestant school boards were forced to pay their Catholic counterparts to provide space on their buses for Protestant pupils. Hemmingford had reached this point for some of its routes by 1959, as did Coaticook a few years later. Such an arrangement was generally satisfactory, although problems arose when it came to Catholic holidays; the Hemmingford commissioners decided that they themselves would transport these pupils “on days the Catholic bus does not run.”40 Whether or not these pupils cared how they got to school, it is clear that for the community in general it was a source of pride to be able to transport their own children to their own schools. In places such as Matapedia, where there were particularly few resources, Protestant solidarity extended even to the level of how buses were maintained and fuelled, as a letter from the local mechanic to the school board implies: “Gentlemen: As a taxpayer of our Protestant School Commission, now fully equipped to handle all requirements as to supplying of Gas, Oil, Greasing and able to make all repairs that could be made locally to your busses and snowmobile, I feel that this business should be given to us Protestants in the same manner that all business of the Catholic School Commission is being given to one of their Rate payers without any hesitation, as you are all aware. I have appreciated your past business, feeling that I have always given full value and feel I can continue to do so.”41 Presumably the board had been thinking of turning to a different mechanic to save money. In most parts of rural Quebec the consolidation of schools and the provision of busing coincided with the improvement and expansion of the area’s main Protestant school. In the Argenteuil, the central board had overseen this long-awaited process, but for most local boards this concentration of effort was part of their agenda even before they joined a central board. Clarendon’s request for a transport vehicle in 1945 set the tone for the central board’s policy of promoting Shawville as Pontiac County’s central place. In 1953 a new high school was built on the town’s Centre Street, and all the secondary pupils in the county were eventually bused to it. Starting in the late 1940s, the Lochaber school board, and its successor the Protestant school municipality of Thurso, undertook at last to close its range schools and convey the children into

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the town of Thurso, where a new intermediate school had been built by the Singer sewing-machine company, whose factory had breathed new life into the community. By the early 1960s, however, the board had decided to convey the pupils from Grade 7 to Grade 9 to Buckingham, the county’s largest town.42 The demise of several small dissentient boards further down the Ottawa River caused problems for the Papineau County Central Board; as one of them, St Angelique, pointed out, the decision to have them merge with Thurso, puts the ratepayers of this Municipality at a great disadvantage due to the distance to be travelled, particularly by the younger children … with no Protestant school operating at the present time between Grenville and Thurso, a distance of approximately thirty-eight miles. Annexation will therefore eliminate any hope for the Protestant ratepayers of ever having a school nearer at hand, leaving them the alternative of making whatever arrangement is possible with the Roman Catholic School Commission or of moving out of the Municipality. It must be understood that pupils with such a distance to travel as ours have cannot enjoy the same facilities for obtaining an education as those living in Thurso, due to fatigue from the strain of travelling so far.43

The central board could do little but bus these pupils westward to Buckingham. The Argenteuil’s main school in Lachute was given an eight-room addition in 1950 and in the early 1960s saw much reconstruction of what had been the Lachute Academy, giving it a capacity of over 1,000 students. The Hemmingford School, the object of conveyance since the early 1940s, was enlarged in 1953 so that it could accommodate high school grades.44 Similar building or rebuilding of Protestant high schools can be seen right across the Eastern Townships. The completion of such big modern schools was always heralded as a great achievement of the community, but seen from another perspective it marked the thinning of the countryside, at least as far as Protestants were concerned. The building of new high schools to accommodate the Protestant children of an entire region was clearly a case of putting all one’s eggs in one basket. Even Quebec City had all but set itself up as the nucleus of a vast area of rural Protestantism with the building of the new Quebec High School, itself a consolidation of several old institutions. The doors of this state-of-the-art building opened in September 1941, and through them eventually passed the Protestant pupils of all the surrounding countryside, starting with those of Levis, who were put on a bus and conveyed the twenty kilometres over the bridge into the city.45 The Gaspé’s second Protestant high school opened in 1956 in the town of Gaspé, serving a persistent Protestant community scattered

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about the tip of the peninsula. The expansion of the high school in New Carlisle in the early 1950s meant that it now took secondary students from along the coast as far east as Port Daniel, as well as primary pupils from nearby Hamilton and Paspébiac. In the absence of a central board in the Gaspé, the Protestant communities in this area amalgamated in 1964 to form the Protestant school municipality of Chaleur Bay, whose aim was to co-ordinate busing. The vast majority of the Protestant population was extended in a thin line along the coast, although a number of families lived in the back ranges away from the sea. In any case, the distances were considerable, and almost all children depended on the bus, even to get to the elementary school in Port Daniel. This situation was made worse by the government’s seemingly arbitrary decision to put the Gaspé in the Eastern time zone along with the rest of Quebec and Ontario, instead of in the Atlantic time zone with the Maritime provinces. This decision went “contrary to the facts of geography and the times at which the sun rises and sets” – a statement loaded with derision for a government that seemingly sought to defy the movement of the sun. Placing the Gaspé in the new time zone would, the board argued, deprive the coastal region “of one hour of afternoon daylight and prolong by two months the period during which our children have to leave school in darkness … our small school children are thereby exposed to unnecessary danger from traffic hazards by being obliged to return home from school during the hours of darkness.”46 Their protest went unanswered; the sun continued to rise earlier than it did on the rest of the province and set in the winter months before children were let out of school. The sunset was the least of the Gaspé’s problems, however. The Chaleur Bay commissioners set themselves the task of providing “a more diversified education for the pupils of the district” with “a broader program of studies requiring additional school facilities.” As things stood, the facilities at New Carlisle High School were severely overcrowded, requiring classes to be held in the basement, the assembly hall, and the science labs; and there were no provisions for the technical and vocational courses ratepayers were demanding. The new board requested that the government undertake a study of the situation “with a view of initiating a building programme … to meet our needs.”47 The government was in the process of studying not just the problems of the Gaspé but also the educational situation of the entire province. The school board in Matapedia had already sent a brief to the qfhsa to be included in its own submission to the Royal Commission on Education. This brief outlined the problems plaguing remote Protestant places: Matapedia pupils were taught ten grades by five teachers; the last three grades were taught by one teacher in one room. Such facilities did not enable pupils to learn

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enough to be admitted to university and therefore did not permit the youth of the Gaspé to advance the economy of this neglected region. “Knowing well that our young people may live a more rewarding life and help to enrich the life in these rural areas if they were provided with more educational direction, we earnestly request such guidance and assistance as would help to realize equality of educational opportunity throughout the Province,” declared the commissioners in 1961.48 Despite the best efforts of rural Protestant communities for over a century, educational opportunities were contracting and local school boards seemed powerless to do anything about it. All eyes turned hopefully to the new provincial Liberal government and the promises of the Quiet Revolution.

Regional boards were the result of Protestant educators’ campaign for better school facilities for rural communities and of Catholic educators’ complaints that the quality of their own school facilities fell well behind that of the Protestants. The Royal Commission on Education would eventually find that, however inadequate the Protestant network of secondary schools in central places might seem, there was simply no parallel Catholic network outside the Montreal area.49 In Catholic parts of Quebec, it appeared, the link between school and community did not extend beyond the elementary level. Furthermore, there had been no systematic attempt at consolidation and no movement to establish central boards. Both of these Protestant endeavours, despite their shortcomings, met with considerable praise in the Parent Report (the result of the commission’s study, published in 1963). To right this wrong on the Catholic side, the new provincial government passed legislation requiring school boards to provide secondary education up to Grade 11, something that had never been part of their mandate; it also made such education compulsory and free. As few rural Catholic boards (and not all Protestant ones) were able to fulfill this requirement, legislation also allowed for the co-operative establishment of regional boards, which the government promoted by means of the socalled Operation 55, a plan to have fifty-five regional school boards, nine of them Protestant. Existing school boards would delegate responsibility for secondary education to these regional boards, leaving the local boards to continue managing local elementary schools. Responsibility for guidance and psychological services, for personnel, and for program planning would also be delegated. Central boards would naturally be dissolved. Protestant school commissioners were eager to participate in regional boards – a complete contrast to their reception of central boards

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twenty years earlier. By 1964 most rural Protestant communities had grown highly sensitive to their precarious hold on the countryside and saw that easy access to schools came at the expense of an education suited to the modern age. Once again, there were simply too many schools – and in places like Stanstead County and the District of Bedford, too many high schools. Further consolidation at the elementary level was not necessarily desired or even possible. Indeed, in the Eastern Townships few schools did not by this time offer some or all of the secondary grades. But to delegate responsibility for secondary education to a separate board promised a more efficient running of Grades 7 to 11, the grades seen as crucial to the development of knowledgeable and well-trained young people. How this was to be achieved would vary, depending on a region’s existing facilities and future needs; they were confident that the co-operation of great minds would lead to sound solutions. Many boards issued a standard declaration: “Resolved that this school municipality be included in the formation of a regional school board … prompted by our desire to plan for the high school education of the whole area and to provide the facilities for carrying out a programme in keeping with a plan approved by the … Department of Education.”50 Boards accepted the involvement of the government, in the form of the newly created Ministry (“Department”) of Education, on good faith, in the spirit of progress and triumph over the Quebec of Maurice Duplessis, which Protestants had generally loathed – and yet within which their institutions had been allowed almost total autonomy. The only matters under some dispute were how the regional boundaries had been drawn and how local boards would be represented on the regional boards. Operation 55 had created Protestant regions that seemed historically and geographically relevant: the Ottawa valley, the Laurentians, the “North Island” (Laval and communities north of the Mille Iles River), the Chateauguay valley, the South Shore, the Quebec City area, and the Gaspé. Some grey areas remained: the north-western parts of the province were not really part of the Ottawa valley; places like St Eustache and Joliette felt conflicting affiliations to the Laurentians and the North Island; and much of the St Lawrence valley from Trois Rivières to Labrador was lumped uncomfortably with the Quebec region, whose board took the name of the Eastern Quebec Regional School Board.51 The Eastern Townships had been divided into the District of Bedford and the St Francis Valley (including Stanstead and Compton counties) regional boards, though the latter was soon renamed the Eastern Townships Regional Board; this change upset the District of Bedford board, who felt they were now excluded from the Eastern Townships, and the board in Richmond, who felt strongly that

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the term “St Francis” ought to be preserved in an institutional context.52 Nevertheless, the new name stuck and the board’s nine representatives met in March 1965: two from each of the three county boards and the other three from Sherbrooke and Lennoxville. Representation on other regional boards was handled similarly, though in more sparsely populated areas each seat was usually shared by a number of smaller boards. Apart from establishing regional high schools, as we will see in chapter 11, the regional boards’s main legacy was to whet the public appetite for large administrative units for education. After the success of Operation 55 in creating regional boards, many of them began to argue that they should eventually be put in charge of elementary education and, in effect, replace local boards altogether.53 The final volume of the Parent Report, issued in 1966, recommended to the same effect, but this would be to do away with 120 years of local control. Governments wrestled with draft legislation for several years, during which time the regional boards attempted to prove they could deliver an efficient product. It was finally a confident new Liberal government in 1971, fresh from the successful resolution of the October Crisis, that felt able to tackle local school boards. Bill 27 forcibly reorganized administrative units off the Island of Montreal, allowing for the establishment of “sector” boards that might replace regional boards, or at any rate mirror their sphere of control by handling elementary education. By the end of the school year in 1972 all rural school boards, from the vast amalgamation of Stanstead, Coaticook, Hatley, and Magog that had been formed four years earlier to the tiny boards still operating one-room schools in the Magdalen Islands, would be expected to dissolve and join a sector board. In the event, there were only two holdouts: the dissentient boards of Ste Agathe and Baie Comeau. Each of these not only remained outside the control of a sector board but also retained their dissentient status right up to 1998. Their survival depended on making contracts with local English Catholic ratepayers to send their children to these two schools. By 1972 most rural boards accepted the idea of amalgamation as they had accepted regional boards, as the only means to provide modern and efficient education to Protestant children. Many areas had already consolidated their local boards by delegating virtually all powers to the regional board: the District of Bedford was one such region and the Argenteuil, which formed an “integrated” board (both elementary and secondary education) in 1974, was another. Protest occurred mostly in areas with very thinly scattered Protestant communities, such as those asked to join the School Board of Greater Quebec. The Protestant inhabitants of Megantic County, especially, felt that they shared a

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common history and formed a cohesive geographical unit. At a meeting of several local boards in Thetford Mines it was agreed that “no improvement in educational opportunity can be expected from union” with the Quebec City board. Instead, they suggested that a Megantic County sector board be created, with representation from places like Inverness, Leeds, Ireland, and Thetford Mines.54 But however natural such a unit might seem, the numbers were too small to justify a separate sector board and, although it was technically possible for a local board not to merge, it was hardly economically feasible in most cases. Remaining independent was an option considered by the dissentient board in Portneuf, which operated a single Protestant school in an area some sixty kilometres west of Quebec City that was overwhelmingly French-speaking and Catholic. Although its school had barely ten pupils in attendance, the Portneuf board was the only Protestant institution in that area; to surrender it would be to watch the community’s only public body disappear. But the board had no resources and, if it resisted amalgamation, almost certainly the school would soon have to close and the children would have to go to a local Catholic school or ride the Catholic bus out of town. The Portneuf trustees decided to cast their lot with the sector board: “By doing so we will be able to … guarantee a Protestant Education for our pupils,” they decided. “If we remained a Diss. School Board we do not know how long we would be allowed to operate our school under the present conditions.”55 Given a choice between the survival of the community and the appropriate education of their children, education won out. The ship had sunk, but the cargo could be saved.

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11

Meeting the Needs: Modern Schools, Protestant Architecture [We realize that] the engagement of Messrs Poulin and Poulin was a mistake, that while they are undoubtedly good architects, they have had no experience in meeting the needs of our modern Protestant schools, that an architect who had had experience in erecting Protestant schools would give much better satisfaction.1 The Stanstead County Central School Board, 1947

The value of a Central Library is undisputed … The atmosphere of an attractively appointed reading room conduces to a sense of pleasure in the child’s contact with books and stimulates the reading habit in the best sense.2 H.J.C. Darragh, Superintendent of Schools, Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, 1939

The group of men who gathered at Cowansville High School on 19 January 1965 comprised the new regional board for the District of Bedford, the somewhat arbitrary name given to the western portion of the Eastern Townships. These men (women could have been chosen, but were not) had been delegated by their local boards: Bedford, Stanbridge East, Sutton, Cowansville, Farnham, Granby, Waterloo, and Knowlton. Their first task was to evaluate the secondary schools within their area of jurisdiction, and it did not take long to find them wanting. The network that had been forged in the first half of the century was no longer adequate in a world where most families were expecting their children to complete eleven years of schooling. It was obvious to the members of the new board that the district’s secondary facilities were hopelessly fragmented, with its six high schools (most of them aging), four intermediate schools, and no arrangements for vocational training. Under these circumstances, they declared that “no purpose would be served by the Regional School Board taking over

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62 Industrial arts, Montreal Woodworking and metalworking were natural successors to sloyd, their importance as much to turn boys into handymen as to produce prospective industrial workers. [emsba: events file]

direction of High School education.” Instead, they decided to put all their efforts into building one regional high school, in which an array of modern facilities could be concentrated, to replace all the others. The institution that the regional board eventually built, which had room for over 3,500, students, represented the ultimate expression of the move towards bigger schools that began in the early part of the century with consolidation. It was certainly the ultimate answer to the problem experienced by rural communities in gaining access to secondary facilities, and would be copied across the province, albeit rarely on quite the same scale. The regional high school was a product of the Quiet Revolution, which systematically advocated more centralized facilities and greater central control. Regional high schools did mean state-of-the-art facilities for secondary students, but their existence would take a toll on the autotomy of Protestant communities, especially given the consolidation of local school boards that was underway at roughly the same time. Even so, the drive to centralize and modernize school facilities had a long history in Protestant Quebec. Regional high schools were in many ways updated versions of the many build-

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ings put up since the war, in both urban and rural communities, to accommodate a new generation of secondary students: they provided similar facilities, if to far larger numbers. Those post-war schools had often replaced the original academies – or, more typically, formed new wings to venerable old buildings – which had themselves, in their day, been welcome improvements to one-room schoolhouses. This drive for modernization proved in many ways to be a defining feature of the Protestant school system. Just as, for many people, the word “public” could have stood for “Protestant” in describing schools, so was the word “modern” used by many school boards to denote features not generally associated with Catholic schools. Indeed, when the leaders of the Quiet Revolution advocated a wide range of facilities for modern high schools – notably gyms, libraries, science laboratories, and guidance services – they implicitly acknowledged that such things had been part and parcel of Protestant secondary education (and, occasionally, primary education) since at least the 1940s and in many cases much earlier. Their promotion of regional boards and regional high schools was at heart a desire to provide the secondary students of Catholic Quebec with facilities that Protestants had long enjoyed. Centralized administrations, they claimed, would put Catholic students on the fast track to modernity.3 The enthusiasm with which the francophone designers of the new District of Bedford high school anticipated its laboratories, gyms, library, and cafeteria itself indicates the relative novelty of such features in Catholic schools. By the 1960s it was rare for Protestant secondary students not to have access to modern sports, science, and other facilities in their high schools; the only real variable was how far they would have to travel.

Modern Protestant high schools took their inspiration from the last incarnation of the High School of Montreal, which opened its doors on University Avenue in September 1914. Over sixty classrooms spread over five storeys accommodated twelve grades and provided laboratories for physics and chemistry, a geography room, five separate rooms for art, an auditorium, a library, a kitchen for cooking class, a sewing room, a shooting gallery, and a room for that new practical course intended to keep boys busy, “sloyd” (a manual training program developed in Sweden in the 1870s). Girls and boys were generally taught in separate wings of the building and had separate lunch rooms, play areas, locker and changing rooms, and bicycle sheds. The building opened with one gymnasium for boys and an auditorium, but before long it was felt the girls needed their own gym, so a new auditorium was built at the back of the building and the old one was turned over to

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63 High School of Montreal, University Street, Montreal, 1921 In 1914 the Montreal Protestant school board opened the new high school on University Street just east of McGill University. It remained at this address for the rest of its existence; the building is still home to a secondary school. [Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal: view-20178]

the girls. The library was common ground, but boys did not take cooking or sewing and girls did not take sloyd or shooting, or, for many years, physics and chemistry, the labs for which were located deep in the boys’ side of the school.4 By the 1920s the gender division was broken down somewhat when it came to most academic subjects, though significantly boys and girls still took art in different rooms. The swimming pool, built in 1924, was used by both sexes, though naturally at different times. This last facility made the High School of Montreal the envy of all schools in the city. It was not, of course, surprising that this institution, the city’s oldest and most prominent Protestant secondary school, should have been blessed with a pool; it had always been able to boast the latest facilities. The city’s other high schools were not, however, all that far behind, though none would acquire a pool during the inter-war period. In 1926 Baron Byng, Commercial, and West Hill high schools could each boast a library, a chemistry lab, a gym, and an assembly hall, though at Baron Byng these last two were the same room. Baron

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64 Basement plan, High School of Montreal Though hardly small or deficient, the previous High Schools of Montreal were outclassed by this new institution, which sported the latest features. The basement plan shows the separate recreational facilities for boys and girls, including a shooting gallery. Visible at the top is the gym and the auditorium, which would soon become the boy’s and girl’s gyms respectively, with the addition of a wing at the rear for the auditorium and pool. [mua: mg1060, Prospectus for the High School, 1921]

Byng High School also featured a physics lab and rooms for music, art, cooking, sewing, and sloyd, while West Hill High School (serving the western suburb of ndg) had a separate room for art. The Commercial High, not surprisingly, contained rooms for sloyd, metalwork, and typewriting; by 1933 it also had two drafting rooms and two “electrotechnics” rooms. By that date, West Hill High School had added a music room, an additional art room, a physics lab, and a science lecture room. All three institutions also had medical rooms, which speaks to the importance given by school boards to public health.5

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65 Boys’ gym, new High School of Montreal The new high school’s original gymnasium, boasting a glass ceiling that gave natural light. [mua: mg1060, Prospectus for the High School, 1921]

66 Girls’ rooftop playground, new High School of Montreal Apart from the two playrooms in the basement, the high school’s rooftops afforded two large terraces for recreation, each offering a magnificent view of the city, the mountain, and the opposite terrace. [mua: mg1060, Prospectus for the High School, 1921]

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67 Chemistry lab, West Hill High School, Montreal A science class for girls at the old West Hill High School in ndg, taken in the 1930s. [emsba: events file]

The provision of gyms (and, in one case, a pool) reflected the very Protestant “sound mind in a sound body” credo, a legacy of the Victorian concern for general fitness and, as we have seen, the early twentieth century’s anxiety over the lack of it. McGill College had a fitness instructor, who also taught the high school boys, in 1862. The Protestant school commissioners retained his services, and later those of a female instructor for the girls, until 1890 when the high school was rebuilt, including a formal gymnasium.6 Elsewhere, at least in academies and the larger urban schools, physical drill and calisthenics formed part of the Protestant school day, though this would typically take place outside, or in some available interior space such as a basement boiler room. Schools with common rooms or assembly halls could improvise makeshift gyms readily enough, but in most urban areas overcrowding in the early twentieth century led to such rooms being divided up into classes. Demographic pressure even took its toll on the gym facilities of the few Montreal schools that the commissioners had expanded after 1903 specifically to accommodate swelling numbers: Aberdeen School, for example, in the east end of Montreal, which had added twelve classrooms and a gymnasium, was obliged by 1909

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to see its barely completed gym subdivided to make yet another four classrooms.7 At that time almost all efforts at school expansion were spent increasing the number of classrooms to relieve congestion. The experience of World War I raised further worries over general levels of fitness, and formal physical education was gradually incorporated into the Protestant curriculum. As a result, gyms became a priority in expansion and rebuilding projects. As early as 1914 the new high school in affluent (and uncrowded) Westmount sported a gym in addition to an auditorium, and at about the same time an extension to Victoria School in the St Antoine ward included a gym.8 Aberdeen School, along with several others that had previously sacrificed their original layout to meet population requirements but then saw a drop in enrolment by the 1920s, had its gymnasium restored to serve as both an assembly area and a gym. Montreal schools with growing populations, such as Lorne in Pointe St Charles and Rosemount in the north-east (whose numbers had quintupled over a ten-year period) were obliged to expand, and by the 1920s such expansions included gyms. New Protestant schools built during this time – Devonshire in the inner city, Herbert Symonds in ndg, Connaught in Côte St Paul – were provided with gyms as a matter of course. The new school built in Montreal West, Elizabeth Ballantyne – this prosperous town’s second school – did not, admittedly, have a gym when it opened its doors in 1922, but within a few years attendance warranted the building of an additional wing of classrooms, plus a gym. The older high school in Montreal West had already fashioned a gym by sealing off and roofing over the space in the middle of the U-shaped building. When this school proved too small – accommodating as it did commuters from the West Island as well as local children – the Côteau St Pierre commissioners decided in 1931 to replace it with a sprawling building containing a gym and an assembly hall; these were separated by a screen that could be removed to create a vast exhibition space, or left in place so that “cinema shows may be given.”9 Communities away from Montreal were much slower to acquire such facilities, owing to a smaller population base and fewer resources – building a gym was not cheap. It is clear, however, that a proper, wellequipped school gymnasium was widely seen as the mark of progressive Protestant secondary education. In 1920 the Longueuil commissioners argued that the chronic overcrowding at their schools would only be relieved by putting up a new building: “This plan for development,” they noted, “should also include a Gymnasium for Physical instruction which is getting to be realized as a most important part of the development of the child.”10 It was perhaps no coincidence that this ambitious scheme should have been proposed in the wake of a major extension (with gym) undertaken by the commissioners of nearby

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68 Girls’ gym class, Lennoxville Academy, c. 1912 In rural areas, Protestant schools did not generally acquire gyms until the 1940s or later: physical activity took place outdoors – providing an instructor could be found. [Lennoxville and Ascot Historical and Museum Society: p 361 sch]

St Lambert, the Longueuil board’s perpetual rival, but the desire for gym facilities was, nevertheless, genuine.11 Rural academies coped as they had done for over a generation. The school in Bedford, for example, which by the mid-1920s still had makeshift toilets and was heated by wood-burning stoves, refitted a basement room as a gym and hired a cadet instructor, Sergeant Ellis, to make weekly visits from Montreal: “When he came he took the various classes, boys and girls separately, and gave them basic physical training,” recalled one former student. “He also gave the older boys rifle practice. He was a considerate man, or maybe just shy, for when he gave the girls certain drills he always stood at the back of the class. That way no one was embarrassed for there were no gym suits and ordinary skirts and dresses were worn.”12 This was a long way from what was already understood as organized physical education, but it was as much as the community of Bedford could support. As was often the case, circumstances intervened to force the hands of prudent trustees: the Bedford Academy was destroyed by fire in the autumn of 1933 and, despite a period of anxiety, the school board and the municipality co-operated to build a new, up-to-date high school complete with gymnasium. And even where resources did not allow major extensions, especially during the Depression, schools organized sporting events on their grounds: volleyball, basketball, and softball in the warm weather and, of course, hockey in the winter. The Ste Agathe Academy even boasted a tennis court.

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During World War II the general will to create a stable and healthy post-war society led to an enthusiasm for school gyms, and many Protestant communities were quick to take advantage of available opportunities. Early in 1945 Farnham, representing small towns in the Eastern Townships, made a plea for government help in improving local facilities.13 One of the arguments for school consolidation was that larger schools could better marshal resources to build what was necessary. In many parts of Protestant Quebec, however, even consolidated schools were too small to justify the cost of a gym, and a number of older communities had to weigh the benefits of a new gym against a precarious tax base. In early 1949 the Hemmingford commissioners submitted a proposal for a new intermediate school, which was rejected by Percival because it did not include a gym: “The Board regretted that he had not accepted the preliminary plan sent to him as they felt that this suited the needs of the district and was within the means of the district, that they did not feel able to undertake building a school with a full sized gymnasium nor did they feel the district was able to operate such a school.”14 The Protestant Committee was clearly keen that major building projects should include a gym and were usually willing to provide grants to ensure that new schools and extensions met modern Protestant standards. They were particularly concerned that secondary institutions were well-equipped. In 1941 Percival wrote the Shawville school board noting that theirs was the largest high school in the province not to have a gym and offering money for that purpose if the board would “send him an estimate of the cost and a plan of what they would like”; if they did not wish to take advantage of his offer (and at the time they did not feel able to) he would make the offer to some other board.15 A few weeks after it rejected the Hemmingford plan for not including a gym, the Protestant Committee came through with a new arrangement that included raising the status of Hemmingford’s school from intermediate to high. The prospect of attendance by Grade 11 students made a gym all but essential, even in an area whose Protestant population was steadily declining.16 By contrast, Lake of Two Mountains saw the number of its Protestant families rapidly rise during the post-war period, and the board had little trouble justifying its proposal for a new school that would accommodate every student in a wide area up to Grade 9; naturally, the plan included a gym.17 Ste Foy, on the outskirts of Quebec City, was also sufficiently populous by the early 1950s to undertake to build a new six-room elementary school, with gym. One-third of the total cost ($177,000) was met by a government grant.18 In addition to their role within the Protestant curriculum, school gyms served the communities around them. Most boards found that

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the minute word got out that they were going to build a gym requests began to pour in from people wishing to use it during the evenings or on weekends; deciding whether or not to grant such requests became a frequent item on the agenda. Early in the Depression the Baroness de Longueuil chapter of the iode organized a “Basket Ball Club for the young people of this City,” and asked the Longueuil school board whether they could use the Caroline School gym, assuming the windows and lights were protected. This, they argued, would not only help the members of the club but would “benefit the children of the school as they would be able to start clubs of their own and in time join in with the interschool games.”19 Scouts and cadets made frequent use of school gyms for their activities, especially during the winter. The close connection between many schools and the ymca meant that school gyms became the venue for all manner of sporting events. Reciprocally, physical education instructors were often borrowed or recruited from local y s, as was the case at the Sherbrooke High School.20 Most requests to use the gym were made by well-established organizations whose names countered any worries that boards might have for the safety of their premises and equipment. All the more unusual, therefore, was a 1950 request to the Protestant commissioners in Sherbrooke from “Miss Esther Barrett, representing a group of working girls from the West Ward, asking permission for the use of the Lawrence School gymnasium on Monday evenings for the purpose of playing basketball. Permission was granted on the understanding that there would be no smoking in the building by the girls concerned, and that Miss Barrett … would be responsible for the building being left in proper condition and locked.”21 The board’s decision to approve this request shows a good deal of community spirit, despite the undue concern about smoking, which the commissioners appear to have assumed would be an issue when it came to working-class women. School gyms were also a good deal more than places for sports and calisthenics. The early 1940s saw a rising interest in “teen-age dances,” and boards found themselves fielding requests by young people to put school gyms to a use for which they had not been intended. To some, this was a risky thing to agree to, given the structural damage that could result and the question of the appropriateness of a school board sanctioning such an event. In practice, a board’s liability insurance covered any possible damage during a dance, and there was no better way to monitor what young people were up to than to hold such events in the schools themselves.22 The trustees in Outremont were even willing to pay the cost of heating the school on a Saturday evening in January when the boys’ Amateur Athletic Association (aaa) sought permission to hold a dance. Curiously, the board had just refused the girls’ aaa

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request to hold a social event in the auditorium on a Saturday evening later the same month, citing that it would be too costly.23 The trustees presumably wished to encourage boys’ activities – to which girls would of course be invited – rather than the less conventional event proposed by the girls. School gyms continued to be used for dances right into the age of rock and roll, when the rebelliousness of youth was such that boards were, more than ever, eager to provide a controlled environment. The discussion of a dance held at the former Sherbrooke High School in 1972 makes the event seem light years away from the socials that took place a generation earlier: The “last dance held in the gym … was not very well run nor well supervised,” the secretary reported. “The band arrived late and kept 400 kids waiting. Members of the band used some profane language and disregarded the ‘no smoking’ request. Smoking continued in the downstairs hall and locker rooms. Burns were found on the gym floor. It was suggested that the gym not be used in future when expensive bands are hired requiring a large attendance to defray costs. The gym may be used for smaller dances, using local bands, thus permitting easier supervision and control.”24 This activity had obviously crossed certain lines and the commissioners were quick to establish their authority. The somewhat ad hoc pattern by which Protestant communities acquired gyms paralleled the provision of other modern facilities. Science, especially natural science, had long been part of the curriculum of academies, but formal laboratories would only appear in rural high schools in the 1920s. As we have seen, the teaching of physics and chemistry often coincided with the appointment of male principals, who would double as science instructors. In almost the same breath, the Longueuil school commissioners reported in 1930 on the building of “physical and chemical laboratories” and decided to advertise for a “duly qualified male principal, competent to teach physics and chemistry.”25 As for gyms, the provision of labs in rural high schools depended on the ability of local boards to fund the necessary extensions or reconstruction. By the 1940s new schools or new wings would inevitably contain rooms for the new domestic sciences, which had a clear precedent in the pre-war cooking and sewing facilities, just as the new industrial arts had a precursor in sloyd. In the 1920s and 30s all the larger elementary schools in Montreal had sloyd and cookery centres, which provided a degree of practical instruction to all pupils and constituted an early form of what would later be called vocational training for those less likely to pursue further academic studies.26 Libraries were a special case, strongly linked as they were to a long tradition within Protestantism of promoting public literacy: the Montreal Mechanics’ Institute and the Fraser Institute were urban cases in

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69 Art class, Montreal Art was an integral part of the Protestant curriculum, but generally did not require a specialized place, at least in elementary schools. The unusual desks pictured here provided an instant easel for each child. [emsba: events file]

point, but the former did set up temporary branches in rural communities. The efforts by school promoters in Upper Canada to provide school libraries that also served the municipality had no real parallel in Lower Canada, and by the later part of the nineteenth century this experiment had ceased to operate.27 In the 1890s Westmount had little by way of example when it contemplated building a public library, other than the many New England towns where such institutions were established next to their schools, churches, and town halls. The Westmount municipal library was the first in the province and served to inspire other communities with sufficient resources.28 Rural communities that could not support a public library did put every effort into providing the local school with a supply of books. Many of the older academies could boast libraries by the early twentieth century and some even had special rooms for their collection: in 1907 the Cookshire board decided to hold their meetings in the newly furnished school library.29 In Ste Agathe, with its solid tax base, providing the academy with a

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library and keeping it stocked with books was a significant preoccupation of the school board by the 1920s.30 Other communities relied on the generosity of wealthy benefactors, whose donations and bequests often included furnishing a library in the local high school: Mr W.H. Robinson, for example, left $1,000 for this purpose to the Granby school board; and in New Carlisle Mrs D. Morell donated “a library,” along with a picture of the Royal Family and a Flag Chart, in the name of the iode.31 Boards always noted generosity of this sort, even when the donation of books for an established school library became a popular means of commemorating the achievements of local citizens. Following the death of Sherbrooke’s Dr McGreer, a long-time local supporter of educational matters, his sister-in-law “made a very generous gift of books for boys which were the property of the late Dr McGreer … [and] wished these placed in the High School Library as a slight token of Dr McGreer’s interest in the Sherbrooke High School.”32 In much of Protestant Quebec, school libraries were great sources of local pride. Montreal’s Protestant schools first saw their classroom collections supplemented by central libraries in 1935, when the commissioners began to promote the idea. To an extent, they also provided funding, though the bulk of the cost of setting up school libraries was met by the schools themselves, through the hard work of teachers and parents, from whom much of the initiative had come. A small number of schools were busily assembling book collections even before the board suggested it.33 But fundraising was supplemented by the commissioners’ official appeal to the general public for donations, which resulted in gifts of over 1,400 books within the first year. The board also partly subsidized the conversion of unneeded classrooms into libraries, which was made possible by declining enrolment in most city schools. The provision of school libraries was born as much of smaller school populations, which freed at least one classroom in most schools, as of a conviction that central libraries would promote better learning. 34 Nevertheless, the development of school libraries dovetailed the rise in Protestant Quebec of the Progressive Movement in education, known locally as the Enterprise Method, which put less emphasis on rotelearning and more on individual pupil initiative; a school library proved invaluable to this sort of teaching.35 Thirteen school libraries had opened within a year of launching the program, and another halfdozen schools had followed by the beginning of World War II. Before long, however, the pressure from rising enrolment on a few schools, notably those in Montreal’s west end, such as Iona Avenue and Willingdon, required that libraries be reconverted into classrooms. By this time, the loss of a library was seen as so lamentable that it came to

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symbolize for the board the chronic need for additional school buildings in some areas.36 Post-war building of urban Protestant schools automatically included school libraries. Moreover, for the first time, elementary school libraries acquired librarians, who soon became key members of the school staff. These specialists, and the continuation of a child-centred curriculum, ensured that libraries became “the heart of the school” – something considerably more than a mere collection of books. As the board’s inspector of school libraries argued in the 1960s, a central library drew the entire school together. A system where only classrooms had book collections was, she added, woefully inadequate: “In a class of thirty children, can there be at least one book per child? Will Mark be interested in what is suitable for Mary? If not, then he does not have thirty books at his disposal for the year. And next year – suppose there is a Matthew with Mark’s capacities but with different needs and interests? Or no Marys in this room, but one in another class somewhere up or down the staircase?” To meet the needs of all children, even within a single classroom, a selection of literally thousands of books was required, and was supplied by most elementary schools. High-school libraries, moreover, provided an infinite variety for all types of student: those who were university-bound could learn the techniques of research; the non-academic pupils could find ways to repair an car; and children from minority groups could find reasons for pride.37 By the 1960s school libraries were not merely the hearts of schools, but the foundation of learning for the current generation. Elementary schoolchildren away from Montreal generally had little access to libraries before mid-century, save for those attending the junior grades of rural high schools. For rural communities, having a library in the high school was the chief objective. Isolated schools with one or two rooms were lucky if they could afford to keep as much as a small shelf of books. Conscious of this lack of reading material, the Protestant Committee made an effort to distribute books to rural schools, but there were hundreds of schools and only so many books. In his report on a visit to Matapedia in 1908, Inspector Sutherland eloquently stated the ideal: “The Department of Public Instruction expects every school to have a library, and for this purpose sends in some books almost every year. This year three books have been sent, two small books of stories for children, and one handsome expensive book named ‘Farm Weeds of Canada.’ It is very important that these books should be well used & cared for. Hence the necessity of either a good desk with drawers or a cupboard bookcase.”38 The department obviously felt it understood the needs of children in rural communities, though one wonders how much competition there would have been among the pupils to read a book on farm weeds. School consolidation

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would gradually allow for the situation to improve, although the creation of library facilities usually depended on local initiative. Beginning in the 1950s, the qfhsa promoted the establishment of public libraries throughout the province as a means to ensure that schoolchildren had proper access to a supply of books; they also systematically campaigned to maintain adequate funding for existing school libraries.39 In many parts of Quebec, Protestant communities lacked the funds to acquire books, but even for them there was a solution in the form of travelling libraries, such as the service offered by McGill University.40 Inadequacies in Protestant schools must be measured against the situation confronting most Catholic students, whose schools generally did not have gyms or central libraries. As far as the latter were concerned, the government had made an attempt to meet the needs in 1959 with the creation of the Provincial School Library Service. It gave the service half a million dollars to purchase books and appointed a professional librarian, who was responsible to the Catholic Committee, a clear indication that the service was principally directed to Catholic schools.41 The Parent Report’s advocacy of what central libraries should be recalls the descriptions of libraries already existing in psbgm schools: “All of these material conditions are absolutely necessary if the students are to be brought to use books and to love them, to discover all their riches and resources, to learn the methods of consultation and research, either in the catalogue or in reference books. It seems very important to us that the reading period, which is part of the elementary school programme, should be given in the library itself, so that each student will become used to visiting and using the library and even to feeling at home in it.”42 The Parent Report was more direct in its deference to Protestant boards when it came to physical education. Lamenting that a number of good intentions for including gym class in the Catholic curriculum had never been implemented, the commission admitted that the “Anglo-Saxon tradition” had a much better track record: “Protestant children are much better provided for, as physical education is dealt with much more seriously in their schools than in Catholic schools; this has been the case since the beginning of the century … All Protestant schools in Montreal have a specialist in physical education; since 1940 the larger Protestant schools even outside Montreal, have had gymnasiums and playgrounds.”43 The recommended solutions also echo concerns that had been expressed in Protestant circles for many decades: bigger schools must be built to meet the needs of modern students; and as well as separate teaching areas for the different grades, each school should feature a library, a gym, a playground, a cafeteria, and, in the case of high schools, workshops and science labs. Such recommenda-

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tions could only warm the hearts of Protestants who had been campaigning for improvements without the full force of a government ministry behind them.

The provision of new Protestant high schools in the post-war years was presented by contemporaries as evidence of the march of progress, with the word “Protestant” standing in for modern values, techniques, and facilities. The Stanstead County Central Board obviously felt they had started out on the wrong foot when commissioning their first big project in 1947, the Ayer’s Cliff High School, by hiring the architectural firm of Poulin and Poulin instead of someone with “experience in erecting Protestant schools.”44 The nature of the first firm’s failure is not spelled out, but presumably it had to do with a lack of familiarity with such modern features as gyms. This sentiment would be echoed a few years later by Howard Billings, an inspector that Percival sent to evaluate the school in Cookshire with regard to forthcoming renovations: “In my opinion the School Board would be well advised to engage the services of a competent architect who has had experience in remodelling Protestant school buildings and instruct him to remodel the school from basement to attic making provision for a sufficient number of classrooms … a principal’s office, teachers’ room, clinic, toilet rooms, and central board office … in the basement there should be new playrooms and an athletic room with showers, toilet fixtures and lockers.”45 Not surprisingly, Protestant school boards had traditionally hired Protestant architects and contractors. Even in ethnically mixed areas such as Hemmingford the two post-war extensions to the high school were undertaken exclusively by Protestant teams, albeit principally firms from Montreal.46 It was not that Protestant boards distrusted Catholic architects – Stanstead County had presumably opted for Poulin and Poulin because they gave the cheapest tender or seemed the most competent on paper – but that Protestant firms accustomed to building gyms and libraries were more likely to be sensitive to what Protestant communities wanted. From the late 1930s through the early 1960s new Protestant high schools arose across Quebec: throughout the Eastern Townships, at the tip of the Gaspé peninsula, in Quebec City, Thetford Mines, Shawinigan, Hemmingford, and Hull. In Shawville, whose old high school had so struck Percival by its lack of a gym, the commissioners secured a government grant to cover 80 per cent of the cost of a new building that would accommodate 1,300 pupils. A booklet commemorating the opening of the new high school in May 1953 sported a trio of images on its first page showing stick figures embodying the three

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70 Sketch from the program of the Shawville High School opening, 1953 [Pontiac Archive]

quintessential features of modern Protestant schools: Science, Library, and Physical Education. It also boasted of these and other facilities, including a health clinic (“one of the most progressive steps in the planning of the new building”), an industrial arts section, a household science department, a music and visual education room, and what was becoming a necessity in schools that drew children from miles away: a cafeteria, whose deep-blue-and-cream-coloured walls “contrive picturesque settings” for “quick and efficient service … in the well-appointed kitchen and servery.”47 Shawville had waited many years for these luxuries – now virtual necessities – but it was fortunate to receive a brandnew school. Other communities resorted to gradually rebuilding venerable institutions such as the Lachute Academy and St Francis High School (formerly St Francis College) in Richmond, both of which were overhauled and expanded in the 1940s. One characteristic feature of new Protestant schools from the 1950s on was the attention to landscape. The urgency for accommodation during this period was tempered by an unprecedented prosperity that allowed planners to indulge in what would once have seemed a luxury. Boards even had regular budgets to repave and reseed the yards of older schools that had been unavoidably neglected for years. The desire to put new schools in extensive grounds was especially striking in urban areas, where space was at a relative premium, and the efforts to make this space as attractive as possible suggest that the motive was as much aesthetics as utility – although it was wise to keep an eye on the possibility of future expansion, a conspicuous use of exterior space was a symbol of confident modernity. Interior features such as gyms, labs, and cafeterias contributed to a sense of progress and would certainly have proved attractive to potential students, but there was nothing quite like the effect of a long symmetrical facade set well back from the road and braced with lawn and gardens like some stately home. Architects’ drawings of prospective

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71 Architect’s drawing for the new Northmount High School, Montreal, 1954 The use of architectural drawings to advertise new buildings became a feature of modern Protestant school construction in the post-war period. In such views, a school’s public image is clearly more important than its interior arrangements. [psbgm Annual Report, 1954]

72 “Attractive school grounds”: new West Hill High School, Montreal, 1954 [psbgm Annual Report, 1954]

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schools emphasized this sense of space, this symmetry, this greenery, without giving much sense at all of the appearance of classrooms, hallways, and toilets where students spent their time; the drawings showed the school as the community would see it. The new West Hill High School, opened in 1952 in Montreal’s west end, personified this aesthetic concern. Built on a thirteen-acre site, the school was set at a diagonal to the two nearby cross streets, allowing for a variety of vistas.48 The frontispiece of one of the psbgm’s annual reports shows a central walkway, flanked with tulips, leading up to the school’s grand entrance; the photograph, entitled “Attractive School Grounds,” drives the point home by showing two female students admiring (and, implicitly, contributing to) the landscape. The design of new schools was generally not especially innovative in architectural terms, save for a marked emphasis on glass. One striking departure from traditional design was Lindsay Place High School in Pointe Claire, on the western side of Montreal Island. Having completed Beaconsfield High School in 1958, the commissioners realized that the area’s steadily rising population would soon warrant another building of similar size, and within two years they had commissioned the firm of Marshall and Merrett to design a structure that would not only house enough students but also meet all the needs of modern secondary education. The architects came up with a plan for a school that purported to give the maximum amount of space for the minimum cost, emphasizing above all the amount of wall space in each classroom without sacrificing the amount of natural light. The new school would be oval, plus a panhandle extending from the centre, which gave rise to the nickname “the Banjo.” Classrooms were grouped around the outside of the oval, leaving the interior for a gym, stage, lecture hall, and toilets, all spaces that did not need windows and therefore did not need to be next to an outside wall. The reduction in total exterior wall would make the school easier to heat, it was argued. The wedge shape of most classrooms allowed for more glass than the traditional rectangle, and if it did not actually give more wall space overall, the wider angles enabled teachers to position their desks so that they could have a full wall on each side in comfortable view of all students. In addition to the twenty-eight classrooms and 150-seat lecture hall, the school also contained rooms for sewing, music, shop (two), science (four), and art, plus a cafeteria large enough to be converted into two classrooms should the population continue to rise. With hindsight, this design may seem more gimmicky than innovative, but at the time, at the height of the modernist movement, it can only have made many rural communities envious.49

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73 Plan for Lindsay Place High School, Pointe Claire, 1958 “The Banjo.” [Educational Record, 1962]

In 1965 the provision of Protestant high schools took a decisive turn – and a curious one, given how much building and rebuilding had recently taken place in so many Protestant communities – when the new District of Bedford regional board decided to build Massey-Vanier Regional High School. The need for a new high-school building was perhaps more pressing in that area, given the age of most of the secondary schools: Bedford High School had been part of the “modern” generation, but it was already thirty years old, and relatively small. In most

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other parts of Quebec the abundance of modern Protestant high schools by the early 1960s would seem to have obviated the need to build vast new structures as recommended by the Parent Report for the province as a whole, but Bedford’s new regional board decided that this was the way to go, even though the existing network of secondary schools, while far from adequate, was convenient to the area’s pockets of Protestants. Regions with less well-established school networks, such as Laval and the Laurentians, were somewhat more justified in calling for large new schools, though even they did not plan on the scale envisaged in the District of Bedford. In an age of technical achievement, and given the Protestant tradition of promoting modern facilities, the idea of the regional high school was irresistible and soon inspired other Protestant communities to follow suit. Massey-Vanier Regional High School was conceived on an unprecedented scale. Within weeks of their first meeting the District of Bedford regional school board had appointed a director-general, prepared a “regional plan” for buildings and equipment, and established committees to deal with transportation, teachers, buildings, vocational education, and student relations. They also approached the Mayor of Cowansville about securing a ninety-acre site slightly to the west of town. After some negotiation, they agreed to collaborate with their Catholic counterparts, the Commission Scolaire Régionale de Missisquoi, in the purchase of this site; it would be divided on a roughly fiftyfifty basis, with “the Catholics to the North and the Protestants to the South.” Both sides then agreed that the complex should also include a community centre, with cultural and sports facilities open to the wider public.50 In a plan for school organization completed by the end of 1965, the board envisaged a staff for the proposed school that included a principal, a vice-principal and an assistant principal, a director of technical and vocational education, a director of guidance (whose tasks were broken down into five areas: inventory, counselling, information, placement, and follow-up), several department heads (each of whom would be responsible for an array of specialized teachers), and five house deans. A dean was to be in charge of one of the “schools within the schools” in the manner of private school “houses”; he would oversee morale and behaviour, and “have at least a nodding acquaintance with each of the 400–450 students in his house.”51 The school’s Protestant population was expected to reach at least 1,800; slightly more were expected on the Catholic side. The notion of putting Protestant and Catholic, English and French, together in one building (though in separate areas), had also been proposed by the Laurentian and North Island regional boards for ethnically and linguistically mixed areas. The theory was that, although

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classes would be held in one language or the other and the academic curriculum of each confessional group might differ, all children ate, drank, and made use of the swimming pool, machine shops, office equipment, and auditorium in a similar manner. This goal had political implications: “The only thing that can possibly derive from our common campus is a better understanding between the two linguistic groups, a much higher standard of bilingualism on both sides, a mutual respect which has not been possible … in the past. This common campus concept is a breakthrough for education. We are getting away from our educational separatism and perhaps when we have gotten away from this, any other form of separatism will also die a natural death.”52 These were noble goals, but they seriously underestimated the ability of adolescents to replicate the divisions within their society. To build a single school with two separate identities required two architectural firms, which was clearly not a recipe for proceeding swiftly. At an early meeting of both regional boards and municipal representatives, two separate designs were put forward, neither of which proved compatible with the town’s plan to run a bypass road near the site. Lengthy discussions resulted in some concessions all round, and it was finally agreed that both sides would adhere to a “devis de construction” that outlined the “philosophy and ideals” of a modern secondary school. Quite apart from its being in French, the language of this document was unlike anything that had been used in the building of Protestant institutions. The philosophy and ideals came straight out of the modernist movement and the language was that of the new bureaucracy. Instead of the brittle, matter-of-fact prose with which Percival described modern schools, the devis analysed and categorized in ponderous tones that often bordered on the ludicrous. The school was to be divided into several “zones,” of which only one was academic; the others were “professionelle,” “socio-récréative,” “administrative,” and “socio-culturelle.” Similarly, the various services that the school would provide were given curiously complex definitions: • Formation physique de l’individu, apprentissage de la maitrise de certains gestes en fonction d’activité sportives. Expression de certaines qualités acquises dans le cadre de rencontres et compétitions. [the gym] • Centre de recherche permettant la vérification de données et l’enrichissement de l’enseignement reçu dans les matières académiques, techniques, artistiques en plus de permettre l’acquisition d’une culture générale appropriée au moyen du livre de l’encyclopédie, de la revue et des moyens audio-visuels. [the library] • Centre de distribution permettant la restauration physique de l’individu par la nourriture, la détente. [the cafeteria]

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This seems a world away from Howard Billings’s description sixteen years earlier of the kind of Protestant architecture needed for the Cookshire High School.53 It was also a world away from the sort of school building most Catholics were used to, but the scale and bravura of the project seemed a perfect representation of the face of French Canada. Its nationalism was that of the Liberal party, and with Canada’s 100th birthday only a year away it seemed natural to call the central part of the complex the Centennial Building; the name Massey-Vanier referred to the first two Canadian-born governors general.54 It was truly a bilingual, bicultural enterprise. As discussions continued and plans evolved, the project often sounded less like a high school than a part of Expo: The municipal parking lot [will be used] for all vehicle traffic at the school site, in effect creating one central arrival and departure point … in front of the Arts Centre, plaza and concourse. If this proposal is accepted by the two Boards and Municipality, the Centennial building becomes the focal point and hub of site development. This will necessitate changing school layouts to conform to this concept. The idea of a natural approach unspoiled by roads is inspiring. The cathedral like atmosphere created by the dense conifers and maples will be preserved. Park-like landscaping can be effected in the areas around the Arts Centre and in front of the school complex … Cantilever the Arts Centre plaza out over a section of the concourse between the arena and parking lot with stairs leading down from the plaza. This would split pedestrian congestion at this point and also create a protected approach to the Arts Centre, plaza and school in foul weather.55

The importance given to the Centennial building with its arts centre and other civic features was, admittedly, appropriate, given that the municipal government was paying for this part of the project. When building finally got underway, it was the Centennial building that received top priority to be finished by 1 July 1967. By that time, the school portion of the complex was still subject to arguments over the arrangement of lockers, lighting, and machine shops.56 It was perhaps not surprising that the director general of the Protestant regional board suffered a heart attack, and eventually stepped down. Construction tenders were issued that autumn, a contractor was selected the following spring, and a sod-turning ceremony took place in July 1968. The board even agreed to a proposal to produce a “full colour sound film covering the progress of construction and promoting the Bilingual and Bicultural aspect of this Regional school.”57 The school had been scheduled to open in September 1969, but this proved impossible. A few classrooms were ready to take Grade 11 students, and the remain-

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74 Maquette, Massey-Vanier Regional High School, Cowansville This early maquette shows the vast extent of the projected regional high school [The School Board, Spring-Summer 1968]

der were available by October, but the auditorium, cafeteria, and library complex was still very much under construction over the subsequent winter.58 By that time Protestant regional high schools had been built in the Pontiac, Hull, the Chateauguay valley, Richmond County, and the South Shore, and within a few years others would appear in Chateauguay, Laval, and Lennoxville. All were large institutions, if less ambitious than their counterpart in Cowansville, and all were designed to bring hundreds of Protestant pupils from across the countryside and expose them to the latest in buildings, services, and equipment. On the whole, regional high schools served urban and suburban areas fairly well, much as the large new high schools did for students on the Island of Montreal. In rural areas, however, regional high schools proved detrimental to many students and certainly to the communities from which they came. When it came to courses, resources, and extracurricular activities, students were spoiled for choice, but they were also obliged to cope in a bewildering new environment. Regional high schools often had larger populations than the students’ communities. Furthermore, the school was a world to itself. Unlike the older high schools, which had formed part of the local townscape, places like

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Map 20 The high schools (later elementary schools) of Stanstead County By the 1960s the five high schools of Stanstead County were essentially the county’s five public schools. With the establishment of Alexander Galt Regional High School in Lennoxville, all five were reduced to the status of elementary schools; secondary students throughout the region were bused to Lennoxville.

Massey-Vanier lay on the outskirts of town, and were as self-contained as shopping malls. As the urban problems of youth raised their heads in regional high schools, townspeople may well have been happy that the school’s location kept the students at a safe distance, but in no circumstances is such sentiment a sign of a healthy community. Towns that had been central places within the education network retained that status insofar as their high schools became elementary, serving the wider community in the manner of consolidated schools. At the secondary level, however, the connection between school and community was severed. The toll this would take on the rural Protestant population was of little concern amidst the excitement of creating huge modern schools.

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meeting the needs • 311

75 Richmond County Regional High School, Richmond Built only a few hundred yards from the former St Francis High School, the Richmond County Regional High School seems a world apart. [The School Board, September 1969]

The severing of the link with the community was particularly sad in places whose schools formed part of local history. St Francis College, which had become St Francis High School at the beginning of the twentieth century, was downgraded as St Francis Elementary; the new Richmond County Regional High School stood at the edge of town, a stark, massive structure with little relevance to the community or the region. The new Laurentian Regional High School just outside Lachute made the old academy similarly redundant. Given that these schools had been almost entirely rebuilt over the previous two decades, an argument could have been made to retain them as high schools – the very argument that the District of Bedford board rejected at their first meeting. Even stranger was the creation of the Pontiac County Regional High School at the outskirts of Shawville fifteen years after the triumphant opening of the longawaited modern high school there. What the new regional high schools did create was an array of very well-appointed elementary schools, such

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312 • a meeting of the people

76 Demolition of Lennoxville Academy, 1982 The oldest part of the Lennoxville Academy was torn down in 1982 despite offers to use it as the offices of a local newspaper. [Lennoxville and Ascot Historical and Museum Society: p 415 sch]

as the “new” Dr McDowell School in Shawville (the former modern high school), Sunnyside in Rock Island, and the former high schools of Ayer’s Cliff, Magog, Sherbrooke, North Hatley, Lennoxville, Huntingdon, and Hemmingford. Not all these venerable institutions could survive without the senior students, at least not intact; unneeded rooms or even whole wings often had to be shared with other community organizations or dispensed with. In some areas compromises were reached so that local schools could continue to teach the younger secondary grades and therefore postpone the time when students had to make their way to regional high schools. Usually such arrangements were a necessity, given the great distances involved. Anticipating this problem, the Protestant regional school board of Gaspesia decided to build two regional high schools in its area, one in the town of Gaspé for the population at the head of the peninsula and the other in the mostly francophone Bonaventure, for all the secondary students living along the shores of Chaleur Bay. Even so, it was a long way from the Magdalen Islands or Murdochville (a min-

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meeting the needs • 313

ing community deep in the Gaspé hinterland) to the polyvalente school in the town of Gaspé, and these schools tended to offer several secondary grades.59 Some communities openly resisted the drive to impose a single regional high school, especially when the local high school’s demotion threatened to diminish the community. The commissioners of Chaleur Bay, notably, resented the decision to give central status to Bonaventure: “The whole student body of the Protestant School Municipality of Chaleur Bay, which has the largest enrolment in the region … and which has operated a High School for more than 60 years, will have to be transported more than twice the distance if the school is located at Bonaventure.”60 Bonaventure lay 12 km west of New Carlisle, but 50 km from Port Daniel and 140 km from Matapedia. The commissioners threatened to withdraw from the regional board over this issue, and in the end managed to secure the concession that the New Carlisle school would continue to teach up to Grade 9, after which students would have to travel to Bonaventure. Such an arrangement prolonged the number of years in which local pupils would retain their links with their community. By the 1960s, caught up in the promises of a confident age, Protestant communities embraced the notion of regional high schools as purveyors of better education. In a co-operative spirit, they also saw them – or at any rate bicultural institutions such as Massey-Vanier – as agents of social and ethnic harmony. While some voices questioned the pedagogical wisdom of pushing students of widely different educational traditions together, few saw any danger to the health of Protestant communities. One who did was Eric Morrison, outgoing president of the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards (qapsb), who raised a note of concern at his final address in October 1965: “From the Protestant viewpoint, I personally have some misgivings as to whether the regional plan is best for the rural … areas,” he wrote in the qapsb’s magazine. “It may hasten the already declining Protestant School population in these areas. I myself visualize these communities being adequately served with schools handling approximately 500 students, which would include the so-called Junior High School. The curriculum for the Junior High School would be strongly academic with a small range of vocational courses.”61 Morrison was arguing that there were not, in fact, too many schools, and implied that a great many high schools should be retained at least as junior highs, rather than be demoted to elementary schools. From the perspective of both the community and the student, the regional boards may have performed some unnecessary surgery. The next few decades would see a radical dwindling of the Protestant population in almost all rural areas of Quebec, with the result that the capacity of Protestant regional high schools

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314 • a meeting of the people

soon far exceeded their actual numbers. By 1991 Massey-Vanier accommodated only 827 “Protestant”students, considerably less than half the number predicted a quarter of a century earlier, while Laurentian Regional in Lachute had a population of 643 and the Regional High in Richmond had only 312. Furthermore, of the 827 MasseyVanier students, only 524 were actually Protestant; of the rest, 252 were Catholic. In practice, the school had a large French side and a small English side, and the two did not always get along as well as the school’s creators had predicted. Protestants rattled around inside an institution that had its architectural origins in a long history that was now largely forgotten.

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12

The Protestant Metropolis For the first time in Montreal we have a full complement of elected school commissioners. Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations, 19731

When one considers that the Board owns 156 buildings, the dimensions of the maintenance task becomes clearer. Apart from supervisory staff, 491 caretaking employees were required to look after the heating, cleaning and general servicing of these buildings. To upgrade the school caretaking, each member of the caretaking staff is now provided with a written individual routine which outlines all of his basic tasks. In 1959, a Caretaking Training Seminar of a week’s duration was held. Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, 19612

On a late spring day in 1959 Dr Giles, the province’s new Director of Protestant Education, took a drive up to the Lake of Two Mountains area and was very impressed by the number of new homes. The local Protestant population was growing and the three schools under the control of the Two Mountains board were already overcrowded: 178 students were registered in the school in the town of St Eustache (the historic centre of the parish); another 465 attended the Laval West school; and 670 went to the high school in St Eustache sur le Lac. The board projected that the next two years would bring additional students to raise these school populations to 316, 600, and 812 respectively – far too many for these buildings to cope with. Giles pointed out that, in a rapidly developing region, it was not sufficient to decide to build a new school. Real estate was being purchased so quickly that it might soon prove impossible to find enough open space. He “strongly advised it [the board] to make sure of a new school site either through an option or immediate purchase.”3 The board already had its eye on a

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316 • a meeting of the people

Map 21 South Shore Protestant schools, 1985 In 1985 the St Lawrence school board, one of three sector boards on the South Shore created in the wake of Bill 27, drew up a list of schools under its jurisdiction, noting for each the date of construction, the state of repair, and the real-estate value. Note St Lawrence School at lower left, a rare English-language school opened by a Parti Québécois government. [Source: Riverside school board files.]

large site to the north of St Eustache sur le Lac on which it hoped to build a modern elementary school that would allow the high school to be devoted exclusively to the secondary grades. Three decades later there would be several good-sized schools in Laval and many more on the north shore, east of St Eustache. Deux Montagnes, the municipality that would succeed St Eustache sur le Lac, had only two Protestant schools by 1991, however, with a total school population of 734 (only 361 of whom were technically “Protestants”). Dr Giles’ assumption that the Lake of Two Mountains area would continue to attract increasing numbers of Protestant families was wrong. His advice about the need to purchase suburban real estate was not wrong, however; he merely made too hasty assumptions about St Eustache. Drives (which he may well have taken) to Laval, the West Island, and the South Shore would have revealed communities where the Prot-

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the protestant metropolis • 317

estant population did continue to grow, even through the 1980s, when large numbers of anglophones fled Montreal for much farther pastures (that is, Ontario) in the wake of the Parti Québécois 1976 election victory, which for many spelled the community’s doom. The reach of Protestant suburbia may not have extended much beyond Deux Montagnes (which today remains the last station on one of the city’s commuter train lines) but these other suburbs lay within its grasp. In the decades following World War II, these areas were transformed from countryside to bedroom communities, with a good share of the region’s commerce and industry. Protestants were major players in this colonization process and, in the case of the West Island, they dominated the landscape. This growth was principally at the expense of the city of Montreal and its older suburbs, although the influx of immigrants during the post-war decades served substantially to counter the effects of Protestant outward migration. Into the 1990s the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal (psbgm) remained by far the largest Protestant board in the province, as well as the most influential. Nevertheless, the accommodation of Protestant and other non-Catholic students was as difficult for the psbgm (because of shifting demographics) as it was for the suburban boards (because of rapid population growth). The Montreal area, city and suburbs, experienced many of the problems typical of modern urban societies. Apart from the length of time on a bus, students’ lives in the inner city and the outer suburbs had much in common, given the size of schools and the nature of school administration. The area also constituted the Protestant heartland of Quebec: 95 per cent of the province’s Protestants lived in or near Montreal by the 1990s. As such, it became the most important stage upon which the struggles of modern Quebec were played out. The agenda of the Quiet Revolution, notably its advocacy of an end to confessional school boards, was most keenly felt in the city, where the multicultural population fitted least well into the established parameters and the various groups were the most conscious of their differences. The agenda of nationalist governments of several political hues also had the deepest impact in the urban areas where, despite the rough division of the “two solitudes” into east and west, many communities had both Catholic and Protestant contingents. These struggles are the focus of chapters 13 and 14. However, because the nature of school boards in the city was different from that in the suburbs, the problem of accommodating a dense and diverse school population was approached from different perspectives, following different rules. In the post-war decades, the psbgm’s problems were complicated by its unrepresentative political structure. Away from Montreal, Protestant communities had to deal with local, regional, and sector boards whose interests did not always coincide.

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318 • a meeting of the people

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal was routinely several steps behind in its effort to provide adequate school accommodation. In any other city of Montreal’s size, the public school board would experience a wide variety of social problems caused by shifting demographics, but for Montreal’s Protestant board the situation was chaotic. The board catered only to a minority, but that minority was first challenged numerically by immigrants, and then by the lure of greener pastures in several directions away from the centre. We have seen the overwhelming numbers of non-Protestants at inner-city schools and the congestion they created by the 1920s. Over the course of these same decades, the city of Montreal expanded considerably through the annexation of surrounding municipalities, thus increasing the actual number of Protestants under the board’s control. St Louis de Mile End, Côteau St Louis, Rosemount, Delorimier, Côte de la Visitation, Bordeaux, and Ahuntsic extended the board’s territory yet farther north, while Côte St Paul expanded its boundaries right up to the border with the City of Verdun. Although the cities of Westmount and Outremont resisted the tide of annexation, Montreal acquired the vast expanse of Côte des Neiges and Notre Dame de Grâce (ndg) far to the west. The latter two areas would see concentrations of middle-class Protestants developing in the 1920s, as English-speaking families moved away from the central parts of the city. Rosemount and Park Extension absorbed large numbers of the city’s Protestant working class, as did St Henri in the west and Maisonneuve in the east. Many of these new areas already contained a Protestant school, although this was often a very modest building that had to be enlarged or rebuilt: the schoolhouse on Berri Street in Côteau St Louis, for example, was soon replaced by the new William Dawson School and Fairmount School in Mile End was enlarged by twelve rooms within two years of coming under the board’s wing.4 Rosemount School was enlarged by ten classrooms in 1915, by fifteen classrooms in 1923, and by another fifteen in 1926, making it the largest school in the Protestant system at the time, at least in terms of space. During this same period the board built four new schools in the east end (one of which was named after John Jenkins and another after Donald MacVicar, both former chairs of the board), two in ndg, and two in Côte St Paul. Côte des Neiges, which had never had a Protestant school, was allocated a small three-room building in 1915 to serve its rapidly growing Protestant population. By the late 1920s the older neighbourhoods had lost their traditional Protestant base, especially those eastern districts represented by the Dufferin, Alexandra, and Lansdowne schools. The immigrant population in these districts was

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the protestant metropolis • 319 Table 9 Schools acquired by Montreal’s pbsc through annexation and school building in annexed territories Territory Annexed Transferred School

Subsequent Accommodation by pbsc

Hochelaga 1884

Wooden one-room schoolhouse

New school built 1890 (destroyed by fire 1907) Sarah Maxwell Memorial School built 1908 – enlarged by 4 classrooms 1912 MacVicar School built 1916

St Jean Baptiste 1886

School in rented building

Mount Royal School built 1889 – enlarged 1898 – enlarged by 12 rooms 1906 – enlarged by 2 rooms 1907

St Gabriel 1887

School

School enlarged 1887 Lorne School built 1992

Côteau St Louis 1893

Berri Street School Boulevard School

Earl Grey School built 1908; enlarged by 6 classrooms 1924 Boulevard School closed 1908 William Dawson School built 1910 Berri Street School closed 1911

Rosemount 1905

Rosemount School

Rosemount School’s Assembly Hall and board room converted to classrooms 1913 – enlarged by 10 classrooms, sloyd room, cookery room, and gym 1915 – enlarged by 15 classrooms 1923 – enlarged by 15 classrooms 1926 Drummond School built 1931

Delorimier 1909

Delorimier School

Site enlarged 1911

St Louis de Mile End 1909

Fairmount School

Fairmount School enlarged by 12 classrooms 1911 Edward VII School built 1912; third storey added 1914; enlarged by classrooms 1919 Bancroft School built 1915; enlarged by 2 classrooms 1915

Côte St Paul 1910

Duke of Connaught School Côte St Paul School

Hamilton Street School built 1915 Duke of Connaught School closed 1924 Côte St Paul School enlarged by 6 classrooms 1918; closed 1924 Connaught School built 1924

Côte des Neiges 1910

None

Côte des Neiges School built 1915 – enlarged by 2 classrooms 1926 – rebuilt after fire 1937 Iona Avenue School built 1932 – enlarged by 12 classrooms 1937

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320 • a meeting of the people Table 9 Schools acquired by Montreal’s pbsc through annexation and school building in annexed territories (Continued) Territory Annexed Transferred School

Subsequent Accommodation by pbsc

Notre Dame de Grâce 1910

Royal George School Royal Albert School Royal Vale School Kensington School West Hill High School

Royal George School enlarged by 2 rooms 1918 – closed 1923 Herbert Symonds School built 1923 Royal Albert School enlarged by 4 rooms 1924 – enlarged by 4 classrooms 1926 and renamed Gilson School West Hill High School enlarged by 8 classrooms, chemistry lab, lecture room, drawing room 1923 Willingdon School built 1929 Rosedale School built 1931

Bordeaux 1910

None

House purchased and converted into a two-room school 1913

Ahuntsic 1910

School

Ahuntsic School enlarged by 4 classrooms 1924

Villeray 1913

Amherst Park School

Shaw Memorial Church School opens in rented basement 1913; closed 1914 Amherst Park School closed 1914 Peace Centennial School built 1914 Greenshields Avenue School built 1914 – enlarged by 4 classrooms 1924 – renamed Barclay School 1928; closed 1931 Amherst School built 1915 Crystal Springs School built 1922 New Barclay School built 1931

Youville 1913

School

School closed 1914

Tétreaultville 1914

None

Tétreaultville School built 1914

St Henri 1918

Prince Albert School

Prince Albert School remodelled 1922 – closed 1930 Lewis Evans School built 1922; closed 1946

Maisonneuve 1918

Maisonneuve School

Terminal Park School built 1916 John Jenkins School built 1917 New Maisonneuve School built 1920

Cartierville 1922

None

Cartierville School built 1922

Source: Reports of the pbsc for the City of Montreal

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the protestant metropolis • 321

also declining, the commissioners noted. Schools that only a few years before had been “overflowing with Jewish pupils” were now “partially vacant and their enrolment … almost wholly non-Jewish.”5 Dufferin School was closed in 1928, and a decade later when Lansdowne School was destroyed in a fire the commissioners decided the pupils could be accommodated at neighbouring schools with no real overcrowding.6 In the 1930s the board’s attention was focused on ndg in the west, Rosemount in the east, and the heavily Protestant Park Extension area to the north. Despite the Depression, the board built Willingdon and Rosedale schools in the west end, Iona Avenue School in the southern part of Côte des Neiges, Barclay School in Park Extension, and Drummond School to provide relief to the ever-swelling Rosemount. In its second year of operation, Willingdon had an enrolment of 1,076, and the overall increase in the population of Protestant schools was attributed to growth in ndg.7 Subsequent enlargements of schools in this area were promptly filled to capacity. But in 1934 the commissioners began to notice a drop in total enrolment in their elementary schools. This would continue steadily throughout the next decade. The Protestant population appeared to have levelled again; certainly immigration had slowed to a trickle. Building operations were suspended.8 The tapering-off of the elementary school population masked a rising demand for secondary education. The suspension of building in the early 1930s left the board with five high schools (the original Boys’ and Girls’, Baron Byng, Commercial, and West Hill – which had been inherited from the annexed board in ndg) and a highschool-age population that had grown by over 33 per cent in five years. This phenomenon was the result of those great numbers of pupils from the 1920s reaching their teenage years and of the rising expectation of more and more families that their children would attend high school, and even university, a destiny once all but reserved for the elite.9 The board was obliged to open Grade 8 classes in several elementary schools: Barclay, Edward VII, Lorne, Maisonneuve, Peace Centennial, Rosemount, William Dawson, and Willingdon. They also closed Strathearn School to elementary pupils, who were easily absorbed by nearby schools, and turned all of its classrooms over to secondary instruction.10 Some secondary pupils in ndg had to resort to attending high schools in Westmount and Montreal West, which were not under the board’s jurisdiction. The trend would continue until after the start of World War II; if anything, it was exacerbated by wartime legislation making schooling compulsory up to the age of fourteen.

See facing page for caption.

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the protestant metropolis • 323

With a war on, additional construction was out of the question for the time being, but the universal fever for planning during wartime had an impact on the commissioners. In 1943 they formed a building committee, which a year later produced a report outlining a major building program to take effect at war’s end. As well as much judicious expansion of elementary schools in key areas such as Côte des Neiges and Snowdon, it called for the construction of at least four new “community high schools” to serve the western part of ndg, Maisonneuve, Park Extension, and Rosemount.11 In this manner the city’s Protestant population would be served at the secondary level as it had been since the 1890s at the elementary level: with an integrated system of schools, each conveniently located. This ambitious scheme was Map 22 Montreal neighbourhoods: comparison of Protestant school populations, 1925–43 This map and the accompanying table 10 show how the population of Protestant schools shifted between 1925 and 1943, using 1933 as a rough middle point. The divisions on this map correspond to several school districts, grouped because they shared topographical features or can be somehow identified as neighbourhoods. Table 10 gives the total population of all Protestant schools within each division for 1925, 1933, and 1943 respectively, in bold. The other numbers show the population within the overall total of Jewish and Greek Orthodox pupils, for the same years. The decline in numbers in the central part of the city is obvious: the population of St Antoine ward schools (which includes the elementary grades of the high schools) went from 1,874 to 1,749 and then to 1,143, while the Centre-East area shrank even more drastically from 3,294 to only 1,229 by 1943. The shrinking Jewish population is particularly striking for the Centre-East area: from over two thousand in 1925 to under two hundred by 1943. The Protestant populations of St Henri, Griffintown, Pointe St Charles, and Côte St Paul also considerably diminished, as did Maisonneuve. This decline is also evident, significantly, along the Main, where a drop in Jewish numbers brought the overall total down from 9,447 to 5,043, indicating that even this densely populated Jewish community, though still numerous, was shifting westwards. Some of this shift can be seen in the mushrooming population of Côte des Neiges during this period – it grew almost nine-fold; the increase in this area was principally due to Iona Avenue School, which served the rapidly growing Protestant and Jewish communities of Snowdon. The three key areas during the late 1920s and early 30s – ndg, the North, and Rosemount – each show a gradual rise in population between 1925 and 1933, followed by a gradual decline over the next ten years.

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324 • a meeting of the people Table 10 Population of Montreal Protestant schools by neighbourhood, 1925–43 Neighbourhood

1925

1933

1943

192 6 0

1,093 94 2

1,665 527 5

Notre Dame de Grâce

2,543 243 2

3,976 462 4

2,751 314 6

Côte St Paul

1,120 14 24

1,174 6 51

737 0 16

St Henri/Griffintown

2,101 209 21

1,552 87 43

1,210 29 46

Pointe St Charles

2,231 52 31

1,936 18 73

1,360 15 38

St Antoine/High Schools

1,874 242 25

1,749 196 57

1,143 55 34

Centre-East

3,294 2,055 334

2,308 768 431

1,229 199 227

The Main

9,447 7,295 59

7,531 6,019 165

5,043 3,787 193

Plateau East

2,721 487 112

2,044 184 152

987 60 102

North

1,994 297 92

2,720 109 260

1,882 23 170

Rosemount

1,481 9 39

2,630 13 141

1,596 4 78

Maisonneuve

2,453 23 236

2,339 11 310

1,620 6 127

Côte des Neiges / Snowdon

Source: psbgm Annual Reports, 1925, 1933, 1943

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the protestant metropolis • 325

eagerly anticipated at war’s end, but it quickly became obvious that Protestant Montreal’s demographic prospects were, if anything, in a greater state of flux than before. Canada’s doors were now open again to refugees, many of whom crowded into temporary shelters in and around Montreal awaiting more permanent placement, and to immigrants, who began to arrive in 1946. These newcomers included a great number of Protestants from Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe, as well as Jews and Orthodox Christians. Within a few years the federal government would make special efforts to recruit immigrants from Britain. All of these groups would clearly turn to the Protestant school system when it came to educating their children, but much would depend on exactly where they would settle. Furthermore, large numbers of Montreal residents with much deeper local roots, especially returning veterans, saw the post-war period as their chance to move away from the city and buy property in the suburbs or even off-island. Although this outward trend would eventually hurt the city’s school tax base, the Protestant board’s immediate postwar problem was matching populations and schools within its territory. For practical purposes, this territory was considerably larger than the city’s boundaries, even after all the annexation of the early part of the century. Most of the outlying municipalities that remained independent had resisted further attempts at annexation in favour of economic association.12 In 1925, as a result of looming financial crisis, the school boards of these municipalities decided to follow this route also. The City of Verdun, whose residents were mostly working-class, had a much tougher job raising enough revenue to pay for its schools than did Westmount, Outremont, and the newer, affluent communities of Hampstead and the Town of Mount Royal. Without giving up their autonomy or their right to manage their schools, these communities – along with Lachine, Côteau St Pierre, St Laurent, Sault au Recollet (on the north side of the island), Pointe aux Trembles (the eastern end of the island), and Montreal itself – agreed to form the Montreal Protestant Central Board, which would collect and distribute tax revenue. As Montreal’s Protestant commissioners had a right to four of the seven seats on the central board, each of the outlying municipalities had little say in spending decisions, but they retained control over their schools and received their share of funding. In 1945, after the absorption of additional territory, the central board was reconfigured, and in 1951 it changed its name to the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal (psbgm), a body whose jurisdiction stretched from Lachine to the eastern tip of the island.

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326 • a meeting of the people Table 11 High schools opened by the psbgm, 1950-65

School Mount Royal

Year Opened by psbgm 1951

Community

Capacity

Town of Mount Royal (under tmr board)

1,050

Rosemount

1951

Montreal: Rosemont

1,150

West Hill (new)

1952

Montreal: ndg

1,400

Outremont

1955

Outremont (under Outremont board)

1,050

Northmount

1956

Montreal: Côte des Neiges

1,200

Lachine (new)

1957

Lachine (under Lachine board)

1,200

Dunton

1960

Montreal: East

1,200

Malcolm Campbell

1960

Montreal: Cartierville

1,200

Sir Winston Churchill

1961

St Laurent (under St Laurent board)

1,200

Westmount

1961

Westmount (under Westmount board)

1,300

Wagar

1963

Côte St Luc (under Montreal board)

1,300

Riverdale

1964

Pierrefonds (under St Laurent board)

1,430

Dorval

1965

Dorval (under Lachine board)

1,930

Source: Annual Reports of the psbgm, 1950–65

The board’s post-war building campaign got underway slowly, its progress marked by caution during the first few years.13 New schools were opened in St Laurent (including one specifically for refugees), the Town of Mount Royal, Rosemount, Côte des Neiges, Lachine, and Lasalle. By 1950 the board finally undertook the first of its projected community high schools, a vast new structure intended to serve Rosemount and much of the eastern part of the city. Over the following decade, the board concentrated on providing much-needed space for the higher grades. This construction did not exactly correspond to the 1943 planning committee’s vision. By the time the board was ready to begin its building program, Park Extension and Maisonneuve did not seem to need secondary schools quite as desperately as they had done a decade before and other areas had even exceeded expectations. A second high school was built in ndg, called West Hill – the old West Hill High School was renamed Monklands – and it soon became the largest in the

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the protestant metropolis • 327

system, accommodating well over 1,500 pupils. A new Outremont High School quickly overtook Strathcona Academy as that municipality’s principal secondary institution. Westmount, too, received a new senior high school. By 1960 the board had built high schools in Côte des Neiges (Northmount), St Laurent (Sir Winston Churchill), Cartierville to the north of St Laurent (Malcolm Campbell), and the east end (Dunton), and was beginning construction in Dorval and Côte St Luc. In that year, these schools accommodated over 18,000 secondary pupils, and within five years this number was up to well over 22,000. The 1950–65 period also saw over twenty new elementary schools open their doors within the psbgm territory. As had been the case during previous boom periods, the building program also included much enlarging of existing schools and even the closing of some buildings that were in poor shape or were in areas where the Protestant population had become negligible. By the early 1960s a new network had been created to meet post-war Protestant needs, with most parts of the city well supplied with schools. The student population continued to grow over the course of this decade, not tapering off until 1967–68. Despite this overall rise, the number of elementary pupils in the system was slowly but steadily dropping. Table 12 shows that, while the highschool population kept pace with the overall growth – it reached its peak in 1968–69 – the elementary population had peaked almost a decade earlier. The same phenomenon had occurred thirty years before: the children of a post-war boom had now graduated to high school, and they were not followed by such a large cohort. The other factor at play here was outward migration: younger families were moving outside the board’s territory.

Beyond the city and the older suburbs, vast stretches of countryside that had been dotted with villages and towns thickened into suburbia in the decades after the war. Montreal’s West Island had developed over the first half of the century because of access to rail transport, its communities growing as Anglo-Protestant commuters built homes a half-hour away from downtown. But until the later 1940s, a great deal of it was still farmlands and forest – a drawing point for the much larger waves of post-war commuters, who depended on the car and the highway as much as on the train. Elementary schools were small and few, and high schools non-existent, apart from the one operated by Macdonald College in Ste Anne de Bellevue. In 1948 the newly created Macdonald Central School Board took over the management of this high school, but felt that it was inadequate for the population that was

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328 • a meeting of the people Table 12 Numbers of psbgm schools and their populations, 1951–91

Year

No. of Elementary Schools

Total Elementary Population

No. of High Schools

Total High-School Population

Total Population

1951

64

34,151

14

9,965

44,116

1961

82

44,067

19

18,217

62,284

1966

82

41,929

20

22,424

64,353

1971

85

38,746

20

21,730

60,476

1976

74

31,444

23

20,682

52,126

1981

52

18,993

21

16,797

35,790

1991

48

19,230*

25

11,199

30,429*

Source: Annual Reports of the psbgm, 1951–91 * Includes social affairs schools

expected for the area. At a special joint meeting of its members and those of the combined Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield board, it was agreed that the building of schools was complicated by not knowing exactly where most of the growth would occur: Ste Anne itself had “very little property left to build on” and Senneville was composed of large estates, but much space remained in nearby Baie d’Urfé and much potential for suburban development further east, through Beaconsfield, Pointe Claire, and beyond. But clearly growth would continue, for “it was a tendency for Protestants to keep on the move.” Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield had to decide whether they wanted a high school in Pointe Claire or a new one in Ste Anne (and then whether all secondary pupils or just the senior grades should go there), or whether they preferred to continue to send their students into Montreal West by train. The largest body of opinion, including that of the Protestant Committee itself, felt that Pointe Claire should be the site for a new high school, whenever it should be necessary to build one.14 The West Island’s immediate priority was elementary schools. The Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield commissioners operated three tiny schools in the old villages of Valois, Beaurepaire, and Pointe Claire – the last of these being Cedar Park, the original dissentient school built in 1895. In 1955 they opened the first modern school on the West Island: Beaconsfield elementary, sporting sixteen classrooms and a gym.15 Over the following fifteen years, as housing tracts replaced forest, the board built seven more modern elementary schools within their

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territory and carried out renovations and extensions on existing ones. The Protestants of the western tip of the island organized by 1950, forming the Protestant School municipality of Baie d’Urfé and Senneville, and opened two elementary schools within the decade, both in Baie d’Urfé, which had by far the greatest concentration of school-aged children.16 The original dissentient board of Ste Anne remained separate, however, and was technically responsible for the elementary grades of Macdonald High School, at least until 1968, when they were closed and the pupils transferred to the schools in Baie d’Urfé.17 North of Pointe Claire, the communities of Pierrefonds, Dollard des Ormaux, and Roxboro came under the wing of the psbgm during the 1950s, and were soon provided with half a dozen Protestant schools. By the mid 1950s, as had been the case in Montreal twenty years earlier, the need for high-school accommodation had caught up to the West Island. The Beaconsfield and Pointe Claire commissioners seized the initiative on this question and built John Rennie High School near Pointe Claire’s new civic centre on St John’s Road, and within two years they were obliged to build a second high school in Beaconsfield, right behind the elementary school. The distribution of pupils to these institutions did not break down along municipal lines, as might have been expected. Because Highway 20 ran laterally through these communities it was safer and more convenient to have all students living south of the highway attend Beaconsfield High School and those living north of it go to John Rennie.18 In the early 1960s the board added a third high school, Lindsay Place, at the eastern end of Pointe Claire. The westerly part of the island continued to be served by Macdonald High School. Although the Lakeshore regional board was established in 1965, it never seriously contemplated replacing any of these recently built schools with a regional high. Something resembling a regional high school was built by the psbgm in Pierrefonds, in 1964: Riverdale High School accommodated close to 1,500 of the area’s Protestant pupils in sixty-one classrooms.19 The West Island would not cease to be a major stronghold of Protestants, at least in terms of school attendance: a generation later in 1991 the combined population of its four high schools was over 4,000, when the number of Protestant students at Massey-Vanier in Cowansville was, significantly, little over 500.20 The South Shore also opened up as a commuter suburb during the post-war period, only to a much more mixed population, socially and ethnically, with consequent problems. Pierre Vallières, the Quebec nationalist, recalled his first visit to Longueuil Annex (east of the old town, also known as Côteau Rouge) in the summer of 1945 as a trip through the countryside, whose fields and forests were as exciting to a seven-year-old boy as the isolation was daunting. “St Helen Street” he

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wrote, “was a real country road. Narrow, zigzag, bumpy, it crossed vast fields in which a few small houses of wood or sheet-metal appeared here and there. For quite a long time we saw only empty fields. Then we saw a farm with a poultry yard and a few cows by the roadside. Finally the bus entered a kind of village and a thick cloud of dust began to vibrate in the air.”21 Vallières made no mention of Protestants in this part of the world – the English were uniformly the enemy, and never poor – but there were plenty, even in Côteau Rouge, and in time they would help fill these fields and farmlands with houses and have children who would need to be sent to Protestant schools. Even so, a large proportion of South Shore Protestants lived in rented accommodation in the villages and towns or in the rapidly urbanizing space in between. This resulted in a reversal of the situation in much of Montreal and the West Island, where Protestants constituted the bulk of the property owners. This situation meant that the Longueuil board and its neighbours – St Lambert excepted – had limited means with which to meet the growing demands.22 They also had an inadequate infrastructure. The sale of the old Longueuil High School to the federal government towards the end of the war had meant the transfer of senior students to the St Lambert High School and the dispersal of the primary grades among Longueuil’s existing elementary schools: Caroline, William White, and the more distant Mackayville. Pupils were not happy with their accommodation in St Lambert, particularly as they were relegated to separate classes and were not permitted to take part in all the school’s activities, partly owing to their being considered outsiders (even though they all came under the central board’s jurisdiction) and partly because of a sense that their presence was only temporary, until a county high school could be built.23 The overcrowding of Longueuil’s schools was made even worse by the absorption of a great many children of refugee families, who were now being housed by the government on its nearby land. As these families paid nothing in the form of taxes or fees, the commissioners were obliged to insist that the government make some contribution towards their schooling, if only by providing a building that could be used for classes.24 By 1947 several Protestant families in Côteau Rouge sent an angry petition to the board wondering why their children were forced to take two separate buses into Longueuil to attend Caroline School instead of the much handier William White. They had been transferred to make way for the children from the wartime housing settlement, whom these parents referred to as “squatters.” Why, they asked, should their youngsters have to “travel to Longueuil from 8 in the morning to 4:30 or 5 o’clock at night?” They also had “complaints of the bus passing them at the bus stop and refusing to

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77 Plan of Lemoyne-d’Iberville School, Longueuil, 1950 A standard, small elementary school that would eventually be transformed into the Lemoyne-d’Iberville Protestant High School. [Adapted from a document in the rsba]

pick these children up and also leaving them stranded at Longueuil at night with two main highways to cross to travel home. If you think a child of 6 to 10 years of age can do this and also to carry a lunch with them well, we think that someone must be out of their heads.” They added, tellingly: “Don’t you think that we have enough to keep clear of the r.c. religion without having to fight to get our children in one of our own schools?” What these parents really wanted was a new school, even a one-room school, despite the current trend that considered small schools “out of the question.”25 The board did not find building small schools to be as much out of the question as building large ones, given the costs involved. With the proceeds of the sale of the high school, they undertook to build an extension to William White School, to rebuild the Mackayville School (which the department had condemned), and, by the end of 1949, to begin work on a new school on land that the city had donated at the corner of LeMoyne and d’Iberville streets. Although it would have only three classrooms, this was to be a modern structure, with a room for teachers, spacious toilets, efficient heating, and a janitor on the staff. The possibility of expanding this school was clear from the start and by late 1954 the board had succeeded in obtaining a grant from the department to cover 80 per

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cent of the cost of an eight-room addition. In the course of construction, a spark from a welder’s torch set fire to the old school and it burned to the ground. The extension project turned into a complete rebuilding.26 By this time the central board had succeeded in constructing a county high school in St Lambert – against the wishes of many of the St Lambert ratepayers, who felt that their taxes had been raised to pay for a building that they needed only because other municipalities were sending their students to them.27 Nevertheless, this school – with sixteen classrooms, science labs, library, gym, and rooms for art, music, household science, and industrial arts – was badly overcrowded almost from the time it opened in September 1954. By its third year it had an enrolment of 685 and was soon obliged to close its doors to intermediate pupils; the Lemoyne-d’Iberville school in Longueuil began to teach up to Grade 9 in the autumn of 1958.28 The following year the Longueuil board decided to expand the school once again, a project that was completed by the beginning of 1962. Like Lemoyne-d’Iberville School, the modern network of Protestant schools on the South Shore took shape in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. Having acquired the vast territory of Laprairie in 1946, the Longueuil board was obliged to bus the older elementary pupils to its own schools; Grades 1 to 3 were taught in a one-room school in Laprairie village. By 1960 the Protestant population was clearly too small to keep this school open, and against much local protest the board closed it. They did open a new school in Preville, south of St Lambert, which was a good deal more convenient to the Laprairie children than Longueuil itself, and another in the vicinity of Mackayville, which was named Vincent Massey School.29 These schools were overcrowded within a few years. Protestants in Brossard petitioned the board for a school in 1970, a request it was finally able to meet a year later after much opposition from the local Catholic board with whom they were competing for government funds; the new school was named Harold Napper, after a long-serving Longueuil school commissioner and current chairman.30 Within a few years, the population of Brossard had grown enough to justify the building of a second Protestant school, but they feared that the government would not agree to fund the board – especially not the Parti Québécois, which had been elected in November 1976, much to the dismay of many anglophones and federalists in Quebec. Having overseen the completion and opening of Harold Napper School in 1973, commissioners Roland Booker and Reginald Staniland pressed the new nationalist government to meet the needs of English speakers in Brossard. Staniland was also the chair of the Executive Committee of the South Shore regional board, a position of some influence when it came to making the case for the new school. Given

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this pressure, the government agreed to provide the necessary funding – an outcome that surprised the local Protestant population as much as it delighted them. The new school, which opened in January 1980, was called St Lawrence, the name of the sector board that in 1972 had replaced the local boards such as Longueuil and St Lambert.31 The pressure in Chambly High School was only relieved when the South Shore regional board, formed in 1965, constructed a regional high school. Unlike most off-island regions, the South Shore desperately needed a building of this sort – less for its facilities, which at Chambly High School were relatively modern, than for its space. It was located in the town of Greenfield Park, but, given the peculiarities of local areas of jurisdiction, within the territory of the Longueuil school board, not that of Greenfield Park. This arrangement, intended as a kind of compromise, resulted in some resentment between the various boards. Although not opened until 1971, the school was built in the optimistic spirit of Canada’s centenary, and so was called Centennial High School. The rivalry between municipalities was resolved in time for the grand opening and became all but irrelevant within a few months when the St Lawrence sector board was created. The St Lawrence Elementary and Harold Napper schools, along with the other above-mentioned elementary schools (save for Caroline, which had become outdated), as well as the two high schools, the two schools in St Lambert, and others in Candiac, St Hubert, and Greenfield Park, were still in use in the 1990s. The region to the north of Montreal developed as suburbia somewhat later than the West Island or the South Shore, but it did so quickly enough by the 1960s. Protestants constituted a sizeable minority in many of the growing communities around the edges of Laval (more properly called Ile Jésus) and the north shore of the Mille Iles River. In places like Duvernay, Pont Viau, St Martin, and Ste Rose, dissentient boards were beginning to appear in the 1950s and early 1960s, but were soon replaced by Protestant school municipalities. These boards typically built medium-sized schools to serve a relatively large territory, such as the eight-room school in Duvernay that opened in 1954.32 Much of the central part of the island came under the control of the Protestant School Board of Greater St Martin, which formed in 1958 and oversaw the construction of several elementary schools and one high school in Laval’s largest municipality, Chomedey. North of the Mille Iles River, St Therese and Rosemere merged as a Protestant school municipality in 1950 and by 1963 it had become a centre of Protestant education when, under the name Laurenvale – suggesting an idyllic setting in the foothills of the Laurentians – it annexed the surrounding communities of Ste Rose, Fabreville, Terrebonne, Mascouche, and several other smaller villages whose

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edges had been blurred with suburban sprawl. These areas sent their senior students to a new high school in Rosemere. In the early 1960s the region’s largest concentration of Protestants was still Lake of Two Mountains, whose board operated three elementary schools and one high school. With the establishment of regional boards in 1964, the commissioners began to explore the possibility of building a new high school, in co-operation with the local Catholic board, to accommodate all English-speaking children in the area. They had the land, and together with the Catholics they would have a large enough student population – or very nearly, almost 1,000 – to meet the government’s requirement for building a regional high school. The regional board wondered whether combining the two confessional groups “might be detrimental to the Protestant standards,” but this did not trouble the commissioners, partly because they intended Protestant pupils to have their own gym and library facilities. The greatest advantage of the arrangement was that high-school students would remain in their own community.33 The Two Mountains commissioners joined the regional board on the assumption that this project would go ahead, and the regional board seemed to have no difficulty with the plan. The representation of the North Island regional board, when it formed in 1965, should have alerted the Two Mountains commissioners to the possibility of trouble. They were to send one member while Greater St Martin sent three (out of seven) – a clear indication that their status as the largest Protestant school board north of the psbgm territory no longer held. The regional board’s name was also inappropriate for an area that included much territory off the “North Island.” The whole region had little geographical coherence, unlike the South Shore or even the West Island; historically, Two Mountains had enjoyed closer ties with the Argenteuil than with Laval. In 1965, however, all the communities on Ile Jésus merged into one new agglomeration called the City of Laval – technically the second largest city in the province, though essentially still a collection of villages and suburbs. This development threw a monkey wrench into the Two Mountains high school project, as the region now theoretically had a centre: Laval.34 In early 1966 the regional board voted to postpone the building of a Protestant secondary school in Two Mountains and to have the senior pupils bused into a new regional high school in Chomedey. The commissioners protested that this would mean having to bus more than 400 students to justify this new school, but the regional board assured them that the expected student numbers in Laval were far higher than those of Two Mountains, a community that was believed to have passed its peak. The commissioners reluctantly backed out of their joint project, much to the surprise of the Two Mountains Catholic

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board and much to the dismay of parents and ratepayers, who grilled them angrily at several public meetings.35 Over the next five years, the North Island regional board negotiated with the government for funding for its regional high school, arguing that rising numbers would require a school to accommodate 2,000 or more pupils. For their part, the Two Mountains commissioners argued that the regional board systematically undervalued the demographic importance of their area. They pointed out that much recent construction of elementary schools in Laval had resulted in “over 1000 empty places.”36 This did not convince the government, which eventually permitted the construction of another high school in Chomedey, but it did convince the Two Mountains Board, who resolved to “reclaim the use of the school building located [in the] … City of Two Mountains.”37 Their elementary schools were overcrowded and they could use the old high school building, which they had handed over to the regional board’s control in 1966. In return, they agreed to surrender control over their newest elementary school – the one situated on a generous amount of land – on the condition that it be used to form part of a new polyvalent secondary school for Protestants and English Catholics.38 The regional board agreed. Although the Two Mountains Board was soon after dissolved and its three elementary schools placed under control of the new sector board – Laurenvale – pupils from the Two Mountains area could be educated from kindergarten to Grade 11 in their own community.

For one hundred and twenty years the nature and composition of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners of the City of Montreal remained virtually unchanged. Protestant clergy continued to dominate it, though occasionally, and always briefly, a layman would serve as chairman. John Jenkins’s long term at the helm was echoed by that of Donald MacVicar at the turn of the century, and of Malcolm Campbell during the 1930s and 40s, both Presbyterian ministers. Despite some lobbying by Jewish groups to be given representation, the board remained closed to non-Protestants. Despite repeated recommendations by public officials and outside observers that the members of the board be elected, they remained an appointed body of six men. Even within the Montreal Protestant Central Board, the school commissioners of Montreal sat as an entity. The Hepburn Report had called for greater democracy in the choice of commissioners, recommending that twenty-two seats on the board be open to election by all regular Protestant voters; these twenty-two men should then appoint three women, making a total of twenty-five

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members.39 The deliberate inclusion of women on this proposed board reflects a growing sense that their presence was not only appropriate but, within limits, desirable. Although women could still not vote in provincial elections in 1938, widows and single female property owners had held the right to vote at the municipal and school-board levels since 1892 – although the bill had been opposed by Montreal Councillor Louis Panneton on the grounds that any political concession would encourage women to demand full voting rights. In 1899 the Montreal Local Council of Women (mlcw) took up this challenge and campaigned to have a woman elected to the Protestant Board of School Commissioners; the House of Assembly responded by passing a bill making women ineligible for municipal or school-board office. Four years later the MLCW successfully resisted the council’s attempt to take away their right to vote in municipal elections, but women’s ineligibility for positions on school boards still rankled.40 The tenacity of the mlcw gave women a valuable lesson in practical politics and made men more aware of what women could achieve in a political campaign. The Hepburn Report attempted to make their inclusion on the board palatable by stipulating that female members should be appointed by the male commissioners. Despite this limited concession, the proposal reflected a growing sense that women’s organizations could be political forces to be reckoned with and that their valuable experience should be useful in running an urban school board. Inspired by the report’s conclusions, a 1942 draft bill proposed the creation of a central board for the Island of Montreal, to be composed of fourteen members, eleven of whom were to be elected by Protestant British subjects of voting age.41 Three additional seats were to be appointed: one, a clergyman, by the Protestant Ministerial Association; the second, an “expert in social welfare problems,” by the Montreal Council of Social Agencies; and the third, a “specialist in public health,” by the McGill Medical Faculty. The nature of these proposed appointments reflects the same wartime paternalism that created the welfare state, but for those keen to provide a stronger voice for local communities, the proposal seemed a distinct improvement. This plan to reform the Montreal board was abandoned, much as was the rest of the Hepburn Report recommendations. The Montreal Protestant Central School Board as it was reconfigured in 1945 had twelve members, and in 1951 the psbgm had sixteen; in each case, eight of these were the appointed Montreal commissioners (whose number had been increased from six). In each case, it was stipulated that members should be “professing the Protestant religion,” a clause that continued to exclude from office a great many of the board’s constituents.42 In practice, none of the local boards, including the city

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board, had much autonomy outside the psbgm other than as a vehicle for raising taxes. Decisions were made in a building at the heart of McGill University on downtown McTavish Street, the home of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners since 1929. In 1960 the psbgm decided to shift its headquarters to a much larger building closer to the majority of the city’s Protestant families: 6000 Fielding Avenue in ndg, which had once been a remote suburb but was now something of a Protestant heartland. The building occupied part of the block on which West Hill High School had been built eight years earlier. The board office, a vast structure with massive classical columns and huge bronze doors, standing somewhat incongruously amid residential streets, looked every inch a grand public building, but can never have seemed as welcoming to parents as the meeting spaces of smaller off-island boards, which most often were the library of the local high school or a room in a municipal building. In the same year that the new psbgm building opened, the school commissioners of Wakefield North (by way of extreme contrast) met in the local service station.43 The size of Montreal’s Protestant system, with its eighty or more schools serving over 60,000 students in 1961, was also in complete contrast to the dozens of Protestant boards across the province that operated only one school, in some cases a one-room school. Although the members of the psbgm represented their individual municipalities, each one had only one voice and one vote. This meant, for example, that the hundreds of Protestant families in the City of Verdun effectively had only one person to intervene on their behalf at the board level. The Verdun board of school trustees technically had three members, but no real power; much less than the five commissioners who continued to run all the affairs of the one local school in Hemmingford. Similarly, although the City of Montreal commissioners were generally all dedicated to the cause of providing quality schooling, no formal representative structure existed; the six appointed members spoke for Montreal as a whole. Parents in these large urban and suburban communities often found their local Home and School associations to be a more agreeable and satisfying venue for airing their concerns – namely the condition of the schools their children attended and the quality of teaching their children were receiving. Indeed, although the Home and School movement strove – and to a degree succeeded – to touch schools in every part of Quebec, the bulk of member associations was in the Montreal area. For its part, the qfhsa proved an effective agency for advancing the concerns of urban parents. Having campaigned for school consolidation and central boards, the improvement of teachers’ salaries and working conditions, and the introduction of such measures as free

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78 New psbgm headquarters, Notre Dame de Grâce, Montreal Built in 1960, the Protestant school board’s new main office was designed to impress. [Author photo]

79 The former MacDonald-Johnston garage, Alcove (Wakefield North) Site of the local school board meetings in 1960. [Author photo]

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textbooks and an end to school fees, the federation was becoming a force to be reckoned with in educational circles by the late 1950s. It had also picked up on the widespread frustration parents felt at the lack of standards in Quebec schooling, caused largely by discrepancies between urban and rural tax bases, as well as by an administrative structure mired in tradition and prejudice. In 1959 the federation embarked on an ambitious study of the state of education in Quebec. Known as Operation Bootstraps, this ad hoc task force sought input from local associations across the province on such matters as the curriculum, standards of teaching, school facilities and services, and the role and responsibility of parents in their children’s education.44 What emerged was a catalogue of much that the federation been publicly recommending during the past decade or so: better facilities, more vocational training, and greater parental involvement, not only in the affairs of local schools but also in making more far-reaching decisions. The completion of Operation Bootstraps early in 1961 coincided with the establishment of the Royal Commission on Education in the Province of Quebec (the Parent Commission), and the federation was able to make use of its own findings to draw up a brief when groups were invited to do so in May of that year. When it received the federation’s brief in June 1962 the Parent Commission praised it for its outstanding degree of coherence and insight.45 Indeed, many of the Parent Report’s recommendations echoed the federation’s earlier pronouncements, most of which wound up in the brief: the creation of a ministry of education, larger units of administration, regional high schools in rural areas, financial assistance for teachers wishing to continue their education, formal technical and vocational training, and even junior colleges. It would not be true, perhaps, to say that the federation directly inspired the educational innovations of the Quiet Revolution, but it is striking how much the reform movement within liberal political and intellectual circles (which to a large extent were francophone) coincided in spirit with the educational system long envisaged by the Home and School movement. The irony is that the adoption of these proposed reforms ended by undermining the strength and effectiveness of Protestant school boards. So much of liberal thinking up to the mid1960s had been predicated on the belief that the Protestant school system, admittedly with some serious retooling, would serve as a model for the rest of Quebec. As we will see this view did not take into consideration the cultural weight of Catholicism or the drive to make Quebec unilingually French. Certainly the creation of a much-anticipated centralized educational bureaucracy in Quebec made it very difficult for Protestant school boards to function.

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In the wake of the appearance of the first volume of the Parent Report, the government passed legislation that effectively abolished the Council of Public Instruction, the office of superintendent, and the two confessional committees. They were replaced by a government ministry – as in the years following Confederation – headed by a minister who was a member of the legislature. Education was now centralized under one executive authority that was ultimately responsible for all its aspects, including curriculum. To assist the ministry, a new Superior Council of Education was formed. This advisory body, made up of two committees (one Protestant, one Catholic), was to make recommendations regarding their respective constituencies. The Protestant Committee of the Superior Council was similar to its namesake prior to the 1964 legislation, but had been stripped of most of its administrative tasks. The Protestant community was now bereft of any ultimate authority that spoke to its own concerns. One of the two assistants to the Deputy Minister of Education was by law a Protestant – the first to occupy this position was the last Director of Protestant Education, Howard S. Billings – though this was scant compensation for the loss of a major Protestant official with real power and influence. Protestants soon realized that a ministry might well implement the sort of efficiency they had always advocated, but if they lacked a strong voice, and the ministry chose not to listen to them, then this efficiency would do away with their autonomy. A centralized system would work well in the pluralist, bilingual Quebec that Protestants had envisaged, but nothing stopped this system from serving the interests of a government bent on creating ethnic and linguistic homogeneity – which, to varying degrees, meant every Quebec government since the late 1960s. At the heart of the Quiet Revolution was a desire to render Quebec society more democratic, and this certainly applied to the administration of schools, especially urban schools. In 1961 the new government passed Bill 85, which opened up school-board elections to the parents of school-aged children (provided they met the standard criteria for voting such as being of age, Canadian citizens, etc.), not only property owners. This measure had profound implications in Montreal, where so many parents were renters and consequently had had no right to vote.46 It would be some time, however, before the seats on Montreal school boards were actually up for election, as the government appointment of Protestant and Catholic school commissioners had been established by law back in the 1840s. The government did strive to make the psbgm more representative of the city’s ethnic diversity, though it was something of a token gesture: in 1965 an act of the legislature allowed non-Protestant representation to the board – namely five seats to be occupied by Jews. Like the seats reserved for the Protes-

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tant commissioners of Montreal, these were to be appointed by the Lieutenant-Governor on the advice of the Minister of Education after consultation with what the Act referred to as “a highly representative institution of the Jewish community in Montreal” – presumably any one that seemed reputable.47 Technically, these five members did not have to be Jewish, as long as five Jews were on the board; thus if Westmount (a majority Protestant board) should send a Jewish representative to the psbgm, a Protestant could be appointed as a memberat-large. The total number of seats was raised to twenty-five (the number of appointed Protestant school commissioners of Montreal was increased to ten) so that the ratio of Protestants to Jews would always be five to one. More fundamental school-board reform would stem from the recommendations of the Parent Report’s second volume, which appeared in 1966, calling for an end to confessional boards. The following year the government established a Council for School Reorganization on the Island of Montreal, made up of representatives from various boards, teachers’ unions, and parents’ organizations; it was chaired by the deputy head of Montreal’s Catholic school board, Joseph Pagé. The council proposed dividing the Island of Montreal into thirteen large boards, nine French and four English, each of which would administer schools that would be designated Catholic, Protestant, or “pluralist.” These proposals came to naught as the government chose to introduce the notion of unified boards, dividing the island into eleven territories, in each of which the linguistic majority would dominate. Bill 62, as the draft legislation was called, would not have allowed linguistic minorities any autonomy. It was intended, however, to be a complement to Bill 63, which proposed to guarantee parents the right to choose their children’s language of instruction. Opposition delayed the passing of these bills and both of them died with the change of government in 1970. The new government finally passed Bill 71, which represented a return to the status quo on the question of confessional boards. It did, however, consolidate all the local boards on the island – they ceased to exist in July 1973. Protestants were now served by the Lakeshore school board on the West Island and by the psbgm.48 Bill 71 also brought democracy to the Montreal boards by eliminating the appointed commissioners, including the five Jewish ones on the psbgm. School-board elections were held for the first time in June 1973. The city was divided into fifteen wards in which candidates – Protestants or Jews or any non-Catholic – would submit their names to the vote.49 Although women had served as members of the psbgm for a decade, the first elections returned an unprecedented six, which said much for the involvement of women in education, not only as teachers

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but also as active members of Home and School associations and parent committees. So much was welcome to the Protestant community, but fears were growing that this new board would have little autonomy in the long run. The powerful new Island Council, also established by Bill 71, had the mandate to draw up yet another recipe for schoolboard reform by the end of 1975. This prospect worried anglophones, for the two Protestant boards occupied only three of the seventeen seats on the council, which many felt was dominated by anti-English forces.50 The qfhsa complained in the autumn of 1973 that the Island Council had already lost the sense of “affability” that had characterized it earlier: “the abundance of chairs for the public has been reduced and is insufficient for the larger audience which now attends; and the regular public meetings, previously two a month, have now been reduced to one monthly meeting.”51 For Montreal’s Protestants, every level of power to which they gained access seemed to be supplanted by a new and even less accessible body.

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13

Numerous and Varied Origins: Immigrants, Human Rights, and the Protestant Tradition Although by definition religion involves either dogma, a form of worship, or faith, our course does not teach these three matters. What we teach is primarily Biblical knowledge, Christian morality and literature. This procedure is a compromise acceptable to the great majority of those attending our schools. We do, I think, favor the continuation of such an approach and prefer to see the sectarian aspects left to the churches and the home. J.P. McGeer, President of the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards, 19661

When Gertrude Katz’s six-year-old daughter Linda came home from Hampstead School in tears complaining that Jesus did not love her, it was clear that a revolution was on the cards. Mrs Katz had herself been brought up in a secular environment, her parents having put much more emphasis on political activism than on religion. Like almost all Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1920s they lived near the Main and like most such families of liberal or left-leaning political views they sent their children to a Protestant public school. Gertrude’s days at Fairmount School had begun with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and years later she found she could still sing several hymns by heart, but none of this appeared to her to conflict in any way with her own sense of identity. As a mother in 1964, however, her conscience was suddenly piqued when she discovered that the words to “Jesus Loves Me” had provoked one of her daughter’s classmates to snicker that, because Linda was Jewish, the hymn clearly did not apply to her. Gertrude looked around her school and her city and noticed how many

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80 Morning prayers in a Protestant school, c. 1940 The school day began with prayers and a salute to the flag; otherwise, moral and religious education did not specifically figure in the Protestant timetable. [Percival, Across the Years, 1946]

families who sent their children to Protestant schools were not Protestant – nor were they Jewish or Greek Orthodox or any of the groups that had been represented in these schools for two or more generations. It seemed incongruous to Gertrude Katz that families of so many faiths, with their origins in China, India, the Middle East, and Africa, should be served by a public school system that privileged one shrinking demographic group. Her concerns put her in contact with the fledgling Committee for Neutral Schools, led by Henry Morgentaler – who would soon become a household name as a crusader for abortion rights – but consisting for the most part of Protestant parents.2 The Committee for Neutral Schools soon came up against one crucial stumbling block: that Protestants had a constitutional right to their own form of schooling. These reformers also discovered, however, that the Protestant school system was open to considerable change. Just as the pressure from immigrants during the century’s first decades had obliged Protestant boards to accept responsibility for a broader constituency, and as the Outremont crisis had led to a renewed focus on the Protestant school system’s liberal and tolerant qualities, the efforts of non-Protestants and their allies in the 1960s helped the system to shake

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off the trappings of religion – even the token references that had framed the school day when Gertrude Katz was a student. It was one of the great strengths of the Protestant school system that it was able to absorb these overwhelming numbers of new Canadians, and yet not suffer a sea change. Indeed, Protestant boards quickly found that their survival in the modern period depended on their being able to open their doors to non-Protestants, just as many dissenters had done a century before. Catholic boards had also received large numbers of immigrants since the war, but as they were mostly from Catholic countries the challenge was essentially one of language. Protestants were challenged on a much more fundamental level: essentially their raison d’être as a separate system. They survived – not because they sacrificed their identity or their values but because they proved willing and able to accommodate. The Protestant school system did not survive indefinitely, however, largely because of its success. In the second half of the twentieth century, the balance between the denominational tendencies of Protestant boards and their “public” tendencies had tipped in favour of the latter, as their experiences paralleled those in much of the rest of North America. The efforts of Protestant boards to modernize and centralize, though not always entirely successful, proved inspiring to the rest of Quebec, as did the campaigns to improve the quality of schooling by essentially Protestant organizations such as the qfhsa. As we have seen, the Parent Commission was more than a little influenced by the relative success of the Protestant system, but having drawn this inspiration, the Quebec government paid it very little heed. In part, this was because the Protestant system was seen as English, regardless of how many French students it served (a fair number; see chapter 14), and a central tenet of modern Quebec politics was the promotion of the French language at the expense of English. The greatest threat to French in Quebec, however, was not so much the presence of English institutions (which even the Parti Québécois was willing to allow to survive) but the ability of Protestant school boards to absorb the children of immigrant families who chose that system largely because it would allow them to learn English. The goal of much of the legislation that was seen as an attack on English schooling was primarily aimed at undermining the power of Protestant boards to serve this non-Protestant constituency. Without this power, Protestant boards could be reduced to an ethnic group like any other – albeit one with certain privileges.

The Protestant nature of Protestant education had always been expressed more in its Anglo-Saxon attitudes than in any specific form of

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81 Christmas concert (junior grades), Lennoxville High School, 1948 Christian ceremonies did not seem out of place in Protestant schools in the early post-war years. [Lennoxville and Ascot Historical and Museum Society: p 974 sch]

religious instruction. All Protestants had once been united by a conviction about what they did not want in their schools – namely the teaching of Catholic dogma – but only when confronted by large numbers of Jewish children in their midst did anyone question the fundamentally Christian character of the Protestant curriculum. At no time did it contain provisions for studying religion the way one studied mathematics or music, although plenty of care was taken to imbue a sense of morality and even spirituality, and the Bible was often a point of reference. As Protestants and Jews shared a tradition of scholarly study – and in that context shared a great deal of sacred literature – much ground could be covered without ruffling too many feathers. Even the saying of prayers, the singing of hymns, and the celebration of Christmas (at least as the occasion for a festive pageant in which the entire school could participate) did not seem incongruous. The post-war period gradually brought an array of new pupils with far less in common: other faiths, other languages, different appearances. It also provided a complicated agenda for Protestant school boards: immigrants had to be welcomed, and steeped in Anglo-Protestant values in the interests of successful social integration, and yet at the same time not made to feel alienated. They also had to be taught English. Given this daunting task, civics and language took on much more importance than spirituality.

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Home and School associations played a crucial part in the accommodation of immigrant children and their families. In the wake of the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act, the federal government appealed to parent-teacher organizations across the country to help foster a sense of citizenship in Canadian children, especially those of newly arrived families, whose loyalties might still be divided between the countries of their birth and their new homeland.3 The qfhsa responded by establishing a citizenship committee, which carefully considered the concept of Canadian citizenship and its implications for an increasingly diverse society. Rejecting any notion of citizenship that was rooted in colonial ties or other traditional loyalties, the committee argued for the need to “develop a deep and real sense of being Canadians,” one that would transcend the differences between immigrants and longer-established residents, as well as the age-old divisions between French and English, Protestant and Catholic. The committee’s chair, D.G. Cummings, argued that it was imperative to “gain that degree of national unity which is most desirable for our well-being” – an ambition that would be echoed within Quebec’s Protestant community, and across the country, for decades to come. At the same time, he insisted, this was not a recipe for a nation with one specific culture: “I do not think national unity requires uniformity in all our tastes and ways of living,” he wrote in the federation newspaper. “In fact, I think it would steal away much of Canada’s greatness if we were to try to produce Canadians to a certain standard like dollar bills.” One answer to this dilemma was to build a sense of community through organizations such as the qfhsa: “We must work towards the betterment of our neighbourhood, our province and our country. We must work against discrimination be it racial, social, economic or religious. We should take an active part in a church, one or two clubs as well as community and provincial organizations.”4 In other words, a nation’s strength lay in its grass roots. For many within the federation, efforts to accommodate immigrants not only served the interests of integration and Canadian nationalism but also helped foster the sense that Canada should be a shining example for the world of an ethnically diverse yet peaceful society. During the 1950s and early 60s the federation became an ideal vehicle for the promotion of this sort of inclusive nationalism. The aim was not only to help integrate children in the classroom but also to make the process of acculturation easier for their parents. Home and School associations worked to make immigrant families feel at home in Quebec communities, rendering intelligible the often confusing school routine and the complexities of the education system. The citizenship committee, chaired by William Asherman in the 1950s, offered its help to member associations as follows: “Have you any problems in your association,

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such as language difficulties, small membership, poor attendance at meetings etc., due to the fact that you have to deal with parents who do not understand enough English, or, being immigrants, hesitate to cooperate because they do not know much about our Home and School movement? If so, please contact Wm Asherman. He and his committee will be glad to assist you in solving these problems.”5 One technique used by Home and School associations was to target a member of an immigrant group who had a good command of English and encourage him or her to serve as an intermediary for those who could not communicate. The federation made every effort to make things easier by providing information in a variety of languages, thanks to a bank of translators.6 At the same time, equal efforts were made to help newcomers learn the language of their adopted country and a school education committee was struck to oversee the special needs of children with a poor command of English. Many associations, especially in urban areas, offered special English classes, often with the support of their school boards. Such activities went a long way towards preparing Protestant communities for the challenge that ethnic diversity would inevitably present, especially in many parts of Montreal, where the children of non-Protestant immigrants constituted more than half of the school population. Home and School associations, with their traditional Anglo-Protestant base, did their best to adapt to a society that not only spoke many voices but also was of many colours and practised widely different customs. During the 1950s the qfhsa newsletter printed a multilingual annual Christmas message, which spoke to universal themes of peace and brotherhood. By the 1960s the spirit of this message still seemed appropriate, but the context of Christmas was not one that a growing number of Canadians recognized as part of their culture. Similarly, the Protestant curriculum was broad enough in its approach to the teaching of moral and even religious issues that nonProtestants were likely to find some aspect that spoke to them. Yet the absence of one coherent agenda such as could be found in the Catholic curriculum eventually drew attention to elements of the Protestant framework that had always been taken for granted, such as the Lord’s Prayer and the hymns. It was the religious trappings of Protestantism that came to alienate some parents. The argument for neutral schools in the 1960s was that the tacit acceptance of one class of symbol as somehow universal, when in fact it favoured Protestants as a core group, was implicitly disrespectful to those that did not share it, and therefore socially divisive. The Committee for Neutral Schools was formed in the early 1960s by parents and educators who shared the belief that Quebec society

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needed a modern, secular form of education, and that school boards must lose their religious orientation. The qfhsa endorsed the notion of neutral schools in January 1964. Given the evident needs of modern Quebec society, it made far more sense to have non-denominational English and French systems, and it was in this direction that the winds of the Quiet Revolution clearly seemed to be blowing.7 Some Protestant school boards were not sure they liked the idea of surrendering power, whatever their attitude towards secular education; others opposed the idea from the beginning. The Outremont trustees, ever sensitive to their minority status even within the Protestant system, referred to the movement to do away with religious teaching as “propaganda.” This reaction seemed all the more strident coming as it did on the heels of the board’s congratulations of the 1965 winners of prizes sponsored by the Lady Drummond Trust Fund at Strathcona Academy; that year’s winners were Lise Chan, Kitty Chan, Isaac Azoulay, Betty Chan, Demetra Mouti, Paul Lee, Apostolos Tassopo, Susan Chan, Alegris Levy, Wing Chan, Nicole Benchette, Josyane Ouaknine, Josiane Wanono, Betty Amsili, and Ruth Wanono – all good Protestant names.8 Lachine, which also had a long tradition of patriotic involvement and social activism, joined with Outremont in protesting the idea of neutral schools; what Superintendent Hatcher would have thought of this issue is difficult to say. Verdun’s Protestant board debated a request from Morgentaler to support the establishment of a non-confessional system and in the end agreed to do so.9 The psbgm proceeded warily on this question, leaving the decision as to how much religion, if any, would figure in the school day up to individual schools, even individual teachers.10 The goal of making everyone in the country a first-class citizen was in keeping with a set of ideas about modern Canada that was rapidly gaining ground in political circles. The progressive trend in the 1960s, which began with the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and culminated with Prime Minister Trudeau’s declared pursuit of the “just society,” espoused an egalitarian view of citizenship that would have little sympathy with the claims to distinct and separate rights made by Quebec nationalists. A wide body of opinion in Quebec society agreed with this trend, or at any rate believed that religious affiliation should no longer constitute the principal way that Canadian citizens defined themselves – certainly not within an institution that was designated “public.” The shift from imperial to Canadian nationalism by the early 1960s opened discussions about the nature of the Canadian identity and many agreed that being “British” was no longer sufficient. With increasing numbers of people from the far reaches of the earth becoming Canadian citizens, it was clear that the new Maple Leaf flag was to stand for something much broader than the Union Jack had done; for one thing, it was a

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good deal less Protestant. This discussion took an official form with the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (B&B), undertaken by the new Lester Pearson government. The commission eventually concluded that Canada’s culture was complex; it expressed itself in two languages and potentially contained a multiplicity of religious beliefs. This implied that, in the public domain, to give undue prominence to one religion in particular was morally dubious. Various Protestant bodies submitted briefs to the B&B Commission that reflected the current thinking in the community. Before preparing its brief, the qfhsa sent a questionnaire to members asking for input and included a note calling for a vote on the issue of neutral schools. Of 520 replies, 482 stated that a neutral school system should be adopted.11 Accordingly, the federation’s brief strongly recommended a fundamental change to Quebec schooling that would reflect the nation’s bilingual identity: language, and not religion, should be the only variable in public education. It also recommended that schools offer courses on civics and history that would appeal to people of all backgrounds and help foster a sense of national identity.12 In its brief to the commission, the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards also endorsed a broader perspective for moral and religious education: “Blending of our separate parts into a truly Canadian nation can only be accomplished by mutual understanding and trust and recognition of the beliefs and values held by others. Education can do much to help us achieve such a goal.”13 The association was quick to add that it did not favour the creation of neutral schools, as it felt that the Protestant curriculum was already evolving in a direction that would accommodate many different groups and achieve the goal of creating the Canadian nation. As a group, Protestant school boards may have been more conscious than the wider public of the importance of their role in administering the curriculum. Was it not preferable to continue to reform an existing system than to create a new one that might not succeed owing to a lack of experience or a lack of funding, leaving its constituents worse off than before? It would take several years, unfortunately, for the Protestant community to grasp the implications of the changes it was advocating in the face of a calculated assault on Protestant boards, and anglophones in general, by successive governments. The position of the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards was something of a compromise between radical change and “tradition” (as it was variously understood), but it was also a careful political stance. The problem with this new direction lay in trying to recognize the rights of “Protestants,” who as a religious group now counted as a fairly small percentage of the population, and the desires of various ethnic minorities within the schools. Most families whose

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children attended psbgm schools were happy to see a further separation of church and state. But the perceived spread of secularism in modern society did not make the argument that spiritual matters could comfortably be left in the hands of churches palatable to devout Christians. This sort of separation was, nevertheless, a recipe for harmony, and most new Canadians could live with it comfortably. To accomplish this goal within the existing school board structure did avoid confronting legal problems. As the constitutional right to Protestant education could be taken to mean the right of Protestants to religious instruction, the system could clearly not be transformed into a non-confessional one without constitutional change. At the same time, the move to accommodate both “Protestant” and “neutral” (other non-Catholics) within the public school system ran the risk of seriously undermining the powers and rights of Protestants, anglophones, and other groups who had long defined themselves in terms of their distinction from the French-speaking Catholic majority. The second volume of the Parent Report, published in March 1966, acknowledged these problems but echoed the views of those pressing for change. It argued that “religious conscience ought in all cases to be respected, and that a citizen indeed has a right to have any or no religious views at all without being any the less a full citizen.” The confessional division within public education did seem to imply that those outside the narrow definitions of Catholic and Protestant were somehow less than full citizens. Public schools, it argued, should offer religious instruction on a strictly optional basis. The report recommended that parents should have the right to choose between six different kinds of schools: English Protestant, French Protestant, English Catholic, French Catholic, and neutral schools in both languages.14 The Protestant response to this suggestion was generally positive. The qfhsa understood the need for compromise. If people were unwilling to pursue the bold and politically awkward path towards constitutional change, the federation decided it was willing to accept the creation of some neutral schools to accommodate the mainstream population. Such schools, it was hoped, would grow in popularity until the constitutional question could be settled properly and a truly public school system established.15 The Protestant Committee (since 1964 a subdivision of the Superior Council of Education and much less influential than before in matters other than curriculum) began to argue for a version of this recommendation whereby Protestant school boards, under the committee’s direction, would offer both Protestant and neutral options. By these means the rights of Protestants could be guaranteed while not offending any other groups. School boards warmed to this suggestion; it was already evident that a formal division between “Protestant” and “neutral” would allow traditional

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Protestants to have a system that conformed to their needs, but would essentially leave every group in a much weaker position than before, including the French Catholics, who would nevertheless remain the dominant force in Quebec education. Successive governments postponed acting on the report’s recommendations for confessionality, knowing it to be cultural dynamite. Instead, they tackled the power of English-language institutions and the right of families to send their children to English schools; unlike the right to Protestant education, no constitutional guarantees protected the English language in Quebec. By the end of the 1960s Quebec anglophones were recognizing that they were a linguistic minority and that solidarity between all English speakers, even all non-francophones, of whatever colour and creed, was essential for survival. Immigrants, who Home and School associations had been working so hard to integrate, were natural allies, though, of course, new families ought to have the right to integrate in French or English. Consequently, any failure to respect this right was worrying on two counts, as an affront to the basic rights of citizenship and as a threat to the survival of the anglophone community. Attempts to integrate the children of immigrants into French schools undermined one of the anglophone community’s most supportive relationships. Most (non-Catholic, non-Protestant) chose to learn English at Protestant schools – where, in addition, religious instruction was less emphasized – confirming the injustice of attempting to coerce them into attending French Catholic schools. “Shouldn’t Culture be a Matter of Choice?” argued the qfhsa, with special reference to several recent cases of government officials directing immigrants to French schools.16 Protestants themselves were not immediately affected by the aggressive promotion of the French language because they had a right to attend the schools run by Protestant boards, most of which were English. English-speaking Catholics had no official right to be educated in English except where Catholic boards had established English sections. All anglophones had reason to worry, however, when in June 1968 the local Catholic school board elections in the suburban municipality of St Leonard were won by the Mouvement pour l’intégration scolaire, a group dedicated to phasing out English instruction in Quebec. The new commission promptly abolished all teaching in English, much to the distress of the municipality’s large number of Italian families, who were left with no means to educate their children in the language of their choice.17 They organized a parents’ association to oppose the commission’s policy, and by September sympathy for their cause poured out in the form of a march on Parliament Hill in Ottawa by some 7,000 protesters.18 The provincial government took note of this frustration and

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drafted legislation forcing school boards to provide both French and English instruction, where required. But the legislation (Bill 63) was soon mired in debate and the St Leonard families were forced to pay $25 per child to educate as many as 400 students in makeshift English schools. Home and School associations organized a nationwide campaign to raise funds to defray these costs.19 The supporters of the Mouvement pour l’intégration scolaire responded by rioting in the streets of St Leonard on 10 September 1969 and causing widespread damage. The riots had the effect of galvanizing public support for Bill 63, which came into effect in November 1969, bringing an end to the St Leonard crisis. At the same time, the Gendron Commission, appointed by the government at the outbreak of the crisis to study the position of the French language in Quebec, was getting clear signals from the province’s majority that more public effort should be taken to improve the standing of French. The commission’s report, delivered at the end of 1972, directly influenced the Official Language Act (Bill 22) implemented in July 1974 by the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa.20 Born of a sense of frustration that francophones in Quebec were losing ground despite being a majority, this legislation underlined Quebec’s fundamentally French character. By not recognizing English as an official language, the Act asserted that those whose mother tongue was not English should integrate with the language and customs of the majority. Bourassa was acknowledging the growing nationalist belief that unchecked immigration would make Quebec more English, in time to the virtual exclusion of French. Accordingly, Bill 22 proclaimed that only those with a working knowledge of English could attend school in English; for those whose “first language learned and still understood” was not English, French school was the only option.21 Eligibility would be decided by means of a written test. The qfhsa attempted to address the situation by using a strategy that had been developed in quite different circumstances: “parallel” classes were established to enable the children of immigrants to learn enough English to be able pass the test and become eligible to register at English schools in September.22 In many ways, Bill 22 aimed at the heart of the Protestant community and all it had stood for over much of its history. Apart from its rather underhanded attempt to separate anglophones from those who were eager to join their ranks, the Official Language Act violated the freedom of choice that many liberal-thinking people (including many Liberals) had been advocating. Bill 22 also brushed aside three decades of expertise on the part of Protestant schools and the Anglo-Protestant population in general in the difficult task of accommodating newcomers. As with many innovations in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, it was assumed that services traditionally provided informally by the

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community – especially the Protestant community – could now be successfully implemented by bureaucrats. In this case, of course, the definition of success was the breaking of a de facto monopoly to weaken the demographic strength of English speakers. In effect, immigrants were being used as political tools and their interests were not being taken into consideration. The Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards began to prepare a legal case against Bill 22 and various anglophone groups raised money to help pay for it. Fundraising was still going on in December 1976, a month after the election of the Parti Québécois under Réné Lévesque.23 The new government moved quickly to revise Bill 22, especially the much-hated imposition of language tests to determine eligibility for attendance at English schools. Established citizens, Lévesque announced, should not be submitted to an “odious” test, and the rights of such people should clearly be entrenched in law.24 Any joy at the prospect of entrenched rights for anglophones and immigrants was quickly dispelled, however, as the government implemented its Charter of the French Language (eventually widely known as Bill 101) in the spring of 1977. The Parti Québécois strategy to promote French did indeed remove much of the arbitrariness of Bill 22: instead of imposing a test on those with a questionable command of English, the charter simply required all immigrants to attend French school. English rights were “entrenched” in that children whose parents had attended English schools were perfectly entitled to do so themselves. Bill 101 drove a much deeper wedge than its predecessor between established citizens and newcomers. Moreover, it assigned all immigrants, even those from English-speaking countries, to French schools. And regardless of lipservice paid to the rights of established citizens, such rights were now clearly seen as “privileges accorded them by the majority which can be withdrawn at any time.”25 Bill 101 was highly popular with the francophone majority, asserting as it did not only the primacy of French but also the collective right of French speakers to enjoy and promote their language as an integral part of citizenship. To anglophones, this emerging notion of rights was anathema. If “rights” were merely privileges, then English-speaking citizens with deep roots in the province were essentially in the same legal position as recent immigrants – an ironic situation, given that Anglo-Protestant organizations such as Home and School had served for so long as the agency through which immigrant families were integrated into Quebec society. Like Bill 22, Bill 101 aimed to break the existing links between immigrants and the anglophone community and, by extension, to undermine the demographic strength of English-speaking Quebec. The latter was, of course, happening anyway, as anglophone families left the

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province to escape the restrictions of Bill 101. But those who remained did not merely retreat into Anglo-Protestant enclaves (as the government might have expected) but allied themselves with “the 6% of the population whose parents’ mother tongues were neither French nor English” in opposing the charter. Besides, in practice, the notion of a distinct, monolithic English community was almost entirely a myth: with much intermarriage and a high degree of social mobility, few nonfrancophones were truly unaffected by the provisions of Bill 101.26 The centrality of immigrants to the language rights issue was brought home with the publication of statements made by Arthur Tremblay, who had been deputy minister of education under Liberal and Union Nationale governments. Although claiming to be a federalist, Tremblay saw the desire of francophones to defend their language, even to the point of curtailing minority rights, as natural, and believed that they had been roused to take stronger action because of the lack of co-operation on the part of immigrants. Bill 63, the legislation passed in 1969 to resolve the St Leonard crisis, had given immigrants (like all Quebec citizens) the right to choose their children’s language of instruction, but these ethnic groups had erred, according to Tremblay, in not freely choosing French. Their insistence on choosing English schooling had served to enrage the francophone majority, who “could not stand still when it was faced with excessive abuse of immigrant liberties.”27 To say the least, such a view suggested an odd interpretation of freedom of choice.

The Protestant curriculum had undergone considerable changes since the days of the campaign for neutral schools, allowing it to keep pace with the needs of a multicultural society. Religion, traditionally conspicuous in Protestant schools mostly by its brief daily prayer session (which nevertheless had the power to strike an “outsider” like Linda Katz as foreign), was already disappearing even from its shadowy presence in literature and related subjects. More than ever, the religious aspects of a Protestant education were broad and unspecific enough for them to be taught by teachers of many different backgrounds and personal beliefs. The 1960s and 70s saw increasing numbers of Jewish teachers and even some from other religious backgrounds within the Protestant school system, above all in the Montreal area. Outside Montreal, the administrative changes resulting from the creation of regional boards had some curious consequences for the teaching of religion in Protestant schools. In many areas – notably the Eastern Townships, the Gaspé, the Laurentians, and to a certain extent the Chateauguay valley – English-speaking Catholics had poor access to adequate schooling in their own language, and the

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obvious course was to make some arrangement with Protestant boards. In the wake of regionalization, boards of both confessions would negotiate what were referred to as ententes over sharing school space, which then had to be approved by the Superior Council of Education (successor to the Council of Public Instruction). One of the provisions on which the Catholic Committee insisted was that religion form a tangible part of the curriculum in these Protestant schools, at least for the Catholic students. This request had never been made by any other religious group seeking accommodation in Protestant schools (none of whom, admittedly, had had a voice like that of the Catholic Committee).28 Being required to provide a course in religion for one group put the onus on these Protestant boards to do the same for others, or at any rate to provide a “Protestant” alternative. In the absence of such a course, the school timetable would have been uneven, even unfair: Protestants might be receiving more instruction in math or science or French while Catholics had a period in mre (Moral and Religious Education). The Protestant Committee responded by devising its own version of mre, a program that eventually became known as Human Awareness. In keeping with the Protestant approach to religious matters, Human Awareness stressed moral development and an exploration of values in the elementary grades, and world religions and a discussion of social issues at the secondary level.29 Although it stood in clear contrast to the catechism-based course on the Catholic side, this Protestant program filled the requirement. Arguably, it also played a useful role in the curriculum by adding a counterweight to the emphasis on math and science and French, although some would have liked more of these subjects. By the mid-1970s Human Awareness was being introduced even by the psbgm at the lower secondary grades. In the early 1980s the Ministry of Education began promoting the adoption of a more formal course in moral and religious education, leading to a province-wide exam for high school leaving credit. Although the nature of Human Awareness did not particularly lend itself to examination, the psbgm worked with the Protestant Committee to ensure that the Protestant mre course retained its basic focus on world religion and social issues. A particularly sore point was sex education, which the board felt ought to be part of the course and not, as the ministry argued, relegated to some other occasion, such as gym.30 Human Awareness was broad enough in scope to appeal to anyone with a liberal view of religion and even to those with strong religious beliefs who were not averse to applying them to a more general set of problems. The qfhsa listed the “Protestant” values taught in Protestant schools as being “freedom of thought, liberty of conscience, opposition to dis-

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crimination, intellectual inquiry, respect for work, academic excellence” – a catalogue of desirable qualities that few Canadians would oppose.31 Ironically, Protestant boards were clearly the best means to ensure the survival of these qualities. Within the Protestant school system almost no one was now calling for neutral schools or linguistic boards. Such a development, it was feared, would mean that Catholics would continue to dominate the French boards (leaving French-speaking Protestants with very little voice) and become the largest religious group (not necessarily the majority) on most English boards. This did not bode well for liberal, non-denominational education. According to most surveys, neither anglophone nor francophone Catholics expressed much interest in doing away with Catholic religious instruction. Those that did were obliged to attend a Protestant school, assuming this was possible. In rural areas, where distance might make it easier for a Catholic child to go to a local Protestant school, families might be required to seek the consent of the parish priest.32 In urban areas, where boards were especially sensitive to their areas of jurisdiction, Catholic parents were often obliged to sign a form effectively renouncing their religion to send their children to Protestant schools. Some in the Protestant community would have liked more emphasis on religion in schools, but they were a minority; most saw a non-denominational approach as the key to keeping the Protestant community alive. The real success of the Protestant curriculum can be judged from statistics of school populations in areas with a good number of English Catholic schools – in other words, areas where non-Protestants were clearly not attending Protestant schools because they were the only English-language schools around. In 1991 Quebec City’s Holland School, for example, taught 222 elementary pupils in English, fifty-seven of whom were technically Protestant and only six of whom were Catholic; the other 159 constituted the bulk of the city’s “ethnic” communities. Table 13 shows the proportion of Protestants to others attending schools operated by Quebec’s Protestant boards in 1991. The Protestant boards in Montreal, the West Island, the South Shore and Laval (the first four boards on the list) all had small Catholic populations relative to their overall size and large “other” populations, which suggests that these “others” chose the Protestant system despite the presence of an English Catholic alternative. Protestant schools, therefore, approached the 1990s with skills they would not have imagined half a century before. Without quite having followed the route advocated by the Committee for Neutral Schools, the Protestant curriculum was made meaningful for the system’s ever-growing non-Protestant population. The efforts of Protestant boards to accommodate these

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82 Form for the renunciation of the Roman Catholic religion [lbpsba, standard form]

children allowed the system to thrive; had non-Catholic pupils been forced to choose between a “Protestant” or a “neutral” system of education, the energies of each board might well have spent themselves in competitive wrangling, to say nothing of the problems faced by those children who might fall into both camps. The survival of this system hung by a thread, however. When the government attempted to replace confessional boards with linguistic ones towards the end of 1984, it was well aware of the provisions of Section 93 of the bna Act pertaining to Protestant institutions, but chose to interpret this section as referring only to those school boards

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numerous and varied origins • 359 Table 13 Student populations of Protestant school boards, 1991

School Board

English Sector

French Sector

Total Students

Protestants

Other

psbgm

18,606

11,823

30,429

12,302

17,877

238

Lakeshore

10,713

2,612

13,325

6,806

6,335

185

South Shore

7,300

4,247

11,547

4,553

6,612

380

Laurenval

4,844

2,901

7,745

2,185

4,718

827

Western Quebec

4,889

687

5,576

3,133

2,102

316

Eastern Townships

3,362

nil

3,362

1,863

401

1,108

Eastern Quebec*

2,208

1,574

3,782

1,867

1,420

422

Chateauguay Valley

3,341

nil

3,341

1,807

591

943

Dist. of Bedford

2,615

nil

2,615

1,558

284

773

Laurentian

1,745

nil

1,745

905

245

597

Gaspesia

1,336

nil

1,336

874

57

402

Laurentienne

242

nil

242

74

29

138

Baie Comeau

131

nil

131

7

6

118

61,332

23,844

85,176

37,934

40,677

6,447

Total

Catholics

Source: Portrait Statistique des commissions scolaires Protestantes 1990–91 * This is a regional board, serving the Quebec City area and much of the St Lawrence valley. Statistics show the totals from several local boards of which it was composed. Note: The language columns show the breakdown of this population by language, while the three columns on the right show the confessional breakdown. In some cases the numbers indicating the confessional breakdown do not quite add up to the total – possibly a consequence of the census taker’s uncertainty as to some students’ religious background.

in existence at the time of Confederation. In practice, only two Protestant boards could trace their histories back beyond 1972, let alone before 1867: the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal and its counterpart in Quebec City, which still technically existed even though they had always operated within the comprehensive boards of Greater Montreal and Greater Quebec respectively. Bill 3, which in 1984 put forward the government’s intention to standardize school administration, called for an end to all confessional boards in the province, except those that served these two cities. To have eliminated these boards would have required a constitutional amendment to remove their legal status, as well as to remove the rights of Protestants to a Protestant form of education. By allowing the city boards (as

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they were defined in 1867) to remain, the government would be able to harmonize the school administrations of all other parts of the province. The result would be the elimination of the Protestant boards – above all, the powerful psbgm – and the influence they wielded over access to English-language instruction. After a heated court challenge, Bill 3 was struck down on the grounds that it satisfied neither the terms nor the spirit of the constitutional guarantees. In the view of the Superior Court, the Protestant right to a specific form of education went far beyond prolonging the life of specific institutions: “It appears from the evidence … that the existence of Protestant denominational schools is part of the culture, the traditions and … is part and parcel of the fabric of the Protestant community.” This statement revealed an unusually clear understanding of the sense of community felt by Protestants within Quebec and an uncharacteristic acknowledgment of their culture and traditions. But what was more striking was the court’s reading of the term Protestant to mean something much broader than the framers of the bna Act would have understood: The concept of a denominational Protestant school is pluralist due to the fact that many Protestant denominations exist arising from numerous and varied origins. The result is that the Protestant schools in Quebec developed with a pluralistic philosophy under which religious instruction was principally concerned with the creation of an individual religious conscience. The teaching of secular matters is totally independent and should not suffer any interference arising from religious doctrine or dogma … it is impossible to conceive that Protestants could agree to be educated in a linguistic school which would be subject to a Catholic educational approach. On the contrary, the evidence … establishes that the concept of a Catholic denominational school implies the influence of the principles and dogmas of Catholicism in all spheres and facets of education.33

In other words, the right of Protestants to a Protestant form of education meant a good deal more than one specific group having access to its own peculiar institutions. Implicit in this argument is the idea that “Protestants” could be a wide range of people of varying backgrounds and that “Protestant education” was essentially a liberal curriculum well suited to a multicultural society.

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14

The Language Bath: Protestant Boards and French Language Instruction Legal proceedings will be instituted by this board in order to obtain a declaratory judgement concerning “Bill 63” being … ultra vires null and of no effect insofar as it imposes upon your petitioners the obligation of adopting French as the language of instruction, in whole or in part, in their schools … insofar as it prevents your petitioners from using English as the language of instruction in their denominational schools for educating children of Protestant settlers who wish their children to be educated in English and it is discriminatory on the basis of Country of origin. Petition signed by many Protestant boards, 19711

Concerned that their children’s education was not preparing them for survival in modern Quebec society, parents at Roslyn School in Westmount decided to campaign for changes to the way Protestant schools taught French. The Westmount school commissioners were not particularly convinced such a move was necessary; this well-established and well-heeled community had always functioned in English and saw little reason to provide more French instruction than it already did. Parents disagreed, having lived through the early years of the Quiet Revolution and the establishment of a Royal Commission to study Canada’s bilingual and bicultural character. French, they argued, was taught in much the same way that Latin was taught, as a dead language, when it ought to be directly linked to communication and to bridging gaps between anglophones and francophones. In 1965 the Westmount Home and School Association arranged for extracurricular French instruction at Roslyn School. This was the result of much hard work by two mothers, Joan Rothman (who would later become a school commissioner and

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83 Roslyn School, Westmount Built in 1908, this school was the site of one the earliest experiments in French immersion. [Author photo]

member of the psbgm) and Carol Kahn. The scale of this project was impressive: sixteen classrooms were to be reserved for noon-hour classes and ten were to be used after school. Even so, when registration began, the organizers had to turn people away. Of the 155 children applying for the program, the Home and School Association was able to accommodate 116. This success prompted Rothman and Kahn and others to lobby the school commissioners to increase the amount of French within the regular curriculum, especially for younger children. After much campaigning, the Westmount board agreed to introduce a completely French kindergarten class in September 1968.2 The pursuit of French immersion at Protestant schools in the 1960s was a truly revolutionary step. The idea that another language could best be acquired by living and breathing it, and especially by studying subjects other than “French” in French, was a complete turn away from the rote learning of the past. It broke with a long history of considering French a subject like any other. A subject, moreover, that simply could not be taught in many schools across Quebec, unless the teacher should happen to speak the language. To pursue French immersion was also to acknowledge that French was the language of the majority, something that Quebec anglophones had not always appreciated. In the spirit of the Quiet Revolution, with its accompanying drive to put French Canadians in charge of their own society, many English speakers felt that it was only decent to make more of an effort to communicate in French, rather than forcing francophones to speak English, which was most often the case when members of the two groups met. In the light of the obvious determination of francophones to make

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Quebec a primarily French-speaking province, moreover, anglophones such as the Roslyn parents began to fear that their children might be at a serious disadvantage, politically and economically, if they remained unilingual. The feeling that the quality of French instruction could be improved was nothing new; for as long as parents had been complaining about teachers they had noted the specific areas in which their children were not receiving what they saw as adequate teaching, including French. What was new was the feeling that fluency in French was vital to the community’s survival. These fears would persist and grow, to the point where French became the single most important item on the Protestant curriculum and in many schools with English-speaking clientele most classes were given in French. Ironically, this promotion of French occurred during a period of intense political controversy marked by staunch anglophone opposition to government attempts to curtail the right of access to English schooling. The watershed decision to embrace the teaching of French as a strategy for survival coincided with another watershed in Protestant schooling: the realization that the provision of French instruction to francophones was not only possible on a large scale, but empowering. Despite a long history of accommodating French-speaking Catholics within their schools, Protestant boards were aware of outsiders primarily as a means to increase student numbers (especially for small dissentient boards) or, if there were too many and not enough space for Protestant children, as a problem. On occasion, boards may have taken pride in having attracted Catholic families who were for whatever reason disenchanted with Catholic schools. Only when the impact of the 1960s’ education reforms was felt, and especially after the controversial language legislation of the 1970s, did Protestant boards grasp that to provide space and even entire schools for francophones was much more than a matter of accommodating a minority of French-speaking Protestants or a few liberal Catholics. Until that time, the major purveyors of French language instruction to francophones were the Catholic school boards, but there was no reason why they should enjoy this monopoly. The ability to run French schools proved, at least temporarily, a way for Protestant boards to offer services to francophones who disliked the policies of the Catholic boards, notably their refusal to teach English before Grade 4. Thus Protestant boards opposed the language legislation less as anglophones than as federalists, in the belief that nationalist measures hurt French speakers as well as English speakers. Indeed, the power to provide French-language instruction became a cornerstone of the Protestant school system and a reason to fear the threatened elimination of boards divided along confessional lines.

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For much of its history, the Protestant school system in Quebec was seen as serving English-speaking people or immigrants wishing their children to learn English. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Protestants were essentially British and Catholics essentially French, with Irish Catholic families fitting uneasily with the English-speaking camp or the Catholic camp depending on the local demographics. This stereotype persisted even after the establishment of confessional boards, which proved convenient for francophone Catholics who wished to promote Catholicism as crucial to the survival of the FrenchCanadian identity. English-speaking Catholics were at a distinct disadvantage, except where their numbers rivalled those of French Canadians, or in Montreal where the Catholic board eventually operated a separate English section. For liberal proponents of non-confessional education, this stereotype proved very inconvenient, as the identification of the English language with Protestantism became a black mark in nationalist circles. It was far less of a problem for most Protestant boards, and for the Protestant Committee, who were able to administer a curriculum without the burden of having to do so in two languages. The group that was almost forgotten with the rise of confessional boards, and for whom the stereotype was least convenient of all, was French-speaking Protestants. Despite the long efforts by Protestant groups to bring French Canadians to Protestantism, converts fitted uncomfortably into the public school system until the second half of the twentieth century, thereby further perpetuating the English character of Protestant education. French Protestants in Lower Canada were almost entirely the product of missionary activity, but the claim of Huguenots (Protestants of French or Swiss ancestry) to New France was as old as that of Catholics. A number of the early explorers and traders were Protestant, including Jean-Francois de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval, who headed the first attempted French settlement near what became Quebec City in 1542. Protestants were enough of a presence in early seventeenthcentury New France for Cardinal Richelieu to make a point of banning further Protestant involvement in trade or settlement as of 1627, establishing a Catholic monopoly on French Canada that would not be remotely challenged for another two centuries. Despite some attempts by Anglican missionaries, it was only through the efforts of Methodists and Baptists in the 1830s that French-speaking Canadians would convert in significant numbers. Most of these missionaries were from Switzerland, many entering Canada via the United States like their Loyalist counterparts. Leon Lalanne, school commissioner of Hemmingford Township, was an early French-Canadian convert to Methodism in that area, although the Lalanne family would be largely

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84 The mission and church, Grande Ligne The first home of the Feller Institute, before a major fire in 1890. [bnq: Cartes Postales du Québec, c03803]

anglicized by the next generation. Huguenot missionaries made much more extensive inroads in the countryside west of the upper Richelieu River near St Jean: the efforts of Henriette Feller and Louis Roussy led to the establishment of a community in Grande Ligne (later St Blaise) that soon numbered sixty people, with secondary communities in nearby l’Acadie and St Valentin. Others made their way to Montreal, Trois Rivières, and Quebec. In the hinterland of the Deux Montagnes seigneury, a number of French-Canadian families living near the Scottish settlement in Belle Rivière converted to Presbyterianism, which speaks to the involvement of other denominations in missionary activity by mid-century.3 Conscious of their position as an anomaly within both French and English Canada, French Protestants were quick to establish their own educational institutions. The first was a small school in Grande Ligne opened in 1840 in a farmhouse attic by Henriette Feller, who devoted the rest of her career to it and the mission. The Institut Feller, as it was soon known, became a private secondary school, attracting students from across southern Quebec. The original school was rebuilt after a fire in 1890 and enlarged a decade later so that it contained several classrooms, an assembly hall for 500 people, a library, a gym, a manual

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training room, a dining hall, and a reception room. The institute also had apartments for teachers and dormitories for students. It was set within 250 acres of farmland, which provided the institute with its meat, milk, and vegetables, and apparently served as something of an agricultural college for “boys who may be prospective farmers.” A description by E.A. Therrien, a leading Huguenot missionary, recalls the idyllic setting of the school: “From the slight elevation upon which the school stands it commands a splendid view of the surrounding plains, the distant river and the Green Mountains beyond. Its lawns are shaded by many stately old trees. Grouped about the school are a number of residences occupied by the Principal and members of the staff, while to the north stands the Roussy Memorial church. Back from the building lies the distant cemetery, the last resting place of Mme Feller, Mr Roussy and many other associates.”4 The self-sufficiency of the institute proved the key to its success at educating French Protestants. Although many converts lived in the area, the institute was large enough to attract children from far away, who boarded within its walls and could live for several years beyond contact with either anglophones or Catholics. The school was heavily subsidized by Methodist and later Baptist organizations, but it appears to have also received money from the Grande Ligne dissentient school board, which was largely made up of francophones.5 By this means, local ratepayers could direct their taxes towards a Protestant institution rather than contribute to Catholic education and then pay the Feller Institute fees. In an effort to remove control of missionary activity from individual societies and unify the campaign to convert French Canadians, various Protestant congregations took part in the formation of the FrenchCanadian Missionary Society. Based in Montreal and led by a variety of anglophones, the society sponsored a number of schools around the province, including one in Belle Rivière.6 It soon decided to focus its energies on one large school which, like its counterpart at Grande Ligne, would draw students from various communities that lacked a sufficient number of French-speaking Protestant children to support a school. The site they chose was at the eastern tip of the Island of Montreal, in Pointe aux Trembles. Like the Feller Institute, this school took children from far afield and boarded them; the facilities seem to have been comparable, though at only nine acres the surrounding terrain was considerably smaller. As an educational institution and as an agent of French Protestant cultural survival, the Pointe aux Trembles school would prove even more successful than the Feller Institute, which retained its Baptist character into the twentieth century and, consequently, saw a decline in attendance, especially in the Depression. In 1880 the Pointe aux Trembles school came under the administration of the Presbyterian Church when

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85 Presbyterian School, Pointe aux Trembles Although this school was primarily for French Protestants, many anglophones across the province experienced a form of “total immersion” by attending as boarders. [Villard, Up to the Light, 1928]

the French Canadian Missionary Society disbanded, but it continued to draw broadly from Protestant communities across Quebec and even opened its doors to anglophones. The admission of English-speaking children might suggest that finding enough French speakers to fill the school was a problem, but the directors’ decision was based on a desire to accommodate “children whose parents wish them to have education in both English and French.”7 By spending a few years boarding at Pointe aux Trembles, such students would gain the sort of exposure to the French language that most anglophone parents would begin to demand for their children only in the late 1960s. The first principal of the Pointe aux Trembles school, the Reverend J.C. Tanner, left after a few years to establish a French Protestant church in Montreal, on Dorchester Street just west of the Main. By the 1860s the city had two additional French Protestant congregations: one Methodist, with a church situated on Craig Street across from the Champs de Mars, and one Baptist, meeting in various rented quarters about town. As in the school he had left, Tanner’s congregation was soon designated Presbyterian and became known as L’église St Jean.8 The French Evangelical Church on Craig Street was the only one to operate a day school, administered by the French Canadian Missionary Society and taught by Sarah Piché. Attendance was such by the early 1870s that the congregation realized a new school was required. Given its financial difficulties,

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the society approached the Protestant Board of School Commissioners asking them to establish a school for eighteen boys and nineteen girls. Although it hesitated for some time, the board eventually decided that it “would be desirable to erect some suitable House in the neighbourhood,” meaning near the Evangelical Church.9 After a little searching, the board acquired a house on Dorchester Street, in the vicinity of the French Presbyterian Church. This arrangement was acceptable to the society, as was the board’s other decision to open the school’s doors to English-speaking children as well; the number of anglophone Protestants in this area was such that it was not worth the board’s investment in a new school unless some of them could be accommodated. It may be, too, that some members of the board were uncomfortable with the prospect of educating francophones. When the school opened in September 1874, attendance by French speakers was lower than expected, and the society blamed the drop on “the fact that the Teachers not being pure French the children did not benefit to the same degree as when in Craig Street.”10 The board maintained that it was not in their interests to refuse admittance to Englishspeaking students, but they did agree to create a separate school for French speakers within the same building and to hire a native speaker, M. Garayt, to teach about fifty children. Within a few years this measure proved too expensive, especially given that the majority of students were considered too poor to pay fees, and in 1876 the French school was closed.11 By that time the French Canadian Missionary Society had dissolved, and the congregation of the French Evangelical Church on Craig Street was obliged to continue operating its day school alone. A decade later, the Reverend Louis Beaudry expanded it into a boarding school, acquiring a house nearby to serve as a dormitory for boys. Seeking larger quarters, Beaudry allied with the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, which had been operating a dormitory for girls attending the school. Together, they acquired property in Westmount on Greene Avenue, just above the cpr tracks, and built a new school, to be called the French Methodist Institute. It was a large brick building with two wings – girls’ and boys’ quarters in separate wings – capable of housing around ninety students.12 The school continued to flourish into the twentieth century, though numbers had fallen by the 1920s. After the union of Methodists and Presbyterians in 1925, the United Church decided to close the Westmount institute and transfer staff and pupils to Pointe aux Trembles, which certainly benefitted from the additional numbers. The Pointe aux Trembles school survived the Depression and World War II, but its directors noted that it was operating at an increasing deficit. In the spring of 1954 they decided to close the school, but

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promptly received a petition from 350 parents, and others interested in the survival of French Protestantism, begging them to seek government help to keep the school open. The directors turned instead to the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, describing the “profound and natural desire” of these French Protestant parents “to have their children educated in their own language, faith and culture. About ten thousand boys and girls have received training at Pointe-aux-Trembles in the past – a truly great contribution to education, citizenship and religion.” The directors suggested that the board consider taking over the responsibility and costs of educating these students, at least for a threeyear trial: “We believe that the provision of education in French for the children of French Protestant parents … will prove a decided advantage to your Protestant School Board, for such a policy will provide for the future a reservoir of people fluent in English and French, from which can be derived leadership in education and other vocations.”13 This sentiment would become very familiar to Quebec anglophones a generation later; in 1955 it may have seemed merely a colourful argument. Nevertheless, the psbgm, in its mood of post-war expansion, agreed to take over the school providing the Department of Education reimburse it for the per-capita cost of educating those students living outside the area of the board’s jurisdiction. This was a wise provision, given that so many of the students, though not the majority by this time, came from off the island. The board also insisted that the school be open to all Protestant students from within its territory.14 This arrangement was to set something of a precedent for Protestant school boards, who had never really felt any special obligation, or necessity, to educate francophones. It also set a precedent for the government, which was wary of demands on its resources and especially wary of demands by French Protestants. The Feller Institute had also fallen on hard times, its population reduced during the 1930s to the point where the federal government felt able to close the school and use the building to house German prisoners of war.15 The Baptist mission started up the school again after the war, but was desperate enough to petition the Protestant Committee for help in March 1955, a few weeks after the request to the psbgm from the Pointe aux Trembles directors.16 W.M. Cottingham, the Minister of Mines and the token Protestant in the Duplessis government, was unwilling to commit public funds to the upkeep of what he perceived as a religious institution. It was one thing for the government to subsidize a few students attending the Pointe aux Trembles school, but another to give yearly grants to a private organization such as the Feller Institute. The view of the Protestant Committee was that the government already gave yearly grants to classical colleges and other

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Catholic institutions, so why not support the Grande Ligne mission? Having been asked by Walter Percival to intercede with the cabinet on behalf of the Pointe aux Trembles school, Cottingham felt obliged to criticize the Protestant Committee’s decision to support the grant to Grande Ligne. It was a slippery slope, Cottingham told the provincial secretary, that could lead to underwriting the education of every obscure group that asked for assistance: “If we start giving grants to schools operated by various sects in what is considered to be Protestants by the majority of people, there is nothing to hinder every socalled Protestant denomination to operate an individual school, and in addition, the Jews.”17 The last point would have pushed very specific buttons for the Duplessis government, but the entire argument rested on a clear bias against Protestants operating outside the mainstream. In Cottingham’s eyes, the French Protestants were rocking the boat. But Cottingham’s concern about the appropriateness of allowing religious schools into a public system was consistent with the attitude of most Protestant boards since the beginning. Despite the presence of Protestant ministers in the system and the occasional use of Protestant church halls as schools, the more evangelical tendencies of certain denominations had always been kept at arm’s length. French Protestants were almost by nature more evangelical in outlook than their anglophone counterparts; it was their religion that fundamentally separated them from the majority in Quebec. For Protestant school boards to take French Protestants under their wing was to raise questions about what their constituency really was, in both ethnic and linguistic terms. In the post-war period, having already absorbed Jews and other nationalities into their ranks, Protestant school boards were inclined to see themselves more than ever as part of a non-denominational, even secular, system that operated chiefly in English and was rooted in values that were Protestant as well as British in nature. Even so, French Protestants existed – in some places their numbers seemed to be growing – and Protestant boards were the obvious ones to accommodate them. Apart from the moral obligation to provide schooling to all Protestants, there was a clear economic advantage in welcoming a group that was ready and willing to pay taxes. The disadvantages, however, were obvious: if French Protestants were to be properly served, special classes, even special schools, would have to be created for them. Even before it acquired the Pointe aux Trembles school (subsequently referred to as the school in Montreal East) the psbgm reserved several classrooms for native French speakers in Peace Centennial School in the northern part of the city. This school was in great demand, and even took day students from off the island. Most of these came from the French Protestant community on the South Shore,

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which by that time was large enough for transportation to be a problem. Through the representation of two French Protestant ministers this community approached the Longueuil school board, complaining that the costs involved in busing forty children over the river had become impossible to bear. They said that an additional twenty students could easily be found to fill up two classrooms, if the board would consider providing such space. The board acknowledged the difficulty of finding qualified teachers, textbooks, and an appropriate curriculum, but promised they would try to make some arrangement with the Protestant Committee and the psbgm. By 1958 two classrooms in the new Mackayville School had been set aside for the education of the French students, with the teachers’ salaries paid for by the board. The only problem was that a number of these children had to travel from the Montreal South area, far enough away for the parents to request that a bus be provided. This the board could not do, stretched as it was by having taken “a great step forward” in arranging these separate classes. The commissioners pointed out that no French Protestant child would be refused admission to any other of the board’s schools, though they would not have the benefit of the special classes at Mackayville. In the end, a compromise was reached whereby the board would rent a hall in Montreal South to accommodate the French children there.18 Other boards began to receive requests to provide space for French Protestant children at this time, but not all were able to meet the needs. Most Protestant boards away from Montreal area were having a hard enough time providing adequate space for English-speaking children. In Granby, an initial request for a class for French speakers was not met with particular enthusiasm by the school board, but by 1962 a new wing was added to the high school and a petition with seventyseven signatures was sent to the commissioners calling for a primary grade to be offered for French Protestants. The board replied that, while there was now space, it would be difficult to find a “bilingual” teacher. The petitioners wrote to the Protestant Committee, who sent a representative, Mr Lessard, to conduct a survey of local families. Lessard eventually reported that seventeen children in Grades 1, 2, and 3 would be willing to form a primary class, which was enough for him to recommend that such a class be established. The board proceeded to search for a qualified teacher, but could only find a Miss Voirol, who was “without diploma or experience,” though presumably a native speaker. The Department of Education was prepared to give permission to hire Miss Voirol, but was unwilling to provide money to pay her salary, believing that seventeen children was too small a number. With the issue of language very much up in the air, given that it was the subject of study by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism,

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the Granby school board decided to hold off making any further plans for French students until the government had determined what course it would take.19 The B&B Commission and the Parent Report did change the Protestant outlook on the French language. The expectation that the government would implement some kind of non-confessional school system, with boards organized along linguistic lines, left the position of French Protestants unclear. In many parts of Quebec, such as the Eastern Townships or the Chateauguay valley, it seemed that English-speaking Protestants and Catholics were natural allies and should be accommodated in the same schools. This had been the logic behind the consolidation of rural schools during the 1950s and early 60s, as well as the creation of the polyvalent regional high schools. In Montreal and the suburbs, however, English Catholics had well-established sections within Catholic boards, and growing numbers of non-Catholic francophones were hoping to find room in Protestant schools; these included not only French Protestants, but immigrants from Africa and Asia who were more comfortable in French than in English. The differences in circumstances between the various regions of Protestant Quebec would become irrelevant once the provincial government began drafting legislation intended to curtail the use of the English language and the power of English-language institutions. By the time Protestant boards began to open French-language schools in the 1970s, the ground had shifted. For institutions that were essentially English to operate French sections was a direct challenge to a government intent on diminishing the power of anglophones. It was also a means of asserting control over a school system that was still essentially Protestant despite its complex constituency, but was now prepared to function in two languages.

Until the 1960s Quebec’s English-speaking Protestants and their representatives on school boards were largely indifferent to the French language other than as a part of the curriculum. In this they were hardly different from their counterparts in the rest of Canada, or in Britain for that matter, where a knowledge of French was a mark of good education but had no practical application other than an appreciation of literature. Many urban Protestants, of course, grew up speaking French with their neighbours, but it was not the sort of French they would learn at school, which would be taught either by an anglophone or by a French speaker who would insist on a “Parisienne” pronunciation.20 But to have a native French speaker as a teacher was a rarity before the middle of the twentieth century, and in some places even having French taught at all was by no means certain. In 1901 Inspector Gilman re-

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ported that in one district school in Buckingham subjects such as “Bible history, agriculture and French are not yet taught,” though whether this was owing to the teachers’ inadequacy or a too-strict application of the “Three Rs” is not clear.21 In Grace Simpson’s well-run school in nearby Lochaber Bay, there was no such ambiguity: Gilman reported with pleasure hearing a French lesson read.22 A generation later, Inspector McOuat reported that in one Lochaber school French was not taught because of parents’ objections, which was not the least of the complaints he listed.23 Although French was always part of the curriculum, not all teachers in one-room schools were able to impart the minimum required by the Protestant Committee. In Barnston, the commissioners complained that students were not getting enough French and asked the Protestant Committee to arrange for a specialist to visit their schools at least once a year – certainly an indication of inadequate instruction.24 Boards operating high schools and other large graded schools had the option of hiring a French specialist. As an incentive, the government on occasion would offer Protestant boards a grant, usually of $150, to subsidize the salary of a French specialist, and a number took up the offer: the Outremont trustees, for example, accepted a cheque for $150 in 1912 to go towards the $500 they intended to pay a French teacher.25 Other boards would encourage teachers already employed in graded schools to obtain the necessary qualifications at the Macdonald School for Teachers, often during the summer. This was what Grace Simpson did while working in the Ormstown Academy, but the practice was common. The trustees in Aylmer offered a teacher, Elsie Galley, a share of the special grant they had applied for, provided she “take a special corse (sic) in french during the coming holiday and obtain the required certificate and teach french throughout the Academy during the school year of 1916–17.”26 Advertisements for “Protestant French teachers” appeared in local newspapers in the 1920s. That there was some difficulty finding suitable teachers suggests that French was not a common speciality at Macdonald College, which would seem only logical in Quebec, given the abundance of native speakers. Nevertheless, most French specialists in Protestant schools were anglophones, since Catholic teachers were prohibited from working for Protestant boards. In 1944 the Hemmingford commissioners asked Percival for permission to hire a French teacher who was Catholic and, despite the shortage of teachers at the time, Percival said no.27 Some boards were lucky enough to find French Protestant teachers. Not surprisingly, the High School of Montreal had not only a specialist but a “French Master.” In the 1920s this master, Professor PimeauRobert, was so successful at “making the French language appreciated

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among the English-speaking pupils” that he was awarded the honourary title of Officer of the French Academy by the French government, an honour to which few French teachers were likely to have aspired.28 Among a surprising number of applicants to teach French at the Aylmer Academy in 1918, Miss G. Thibault stood out as the best candidate, though it was not clear from her letter whether she had an actual certificate to teach French.29 It proved to be a common problem: teachers with the proper certification were often anglophones and francophones often did not have the certification. The advantages of having a native French speaker could outweigh the lack of training, however: in 1925 the Lennoxville commissioners were willing to hire a Madame L’Hote to teach at the high school three afternoons a week at $15 a month, even though she lacked a French specialist certificate. The principal reported that “her well-known ability as a French teacher” would be sufficient to convince the Department of Education to give them “at least part of the special grant for French.”30 In that same year, Inspector McBurney presented a report to the St Lambert school board in which he recommended, among other things, that French should only be taught by certified French teachers, rather than by the regular class teachers; this suggests that the latter was too often the case in St Lambert, and no doubt it was so elsewhere. One problem of considering the teaching of French as a specialty was that it could easily fall into the same category as art or music or gym, and be cut from the curriculum. When Elizabeth Ball resigned in 1930 after nine years as French teacher at the Cookshire High School, she was not replaced; the commissioners decided that French would now be taught by the class teachers, though only in those grades where it was “required by the course of study.”31 Such a decision does not speak to any great importance placed on learning French. The Outremont trustees made a similar decision a few years later, but their action was widely criticized. The fledgling Home and School Association at King’s School in Westmount deplored this economy measure and urged that “this economy, if necessary, be effected in some other quarter.”32 By that time, many parents were expressing the opinion that the level of French instruction their children were receiving was substandard, particularly in suburban areas that relied on the city high schools for their secondary education. Parents of children who had attended Cedar Park School in Pointe Claire expressed their frustration that “pupils were backward upon going to the Montreal schools after graduating.” When confronted on the subject, the principal of Cedar Park attributed this unpreparedness to the elimination of the position of French specialist some years before, a situation the board promptly moved to cor-

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rect.33 In 1950 the Coaticook school commissioners complained to their central board that it had taken away their French specialist, though the central board replied that a local position had merely been abolished in favour of a specialist who could serve several schools in the county, some of which had no French teacher. From Coaticook’s point of view this was by no means an improvement.34 Parents who wished to see an improvement in the level of French instruction found the Home and School movement a useful vehicle for such change. Their involvement began in 1948 when the Barclay Home and School Association conducted adult evening classes in French conversation, and over the course of the next decade increasing numbers of local associations offered such classes to adults and children alike. Whereas the emphasis in teaching French had once been on grammar and syntax – almost for its own sake, like Latin – now the interest lay in conversation, in the belief that communication was important.35 In 1954 the qfhsa endorsed “French Without Tears,” an innovative program that was being introduced at selected schools. Students were encouraged to make a special effort to improve and use their French. From 1954 on schools in Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield sent students in Grades 5 through 9 to French summer school at Macdonald College and a few years later a special Grade 8 class was formed at the two high schools to provide advanced French.36 By the mid 1950s schools began to introduce children to French earlier than had been previously thought appropriate, thanks, in part, to Dr Wilder Penfield’s theories on early language acquisition.37 Children appeared to respond well to this early exposure, and their success pleased parents.38 But the most far-reaching innovation championed by the Home and School movement was French immersion. The difficulties experienced by the members of Roslyn’s Home and School Association in getting their board to agree to a new way of teaching French was largely forgotten only a few years later, by which time French immersion had proved widely popular. The psbgm would even claim with pride that French immersion had been pioneered at one of its schools, even though at the time the Westmount board was still technically independent.39 This claim was particularly cheeky because the first experiment in French immersion actually took place off the Island of Montreal – in St Lambert, first at Margaret Pendlebury School and then at the St Lambert Elementary School, that venerable institution that had once been the principal high school of the South Shore, as well as the successor to the old Riverside School, which had initially been bilingual. Again, the initiative came from local parents, but they found their school commissioners more willing to experiment than those in

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Westmount. St Lambert, a community with a linguistically mixed population, was home to the Protestant Parents for Bilingual Education. This group devised the concept of a “Language Bath” as the ideal way to learn a language at a young age.40 What started in the autumn of 1966 and soon became known across Canada as the St Lambert Model, involved teaching pupils in the first few grades completely in French, and then gradually introducing first language instruction.41 The argument, developed from the theories of Wilder Penfield, was that children’s ability to master another language not only benefitted from early exposure but benefitted exponentially when the early exposure was total. Numerous evaluations of such programs since then have generally supported this theory. A few years later, a British study that found no evidence to support Penfield’s claims about early exposure was given wide publicity in Quebec, largely because it supported the Parti Québécois plan not to permit second-language English instruction in French schools. As many pointed out, however, the experience of learning French in Britain is vastly different from doing so in Quebec.42 French immersion quickly became a buzzword in Protestant schoolboard circles. It was progressively implemented at a number of schools, including Roslyn, Meadowbrook in Lachine, and Bannantyne in Verdun. By 1972 these programs were so successful that the qfhsa could claim proudly that “parents have brought about a mini-revolution” in the teaching of French.43 School boards were still inclined to worry about the difficulty of implementing French immersion on a large scale – notably how to secure the services of a sufficient number of French-speaking teachers and how to deal with anglophone teachers who were unable to teach in French. Since 1969 Protestant boards were permitted to hire Catholic teachers, and vice versa, but boards had little desire to replace long-serving teachers with new ones from the Catholic board in the interest of immersion. But clearly more French had to be taught in Protestant schools. The Lake of Two Mountains board did not embrace immersion per se, but began introducing what they called a “parallel” system, whereby students would learn certain subjects in French, with increased specialization as they advanced.44 The psbgm also increased the number of hours of instruction in French in all its schools and introduced training programs to make teachers “sufficiently bilingual.”45 It also began to develop “Grade 7 immersion centres,” which would prepare students for highintensity French courses in various subjects right through the high school years – at least for those enrolled in the immersion stream. The goal was to have students who completed this program given a bilingual certificate on graduation, a mark of achievement for a young an-

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glophone from ndg or Westmount. When the ministry balked at issuing such a certificate in 1973, the board decided to create its own and distribute them to successful graduates.46 In that same year the psbgm opened a new high school in the northern part of the city, which taught exclusively in French: some classes were designated as French immersion, but most catered to native French speakers. Its name, significantly, was Roberval, after the early Huguenot explorer of Canada. Over the next decade a number of French language elementary schools were also opened, most of them in older buildings in areas where the English population had diminished to the point where some of the schools built a generation earlier were superfluous. By the 1980s several venerable English Protestant institutions had been turned over to the psbgm’s French sector, including Barclay, Iona, Edward VII (which became Edouard VII), Maisonneuve, Tétreaultville, Lachine Rapids (which became Rapides de Lachine), and Peace Centennial (which became école élémentaire Centenaire de la Paix). The Dorval, Dunton, and Town of Mount Royal high schools also became French. In the West Island, Beaconsfield and Pointe Claire elementary schools and Dorval High School constituted the Lakeshore board’s French sector. On the South Shore, Mackayville School had become exclusively French by 1973 and most other elementary schools soon had substantial French-language enrolment. With Chambly County and Centennial high schools accommodating over 2,300 Englishspeaking students between them, the St Lawrence board decided to provide a French-language secondary I (Grade 7) year at Lemoyned’Iberville school in Longueuil.47 The Lake of Two Mountains High School remained English, but the St Eustache Protestant elementary school was made French. In Laval, French secondary students attended the two Protestant high schools in Chomedey. Outside the Montreal area, Protestant boards either did not have French sectors (as in the Eastern Townships and the Chateauguay valley) or provided French instruction primarily for French Protestants (as in the Beauce, Chicoutimi, and parts of Quebec City). Having French sections enabled Protestant boards to undermine much of the government’s attempt to control access to English education. The greatest impact on education of the Parti Québécois language law was that all new families settling in Quebec after 1977 were obliged to send their children to French schools. Protestant boards found themselves in a position to accommodate many of these children, however much they might dislike the restrictions imposed by the law. As Table 13 shows, most of the pupils who attended schools in the French sectors of Protestant boards were neither Protestant nor

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Catholic. These children would still be taught in French, but they would have the benefits of a more liberal curriculum. They would also be given instruction in English as a second language from the day they started school. A further imposition by the government was the Régime Pédagogique in 1981, which reorganized the curriculum in an attempt to streamline the various programs offered by all school boards, Protestant and Catholic, English and French. In conformity with Bill 101, which effectively set out to discourage access to the English language, all pupils in French schools were not permitted to take English until Grade 4, a measure that contrasted completely to the Protestant policy of teaching English as a second language in French schools from the earliest grades. Bill 101 effectively made this policy illegal; to conform to the law, Protestant boards would have to stop teaching English to French speakers before Grade 4. Several Protestant boards took a principled stand on this matter, however, and continued to offer English classes in French schools.48 If anything, this feature of Protestant French schools made them even more attractive to outsiders; the numbers enrolled in these schools continued to rise through the 1980s. This was another reason for anglophones to champion the continued existence of Protestant school boards. As we have seen, in the 1960s support for the idea of neutral schools had been strong, but now Protestants came to realize that a system of linguistically based school boards would greatly diminish the control over education currently exerted by anglophones. The ability of Protestant boards to offer French language instruction, and especially to operate French language schools, gave them a degree of leverage, albeit a problematic one. It is perhaps not surprising that the Parti Québécois soon began to promote the replacement of confessional boards with linguistic ones. Registration for English schools, however, fell dramatically by the year, and as a result the overall number of pupils declined as well, despite the rise in the French sector. Table 12 (p. 328) shows how the population of psbgm schools dropped by half between 1971 and 1991, from roughly 60,000 to roughly 30,000. Other Protestant boards saw a decline also, though not quite so dramatic, given that some of the city’s shrinkage was due to the flight to the suburbs. But the principal reason for the overall decline was the flight from Quebec of English-speaking families, much of which occurred during the years immediately following the Parti Québécois election in 1976; by the later 1980s boards noted that the decline had slowed considerably.49 For those who remained, the challenge had become “anglo” survival, and differences between English-speaking Protestants, Catholics, Jews,

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and other cultural groups were de-emphasized – just as the differences between Protestant denominations had been de-emphasized nearly a century and a half before, in the interest of building common institutions.50 Unfortunately for Protestant education, the survival mentality tended to reduce political discourse to a question of language rights. To many implicated in this struggle – though not school-board administrators, teachers, or most parents of children attending Protestant schools – linguistic school boards seemed a good idea.

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15

Paths to Wisdom: The Cree and Kativik School Boards The Council of Commissioners must identify the needs of the community and available resources, set objectives, and establish priorities. The Council must ensure that the public’s wishes and needs are translated into concrete policies of the school board. The Council must maintain close relations with communities and ensure dissemination of information from the school board to the community and the general public. Policy on the Role of Council of School Commissioners, Kativik School Board, 19791 A community-based education system with a decentralized administrative structure is an integral component of the overall development plan of the Eeyou Chiskotamachaoun. As a milestone, the Eeyouch/Eenouch of Quebec, through the Cree School Board, has brought the central management and administration of Eeyou education “home” to Eeyou Istchee. Philip Awashish, Cree negotiator and leader, 19982

On 11 November 1975 Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees Billy Diamond, and Charlie Watt, President of the Inuit Association of Northern Quebec, met with federal and provincial officials, Premier Robert Bourassa, Quebec representative John Ciaccia, Treasury Board President Jean Chrétien, and Minister of Indian Affairs Judd Buchanan, to sign the historic document, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (jbnqa). Within its text – specifically sections 16 and 17 – the federal and provincial governments recognized the right of the Cree of James Bay and the Inuit of Northern Quebec to control their education. Although the Kativik and Cree school boards would continue to be governed by the regulations of the Ministry of Education with respect to curriculum, they were given wide powers to design their education systems to reflect the cultural, social, and economic needs of their constituencies with respect to language and culture. In essence, the agreement transferred the power previously invested in the Indian Act to these two nations.3 As a later commentator put it, “Education is at

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86 Cree School Board building, Mistissini In a land where culture is ancient, institutional buildings tend to be modern. [Author photo]

the heart of the struggle of Aboriginal peoples to regain control over their lives as communities and nations.”4 In the nearly three years between the signing of the jbnqa and Bill 2 – legislation that amended the Education Act to allow for the establishment of the Kativik and Cree school boards – elected Cree and Inuit representatives embarked on a historic project to create their school commissions. This was a daunting task, as the Kativik School Board covered the largest territory of any provincial school board, yet provided education to the smallest number of children, most of whom lived in the fourteen scattered coastal communities of Kuujjuarapik, Umiujaq, Inukjuak, Puvirnituq, Akulivik, Ivujivik, Salluit, Kangiqsujuak, Quaqtaq, Aupaluk, Kangirsuk, Tasiujaq, Kuujjuak, and Kangiqsualujjuaq.5 The Cree School Board served the eight remote communities of Nemiscau, Whapmagoostui, Wemindji, Eastmain, Waswanipi, Chisasibi, Waskaganish, and Mistissini that made up the Cree nation of James Bay; in 1989 the Cree band of Oujé-Bougoumou joined the Grand Council of the Cree.6 Most of the Cree and Inuit in these northern communities were Protestants who attended local Anglican, Baptist, or Pentecostal churches; many of their schools had been Protestant as well until a recent change to non-denominational status. These isolated native communities had something in common with the small, sometimes remote Protestant communities in the south: both had to deal with a large provincial bureaucracy (although the Cree and Inuit also negotiated with a federal administration) wherein the unique characteristics and needs of their communities were subsumed by those of the majority francophone and Catholic population.

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Map 23 Schools of the Kativik School Board

Inuit and Cree school commissioners understood that their schools had to respond to the momentous social, political, and economic changes taking place within each of these nations. The challenge was to prepare Inuit and Cree youth for the intricacies of a modern economy and society, but to do so within a traditional culture. To weave together aboriginal cultural practices and language with the pedagogical demands of the Quebec Ministry of Education, the school boards needed to develop a curriculum that would include culture and language, and to hire culturally sensitive educators who could teach academic courses up to southern standards. They also had to design materials and to train native teachers as language and culture experts. Curriculum development became a source of considerable discussion and controversy as parents, teachers, and administrators considered how best to instruct youth. As parental involvement was critical to achieving success, commissioners understood that they needed to establish strong links between the school board and the community and to enlist the help of parents in the schools.7 This help came largely through participation in school committees,8 although in many cases school boards had to prepare parents carefully for their new responsibilities. Examples of community involvement in local schooling resonate in the minutes of school board meetings, although the experiences of parents and other individuals are more difficult to tease out given the legalistic nature of school-board documents.

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Map 24 Schools of the Cree School Board

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The achievement of administering their own education system is particularly momentous in the light of the similar and poignant school experiences of Cree and Inuit children before the agreement. The Anglican church, and to a much lesser extent the Catholic church, played a crucial role in the delivery of northern education. Despite its technical responsibility for native affairs, the federal government’s involvement was non-existent until recent decades, largely because of lack of interest and also because of the Inuit’s and Cree’s nomadic existence in remote regions of northern Quebec. Even those associated with religious institutions in the late nineteenth century provided only sporadic schooling. Anglican missionaries taught arithmetic and syllabics to Inuit children in villages such as Kuujjuak whenever families came to town to purchase provisions. Eventually, a permanent mission was established there in the 1930s. The same churches operated day schools in some of the Cree villages by the turn of the century, although children attended class irregularly, given that until the late 1940s the majority of the James Bay Cree spent most of the year “in the bush.” Eventually, the federal government handed over the authority to operate and partially finance residential schools to church hierarchies; it took responsibility for determining guidelines, inspecting schools, and providing grants.9 The Oblats de Marie Immaculatée opened the first Roman Catholic residential school in the north at Fort George in 1930. The Anglican church established the St Philip’s Anglican Indian Residential School a few years later. Native children also attended educational facilities in Ontario at the St John’s Indian Residential School in Chapleau, and later in Moose Factory, Sault Ste Marie, and Brantford. The last residential school was opened at La Tuque in 1964.10 Since the goal of residential schooling was to assimilate native children, “Indian agents” helped school administrators to physically remove school-aged children from their villages to attend schools for ten months of the year. Teachers forbade the children to speak Cree or Inuktitut or to practise their culture, removed all remnants of native clothing (which they replaced with school uniforms), and immersed them into a regimented culture of church rituals and European practices. A generation of First Nations children who attended residential schools were deprived of their ancestral language and estranged from their culture. Discipline was strict and punishment swift for those who did not obey. Schooling was marked by isolation, loneliness, neglect, and incidents of physical and sexual abuse.11 Many children responded to this oppressive system and to their subsequent homesickness by running away or by dropping out of school. Following published newspaper reports about the poor living and health conditions of the Inuit – the consequence of the federal govern-

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ment’s abysmal neglect of the population – Ottawa established its first Inuit day school at the end of the 1940s, in addition to a string of nursing stations. Twenty years later, it had erected thirty-one day schools, all of which had the same assimilation bent – that is to say, to Christianize and “civilize” First Nations’ children by turning them into the government’s version of responsible citizens.12 The first Cree day school opened in 1964 in Mistissini and by 1971 every Cree village had its own school.13 Residential and day schools shared similar features. Teachers used the Ontario school curriculum, ignored Inuit language, and culture, and physically punished their pupils who spoke Inuktitut. By the 1950s the federal government initiated a policy of integration, to be financed by the Department of Indian Affairs, in schools near native communities. Such was not the case in Quebec’s northern regions until 1970. But in 1954 the Department of Indian Affairs asked the Lake of Two Mountains School Board to accept eighteen to twenty students from Grades 5, 6, and 7 who were attending the Indian school in Oka. The request was turned down for lack of space, though the board was in the process of buying land to build a larger school.14 Three years later the inspector of Indian schools, J.A. Doucet, promised the school board federal funding, proportional to the number of Indian pupils attending its schools, which it could use toward the building costs of this new St Eustache school.15 By the late 1960s the federal government was eager to divest itself of responsibility for education and transfer it to the provinces. This was revealed in its policy initiative, the White Paper of 1969, a document that was denounced by native leaders across Canada, especially for its main proposal to relinquish education to another non-native government. The National Indian Brotherhood (the forerunner of the Assembly of First Nations) produced its own report, Indian Control of Indian Education, in 1972. Its writers argued for native-controlled education with a native-oriented curriculum. The report asserted that aboriginal parents needed to be given the same opportunities to participate in their children’s education that other Canadians enjoyed and that they should control education locally.16 While the federal government agreed in principle with the report, it argued that the Indian Act included no mechanism for transferring education to natives. Ottawa responded to the native demands to train aboriginals as teachers and to provide cross-cultural training to non-native teachers. The federal government introduced native teaching assistants into the classroom and permitted native teachers to teach Inuktitut and Cree. The 1960s also marked a turning point in the provincial government’s involvement in its northern territories. Quebec’s lack of interest changed when it recognized the potential profits of the natural

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resources in the north and, with the rise of nationalism, it wished to assert its sovereignty in all of the province.17 The consequent tug of war between the two levels of government left no venue available for the Inuit and Cree to negotiate their own interests regarding schooling, and resulted in the co-existence of two education systems. By the 1970s Cree and Inuit children attended local and regional provincial schools under the jurisdiction of the Department of Natural Resources, which reported to the Ministry of Education. The Quebec government introduced the nucleus of a modern system that was further developed after 1975. Following the Parent Commission, aboriginal language instruction continued up to Grade 2 when a second language – French or English – was introduced. The relationship between language and religion necessitated that school officials be warned to respect the religious freedom of their constituency and not to indulge in religious proselytism.18 Each community was given the power to hire its own religious teachers. School committees were organized in provincial day schools, although they had only an advisory status. Notwithstanding the disturbing legacy of residential and federal day schooling, many of the leaders who negotiated the jbnqa, and those who became educators and administrators of the native school boards and parents’ committees, were products of this system of schooling.19 Moreover, provincial day schools and their parent committees served as a training ground for a generation of Inuit and Cree politicians, administrators, educators, and support personnel, who became increasingly vocal in their demands for more autonomy. Inuit leaders Zebedee Nungak from Kangirsuk, Tommy Cain from Tasiujaq, and Charlie Watt from Kuujjuak questioned the role of the two governments in the north and reasoned that the Inuit should have a larger voice in all affairs that touched their lives.20 By 1971, with the announcement of the James Bay Project, these leaders formed the Inuit Association of Northern Quebec. Similarly, the James Bay Cree transformed themselves from a society made up of eight scattered community bands into a regional society of the Grand Council of the Crees. The school experiences of Cree and Inuit leaders propelled them to demand native-controlled school commissions and to play a pivotal role when native school boards designed their systems of schools, curricula, and school calendars, and when parents participated in local schooling. Since education had been something that was done to native children without the collaboration of the Cree and Inuit, as part of a process of assimilation, it had been viewed with extreme apprehension. This fear would prejudice the relationship some parents had with their local schools. Despite the link between the church and residential schools, many Cree and Inuit remained devout in their religious practices and

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affiliations. As the vast majority of Cree and Inuit were Protestant by religious practice, moral and religious education reflected the Protestant doctrines of the Anglican, Pentecostal, and Baptist denominations – even though the subject was authorized to be taught in Cree and Inuktitut by native teachers.

The newly created native school boards differed in at least five ways from others in Quebec. First, they were intrinsically linked to the notion of self-government, where control of language and culture was pivotal in maintaining and strengthening their identities as nations. Second, if language and culture were to be fully integrated in their schools, both school boards required qualified native teachers to provide language and culture instruction as well as to teach the curriculum laid out by the Ministry of Education. Third, the school boards depended completely on the provincial government to finance their education systems, rather than on a local tax base; administrators had to negotiate with the Ministry of Education to obtain adequate operating budgets, instead of raising needed revenue by taxing property owners as did their counterparts in the south. Fourth, both school boards exercised greater budgetary and financial control than did non-native boards; this was done to allow the boards more freedom in providing native-based education to their constituencies – a mandate that Philip Awashish refers to as “education in a multicultural environment.”21 In addition, these native boards were responsible for all levels of education in their territories: elementary, secondary, adult, and post-secondary adult education. Although schools operated by both levels of governments were transferred to these school boards, many of the buildings required extensive renovations to meet the burgeoning needs of the communities. The school commissioners also needed to develop a new infrastructure that would include high schools, administrative offices, teacher residences, and adult education facilities. Fifth, community school committees, which were common to all school boards as mandated by the government, were given more power than their equivalents in the south, to reinforce local control of education. These committees were undoubtedly authentic partners with the schools and the school board. They determined the individual educational needs of each community, recommended which teachers to hire and to dismiss, and decided matters of curriculum pertaining to language and culture. While the degree of decentralization differed between the two school boards, both appointed an administrator who acted to a large extent as a director general. Parents were given a very active role in local education as members of school committees, educators, administrators, commissioners, and resource persons.

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Fostering aboriginal language and culture was the raison d’être of the school boards and lay at the heart of the curricula that all communities sought to establish. Parents, by way of their school committees, school boards, teachers, and administrators, debated how and when to introduce second language instruction in the classroom. While the Kativik School Board expected Inuktitut to be the language of instruction up to and including Grade 2, the power to decide was left to the school committees; it was up to the community, not individual parents, to decide which language would be chosen as the second one. As school committees struggled with these questions, they sometimes changed the language of instruction from one year to the next, as in Chisasibi, which in 1983 requested that the Cree School Board make the native language and culture program optional and return to the previous practice of introducing a third language in Grade 4.22 The boards tried to accommodate these changes. While the Cree and Inuit debated and disagreed within their communities, neither tolerated any interference from outsiders, remembering as they did the days before the jbnqa when European language and culture were imposed on them. Commissioners understood that, for any student, the development of mother tongue language skills would lead to improved self-esteem and confidence. Over the course of twenty-five years both school boards succeeded, to a greater or lesser degree, in devising language and culture programs that were integral to the curriculum. Each school committee customized its school year to incorporate not only the provincial curriculum but also traditional cultural activities such as hunting, fishing, and trapping; they drew up a calendar that included breaks to accommodate these endeavours, as well as floating pedagogical days if hunting activities had to be delayed or moved forward. The Kativik School Board introduced a language program that was taught in all but one of its schools; the Cree School Board established a compulsory Cree Language Instruction Program or clip as it came to be known. Whatever resistance these language and culture programs might have encountered was insignificant compared to the way it was heralded by the vast majority of the Inuit and Cree: “We did not have our culture when we went to school and now we have the opportunity to give this back to our children,” the school commissioners noted. “We must work together and stand together on this decision made by Council.”23 Language disputes arose between the Cree School Board and its nonnative teachers and other professionals living in Cree communities, notably when these outsiders asked that their children be educated in English or French. When their request was refused, teachers sometimes threatened to take the conflict to Quebec City for resolution. Although the school boards were obligated to provide French language instruc-

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tion according to provincial linguistic laws, the commissioners were adamant that they, with the support of parents, would fight any encroachment on their right to aboriginal language instruction. The controversy re-emerged in 1995 when Inuit residing in the Cree community of Chisasibi asked to be taught in Inuktitut. Cree commissioners were apprehensive that if they agreed to the request, it would erode the Cree language by setting a precedent and thus opening the door to the demands of southern personnel to have their school-aged children instructed in French.24 A month later, the commissioners and chiefs agreed to develop a language policy that would commit the school board to French as the second language of instruction, but would retain Cree as the only language taught up to Grade 3. This was submitted to the Ministry of Education.25 Both school boards resisted government intrusion into their jurisdiction in other matters as well. When the two dissenting communities of Puvirnituq and Ivujivik refused to be incorporated into the Kativik School Board – protesting the extinguishment of their rights in the jbnqa – the National Assembly passed a decree giving the Ministry of Education the power to set up their schools. The Kativik school commissioners fought Quebec’s interference in their domain by taking the government to court.26 The judiciary affirmed the Kativik School Board’s powers in all education matters north of the 55th parallel,27 but it would take several more years of negotiations between the parent committees of Puvirnituq and Ivujivik and the school commissioners before the dispute was resolved. The relationship between the school boards and the provincial government was tenuous at the best of times, but the tabling of Bill 101 strained matters much further. Both the Cree and the Inuit viewed this language legislation as an attack on their fundamental right to a nativebased curriculum and a threat to language and culture acquisition by native schoolchildren. They demanded that the affirmation of their languages be incorporated into the legislation. The Quebec government refused, but it did assure them that their children would be exempt from the provisions of Bill 101. This exemption, however, did not apply to other Cree and Inuit children who travelled to northern Quebec with their parents from Labrador or the North West Territories – an exception that the Inuit and their school board found especially unacceptable, as it would split families apart and impede their traditional free movement across the north. The Inuit also protested about being lumped under the term Amerindiens, insisting that they be referred to as Inuit.28 Opposition to Bill 101 mounted as both the Cree and the Inuit came to view the law as an obstacle to the development of their own economic structures and school administrations; it also appeared to

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subordinate their languages and cultures, and their historic affiliation with the English language. Protests against government employees and buildings broke out in communities across the north until the government backed down. The Cree and the Inuit had become quite astute at using the media to get their message out to a larger public in the south. While parents and native leaders were well aware of the importance of French as a second language, they were determined to regulate linguistic issues in their own communities. When left to decide on their own, growing numbers of Inuit chose French as the second language of instruction in schools across the north. By the 1997–98 school year, 57 per cent of elementary students were enrolled in the French sector and 52 per cent at the high-school level. Similarly, Cree communities such as Mistissini recommended in the early 1980s that a French sector be established in their schools; they recognized that their children needed to learn French to fully participate in contemporary Quebec. By 1996 almost half (1,136 versus 1,186 in the English sector) of Cree children were enrolled in French schools.29 Native communities fought against any interference with their own languages by Quebec; they also strove to obtain funding to provide a multilingual school curriculum that gave priority to Cree and Inuktitut. Since second and third language instruction cost money to implement, school-board officials looked to the provincial government to finance the infrastructure and personnel required to operate these programs. Native communities clashed with the Ministry of Education over education budgets; they also had to resort to the courts to ensure that the government complied with its responsibilities under sections 16 and 17 of the jbnqa. Inevitably, such conflict was detrimental to relations between natives and government. From the school boards’ point of view, dealing with provincial bureaucrats distracted them from their main purpose – to create a culturally responsive system of education. Such controversial subjects as the Great Whale Project30 overshadowed the school boards’ budgetary deliberations, since the provincial government opposed any rise in school budgets while it was transacting other deals. These negotiations also left parents and school committees out of the process, even though they were directly affected by the results. Notwithstanding the guarantee of government funding in the jbnqa, budgetary reductions interfered with the school boards’ mandate as outlined in the agreement. A case in point was the financing of school computers. In Waswanipi, parents demanded economic aid to purchase computers for the school’s empty computer room. When the government refused, Commissioner Hugo Hester argued that every time such a project was rejected, it was as if the school board had said “no” to students.31 Budgetary reductions also affected native teacher training

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and infrastructure development, which was critical given the high cost of providing services in the north. Similarly, Quebec refused to acknowledge native school boards’ jurisdiction in post-secondary education and consequently would not provide the necessary funds. On a more positive note, as increasing numbers of communities chose French as a second language and as future hydroelectric development in the region became a possibility, there was a thawing of relations on the part of the government.32 While conflict resolution played an important role in the process of empowerment at the school-board level, it was not as easily reproduced at the local level.33 The relationships between the school boards and the local communities and their school committees, while cordial, have been complex. Although both school boards felt caught between what they perceived as the intransigence of officials at the Ministry of Education and the demands of parents, they demonstrated remarkable respect for the decisions made by school committees and showed a willingness to accommodate them. The Inuit and Cree tradition of deciding by consensus boded well in developing effective relationships between school committees and the school board. When school committees had difficulty with procedural arrangements in collective bargaining agreements regarding the dismissal of teachers, the school boards often found themselves involved in court cases with disgruntled teachers and their union over unlawful dismissal claims. Usually the school boards did what they could to comply with the school committees’ decisions; occasionally, because of extenuating circumstances, they could not. On a few occasions, school committees felt so strongly about a teacher whom they had recommended be discharged, that members threatened to resign if the school board did not support their decision. In one case, the school committee told its local commissioner that if the board allowed a teacher to return to the Voyageur Memorial School, every member would quit.34 An especially telling incident in 1991 revealed just how determined yet politically savvy the Cree commissioners had become regarding any encroachment on their jurisdiction. Frustrated by prolonged negotiations between the school board and the government over an extension to the Waskaganish school and by the failure of a community petition to effect change, Waskaganish band chief Billy Diamond (who had been chairman of the Cree School Board) bypassed the school commission and met with the Deputy Minister of Education Thomas Boudreault. The chairman of the board at the time, Mr Blacksmith, indicated to Ministry of Education officials that, by meeting with Chief Diamond, they had seriously undermined the authority of the school board. Since only school commissioners could speak for the schools,

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Boudreault’s invitation to Diamond meant that each community could deal directly with the ministry and circumvent the school board entirely.35 The school boards came under increasing criticism for their failure to establish a culturally relevant curriculum, to reduce a too high dropout rate, to stop behaviour problems in the schools, and to engage parents in the education of their children. Charlie Watt, the Inuit signatory on the jbnqa and an influential and outspoken critic of the Kativik School Board, argued that when school commissioners incorporated both federal and provincial school systems into the new school board without solving the problems inherent to these structures, they simply perpetuated the high dropout rate. Watt concluded that the school board was too independent and that non-native administrators were too influential in the system; he also felt that the board should be subservient to Makivik, the Inuit organization responsible for economic development in the north. His assessment resonated with Inuit leadership, because shortly thereafter both Makivik and the Kativik School Board agreed to fund a task force to investigate problems related to the delivery of education. A similar appraisal had been made of the Cree School Board, but the solution was different. Each community established an education conference that focused on local problems. With their more decentralized system, Cree communities felt responsible for local education and school committees in each town organized these meetings with the goal of engaging parents and students in the problem-solving process. Since school committees worked in partnership with the school board, responsibility for the quality of education also lay with them. Many believed that the calibre of schooling had understandably suffered during the initial building stage when the boards were forced to enlarge and improve a severely inadequate and deteriorating infrastructure inherited from the provincial and federal governments. They erected elementary and secondary schools where none had previously existed. Parents, through their school committees, played a critical role during this phase: they assessed and reported on the condition of schools and on the resources available to teachers and administrators. School committees also determined when was the best time to add higher grades and when it was appropriate to establish a community high school rather than send students to a regional school. Each committee operated autonomously, as the following example reveals. In 1978 when the Kativik School Board made plans to build a secondary school in Dorval for students aged sixteen or over, the majority of school committees agreed with its decision. However, the committee representing Kuujjuak dissented, believing that building a school in the

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south would delay construction of one in the north and would not reduce the already high dropout rate. The discussion carried on all day until a consensus was reached by those who attended the meeting.36 They agreed to begin construction of two high schools: one in the village of Kuujjuak and the other in Dorval. During this phase of development, Kativik School Board commissioners decided to locate their administrative offices in the south – initially in Dorval, later in ndg – to be close to the provincial government, which allocated resources for the physical development of the school system. Commissioners decided to remain near the centre of power until all of their schools had been constructed. A number of feasibility studies recommended relocation, and a site for the new administrative buildings was selected democratically. Despite this and despite the great deal of time spent discussing this matter at the Council of School Commissioners and in communities across the north, the school board office remained in Montreal. The 1992 the Nunavik Educational Task Force on Education condemned this inertia and understood it as symptomatic of the Kativik School Board’s ambivalence towards a full commitment to a new way of providing education. The Cree School Board chose a different path. With decentralization, it moved its administration building from Val d’Or to Mistissini, necessitating the construction of a new centre; it chose to place its pedagogical services in Chisasibi. Moreover, Cree secondary-school students no longer had to leave the James Bay region to attend high school. Students from the coastal villages of Whapmagoostui, Wemindji, and Eastmain travelled and boarded in the community of Chisasibi, which had the only high school in the region. Inuit students were not so fortunate. Initially, to prepare for postsecondary education, they had to attend the Kativik Senior Education Centre in Dorval for an upgrading program. This required them to leave their families and communities. They faced challenges their Cree counterparts did not. For these Inuit students, the disaffection was so great that most returned to the north before completing their studies. With the establishment of these programs in secondary schools in the north, dropout rates improved, but not significantly. This prompted a re-evaluation of the quality of education and of what had to be changed to promote success. The Inuit concluded that the school board was the cause of the problems. In its report, Silaturnirmut: The Pathway to Wisdom, the Nunavik Educational Task Force called for a complete overhaul of the Kativik School Board. Although such an overhaul did not take place, a consultation committee – Satuigiarniq – was established to confer with each community to determine what kind of education it wanted for its children. After extensive consultation, edu-

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cators were to devise a curriculum, based on the information gathered by this process, that would satisfy all of the Inuit communities. The Cree focused on the role of parents in education and on the need to encourage them to become more involved in their local schools. School committee members, educators, community leaders, and school board officials representing both the Cree and the Inuit expressed consternation over what they perceived as low levels of parental involvement in children’s schooling. This lack of involvement, they argued, adversely affected children and resulted in chronic problems of tardiness, absenteeism, high dropout rates, poor academic achievement, and behaviour problems. School committees had difficulty recruiting parents as committee members; it was even a battle getting them to attend meetings, to elect committee members, and to appear at school activities that had been jointly organized by the school committees, teachers, and students. To encourage greater involvement, some committees resorted to innovative measures to attract parents to their meetings: they held supper meetings, distributed boarding cheques on the night of the meeting, gave mugs to the first twenty people who attended, asked native leaders to declare educational matters a priority in communities, and organized social activities for school committee members to reinforce their relationships.37 It seemed to many, however, that the more they talked about these problems, the less engaged the parents became. Although the frustration of officials is understandable, the problem surely had much to do with the north’s particular educational legacy. Many parents felt disconnected from their community schools, their attitude coloured by their own experiences and by their perception that schools were intimidating and unwelcoming institutions, especially if staffed even in part by non-native teachers. The culture of being away from their communities for long periods, to pursue traditional activities in the bush or on the land, did not lend itself to involvement in institutions. Even so, the records of board and committee meetings reveal that some parents did take an interest, even an active interest, in community schools. Parents complained that the quality of education their children received was inadequate, that homework should be assigned, and that students who moved from native to southern schools seemed unprepared for the academic workload. In an attempt to improve matters, parents signed petitions and even boycotted schools. They demanded that new schools be built, that old ones be expanded or renovated, and that higher grades be introduced. Parents who lived on the James Bay coast, but whose children attended high school in Chisasibi, complained that these adolescents were not receiving adequate attention or access to services.38 Parents objected if they felt their children were be-

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ing mistreated or neglected by teachers; if problems were left unaddressed, they refused to allow their children to attend classes until matters improved. In one case in Mistissini, parents were dismayed by the constant turnover of staff in a particular Grade 5 class, and sent a letter to the school committee with the following ultimatum: school officials had until the end of the month to recruit a suitable teacher and substitute or the parents would refuse to send their children to school. They also threatened to institute legal action against the teachers, school administrators, and the school board.39 Others requested professional help for their children to deal with problems at school. Some parents sent their children to high schools outside Cree communities or enrolled them in southern post-secondary institutions where they could get what they perceived to be a better education. Inuit parents of teenagers who attended the Kativik Senior Education Centre in Dorval had other worries: in a letter addressed to the commissioner in the village of Tasiujaq, two residents complained that, contrary to what had been promised, they had not received any information from the school regarding their children’s progress. Without a telephone service, they had resorted to listening to the cbc northern service for information.40 Parents also served as school commissioners and were employed as administrators and resource persons in the culture program, as well as providing a host of support services. One area of particular tension was the presence of non-native teachers, upon whom both school boards depended to educate Cree and Inuit students. Problems were plentiful: high turnover, inexperience, multigraded classrooms, inadequate teaching materials, absenteeism due to burnout and a battery of other health problems, and an inadequate supply of substitute teachers. Such problems created conflicts among parents, school committees, school board, and teachers. In Nunavik, teachers worried about being dismissed for inadvertently offending a member of the community and were dubious about some of the committee members’ ability to grasp the complexities of educational matters over which they had jurisdiction. Some teachers refused to carry out decisions that had been made by school committees. For instance, two-thirds of the staff at the Mistissini high school were opposed to singing the national anthem and reciting the Lord’s Prayer each morning as mandated by the school committee.41 Nevertheless, all parties recognized that good community-teacher relations were crucial if children were to succeed. Native communities also felt that teachers needed to be more involved in community life. In Whapmagoostui, for instance, the school committee argued that teachers were often unaware of their students’ background and home situation and of how these contributed to behaviour problems at school.42 Some teachers, by

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contrast, went to the other extreme, blurring the boundaries of responsibility by sitting on school committees. In Chisasibi, members of the teaching staff – including its union representative, who acted as chair – were elected to the James Bay Eeyou school committee. Commissioners argued that this practice undermined the original purpose of school committees and created a conflict of interest by providing school-board employees with the opportunity to control the decision-making process that affected them.43 Life was not easy for non-native teachers in these communities. Some of them exhibited poor teaching skills, cultural insensitivity, and an inability to control their classes or to supervise students adequately. Many had little contact with the community, or if they did, failed to respect the appropriate chain of command. One teacher publicly complained about the school to members of the community without first having voiced these concerns to the principal. Others were unprepared for life in small northern communities and brought with them personal problems that were exacerbated by the isolation. Complaints about working and living conditions could even lead to informal strikes. Fed up with deteriorating housing in Chisasibi, teachers demonstrated in protest. The commissioners declared the strike illegal, and the time that they spent on the picket lines was deducted from their pay.44 Most teachers, however, worked hard under conditions for which they were unprepared, and integrated well into community life. Even so, nonnative teachers tended to leave after one or two years in the north. Native teachers also resorted to criticism of the conditions under which they worked. They argued that too much was expected of them, that there was never enough of them, and that they had to teach without adequate time, space, resources, and materials; all this diminished the effectiveness of cultural programs and, to a lesser extent, Cree and Inuktitut language instruction. Inuit elders criticized course content that did not include all the skills needed for survival on the land and the allotment of class time to cultural programs. They also complained that classes were mixed with non-Inuit pupils who could not speak Inuktitut.45 In their opinion, culture classes needed to be taken out of the classroom and put “on the land” where learning to survive helped students to “overcome the difficulties with intelligence, ingenuity, patience, courage, cheerfulness, and cooperation.”46 Like their nonnative counterparts, culture teachers resigned from their teaching posts in protest. The school boards contended that underfunding of native teacher-training and specialist-training programs had hindered their task of hiring additional native teachers.47 School committees also complained that certain native teachers were either unqualified or incompetent and lacked any incentive to upgrade their teaching skills;

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others had personal difficulties that interfered with their effectiveness as teachers. Inuit elders argued that lack of community support for teachers contributed to the high turnover.48 School boards and school committees searched for solutions to these problems. To improve communication between parents and the schools, administrators and school committee members initiated a number of strategies, such as using cbc radio to inform parents about disciplinary problems and encouraging elders to play a greater role in the schools. When he was principal at the Voyageur Memorial School, George Blacksmith invited Mistissini elders into the school as traditional counsellors. With improved communication between the school and the parents, disciplinary problems decreased.49 This same school, under a different administration, sought to reduce attendance problems by initiating a zero tolerance policy for lateness and absenteeism with a set of consequences if students did not attend classes. Some parents in the community denounced the rigidity of this strategy. Another tactic was to quite literally bring the problem home. At the Waswanipi school, administrators decided to deal with student absenteeism by suspending offenders. As they kept sending students home, parents became angry with school authorities, but the situation improved.50 Cree school principals also recommended introducing a modular system at the secondary level, so that students could earn credits for the subjects they passed and not fail the school year because they did not succeed in all subjects. Such a system would also help in the evaluation of language acquisition skills and encourage parental involvement, thereby improving the quality of education and promoting student success.51 Similarly, teachers working in Nunavik recommended that a semester system be instituted, so that students who did not complete the year could return to repeat a semester rather than the entire school year.52 Others argued that young people’s attitudes and behaviour were not only a school problem but also a community one. Children who stayed up too late at pool halls and small stores had difficulty getting up in the morning and usually did poorly in school.53 Boards turned to community leaders to address the young about issues such as teen suicide, substance abuse, violence, the high dropout rate, and the low numbers pursuing post-secondary education. In communities across the north, school committees and teachers made a concerted effort to work as partners to resolve these problems and to foster innovative ways to engage students more effectively at the school. The Mistissini school committee, for instance, organized a forum for students so they could talk about their concerns and about their relations with teachers.54 They sought novel ways to attract students to class: they organized class trips, rewarded successful students,

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instituted programs to reduce the incidence of violence at the school, and worked to improve the physical condition of buildings and playgrounds to make them more conducive to learning. School committees asked for music programs, scheduled youth cultural festivals, and set up foster programs for students whose parents went into the bush or on the land to pursue traditional activities. School committee members recognized the value of improving their relationships with each other and with non-native teachers and organized teacher orientation dinners for new staff, mid-semester potluck suppers, farewell parties for departing staff, and other social activities.

Both school boards faced tremendous challenges following the signing of the jbnqa. In preparing their youth for the realities of a rapidly changing society, they needed to design a school system that would educate Cree and Inuit children for the demands of contemporary Quebec within the context of aboriginal cultures. Commissioners were placed in the unenviable position of having to learn on the job, while depending on a handful of native community leaders and on non-native pedagogical and administrative experts. Each school board had to manage an education system that covered a large territory made up of isolated communities, each with its own distinct needs. These villages were distinguished by different levels of development and different demands for teaching materials, staff, and multilingual and multicultural education for the communities’ native and non-native children. School boards had to deal with the provincial government in ways far beyond those of their southern counterparts. Like all school boards in Quebec, the Cree and Inuit commissioners had to follow the Ministry of Education’s curriculum, but unlike the others, they had to negotiate their budgets to provide myriad costly services to their constituencies. As in any complex relationship, a number of factors affected these negotiations between the aboriginal school boards and government officials. From the beginning of this venture, parents were expected to take on the responsibilities of running school committees – an overwhelming task. Nevertheless, Cree and Inuit parents were very sure that they wanted to make aboriginal language and culture not only integral to local education but also a part of everyday society, despite the onslaught of English (and, to a lesser extent, French) from outside their communities. This philosophy was at the heart of their decision-making. They decided when and how to introduce native language and culture into their schools, sometimes without the benefit of formally trained native teachers. They decided how to provide community teacher training to meet the school’s most immediate needs. They de-

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cided when to start second and third language instruction, and how to design a culturally sensitive and relevant curriculum given the complexities of their society. They also had to take into consideration the intricacies of human relations: how to engage their children in this system, how to effectively deal with the school board when setting priorities and making requests for resources, and how to reduce the high turnover of teachers by encouraging them to remain in their community rather than leave after a year or two. School committees confronted serious social and health problems such as teen suicide, substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancies, and obesity, all of which affected the student population and the culture of their schools. In the face of growing criticism of native students’ lacklustre showing in provincial exams, poor school attendance, low numbers pursuing post-secondary education, and growing behaviour problems in the classroom, both school boards agreed to undergo an internal and external examination of their education systems. The Kativik School Board provided half the funds for the Nunavik Educational Task Force; the Cree School Board hired experts to make an internal examination of their departments and sponsored education conferences in each Cree community. Notwithstanding serious problems in their schools, both the Cree and the Inuit made great strides within a relatively short period. They constructed elementary and secondary schools, often where none had existed, integrated native language and culture programs into curricula, established second and third language sectors, and increased the number of high school and post-secondary graduates.

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Conclusion Strange Bedfellows: The Imposition of Linguistic Boards He deplored the fact that the children of this Province still continue to be taught in two separate camps. He hoped to see the day when every child, irrespective of creed, race, or colour, might enjoy the privileges of a sound secular education, free as the air he breathed. Report of the address given by Principal Gilmour on the laying of the cornerstone of the Longueuil school, 19031

The end of confessional school boards in Quebec has turned out to be just the beginning of a difficult debate on what role religion should play in the province’s public school system. Montreal Gazette, Editorial, 3 April 1999

On a late September evening in 1998 a group of men and women met in the music room of Elizabeth Ballantyne School in Montreal West, having been elected members of the school’s governing board the previous week. These eight parents (joined by eight representatives from the school staff) were from a variety of social backgrounds; the school drew pupils from ndg, Côte St Luc, Ville St Pierre, and Lasalle. They also represented a range of ethnic groups: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Greek Orthodox.2 They were united by a common language, English, which was the defining characteristic of the new school commission to which they were responsible: the English Montreal School Board (emsb). But unlike this board, Elizabeth Ballantyne’s governing board was essentially a product of the Protestant school system. Each of its members had served on the local school committee, or in the Home and School association, or both, during the previous few years when the school was under the control of the psbgm. More fundamentally, they believed – perhaps without quite realizing it – in the tenets of

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87 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Montreal West This photo of the entire school population was taken on the occasion of the school’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1997. [Author photo]

Protestant education, whatever their personal religious convictions: a liberal curriculum, with a good deal of flexibility on matters of language instruction, a strong science program, and a broad, inclusive approach to the study of morals and values. Over the following months, these parents spent countless hours wrestling with curriculum changes imposed by the Ministry of Education, including a minimum of two hours of moral and religious education (mre), and a host of changes proposed by the school board, including changes to the permitted time for French language instruction and the elimination of science in the early elementary grades. To these parents, such measures reflected an agenda that was essentially Catholic, or at any rate foreign to their concept of a liberal education. With the creation of governing boards, the wheel had come full circle – with some significant differences. Technically, the governing board is the heir of the school committee, an institution created in the wake of the Quiet Revolution to give the parents at each school an official forum for discussion. More fundamentally, it is the heir of the school board as it was conceived in the 1840s. It was certainly born from a similar desire to allow decision-making at the local level. Early school

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municipalities typically ran a dozen or more schools, of course, but the total population served was no greater than that of most of the province’s elementary schools in the later twentieth century. Like those early bodies, governing boards are elected by local people (not the public at large, although community representatives are encouraged to sit on them) and they are answerable to a higher administrative authority, with which they do not always agree. They have a great deal of power, albeit of a very different sort from that of the early school boards: they are entitled to make major curriculum decisions for the school, such as the number of minutes per week to be devoted to each subject (save for the stipulated minimum two hours of mre). They do not have the power to tax or to hold property or manage money, but they can pressure school boards to fund specific projects and can advise board administrators of necessary repairs to schools. For the most part, however, their powers are greater on paper than in practice: the decisions they are entitled to make are those set by the Ministry of Education and must, within a narrow margin, conform to government expectations. It is arguable that governing boards were created essentially to deflect responsibility from the government for crucial decisions regarding culture and identity. Having legislated away the confessional basis for education, the Quebec government has shown little desire to address the questions that have arisen in the wake of this ruling, preferring to let school boards and communities battle it out. In many ways it is surprising that the shift to linguistic boards has resulted in so many problems. Over the past several decades a great many people have argued that language, and not religion, is a natural fault line within Quebec society and that institutions should reflect this division. Certainly Quebec political discourse during this period has concentrated overwhelmingly on linguistic differences and the rights of one group over another, and education has clearly been at the heart of this issue. Contrary to popular wisdom, however, the “English” of the new English school boards is an artificial construction, pushing together two traditions that are all but incompatible, despite much desire for cooperation. Quebec’s history shows that, at least until the second half of the twentieth century, the identification of Protestantism with Britishness and Anglo-Saxon attitudes was as significant a social divider as the language one spoke – perhaps considerably more so. Until that time, the difference between Protestant and Catholic forms of education would have been obvious – as obvious as the difference between two political parties, or between the two sides during the rebellions, or between those who supported conscription and those who opposed it. Since World War II, with the expansion of modern facilities, the accommodation of non-Protestant immigrants, and the secularization of the

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Protestant curriculum, the nature of Protestant education was distinct enough for the shapers of the Quiet Revolution to take careful note. To combine (as legislation did in 1998) the heirs of this tradition with those from the Catholic school system who happened to be Englishspeaking, was to bring together strange bedfellows indeed. The constituency of Quebec’s French-language boards is still in the majority Catholic, whereas the English community is divided among many faiths – a recipe for conflict on the English side. Given the indifference of the French boards and the squabbling within English boards, the legacy of Protestant education has been largely forgotten and its possible benefits to modern Quebec society overlooked.

With Bill 180 (passed in 1998) the Parti Québécois fulfilled the Parent Commission’s recommendations of three decades before to abolish confessional school boards. As a party, it had always been opposed to what it saw as an old-fashioned education system, which was in keeping with its social democratic roots. As an alternative, it had always espoused the creation of separate French and English boards, which was somewhat less in keeping with its nationalist program, which most anglophones saw as anti-English. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the party’s policy on the right to English-language education was to acknowledge it, albeit in a very restricted way, and so limit its influence. “Protestant” education was obviously a much more ambiguous term than “English-language” education, and so therefore less manageable. Having made one unsuccessful attempt to reform the school-board structure in the 1980s during its first period in office, the Parti Québécois moved cautiously after being elected again in 1994. Rather than launch into aggressive legislation, the government commissioned an Estates-general on Education to study the current situation, much as had been done in the Protestant system a century earlier under Adams and during the Depression under Hepburn. In anticipation of the report of the Estates-general in 1996, Education Minister Pauline Marois drafted an overhaul of education that would encompass a variety of schooling options, without requiring constitutional changes. This proposal was soon withdrawn after complaints that too many options would create confusion without solving the fundamental problem (as many saw it) of a school system mired in sectional division and plagued with inefficiency. The proposal did serve to rekindle the idea of linguistic boards in the popular imagination – which proved convenient a few months later in October 1996 when the Estates-general reported that linguistic boards should be universally implemented and that a constitutional amendment should be sought to achieve this.

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This course of action delighted many but horrified others. Most people in Quebec, if they thought about it at all, were probably pleased at the prospect of all school boards providing more or less the same type of education, albeit in two languages. Few francophones were concerned with the impending change, largely because it essentially promised to give the school system they knew a more appropriate name. As the issue of the place of religion in the classroom was not addressed by the proposed legislation, even devout Catholics had no reason to feel their children would be deprived of an appropriate form of instruction under linguistic boards. The same was true for English-speaking Catholics, towards whom Protestant school boards had been welcoming in the past, even to the point of offering religious education. While they were keen to maintain a Catholic form of education for their children, most English Catholics were chiefly concerned with creating common anglophone institutions. Protestants, however, had larger concerns. Many were conscious of the lessons learned in the wake of the Quiet Revolution: Englishlanguage boards could be marginalized or their members left to bicker among themselves (as would be all but inevitable given the distinct educational traditions that divided Catholic and Protestant anglophones), while the government was at liberty to determine educational policy without the limitations of constitutional guarantees. Others in the Protestant camp were worried that linguistic boards would mean an end to the liberal approach to education that even the Superior Court had found was characteristic of the Protestant school system, especially since the trend in current political discourse was to cater to the demands of many, if not all, religious groups. At the same time, the rapidly growing numbers of French-speaking Protestants (most of them evangelical in outlook) were loath to be lumped in with French boards, whom they suspected would have little sympathy for their needs. For many the constitutional amendment itself was the greatest assault: it was morally wrong, they argued, for rights that had been enshrined for 130 years to be abolished at the flick of a pen. Members of all these groups opposed the impending legislation and many openly supported a court challenge launched by the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards. Despite these varied concerns and the widespread opposition, the National Assembly of Quebec voted unanimously in favour of the proposed amendment in April 1997. This meant that the idea had won the approval of opposition parties as well as of the government. It is true that the Liberal party had been in favour of linguistic boards during its period in office in the late 1980s and early 90s and had not substantially changed its outlook. Even so, the lack of any dissenting voices is

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striking, especially when the issue was one of abolishing constitutional rights. A few voices were raised against the proposals in the Canadian Parliament the following November, but the amendment passed by a vote of 204 to 59. For all their efforts, Protestants in Quebec had failed to create the kind of passion about their own rights – to say nothing of their own historical contribution to Quebec education – that could stir their leaders at the national level. To most Canadians, for whom the language of instruction was not an issue, the direction in which the Quebec government was heading seemed entirely appropriate. It even appeared to diminish the sense that Quebec was somehow “distinct,” a phrase that particularly rankled in other parts of Canada. Within Quebec’s boundaries, the prospect of change itself seemed a welcome opportunity for reforming various aspects of education. Many people were understandably frustrated by the variety of school boards operating in Quebec in the 1990s – rather as Percival was frustrated by the chaotic multiplicity of boards over half a century earlier. The reforms of the early 1970s had left some Protestant schools controlled by regional boards, some by sector boards, and some by combinations of the two, while two Protestant boards remained dissentient. (A third remaining dissentient board, Greenfield Park, was Catholic.) In many areas the relationship between sector boards and regional boards was similar to that between local boards and central boards in the 1940s (and in Montreal between 1925 and 1973): the smaller unit would raise taxes and handle buildings and repairs, while the larger unit would make the pedagogical decisions. In the Gaspé peninsula, for example, the Bonaventure sector board (composed of Matapedia, Chaleur Bay, and New Richmond) and the Gaspé sector board (composed of the Protestant communities at the head of the peninsula) deferred to the Gaspesia Regional Board (based in the town of Gaspé) in all matters of educational importance. The same was true for the Northwestern Quebec, Greater Hull, and Pontiac boards, who delegated these major responsibilities to the Western Quebec Regional School Board, which operated out of the old Aylmer Academy building. Arrangements could be even more complicated: on the South Shore, the St Lawrence School Board and the South Central School Board had agreed to let the South Shore Regional Board handle all pedagogical matters, but the Richelieu Valley School Board retained control over its elementary schools while delegating control of secondary schools to the regional board, which was the way the relationship had been originally intended.3 In almost all cases the regional-sector board distinction was simplified over the years leading up to 1998, but there were still anomalies. Because the Protestant status of the Greater Quebec School Board had

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been established by law (along with that of Montreal) it could not merge with other boards without constitutional change. Its members, along with those of the Eastern Quebec Regional Board and the St Maurice Protestant Board, all of whom met separately, jointly employed a single director general, secretary general, and administrative staff, who worked out of a single building in the suburb of Sillery.4 Two dissentient boards, in Ste Agathe (known as Laurentienne) and Baie Comeau, also survived to 1998. The trustees of Ste Agathe des Monts had resisted the push to join the regional board in 1964 and send all its senior pupils to Lachute; they also resisted the push to join a sector board in 1972. Instead, they negotiated with the local Catholic board, agreeing to provide bus service for English Catholic children in return for tuition.5 The Ste Agathe municipality had the advantage of a solid revenue, thanks to the high-priced vacation properties within its boundaries. The same could not be said for Baie Comeau; it was able to withstand pressure to merge with larger boards because it was the only show in town – and in most of that part of the Lower North Shore – for English-speaking children. Over half the population of the school in Ste Agathe was Catholic; only seven pupils out of 131 in the Baie Comeau High School were Protestant in 1991. With a stroke of a pen, the new English boards formed in 1998 resolved these anomalies. Without its former confessional status, the Greater Quebec School Board could be merged with the others it was already sharing office space with, to form the Central Quebec School Board, which now takes in English-speaking children from a huge territory extending from Trois Rivières to Métis Beach and from Chicoutimi to Thetford Mines. Baie Comeau, Port Cartier, Sept Iles, and much of the Lower North Shore were lumped in with the Gaspé peninsula to form what was called the Eastern Shores School Board, with its head office back in the region’s old centre of English life, New Carlisle. This arrangement may have looked good on paper – Baie Comeau is only 200 km from New Carlisle, as the crow flies – but the problems of administering a territory stretching over vast tracts of forest and miles of open water has put considerable strain on a school board serving only 1,800 pupils; flying the commissioners in for a single monthly board meeting can cost more than $7,000.6 The Laurenval School Board, itself a 1979 amalgamation (the board and the word) of the Laurenvale and Laval boards, absorbed both the Laurentian board (serving the Argenteuil) and the trustees of Ste Agathe. For the latter no arrangement could be made this time to retain a semblance of autonomy, except by holding tenaciously onto its school-board records. But the creation of linguistic boards was considerably more than yet another milestone in board consolidation. The territory of many

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boards changed very little, but the process of separating out French Protestants and English Catholics could be positively Byzantine. On the South Shore, for example, the Protestant board served almost as many French pupils as it did English ones, and most schools had a fair distribution of the two groups; at the same time, relatively few Catholic children attended these schools. As a result, large numbers of children who had been going to one school in the spring of 1998 were obliged to move to another the following autumn, even though the original school had the facilities for educating them in French; in many cases this meant travelling a greater distance. Some boards had, in effect, been operating a linguistic system for some time, for demographic reasons. The Laurentian board was one of these, serving the English-speaking children of the Argenteuil and virtually no French students. Any possible advantages this board might have enjoyed under the new regime were obviated by its being forcibly merged with Laurenval, a large board that accommodated pupils of both language groups but relatively few Catholics. The two bodies also had very different administrative philosophies: the Argenteuil was still a largely rural area, with Lachute something of a county town, while Laval was sprawling suburbia; the one ran things simply and efficiently, while the other operated at a more hectic pace, with further layers of bureaucracy.7 From the communities’ point of view, the worst part of the changeover was the loss of schools. Buildings that had been constructed by English Protestants, and had become symbols of their community, had to be handed over to a nearby French board. On the South Shore, the Lemoyne-d’Iberville School, heir to the first Protestant school built in Longueuil, was surrendered, as were several elementary schools, including Préville and – most poignantly, given its origins as an English school sanctioned by the Parti Québécois government – St Lawrence. On the West Island, Beaconsfield and Pointe Claire elementary schools became part of the francophone system. The original Protestant school in St Eustache now fell under the wing of the local French board. In Montreal, many Protestant schools with deep roots in their communities were transferred to the new Commission des écoles de Montréal and to the Commission scolaire Marguerite Bourgeois: Guy Drummond, Barclay, Edward VII, Iona, Maisonneuve, Town of Mount Royal High, Outremont High, Dunton High, and of course the école secondaire Roberval. Such transfers were naturally not really losses, as the new English boards were not technically the heirs of Protestant ones, and yet in many areas the process was perceived as one of loss. With the offices of the Western Quebec, Central Quebec, New Frontiers (the Chateauguay valley) and English Montreal school boards located in the buildings that had

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served Protestants, the link was clear, not to mention that the Protestant school records have become the preserve of English school boards. The emsb has been in the unenviable position of also having to hand over schools to the French boards, not because they had been French under the psbgm, but because they were simply too large for the local English population and were needed by the French system. Given this obligation, the choice of which school to hand over has often become a considerable headache for the emsb, vulnerable as it is to accusations from both Protestants and Catholics that it favours one side or the other. In fact, it has a fairly even representation of both traditional groups, its “Protestant” contingent made up, naturally, of members from several religious minorities as well as Protestants. This distribution was not by design, however. The first school-board elections under the new Act in June 1998 saw most school districts contested by candidates representing Protestant and Catholic “factions”; although the actual point of contention was the survival on the new board of what was portrayed as the psbgm’s “old guard,” the opposition was mostly Catholic.8 The prospect of people voting along religious lines was highly ironic, given that critics of confessional boards had argued that it was unseemly in modern society to divide people according to religion. An even greater irony is that public schools are arguing over religion now that religiously oriented schools have been abolished. Education minister Pauline Marois sold Bill 180 to the Quebec public largely with reassurances that the general desire for religious education would be respected and that parents would have a voice in this matter. This promise was in keeping with the letter of the Quebec Charter of Rights, section 41, which asserts that parents “have a right to require that, in the public educational establishments, their children receive a religious or moral education in conformity with their convictions.” Many have interpreted this clause as guaranteeing the right to religious instruction in any faith, at least where numbers render this feasible. In an effort to address the question of religious instruction, the government commissioned a Task Force of the Place of Religion in Schools in Quebec, chaired by University of Montreal Education Professor (and reputedly devoutly Catholic) Jean-Pierre Proulx. Awaiting the report of this task force, the school boards were obliged to provide mre programs based on the existing options: Catholic, Protestant, and moral. The difference was that, now that boards were no longer Protestant or Catholic, all schools had to offer all three options. Given the small enrolment at many English schools, a greater number of options spelled greater administrative headaches when it came to planning timetables.

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In the spring of 1999 the emsb sent parents a questionnaire, done up as an attractive pink brochure, informing them of the choice they must make for their children regarding mre. The choice was between “Catholic Religious and Moral Instruction,” “Moral Education,” and “Protestant Moral and Religious Education.” Other options were not made available. The language of this document speaks volumes about the two confessional traditions. In the choice and order of words, the headings themselves suggest that the Catholic option involved something taught, with religion more significant than moral issues, while the Protestant option, which placed morality before religion, was concerned with learning. The goals of each option differ considerably also: the Catholic choice involved having children “discover a way of living and being human that is inspired by our Catholic heritage,” while the Protestant program “acknowledges the cultural and religious pluralism of our society” and “would develop critical thinking … to help your child discover the religious and moral principles.” The moral option was “not based on any religious tradition. It aims to help your child discover what contributes to his or her well-being and to that of others.”9 The option that would expose children to a variety of religious beliefs was the Protestant one; the Catholic option emphasized the Catholic faith. In theory, those parents wishing their children to be taught the history of religion in a secular context would choose “Protestant,” for “moral” purported not to discuss religion at all. These mre options threatened to strengthen ethnic divisions within schools, rather than smooth them over, particularly in schools with small Catholic or Protestant minorities whose choice had to be accommodated. In Elizabeth Ballantyne School, for example, parents chose the Catholic option for only 14 per cent of the children, versus 32 per cent for Protestant mre and 44 per cent for the moral option (10 per cent did not respond – unhelpfully, to say the least, for the administration). Those who chose “Catholic” were in a minority – but even more so than the number would suggest, as the other two figures effectively represented shades of opinion rather than difference. Indeed, it is likely that a high degree of confusion prevailed within the 76 per cent that voted “Protestant” or “moral” (and no doubt within most if not all of the 10 per cent who did not respond) as to what each option represented: many Protestant parents probably chose “moral” simply because they saw no need for a specifically “Protestant” course, without realizing that what it promised varied little from what their children had been receiving for some years. The disruption caused by having to accommodate these options seemed all the more unwarranted when it was pointed out how well a very mixed population had been served by “Protestant” mre. The principal expressed her frustration in an open

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88 Moral and religious education brochure, English Montreal School Board Brochure sent to parents in the spring of 1999 to inform them of the choices available for mre. [Elizabeth Ballantyne School Archives]

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letter to the parents: “Never in the past have Protestant schools been required to have qualified teachers able to teach the Catholic mre curriculum and never have teachers been asked to teach a Catholic mre program. Due to the diversity of various religious backgrounds,” she added, the school “has offered mre Protestant in combination with the ME curriculum integrated into our Language Arts Program. Therefore, this sudden need has a serious impact on our school.”10 The principal also outlined her dilemma: the only way to accommodate those taking the Catholic option was to put children of six different grades in one class for a two-hour period every week. These students would have to be removed from the regular class for that amount of time, missing out on subjects such as language arts, science, or French.11 Realizing this, many who had opted for the Catholic course complained that, had they known this would be their child’s lot, they would have made a different selection. In the face of these inconsistencies, and in the absence of the Catholic “pastoral animator” that the school board had promised, the administration decided to maintain the status quo for the following September, reserving parents the right to “opt out” of mre altogether, much as had always been done by Catholics whose children had attended Protestant schools.12 Shunting pupils about in this manner not only is unfair to ethnic minorities but also contravenes the Canada Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which sees depriving a child of access to education on religious grounds as a form of discrimination, and forcing a child to sit in the corridor as a form of abuse. To respect the terms of the Canadian Charter, the Quebec government would have been obliged to remove the privileged status of “Catholic” and “Protestant” and provide additional options – or offer none at all. None, arguably, would contravene the letter of the Quebec Charter that gave parents the right to demand that their children receive religious instruction in their own faith. Instead of addressing this contradiction, the Quebec government made use of an override clause in the Canadian Charter that enabled it to preserve the status quo.13 The override clause was to expire in June 1999, by which time the government expected to hear from the Proulx task force on the place of religion in schools. The Proulx Report, issued in March 1999, did not let the government off the hook – far from it. Despite having noted that 72 per cent of Quebec parents stated that they believed public schools should provide religious instruction, the Proulx Report recommended that they not do so as part of the general curriculum. Public education, it suggested, ought to be “unequivocally based on respect for the right to equality and respect for freedom of conscience and religion.” Given the cultural diversity of modern Quebec society, education should be

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neutral on the question of religion: “We have come to the conclusion, that to provide for the full exercise of these rights, Quebec must replace its current denominational school system by a secular school system and consequently redefine the place of religion in schools.”14 The report argued that the government should pass legislation creating a secular school system that would replace the current mre structure with a universal course in religion studied from a cultural and historical perspective. To further this end, the Ministry of Education should introduce the necessary training for teachers and provide “religious and spiritual support services” for all faiths in all schools. Section 41 of the Quebec Charter should be amended in such a way that it would underline parents’ freedom to “ensure the religious and moral education of their children” without reference to their unquestioned right to insist that their children receive it. Such a view was in keeping with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which puts much more emphasis on the rights of children than does its Quebec counterpart. Arguably, these recommendations were more or less in keeping with the Protestant approach to religious education since the 1960s: the “human awareness” answer to mre could safely be labelled as “neutral” insofar as the Proulx Report understood the term. There were, however, no longer any official Protestant bodies to defend this approach. Voices were raised on all sides attacking the idea of suspending confessional instruction: some were eager to defend their historic privileges regarding religion (in the case of Catholic organizations) or to advance their cause (in the case of evangelical Protestants or other, hitherto unrecognized, groups), while others saw the prospect of a government-ordered ban on religion in schools as an opportunity to raise the issue of parents’ rights versus state control. For many, the revolution that Bill 180 set in motion was a long-awaited chance to redress old wrongs and broaden the concept of religious education beyond the status quo, which privileged Catholics and Protestants. What became known as the Rainbow solution to the problem of confessionality advocated a wide range of options wherever numbers warranted, including religious instruction for Jewish, Muslim, and Greek Orthodox students. The Rainbow approach, which follows the letter of section 41 of the Quebec Charter, is in itself a very reasonable and equitable solution to the problem of religion in schools. In practice, however, it fails to satisfy on two broad counts. From the point of view of human rights, having instruction in many faiths available where numbers warrant does not solve the problem of making certain children stand in the corridor: if numbers do not warrant a separate class for Jewish or Muslim or Catholic children, what do they do while the majority of students are at

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mre?15 (One might also question the sincerity of a province’s charter that guarantees parents the right to choose the form of mre their children may have, but does not recognize a parent’s right to choose the language of instruction for their children.) In many parts of Quebec, keeping English schools open is a constant battle; in urban areas schools must even compete with each other for enrolment, with the threat of closure for want of enough pupils always over their heads. Few such schools would have the luxury of being able to offer mre classes in a variety of faiths – unless all such faiths were evenly represented at the school, which is unlikely given the demographic breakdown of much of Montreal. It may not be true, as some argue, that to acknowledge a variety of faiths necessarily fosters ethnic divisions, but having to accommodate numerous conflicting demands in a climate of anxiety lends itself to resentment, which is hardly healthy for pupils or conducive to improved human relations. The other weakness of the Rainbow approach is that it is based on the assumption that every child can be fitted into one faith or another, or into “moral” if no faith is designated. This view does not take the reality of Protestant education into consideration. At almost no time in its history has the Protestant community advocated specific instruction in its own faith, at least in any narrow, denominational way. Protestant mre has been covert, or broad in approach, or both. The “Protestant” option under the Rainbow approach, if it had any meaning at all, would cater to the demands of religiously minded Protestants, especially the growing number of francophone evangelicals. At the same time, the neutral “moral” option is not the same as the existing “Protestant” option, as the emsb’s pink flyer illustrates. The Rainbow solution leaves no room for the liberal approach to religious education that the Superior Court recognized in its 1985 ruling on Bill 3. Outside the classroom this is little appreciated, although with no understanding of the history of Protestant communities in Quebec, well-intentioned people can easily assume that Protestantism is a monolithic cultural block with a clear teachable dogma. For the government to adopt the Rainbow approach would be to deny the validity of the liberal Protestant tradition in favour of a narrow, sectional definition of Protestantism. On the other hand, for the government to maintain the status quo is to preserve the option of studying religion from a broad cultural perspective – and yet, it is also to preserve the notion that this option represents the privileging of one cultural group. This is not to argue that to drop religious education altogether is the best answer. Apart from the 72 per cent of Quebec parents who seem to feel the need for it, there is a sound argument that to consciously avoid any discussion of religion, as American education does, is to deny a crucial aspect of human

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society and to abandon the opportunity to equip children with the means to understand and relate to other cultures. At any rate, the Quebec government has decided to postpone addressing the question of religion in schools altogether by continuing to renew the override clause in the Canadian Charter. Parents of elementary schoolchildren, as well as those of students in the first years of high school, must choose between the same three options that were outlined in the emsb’s pink brochure. The mre question has proved symbolic of the fate of Protestant education. For schools such as Elizabeth Ballantyne and countless others that had been part of the Protestant system, the imposition of linguistic boards resulted in what seemed like unnecessary confusion, to the detriment of good education. Whereas previously the focus was on language arts, math, science, music, and social studies, schools had to cut back on these subjects to make time for mre, traditionally incorporated seamlessly into the Protestant curriculum, but now set by law at two hours a week. In the autumn of 1998 the emsb began to reform its curriculum, which entailed reducing the various programs available to two. The basic variable was the number of hours of French-language instruction, which varied from school to school and entailed children being bused across town to where their needs could be met. Though it seemed to the new school board that this variety meant needless expense on transportation, to individual schools it often meant survival: two schools in the same area offering the same curriculum might not each be able to fill their classrooms with neighbourhood children, but if they offered separate programs each could appeal to a much wider catchment area. For this reason alone, many schools objected to the proposed “harmonization.” Some additional aspects of the reform grated for pedagogical, and therefore implicitly cultural, reasons.16 Parents from formerly Protestant schools noted how much it appeared to conform to the practices of the three formerly Catholic boards that also made up the emsb, and how much it seemed to deviate from their own experience. Nonimmersion Protestant schools had always offered math in English, as the course involved a great deal of word-related problems; now, in both proposed programs math would be taught in French during the early grades – but not, curiously, mre or gym, which seemed better suited to being taught in a second language. More provoking still, science, a crucial part of the Protestant curriculum, would not be taught until Grade 3, and then in French. The same was true of history, geography, and citizenship. In general, the proposal conflicted with what many parents felt was in their children’s best interests and with what many teachers and administrators knew to be effective and efficient

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practices.17 Teachers – via the newly formed Montreal Teachers’ Association – raised their serious concern that increasing the number of hours of French instruction would mean the elimination of many teachers, notably anglophone math teachers.18 Despite the emsb’s concerted effort to convince schools across the city to accept the harmonization plan, arguing that it was important for each community to think in terms of the “good of the whole school board,” many governing boards objected so strongly that the emsb was obliged to concede and offer more than the bare choice it had been advocating.19 This was a small victory for variety over the drive for uniformity that now seemed to characterize every level of bureaucracy. Issues beyond the curriculum arose when formerly Protestant schools found themselves asked to adopt changes that seemed to have been imported from Catholic school-board tradition. Under Catholic school boards, lunch monitors had been unionized, therefore this should be the case for all emsb schools – a development that put many casually employed mothers out of work and significantly raised the costs of most lunch programs.20 Catholic schools generally did not have central libraries, therefore all school libraries should be closed and the books shared among classrooms. (This proposal was quickly withdrawn after a group of 300 parents, students, and librarians angrily confronted the board in the spring of 2000.)21 In reality these were cost-cutting measures previously used by the Montreal Catholic School Commission, which had never been as well funded per capita as the psbgm. Nevertheless, for many Protestant parents, the emsb was clearly not serving their needs and interests. Instead of a function of the community, the school board had become a government agency. The same could certainly be said for governing boards, created as they were to give lip-service to local democracy. Decisions regarding a school’s religious character, which lie technically within the mandate of governing boards, would indeed reflect the wishes of the school community, much as the election of a member of parliament reflects the wishes of his or her constituency. In practical terms, this means that the choice would not reflect the wishes of everyone, and not necessarily even the wishes of the majority but merely of the largest group. If governing boards are ever called upon to choose their schools’ religious orientation, the result might well be greater injustice for minorities than any attempt to provide a variety of religious options would entail – and yet the government would be able to wash its hands of the matter. It is in the interest of everyone concerned with having a fair and pluralistic society that schools not be obliged to make such a decision. Eventually, governing boards may also be used as part of a strategy to abolish school boards altogether; the more that boards become mere

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vehicles for educational policy, the more they become redundant, and with governing boards established at the local level the need for large, democratically elected bodies is less obvious. In this light, it is important for governing boards to retain as much independence as possible; they have the potential to serve as a genuine voice for the school community. Like the old school commissions, some governing boards are factious bodies arguing over details and achieving little, but others are models of co-operative endeavour with efficient subcommittees to deal with specific concerns, from public relations to curriculum to the regulation of outside agencies operating within the school, such as the Home and School associations. It is true that members of governing boards often have very little experience and a great deal of responsibility, but the same was true for the early Protestant school boards – such is the nature of democracy, however imperfect. Given that they represent parents, rather than communities per se, it is probably a good thing that governing boards do not have the power to raise revenues; for schools to compete for ratepayers’ dollars would mean the privatization of education. Even so, in an age where school boards have been consolidated beyond the grasp of most parents, governing boards have become the decision-making institutions that assemble once again at the heart of the community.

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Notes

introduction 1 wqsba, Minutes of the Pontiac Protestant School Municipality, 31 August 1972. 2 Audet, Le système scolaire de la Province de Québec, vols 1–6; Educateurs: parents, maîtres; and Histoire du Conseil de l’instruction publique de la province de Québec, 1856–1964. 3 Others include Arnopoulos and Clift, The English Fact in Quebec and the collection edited by Caldwell and Waddell, The English of Quebec from Majority to Minority Status. In a similar vein, Milner writes an unapologetic political interpretation of education, The Long Road to Reform, wherein he defends the educational reform initiatives of the Parti Québécois government under Réné Lévesque to deconfessionalize the public school systems. His quarrel, which originated from a personal experience with the schooling of his children, is really with the Catholic school system; the Protestant education system, he contends, was secular in its practice. 4 See for example Finley, “The Bi-Religious Basis of Québec’s Public School System.” A number of masters’ theses deal with aspects of Protestant education, most written by students in education at McGill University: Ross, “The Jew in the Educational System of the Province of Quebec”; Dowd, “The First County Central School Board in Quebec; Burdett, “The High School for Girls, Montreal, 1875–1914”; Neil, “A History of Physical Education in the Protestant Schools of Quebec”; and Drummond, “From Autonomous Academy to Public High School: Quebec English Protestant

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5 6 7 8 9

10

Education, 1829–1889”. See also the MA thesis by Lapicerella, “Le Groupe anglophone du Québec et l’éducation, 1840–1870.” See Fahmy-Eid and Dumont, Maîtresses de maison, maîtresses d’école and Les couventines: l’éducation des filles au Québec. Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, 338. Lawr and Gidney, “Who Ran the Schools?”; Gidney and Millar, “From Voluntarism to State Schooling.” Dufour, Tous à l’école, 22. Little, Crofters and Habitants, 219–45. See also “School Reform and Community Control in the 1840s.”; “Labouring in a Great Cause”; and “The Demise of Voluntarism: School Reform to 1846” in his book, State and Society in Transition, 171–201. Although correspondence with the school board reveals rich information about the relationships between parents, teachers, and the trustees and commissioners, they unfortunately have not usually been preserved. Some letters sent to the Lachine School Board are available at the McGill University Archives. They cover a variety of topics and include letters sent by parents during the 1930s asking to have their children’s school fees reduced or stopped and providing reasons for their requests.

chapter one 1 mua, rg4, c. 67, Letter from the people of Frelighsburg to the Royal Institution, 9 July 1832. 2 For details on the Cushing family, see Dresser, “Early Days in Shipton” and “History of Education in Richmond and Adjacent Districts,” 44–7. 3 One of the most quoted authors on Quebec education, Roger Magnuson, claims that the Royal Institution was handicapped by having to rely on “the cooperation of the local population” (A Brief History of Quebec Education, 20). This is to assume that education is always imposed from above, rather than demanded from below. 4 The emphasis here should be on the word “permanent.” The stone church on St Gabriel Street survived until the twentieth century. Other, less permanent structures were also built at this time. Reputedly, the “first Protestant bell to be heard in Canada” was the one at Christ Church in Sorel, a 35’ × 45’ wooden building put up in October 1790 by the Anglican Loyalists settled there since the American Revolution. See McCaw, “Refugees on the Last Frontier,” 40. 5 Watson, Protestants in Montreal, 19. 6 Campbell, A History of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, St Gabriel Street, Montreal, 205. 7 Annett, “British Influence in Gaspesia,” 51.

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notes to pages 29–44 • 419 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Little, Ethno-cultural Transition and Regional Identity, 6. McIntoch, “The Palatines: Some Missisquoi ‘Dutch’,” 48. Barry, A History of Megantic County, 40–1. Bouchette, A Topographical Description, 259. Gaffield et al., History of the Outaouais, 128ff. Noel, Competing for Souls, 22, 49–62. Harris and Healy, “Richmond Hill,” 183. It is perhaps misleading to refer to such schools as “private,” as, for example, Brown does in Schooling in the Clearings; such a term implies a far greater distinction between certain types of schools than contemporary people would have made. Keeping a school going was the issue, not how this was done. Sellar, The History of the County of Huntingdon, 311, 374, 461. Cleveland, A Sketch of the Early Settlement of Shipton. The industriousness of Scots formed part of local (Protestant) legend. According to the late nineteenth-century local historian Colin Dewar, the French inhabitants of the Argenteuil manufactured potash until the Scots arrived and cleared the land of trees, thereby forcing them to turn to agriculture; quoted in Thomas, History of the Counties of Argenteuil, 63–4. Boulianne, The Royal Institution: Correspondence, 322. See also Bouchette, A Topographical Description, 110. Thomas, History of the Counties of Argenteuil, 58. Boulianne, 271. mua, rg4, c. 69: Conveyance of land by the Royal Institution to Samuel Hill et al., 29 August 1848. Information on government-funded schools (including those of the Royal Institution) provided in this section is taken from Boulianne. For Montreal and Quebec, see pp. 400 and 1152. See also Bosworth, Hochelaga Depicta, 136. Letter, Benjamin Hobson to Joseph Mills, 6 June 1820. Reprinted in Annett, “Gaspé of Yesterday,” The Spec, 23 March 1979. Brown, Schooling in the Clearings, 48–9, Appendix A1. Boulianne, 1243. mua, rg4, c. 70, Letter of 2 July 1850. Boulianne, 432; Gravel, Histoire de la commission scolaire du Sault-SaintLouis, 22ff. Boulianne, 323. St James Anglican Church, Port Daniel, One Hundred Years of Witness, 11. Boulianne, 498, 738. Frost, McGill University for the Advancement of Learning, 50 ff. Boulianne, 597. Boulianne, 1038. Boulianne, 1036, 1094. Boulianne, 775.

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420 • notes to pages 44–56 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Boulianne, 500. Boulianne, 326. Archambault et al., Inverness, 31. Armstrong, Clarendon and Shawville, 25. Armstrong, 42, 95. Pontiac Archive, Minutes of a Meeting of the Heads of Families, School District #2, Minutes of the School Trustees of the Township of Clarendon, 2 December 1830. William IV, cap. XXVI (25 February 1832), section 8. mua, rg4, c. 67, Letters from the people of Gaspé (14 August 1832) and Ascot (16 August 1832). mua, rg4, c. 67, Letter from the people of Mount Johnson, 10 December 1832. mua, rg4, c. 67, Letter from the people of Drummondville, 11 December 1832. mua, rg4, c. 67, Letter from the people of Abbottsford, 12 July 1832. mua, rg4, c. 69, Letter from George Heath to Burrage, 27 May 1845. nfsba, Minute Books of the School Commissioners of the Township of Hemmingford, 14 December 1842.

c ha pt e r t wo 1 nfsba, Minute Books of the School Commissioners of the Township of Hemmingford, 14 December 1842. 2 1851 Canada East census for Hemmingford. As there is another, much younger, Leon Lalanne (not a son of the commissioner) buried in the Hemmingford Catholic Cemetery, it is possible that Commissioner Lalanne was a French-Canadian Catholic who had married into a Methodist family and converted. Lalanne died in 1848 but his widow and two daughters are listed in the 1851 census as Methodists. It is also likely that the Lalanne family were originally Huguenots or Swiss. 3 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 22 June 1844. 4 The inquiry into the school situation was handled by Durham’s assistant, Arthur Buller. For a more complete treatment of the process of forming the report, see Curtis, “The State of Tutelage in Lower Canada, 1835–1851.” 5 Little, State and Society in Transition, 177. 6 Charland, “Le réseau d’enseignement public bas-canadien.” 7 Little has studied several Eastern Townships communities during this period, as well as St Armand (“School Reform and Community Control in the 1840s”) – all places where ethnic and religious unrest seems to have been relatively minor. 8 Somerville, Hemmingford Then and Now, 118. 9 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 1 February 1843.

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notes to pages 56–65 • 421 10 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, table compiled 14 December 1842. 11 Three were “new districts,” – presumably areas with relatively new settlement. District No. 8 had two schools. 12 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 14 January 1843. 13 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, Visitors’ reports of 1 February 1843. 14 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford: letter, William Barrett et al. to Sir Charles Metcalfe, 26 December 1843. 15 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 8 June 1844. 16 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 20 May and 6 October 1845. 17 For a discussion of the impact of school inspectors on the administration of schooling and on the literature surrounding the topic, see Little, “Labouring in a Great Cause.” 18 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, Visitors’ reports of 1 February 1843. 19 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 30 June 1845 and 6 October 1845. 20 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 5 August and 2 September 1844. 21 nfsba, Minute Books, Annual Report for the Township of Hemmingford for the year 1843. 22 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 12 September 1846. 23 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 20 October and 24 November 1845. 24 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 22 June 1844. 25 anq-q, e13, no. 541, Letter, William Barrett et al. to Meilleur, 3 May 1847. 26 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 26 December 1844, 24 November 1845, 21 April 1847. 27 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 20 April 1844. 28 mua, rg4, c. 69, Letter, George Milne to Burrage, 12 March 1846. 29 mua, rg4, c. 69, Letter, Meilleur to Burrage, 8 June 1848. The reluctance or indifference of the Royal Institution must be seen in the context of the widespread political and economic uncertainty of the later 1840s, a time in which property relations were undergoing crucial change. The Royal Institution, for one, was largely unsure of its own claim to its properties, even McGill University. 30 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 14 December 1842. 31 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 12 September 1846. 32 nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 12–18 October and 23 November 1846.

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422 • notes to pages 65–80 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 58

nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 14 January 1850. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 12 November 1849. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 15 December 1849. See Nelson, “Rage against the Dying of the Light.” etsba (Richmond), Minute Books of the School Commissioners of the Township of Melbourne: letter, Chairman W. Lloyd to Meilleur, 13 June 1851. anq-q, e13, no. 1074: Letter, Lloyd et al. to Meilleur, 10 July 1851. etsba (Richmond), Minute Books, Township of Melbourne, 12 September 1849, 7 July 1851; Letter, W. Lloyd to the Earl of Elgin, 28 July 1851. etsba (Richmond), Minute Books, Township of Melbourne, W. Lloyd to the Reverend W. Falloon, 9 September 1851. For discussion of the bna School Society and of the Anglican church militant in Canada during the 1840s, see Moir, The Church in the British Era, 162–4; see also Hunte, The Development of the System of Education in Canada East, 1841–1867, 40 ff. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 4 February 1845. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 12 September 1844. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 6 October 1845. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 24 November 1845. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 2 April 1846. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 30 June 1846. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 21 April 1847 and 19 May 1848. nfsba, Minute Books, Township of Hemmingford, 10 May and 26 June 1847. anq-q, e13, no. 1453, 16 December 1853. Somerville, 126. Report of the Superintendent of Education for Lower Canada for 1850–51, 10–23. Only one, and it was Protestant (Milton). The statistics for these counties are from Noel, Competing for Souls, 238–9. Moir, The Church in the British Era, 178f. Hunte, The Development of the System of Education, 175, 181. Hunte, The Development of the System of Education, 186. Mair, Protestant Education in Quebec, 33.

chapter three 1 Jodoin and Vincent, Histoire de Longueuil, 446–9, 484. The information on Robert Cross comes from the 1842 census. 2 There is much evidence of Protestant representation on school boards in majority Catholic areas. Correspondence with the Royal Institution re-

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notes to pages 82–5 • 423

3

4

5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12

questing the return of school property was signed by all five commissioners, and many of the names are English. In the request from the Parish of Ste Brigide in Rouville, for example, William McGinn and Robert Hanna’s names appear alongside those of Henri Lasonde, Damasse Reuville, and Louis Bourdon (the chairman), while in the letter from St Jean sur Richelieu the name of the Protestant minister William Dawes appears below that of the Catholic priest Charles Laroque. These and other examples, significantly, date from the late 1840s. At that time school municipalities were requesting the return of property from the Royal Institution, but most dissentient boards had not been created. Even so, it would seem that in the wake of the 1845 and 1846 Education Acts, areas with Catholic majorities commonly elected one or more Protestants to the school board. mua, rg4, c. 69: Deed of Conveyance from the Royal Institution to the school commissioners of the Parish of Ste Brigide, 4 August 1847; Assignment of land from the Royal Institution to the school commissioners of the Parish of St John, 27 June 1846. rsba, Minute Books, Trustees of the Dissentient School of the Parish of L’Acadie, 1 July 1848. This entry lists the names of the original dissenters and the valuation of their properties. Report of the Superintendent of Education for Lower Canada for 1850–51, 10–23. The report lists schools run by dissentient boards but does not mention whether they are Protestant or Catholic. In most cases school-board records and other documents make it clear which group would have been in the minority, but failing this, one must assume that dissenters in a municipality with a French or Catholic name, or in an area with sparse British settlement, were Protestant. anq-q, e13, no. 412, Letter, school trustees of New Glasgow to Meilleur, 13 Nov 1843. Boulianne, The Royal Institution: Correspondence, 369. The Belle Rivière dissentient board was created in 1852: swlsba, Minute Books, Belle Rivière/St Scholastique School Board, 2 May 1855. mua, rg4, c. 70, Memorandum pertaining to a court case involving the two boards, c. 1860. rsba, Minute Books, Town and Parish of Longueuil, 29 August 1894. mua, rg4, c. 69, Letter, A. Duranceau to Meilleur, 8 October 1845; Draft of a deed of assignment by the Royal Institution to the school commissioners of the parish of St Michel de Lachine, 13 March 1946. mua, rg4, c. 69, Letter from Robert Buchanan et al. to Burrage, 2 July 1850. mua, rg4, c. 69, Don Gratuit, 21 September 1850. mua, rg4, c. 69, The Protestant Inhabitants of Sorel (represented by William Anderson) to Burrage, 14 December 1847. mua, rg4, c. 70: Anderson to Burrage, 7 July 1852. Jodoin and Vincent, 466.

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424 • notes to pages 86–97 13 Fifth Report of the Colonial Church and School Society, for the Diocese of Montreal, Canada, 17. 14 Jodoin and Vincent, 485; rsba, Minute Books, Town and Parish of Longueuil, 13 January 1898, 27 June 1903. 15 swlsba, Minute Books, Belle Rivière/St Scholastique School Board, 22 September 1856. 16 swlsba, Minutes of the Trustees of the Municipality of Belle Rivière, entry marked Spring 1873; wqsba, Minute Books, Trustees of L’Ange Gardien Dissentient School, 16 November 1877. 17 rsba, Minute Books, Trustees of the Dissentient School of the Parish of L’Acadie, 20 April 1850. 18 cqsba, Minute Books of the Montmorency Dissentient School, 1 April 1896. 19 rsba, Minute Books, Town and Parish of Longueuil, 4 January 1899. 20 swlsba, Minute Books, Trustees of the School Municipality of Joliette, 1 February 1901. 21 rsba, Minute Books, Trustees of the Dissentient School of the Parish of L’Acadie, 3 June 1850. 22 Schull, Laurier: The First Canadian, 19. Curiously, the town of New Glasgow does not acknowledge his former presence in any way. 23 wqsba, Minute Books, Trustees of L’Ange Gardien Dissentient School, 19 February 1863. 24 cqsba, Minute Books, Montmorency Dissentient School, 9 March 1896. 25 rsba, Minute Books, Trustees of the St Hilaire Dissentient School, 30 April 1900. 26 wqsba, Minutes of the “municipalité dissidente de Suffukk,” 22 January 1888. 27 rsba, Minute Books, L’école dissidente de la Grande Ligne, Municipalité de St Valentin, 1 July 1881. Larin, Brève histoire des protestants en NouvelleFrance et au Québec, 166. 28 swlsba, Minutes of the Trustees of the Municipality of Belle Rivière, title page, 13 June 1894. 29 anq-q, e13, no. 22, Letters, George Milne to Chauveau, 27 December 1865, 7 April 1865. 30 Quebec Home & School News, December 1976. 31 Beaudry, “Une première école à Saint-Lambert,” 33–7. “Riverside” was later adopted as the name of the English school board created for the entire South Shore in 1998. 32 anq-q, e13, no. 22, Letters, George Milne to Chauveau, 27 December 1865. 33 Gubbay, A View of Their Own: 31; Watson, A Pictorial History of the Town of Montreal West, 19f. 34 cqsba, Minutes of the Trustees of Loretteville, 5 July 1915.

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notes to pages 97–113 • 425 35 rsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of the Town and Parish of Longueuil, 6 July 1894. 36 rsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of the Town and Parish of Longueuil, 11 September and 19 November and 1 December 1894, 8 January and 9 September 1895, 3 December 1907, 17 February 1913, 22 September 1931. 37 The original Aylmer Academy building is now used as the offices for the Western Quebec School Board, which serves the Outaouais and all of northwestern Quebec. 38 nfsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Township of Hemmingford, 13 April 1896. 39 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the Trustees of Paspébiac, 3 and 20 February and 30 March 1933. 40 Percival, Across the Years, 24. 41 See Mair, Protestant Education in Quebec, 43–4. chapter four 1 Bradbury, Working Families, 72. 2 emsba, Minutes of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, 20 November 1871. 3 Funds for building the school were announced in 9 George IV, cap.46. 4 Rexford et al., The History of the High School of Montreal, 5. 5 Boulianne, The Royal Institution: Correspondence, 412. 6 Bosworth, Hochelaga Depicta, 120. 7 John Brown, quoted in James Croil’s History of St. Paul’s Church, Montreal. 8 Bosworth, 136. 9 Bosworth, 148–9. 10 The Montreal Gazette, 22 September 1836. 11 Bosworth, 149. 12 Bosworth, 205. 13 The Montreal Transcript, 10 May 1838. 14 Rexford et al., 5, 12. 15 Frost, McGill University for the Advancement of Learning, 161. The Quebec High School, with similar roots in a Royal Institution school, was also started in 1843. 16 Grand Jury Report, 30 October 1841. 17 Percival, Across the Years, 84. 18 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 13. 19 Noel, Canada Dry, 85–6. 20 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 13. 21 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 5–11.

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426 • notes to pages 114–31 22 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 14. 23 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 3. 24 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 6. The figures given in the annual report are in 1871 dollars – $340 and $300 – which converted to 1847 sterling would have been £85 and £75 respectively. 25 Percival, Across the Years, 85. 26 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 6–11. 27 emsba, Minutes of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, 8 October and 8 November 1866. 28 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1886, 4. 29 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 11–12, 16–17. 30 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 24 January 1868. 31 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 14 February 1868. 32 See “Report of the Inspector” in the appendix to the Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871. 33 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 73. 34 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 20. Griffintown refers to that part of the St Ann’s ward north of the canal, while Pointe St Charles is that part to the south, including the village of St Gabriel. 35 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1877, 3–4. 36 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 25 November 1869. 37 Frost, McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning, 172ff. 38 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 11 January 1870. 39 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 36. 40 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 72. 41 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 2 May 1874. Rexford et al., 65. 42 See “Statement of School Tax” in the appendix to the Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1877. 43 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 24 February 1870. 44 Report of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners, 1886, 7. 45 mua, rg, Montreal Senior School, Session 1902–1903, 3. 46 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1891, 13. 47 Appendix B to the Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1877, 24. 48 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1877, 7. 49 Bradbury, Working Families, 123.

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notes to pages 131–45 • 427 50 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 25 January 1877. 51 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1871, 36. 52 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 3 December 1869. 53 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 28 August 1866, 7 May 1868. 54 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1 November 1867, 2 and 9 April 1868. 55 emsba, Postcard, Orrin Rexford to Olive Carson, 3 March 1907. 56 The Montreal Star, 26 February 1907. 57 The Montreal Star, 17 March 1907. 58 Watson, Protestants in Montreal, 1760–1992, 48–9. 59 There were even some Italian children in the system. In Mile-End, Italian parents established their own schools or enrolled their children in Protestant schools, largely owing to the overcrowding in French Catholic schools and the effect of Protestant proselytizing. See Ramirez and Del Balso, The Italians of Montreal. chapter five 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Report of the Superintendent of Education, 1905, 41. The Buckingham Post, 14 July 1905. Gaffield et al., History of the Outaouais, 126. wqsba, Minutes of the Board of School Trustees of Lochaber and Gore, 22 August 1864. Mackechnie, I Am What They Were, 188–90. On this subject see Curtis, Building the Educational State,184–5, and others mentioned in note 14. Pontiac Archive, Minute Books, School Municipality of Clarendon, 20 June 1891. Report of the Superintendent of Education, 1879–80. Geggie, Lapêche, 53. etsba (Magog), Minutes, School Municipality, Township of Barnston, 11 July 1929. Pontiac Archive, Maurella McCagg, “My Year at Waltham,” 1. Linteau et al., Histoire du Quebec contemporaine, 244. Pontiac Archive, Maurella McCagg, “My Year at Waltham,” 20. A growing literature about teaching in rural schools speaks to some of the problems that young, unmarried women faced in isolated rural areas of Canada. See for example, Dorion, Les Écoles de rang au Québec; Cochrane, The One-Room School in Canada; Dionne, L’école de rang d’Authier; Danylewycz and Prentice, “Teachers’ Work: Changing Patterns

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428 • notes to pages 145–52

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

and Perceptions in the Emerging School Systems of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Central Canada”; Abbott, “Accomplishing ‘a Man’s Task›; Wilson and Stortz, “May the Lord Have Mercy on You”; Gaffield and Bouchard, “Literacy, Schooling, and Family Reproduction in Rural Ontario and Quebec”; Peabody, School Days: The One-Room Schools of Maritime Canada; Axelrod, The Promise of Schooling. Wilson & Stortz, 31. wqsba, Minutes, School Trustees of Lochaber and Gore, 24 November 1922. Pontiac Archive, Maurella McCagg, 16. Joan Bisson Dow (interview, 12 March 2002) recalled her New Richmond class dreading the visit of the school inspector, who always made a beloved teacher cry. nfsba, Minute Books of the School Commissioners of Havelock, 9 February 1864. rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of McMasterville, 5 August and 2 September 1918. Pontiac Archives, Minutes of the Thorne School Board, Binder #30, 3, 17, and 31 December 1932. The Buckingham Post, 8 December 1911. cqsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Inverness, 12 December 1891. Drummond, “Sydney Arthur Fisher and the Limits of School Consolidation,” 31ff. etsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Barnston, 4 August 1879. etsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Barnston, 3 January 1913. etsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Barnston, 19 February 1916. etsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of the Township of Hatley, 6 June 1926. essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Matapedia, 10 July 1907. These statistics were compiled from the records of the Board of School Trustees of Lochaber and Gore (wqsba), School Journals, 1932–46; Board Minutes, 1903–45. wqsba, Minutes, School Trustees of Lochaber and Gore, 28 May 1923. Buckingham Historical Society, Report on the Protestant School Situation, Municipality of Thurso, 26 September 1929. wqsba, Correspondence between Dr Leo Lynch and Romeo Mondello, 24. Cochrane, The One-Room School in Canada, 142.

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notes to pages 152–61 • 429 35 Pontiac Archives, Thorne School Board Minutes, Binder #30, 18 February 1933. 36 Abbott, “Accomplishing ‘A Man’s Task’,” 320–1. 37 See wqsba, Gatineau Protestant Teachers’ Association, History of Education in the Gatineau Valley. 38 Drummond, “Sydney Arthur Fisher and the Limits of School Consolidation,” 33. 39 Percival, Across the Years, 74. 40 Macdonald’s plan was national in scope; his offer was to build a consolidated school in every province and he succeeded in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (Macdonald’s home province), and Ontario. On this subject, see Dowd, The First County Central School Board: 38. 41 nfsba, Minutes of the Municipality of the Village of Ormstown, 21 July 1904, 2 February 1905, 9 April 1906. 42 Quoted in Percival, Across the Years, 77. 43 Moore, The Life and Times of a High School Principal, 57–9. 44 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of the Township of Hemmingford, 22 May 1905. 45 Percival, Across the Years, 80–1. 46 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Hemmingford, 6 February 1940, 23 April 1941, 20 April and 1 June 1943. 47 wqsba, Minutes of the Pontiac County Protestant Central School Board, 4 March 1954. 48 Pontiac Archive, “Up to the Hills to Home,” 25. 49 cqsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of West Frampton, 31 August 1940. 50 Goodwin, ed. Island Schools. 51 wqsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of St Edouard de Wakefield, 30 November 1948. 52 wqsba, Correspondence, Dr Percival and Inspector King, 20 September 1939. 53 wqsba, Minutes of the Bourlamaque School Board, 25 March 1937. The community grew rapidly and by 1937 Lamaque had built a new two-room school (Ibid: 19 January 1937) to replace the log cabin. Within five years of its inception the school had grown to five classrooms, five teachers, and 130 pupils. 54 Pontiac Archive, “A Century of Unity”; cqsba, Minutes of the Loretteville Trustees, 29 August 1958. 55 Walter Percival, Life in School, 86. 56 Percival, Across the Years, 72–3. 57 This information was taken from partly censored letters in a teacher’s file from the Western Quebec School Board.

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430 • notes to pages 161–8 58 lbpsba, Minutes of the Protestant School Board of Trustees of St Télésphore de Montjoy, 8 February 1968. 59 Montreal Gazette, 19 September 1996. The board agreed to the community’s plea on the condition that the school should have a population of at least seventeen and that a second room be added to make a library and gym, to be built at the parents’ expense. The St Télésphore parents accepted these conditions and proceeded to raise enough money to build the school’s new wing. 60 This petition was transcribed in the minutes of several school boards; see for example etsba (Magog), Minutes, School Commissioners for the Village of Coaticook, 27 January 1920. 61 cqsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of St Dunstan of Lake Beauport, 16 May and 6 August 1960. 62 Pontiac Archive, Maurella McCagg, 1. 63 The information is taken from an article in The Buckingham Post, 5 March 1920, and from the minutes of yearly meetings of the Ormstown School Board (nfsba, Minutes of the Municipality of the Village of Ormstown), notably 23 April 1906, 13 November 1911, 10 June 1912, 14–17 April 1919, 25 February 1920, 18 May 1920. chapter six 1 etsba, Minutes, School Commissioners for the Village of Coaticook, 17 February 1877. 2 essba (New Carlisle), Minute Books, School Commissioners of Cox, 8 November 1913. 3 Almost all of the historians studying the rise of secondary education – Alison Prentice, Michael Katz, Chad Gaffield, Robert Gidney, Susan Houston – have focused principally on Ontario schools. The best work on Protestant Quebec is by Anne Drummond: “From Autonomous Academy to Public ‘High School›; “Gender, Profession, and Principals”; “Sydney Arthur Fisher and the Limits of School Consolidation.” 4 Brown, Schooling in the Clearings, 134–5. 5 Drummond, “From Autonomous Academy to Public ‘High School’,” 17. In The Stanstead College Story, 3, Joan MacDonald refers to the original seminary as fulfilling the function of a high school, its intended role being that of “a new and larger school” than the existing school run by the Royal Institution. 6 Drummond, “From Autonomous Academy to Public ‘High School’,” 20. Drummond asserts that Protestants often built academies in areas where their population was thin, and where “there was no education of any kind,” but the school board records do not always bear this out. Clarendon, Aylmer, Lachute, and Huntingdon had thriving Protestant communi-

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notes to pages 169–74 • 431

7 8 9 10 11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

ties, with school commissions that provided an array of common schools. What is true is that Protestant communities in such places as Ste Foy and Trois Rivières were very much in the minority and may have seen the establishment of an academy as an alternative to declaring dissentient status. etsba, Minute Books of the Granby Academy: Note pasted inside front cover of volume 1, c. 1854. Thomas, History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Que., & Prescott, Ont., 233–4. Healy, St Francis College, 20. Healy, 32; Frost, McGill University for the Advancement of Learning, 196. In Wilson et al., Canadian Education, 181, Louis Audet identified five Protestant classical colleges: the High Schools of Montreal and Quebec, and the colleges in Richmond, Lennoxville, and Quebec City. Drummond, “From Autonomous Academy to Public ‘High School’,” 62ff. Percival (Across the Years, 61–2) gives the example of the Three Rivers Academy: it was cut off from government assistance in 1867 for having hired an uncertified teacher, which meant it only deserved the rank of elementary school. etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Trustees of Granby Academy, 23 December 1869; Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Village of Granby, 21 December 1869. Drummond, “From Autonomous Academy to Public ‘High School’,” 69. etsba, Minute Books, School Commissioners of the Town of Waterloo, 3 September 1988. etsba (St Francis), Minutes of the School Municipality of Danville, 2 October 1876. etsba (St Francis), Minutes of the School Municipality of Cleveland, 3 February 1883; Healy, St Francis College, 62. Richmond County Historical Society Archives, 94-g-f-la-328: Danville Academy Annual Announcement, Session 1898. Drummond, “From Autonomous Academy to Public ‘High School’,” 70; MacDonald, The Stanstead College Story, 5. etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Stanstead Plain, 15 July 1895, and of Rock Island, 8 May 1895. etsba (Magog), Minutes, School Commissioners, Stanstead Plain, 30 July and 30. August 1906; Minutes, School Commissioners, Rock Island, 19 December 1902 and 8 November 1906. etsba (Magog), Minutes, School Commissioners, Stanstead Township, 29 October 1926 and 19 April 1927. Thomas, History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Que., & Prescott, Ont, 236; swlsba (Lachute), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Lachute Town, 24 August 1885. wqsba, Minute Books of the School Trustees of Aylmer, 9 July 1883.

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432 • notes to pages 174–86 25 nfsba, Minute Books, School Commissioners of Hemmingford, 9 January 1855, 10 June 1861, 15 February 1868, 13 July 1874, 9 July 1883. 26 nfsba, Minute Books, School Commissioners of Hemmingford, 9 April 1919, 2 August 1920. 27 etsba, Minute Books of the School Commissioners of Lennoxville, 25 February 1874. 28 etsba, Minute Books of the School Commissioners of Lennoxville, 23 October 1884, 3 February 1885, 29 October 1889. 29 Atto, ed., Lennoxville, vol. I., 61. 30 In several of the Clarendon schools, for example, this practice continued into the 1920s, even though the commissioners declared it was “contrary to school law” unless the school had more than one teacher; see Pontiac Archive, Minute Books of the School Commissioners of Clarendon Township, 22 September 1923. 31 Pontiac Archive, Minute Books of the School Commissioners of Clarendon Township, 14 August 1879, 18 March 1882, 8 February 1896, 6 June 1896. 32 Pontiac Archive, Minute Books of the School Municipality of Shawville, 25 February 1911. 33 Barry, A History of Megantic County, 233. 34 cqsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of Leeds South, 7 April 1923. 35 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality of the Town and Parish of Longueuil, 13 October 1896. 36 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 30 June 1911. 37 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 17 August 1914, 9 and 28 September 1914. 38 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 7 December 1914. 39 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 16 August 1915. 40 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 15 May 1916. 41 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 17 March 1920. 42 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 30 October 1919. 43 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 14 March 1929. 44 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 14 March 1923. 45 swlsba, Minutes, Trustees of the Joliette Dissentient School, 8 July 1912. 46 swlsba (Ste Agathe), Minutes, Municipality of Ste Agathe des Monts, 23 March 1923, 9 September 1930. 47 Interview with Nathan Rosenberg, 28 April 2002. 48 swlsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of Grande Fresnière, 21 September 1942. 49 swlsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of Grande Fresnière, 11 September 1945, 1 December 1949. 50 swlsba, Minutes, School Municipality of Grande Fresnière, 7 March 1951; Minutes, Lake of Two Mountains Protestant School Municipality, 2 August 1951.

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notes to pages 186–94 • 433 51 swlsba, Minutes, Trustees of the Joliette Dissentient School, 8 February 1960. 52 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 19 December 1921, 20 September 1922. 53 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 12 July 1927. 54 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 23 January 1931. 55 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 13 November 1939. 56 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 12 July 1927. 57 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 23 January 1931. 58 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 23 January 1931. 59 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 22 and 24 September 1948. 60 cqsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Inverness, 2 July and 2 August 1892. 61 Percival, Across the Years, 108. 62 Pontiac Archive, Minutes of the School Municipality of Shawville, 26 June 1911. 63 swlsba, Minutes, Trustees of the Joliette Dissentient School, 3 July 1911, 8 July 1912. 64 nfsba, Minutes of the Municipality of the Village of Ormstown, 10 June 1912. 65 Drummond, “Sydney Arthur Fisher and the Limits of School Consolidation,” 32. 66 cqsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Inverness, 26 August 1897, 15 June 1899. 67 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, School Commissioners of Cox, 19 June 1914, 24 February 1915, 27 April 1916. The board eventually let her go and, in 1916, she was replaced by a male principal, at the same salary. 68 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Lennoxville, 10 May and 26 September 1911. 69 rsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of Longueuil, 13 February and 20 December 1930. 70 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Village of Granby, 25 February 1936. 71 swlsba (Ste Agathe), Minute Books, Municipality of Ste Agathe des Monts, 23 March 1923, 9 September 1930.

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434 • notes to pages 194–206 chapter seven 1 Quoted in Rexford, Our Educational Problem, 27. 2 This story has been addressed by various writers: Corcos, Montréal, les juifs et l’école; Crestohl, The Jewish School Problem in the Province of Quebec; Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1903–1931 and The Heroes of Montreal Jewish Education; Ross, The Jew in the Educational System of the Province of Quebec. The Library of the Canadian Jewish Congress has an extensive file on the Jewish school question. 3 Report of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, 1889, 8; Gagnon, Histoire de la commission des écoles Catholiques de Montréal, 85. 4 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1895, 7–8. 5 Robinson and Butovsky, Renewing Our Days, 13. 6 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1901, 4. 7 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1902, 5. 8 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1902, 6. 9 Quoted in Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1. 10 Quoted in Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 2. 11 Oiwa, Tradition and Social Change, 263. 12 Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 11. 13 Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 34. 14 Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 12. 15 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1926, 18. 16 Rexford, Our Educational Problem, 25. 17 Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 15. 18 Brainin, “Strike of Yiddish School Children in Aberdeen School” in Anctil, ed., Through the Eyes of the Eagle, 78–9. Rome, The Canadian Story of Reuben Brainin, Part 2, 63–4. 19 Rome, The Canadian Story of Reuben Brainin, Part 2, 64. 20 Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 34–5. 21 Rexford, Our Educational Problem, 34. 22 Jewish enrolment in Montreal’s Protestant schools began to decline slightly after 1922, though it remained high. The overall percentage of Jewish pupils within the system declined from a high of 45 per cent, reached in 1917; significantly, the increase in Protestant numbers from 1918 on was the result of annexation not an increase in the Protestant population within the former city limits. Naturally, this did not assuage Protestant fears of being outnumbered. See the Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1926, 18. 23 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1926, 5–6. These numbers were generated (by the commissioners) from statistics of average class size, not total enrolment. Many classes were considerably larger;

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notes to pages 206–15 • 435

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

in her memoirs, Shulamis Yelin recalls with pleasure and excitement the sight of her first grade two class in Bancroft school, which consisted of forty-eight Jewish pupils. Her enthusiasm and skill must have been great indeed for her to look “forward to each day with pleasure.” See Shulamis: Stories from a Montreal Childhood, 161. Quoted in Rexford, Our Educational Problem, 33. Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 32. Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 40. Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 18. Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 120f. Rome, On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 131; Sancton, Governing the Island of Montreal, 46. etsba, Minutes of the Board of Protestant School Commissioners for Sherbrooke, 12 November and 9 December 1918, 13 December 1921, 7 November 1922. etsba, Minutes of the Board of Protestant School Commissioners for Sherbrooke, 15 July 1918, 28 March 1919, 28 April 1919, 13 November 1951. Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives, file on Ste Sophie: Ruth Lehman, “They Came to Eat: The Story of Canada’s Borscht Belt,” May 1990. Interview with Solomon Goodz, 12 November 2000. Goodz, a former pupil of the school, is one of a mere handful of Jewish residents still in Ste Sophie. anq-q: e-13, no. 2065, Letter, George Parmalee to E. Guilaroff, 16 July 1913. anq-q: e-13, no. 2065, Letter, J.W. McOuat to George Parmalee, 11 December 1913. anq-q: e-13, no. 2065, Letter, E. Guilaroff to George Parmalee, 26 December 1913. anq-q: e-13, no. 2065, Letter, George Parmalee to E. Guilaroff, 31 December 1913. anq-q: e-13, no. 2065, Letter, George Parmalee to E. Guilaroff, 9 January 1914. anq-q: e-13, no. 2065, Letter J.E. Parent to George Parmalee, 13 May 1914; No. 1170: Petition, May 1914. mua, Minutes, Ste Sophie Dissentient School Board, 5 February 1922. mua, Minutes, Ste Sophie Dissentient School Board, 21 April 1930. mua, Minutes, Ste Sophie Dissentient School Board, 6 March 1921. mua, Minutes, Ste Sophie Dissentient School Board, 30 January 1922. mua, Minutes, Ste Sophie Dissentient School Board, 5 February 1922. mua, Minutes, Ste Sophie Dissentient School Board, 19 February 1922. mua, Minutes, Ste Sophie Dissentient School Board, 12 April 1933. Canadian Jewish Congress Archives, Ste Sophie File: Article on Rudy by Lou Seligson. A number of anti-Semitic acts had occurred in the

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436 • notes to pages 215–21

48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Laurentians in the 1930s. In Ste Adèle in August 1937 rioters targeted Jewish homes in the town, smashing windows and burning two houses. Synagogues were also attacked. In Val David the synagogue was burned and the Torah scrolls destroyed and in Val Morin the synagogue was defaced with swastikas. swlsba (Lachute), “History of Development of Laurentian School Board.” Smith, The Jews of Montreal and their Judaisms, 23. swlsba, Minute Books of the School Municipality of Grande Fresnière, 14 November 1941, 3 February 1942. swlsba (Ste Agathe), Minutes, Municipality of Ste Agathe des Monts, 17 January 1947, 25 February 1949. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 14 February 1944. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 11 February 1889, 13 and 29 September 1897, and 13 November 1897 through 11 October 1898. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 11 June and 16 July 1900. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 17 February 1916, 5 September 1918, 1 December 1927. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 3 April 1924. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 17 January 1924, 2 October 1924, 4 October 1928, 22 December 1930. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 13 September 1939, 26 June 1941, 4 September 1941, 9 November 1942, 30 November 1943, 21 February 1944, 11 April 1944, 12 July 1944. Quoted in Ross, 93. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 5 March 1945. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 11 June 1945. Quoted in Ross, 100. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 11 February 1946. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 13 November 1945. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 6 & 13 May 1946. qfhsa Archives, Report of the Committee Appointed to Study the Outremont School Situation (May 1947), 3; Ross, 101. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 6 May 1947. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 20 June and 8 September & 20 October 1947. Quoted in Ross, 102. emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 12 January 1948.

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notes to pages 221–9 • 437 71 emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 22 July and 4 August 1947. 72 emsba, Minute Books of the Outremont School Trustees, 8 September 1947. 73 qfhsa Archives, Minutes of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Council of Representatives, 28–29 April 1950; Proceedings of the 4th Annual Conference, 11–12 May 1951. 74 Quoted in Ross, 102. chapter eight 1 O’Brien, “Manhood and the Militia Myth,” 120. 2 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of St Lambert, 9 April and 14 November 1918. 3 Coates and Morgan, Heroines and History, 167ff. 4 For a thorough treatment of this phenomenon, see Nelles, The Art of Nation Building. 5 Moss, Manliness and Militarism, 8. 6 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Village of Granby, 17 April 1907. 7 Stamp, “Empire day in the schools of Ontario,” 37. 8 Although the iode added a female voice to the imperial chorus in the new millennium, Nancy Sheehan argues (“Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Practice,” 307–15) that its vision was “imperialist, racist, class-biased, and patriarchal.” 9 rsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Longueuil, 6 October 1913, 5 January 1914. 10 rsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Longueuil, 25 November and 2 December 1912. 11 rsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Longueuil, 6 January, 7 April, and 2 June 1913. 12 rsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Longueuil, 25 June, 31 August, 9 September, and 5 October 1914. 13 rsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Longueuil, 14 September 1914, 15 March, and 2 August 1915. 14 Francis, National Dreams, 12. 15 Moss, 49. 16 Young, “We throw the torch,” 11. 17 Young, 6. 18 Lewis, “Isn’t This a Terrible War?” 203. 19 rsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Longueuil, 9 September 1914, 6 March 1916, 30 October 1919. 20 The Buckingham Post, 19 July 1918.

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438 • notes to pages 230–9 21 The Boy Scouts asked for and received permission from the St Lambert School Board to use the rifle range, as long as they were properly supervised and the ammunition did not exceed 22 or 303 calibre. rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of St Lambert, 4 May 1921. 22 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 12 December 1933. 23 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 9 March, 6 April, and 10 May 1937. 24 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 10 May 1939. 25 Weintraub, City Unique, 10. 26 Interview with Myron Echenberg, 17 January 2001. 27 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of St Lambert School Board, 4 February 1941. 28 mua, mg3074, Letter, Walter Percival to the School Commissioners and Trustees of the Protestant Schools of the Province of Quebec, 18 July 1940. 29 Pontiac Archive, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Clarendon Township, 20 July 1940; swlsba, Minutes of the Trustees of the Protestant School Municipality of Joliette, 22 July 1940. 30 Bilson, The Guest Children, 187. 31 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Rock Island, 12 July 1940. 32 mua, mg3074, Letter, Marion T. Roberts to H.A. Hatcher, 20 January 1942. 33 emsba, Minutes of the Verdun School Board, 19 April and 21 June 1945. 34 emsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Outremont, 14 February 1944. 35 mua, mg3074, Letter, Patterson to Hatcher, 21 September 1939. 36 William Tuttle’s study of American children during the war shows that, despite the rhetoric, women often served as strong role models for their children – coping well with all the demands made on them as mothers, workers, disciplinarians, etc. – even when they were dealing with separation from their husbands and their own grief when their partners were killed. For some, the separation was a break from a poor marital relationship. Tuttle, Daddy’s Gone to War, 30–48. 37 mua, mg3074, Letter, Patterson to Hatcher, September 1942. 38 emsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Verdun, 20 April 1944. 39 mua, mg3074, Correspondence between Fred Newell and R.S. Tuer, 13 March, 17 March, and 30 March 1943. 40 emsba, Minutes of the Board of School Trustees of Outremont, 12 November 1940. 41 mua, mg3074, Letter, S.F. Kneeland to H.A. Hatcher, 24 April 1942. 42 Pontiac Archive, Minutes, School Commissioners of Clarendon, Binder #26, 9 December 1943. 43 MacDonald, Sons of the Empire, 13, 183, 186. 44 rsba, Minutes of the St Lambert School Board, 8 December 1943.

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notes to pages 239–48 • 439 45 swlsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of the Lake of Two Mountains, 15 November 1965. 46 Moss refers to this phenomenon as “extrafamilial social fatherhood.” Manliness and Militarism, 112. 47 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of McMasterville, 3 January 1955. 48 etsba, Register of the School Commissioners of the Village of Granby, 18 November 1947. 49 psbgm, Annual Report, 1951–52, 19–22. 50 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Matapedia, 27 December 1961. 51 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Coaticook, 17 April 1967. chapter nine 1 mua, mg3074, Letter: Elzéar Pelletier (Secretary-Director of the Superior Board of Health of the Province of Quebec) to the School Trustees of Lachine, 3 December 1920. 2 mua, mg3074, Notes for a talk or report, “Extension of the School’s Activities,” c. 1938. 3 mua, mg3074, Report: Office of the Board of Health, City of Lachine to the Protestant Board of School Trustees, 5 October 1918. 4 See, for example, rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 4 June 1901. 5 emsba, Minutes, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 26 June 1884. 6 emsba, Minutes, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 11 September 1884. 7 emsba, Minutes, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 6 October 1884. 8 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commission of Lennoxville, 21 May 1898; Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Town of Cookshire, 30 October and 6 November 1897. 9 Pontiac Archive, Minutes, School Commissioners of the Township of Clarendon, 6 April 1895. 10 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 18 December 1916, 3 December 1917; Pontiac Archive, Minutes, School Commissioners of Shawville, 1 February 1922; etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Granby, 24 October 1914. 11 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of St Lambert, 19 February 1925. 12 Bliss, Plague: A Story of Smallpox in Montreal, 147. emsba, Minutes, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, City of Montreal, 26 August 1885.

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440 • notes to pages 248–54 13 emsba, Minutes, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 18 March 1893. 14 Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty, 26. 15 Copp, 92. 16 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 3 December 1901. 17 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 6 October 1913; Minutes of the School Commissioners of McMasterville, 31 January 1916. 18 Copp, 103. 19 etsba (Magog), Minutes, School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 2 January and 6 June 1922. 20 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 12 January 1928, 23 August 1928, 14 August 1930, 11 October 1932. 21 emsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Verdun, 18 May 1933. 22 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Grande Fresnière, 29 November 1938. 23 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 18 January 1940. 24 mua, mg3074, Letter, J. McLeod to the Lachine School Trustees, 10 June 1916. 25 mua, mg3074, Letter, J. McLeod to Mr Erinstone, 15 February 1917; etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Lennoxville, 11 September 1914; Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 6 October 1920. 26 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Town of Granby, 19 March and 18 December 1933, 27 June 1934. 27 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of St Lambert, 17 January 1920. 28 swlsba (Ste Agathe), Minutes of the School Trustees of Ste Agathe des Monts, 26 September 1922, 4 March 1937. 29 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Municipality of Coaticook, 21 January 1935. 30 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 1 October 1934. 31 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 3 July 1923, 5 July 1932; emsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Verdun, 17 November 1932; lbpsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Pointe Claire, 18 February 1938. 32 emsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Verdun, 19 December 1935. 33 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 23 May and 14 November 1933, 7 August 1934. 34 etsba (Magog), letter pasted in the Minute Book of the School Commissioners of the Village of Cookshire, c. 1932.

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notes to pages 254–62 • 441 35 An assortment of Hatcher’s correspondence can be found in the mua, mg3074. See, for example, his contribution to the Rehabilitation Fund of the “Friends of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion” (17 January 1939), which sought financial assistance for the otherwise unacknowledged Canadian fighters for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. 36 mua, mg3074, Notes for a talk or report, “Extension of the School’s Activities,” c. 1938. 37 Ibid. 38 Quebec Home and School News, June 1950. 39 qfhsa Archives: Minutes of Annual Meeting of Council of Representatives 30 May 1945. 40 Quebec Home and School News, January 1946. 41 qfhsa Archives: Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors and Administrative Committee, 21 May 1945. 42 qfhsa Archives: Minutes of Meeting of Council of Representatives, 9 September 1944. 43 psbgm Annual Report, 1961–62, 27. 44 mua, mg3074, Letter, Frances S. Alexander to W.J. Larminie, 25 February 1942. 45 Sourkes & Pinard, Building on a Proud Past,110. 46 Montreal Gazette, 8 May 1947. 47 qfhsa Archives: Minutes of the Fourth Annual Conference, 11–12 May 1951. 48 Quebec Home and School News, March 1984. 49 psbgm, Annual Report 1954–55, 24–5. 50 psbgm, Annual Report 1962–63, 11. 51 lbpsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Lake of Two Mountains, 9 December 1958. 52 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 15 April, 13 May, 9 June, and 16 July 1964, 12 July 1965. 53 Quebec Home and School News, November 1969. 54 psbgm, Annual Report 1967–68, 13. 55 lbpsba, Minutes of the Lakeshore Regional School Board, 7 April 1969. 56 Quebec Home and School News, February 1977. 57 lbpsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield, 23 November 1943. 58 Quebec Home and School News, June 1970. 59 Quebec Home and School News, May 1989. chapter ten 1 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Stanstead County Protestant School Board, 7 March 1947.

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442 • notes to pages 262–70 2 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the Protestant School Municipality of Matapedia, 29 November 1961. 3 cqsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of the Township of Inverness, 6 June and 7 August 1962, 31 May and 20 and 29 July 1965, 4 July and 7 November 1966. 4 Percival (Across the Years, 78–83) makes it clear that the consolidation movement had been undertaken to improve the quality of education by providing better facilities and better teaching; Percival, like Adams, felt there were “too many schools.” It is interesting that the Parent Report (vol. III, 1966, 140) attributes the desire for consolidation mainly to the thinning of the rural Protestant population, a factor that was not given much importance prior to the 1960s. 5 Dowd, The First County Central School Board, 46. 6 Protestant Committee, Statement Concerning the Report of the Quebec Protestant Education Survey Presented by the Protestant Committee of the Council of Education, 1939. 7 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality of the Town and Parish of Longueuil, 22 February 1939, 22 February 1940. 8 etsba (Magog), Minutes, Protestant School Board of the City of Sherbrooke, 12 March 1940. 9 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Municipality of the Township of Barnston, 6 March 1940. 10 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Municipality of the Township of Brome, 8 April 1940. 11 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Matapedia, 16 April 1940. 12 Dowd, 60–1, 94–7. 13 Barry, A History of Megantic County, 233. 14 cqsba, Minutes, School Municipality of St Pierre Baptiste, 11 January 1943, 20 April 1953. 15 rsba, Minutes of the Chambly County Protestant School Committee, 22 May 1944. 16 Dowd, 59, 64. 17 rsba, Minutes, School Municipality, Longueuil, 7 October and 4 November 1946. 18 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of McMasterville, 5 December 1944. 19 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Grande Fresnière, 27 August 1946, 29 March 1947. 20 swlsba (Lachute), Minutes of the Argenteuil-Two Mountains County Central School Board, 30 June and 13 November 1952, 13 April and 30 September 1953. 21 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Stanstead Plain, 22 January 1948.

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notes to pages 271–9 • 443 22 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Stanstead Plain, 21 September 1945; Minutes of the School Commissioners of Rock Island, 11 December 1945. 23 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Stanstead County Central School Board, 7 January 1947. 24 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Rock Island, 27 May 1949. 25 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Stanstead County Central School Board, 10 May and 14 and 22 June 1949. 26 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Rock Island, 3 and 27 February 1950. 27 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Stanstead Plain, 11 April 1950; Minutes of the Stanstead County Central Board, 22 June 1949. 28 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Rock Island, 14 February 1955; Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Municipality of Beebe, 31 January and 10 February 1958 and 25 May 1959. 29 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Stanstead Township, 22 February and 2 September 1954, 7 May 1959, 2 July 1965. 30 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Township of Barnston, 30 June 1948, 17 June 1954. 31 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Hemmingford, 18 and 20 August 1943. 32 The Educational Record of the Province of Quebec, vol. LX, no. 1 (January-March 1944), 7. 33 Pontiac Archive, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Clarendon Township, 6 June and 1 August 1945. 34 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the School Trustees of St Laurent de Matapedia, 12 December 1953. 35 The Educational Record of the Province of Quebec, vol. LX, no. 1 (January-March 1944), 5. 36 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the School Trustees of St Laurent de Matapedia, 7 September 1955, 3 March 1956. 37 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Hemmingford, 18 July 1947. 38 wqsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Thurso, 13 September 1955. 39 etsba (Magog), Minutes, School Commissioners, Town of Cookshire, 24 January 1955. 40 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Hemmingford, 23 October 1959. 41 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Matapedia, 18 August 1960. 42 wqsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of Thurso, 27 February 1964.

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444 • notes to pages 279–89 43 wqsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Ste Angélique, undated, but the last entry in the Minute Book; the petitioners’ request was obviously not met. 44 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners, Township of Hemmingford, 2 April 1952, 7 February 1953. 45 cqsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Levis Town, 30 December 1940. 46 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, Protestant School Municipality of Chaleur Bay, 10 November 1969. 47 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, Protestant School Municipality of Chaleur Bay, 6 July 1964. 48 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, Protestant School Municipality of Matapedia, 29 November 1961. 49 Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education, vol. III: “Educational Administration,” 140–1. 50 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Protestant School Board of Sherbrooke, 16 December 1964. 51 By 1967 the series of tiny communities along the Lower North Shore, many of which were connected only by sea, had formed a separate board known as Littoral. It was expressly non-confessional (because of its dispersed and diverse population) and operated in English and French. All of its schools offered elementary and secondary education, mostly in two or three rooms. 52 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 21 June 1965; Richmond County Historical Society Archives, “The Demise of St Francis Protestant School Board.” The local boards of Richmond County amalgamated two years later in 1967 to create the St Francis Protestant School Board to perpetuate the name. 53 Panel discussion at the annual meeting of the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards, reproduced in The School Board (January 1966), 21. 54 cqsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of Coleraine and Thetford, 10 May 1971. 55 cqsba, Minutes of the Trustees of the Municipality of Portneuf, 24 February 1971. chapter eleven 1 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Stanstead County Central School Board, 12 November 1947. 2 Report of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, 1939, 11. 3 Royal Commission on Education, 1966, vol. III, 142. 4 mua, mg1060, Prospectus, High School for Girls, 1921. 5 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1926, 52; Report, 1933, 56.

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notes to pages 291–7 • 445 6 Frost, McGill University, vol. I, 291. Stanstead College also had something that the school calendar referred to as a “gymnasium” as early as 1890, though the campus’s oldest gym building was not erected until 1905. Brian H.V. Denney, “Athletics,” in MacDonald, The Stanstead College Story, 146. 7 Report, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 1903, 7; Report, 1926, 47. 8 emsba, Minutes of the Westmount Board of School Commissioners, 14 July 1914. 9 The booklet “Montreal West Yesterday and Today,” quoted in Watson, Looking Back: A. Pictorial History of the Town of Montreal West, 23–7. 10 rsba, Minutes of the School Municipality of the Town and Parish of Longueuil, 17 March 1920. 11 Iton, “The Protestant Schools of St Lambert,” 28. 12 Richard, “Old Bedford High,” 132. 13 qfhsa Archives, Minutes of the Council of Representatives, 20 April 1945. 14 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of the Township of Hemmingford, 1 November 1949. 15 Pontiac Archive, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Shawville, 7 May 1941. 16 nfsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of the Township of Hemmingford, 19 January 1950, 2 January 1951. 17 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the St Eustache School Board, 6 June 1949. 18 cqsba, Minutes of the Ste Foy School Board, 12 April 1954. 19 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 9 January 1930. 20 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 18 April 1949. 21 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 10 October 1950. 22 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Beebe, 28 September and 28 December 1959. 23 emsba, Minutes of the Outremont Board of Trustees, 15 January 1943. 24 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Sherbrooke, 10 January 1972. 25 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 27 December 1930. 26 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1926, 52–4. 27 Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario, 313. 28 Sweeney, Polishing the Jewel, 7. 29 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Town of Cookshire, 18 April 1907.

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446 • notes to pages 298–308 30 swlsba (Ste Agathe), Minutes, Municipality of Ste Agathe des Monts, 16 November 1922. 31 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of Town of Granby, 29 March 1928; essba (New Carlisle), Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Township of Cox, 26 May 1922. 32 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of the City of Sherbrooke, 7 June 1948. 33 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1939, 11. 34 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1936, 8–9; Report, 1937, 11. 35 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1939, 8; Report, 1941, 13. 36 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal, 1941, 14. 37 McCabe, “The Library: The Heart of Your School,” 18–22. 38 essba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Matapedia, 1 May 1908. 39 qfhsa Archives, 1952, 1960, 1969 resolutions. 40 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 14 February 1933. 41 Royal Commission on Education, 1965, vol. III, 298. 42 Royal Commission on Education, 1965, vol. III, 300. 43 Royal Commission on Education, 1965, vol. III, 156. 44 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the Stanstead County Central School Board, 12 November 1947 (see full quote at the beginning of the chapter). 45 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Town of Cookshire: Letter, Dr Percival to A.H. Pope, Secretary-Treasurer of the School Board, 25 April 1950. 46 Somerville, Hemmingford Then and Now, 110–11. 47 Pontiac archive, “The Official Opening of the New High School.” 48 psbgm, Annual Report, 1952, 48. 49 Perras et al., “Lindsay Place High School,” 128–9. 50 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the District of Bedford Regional School Board, 19 January and 1 February and 29 April 1965. 51 etsba (Magog), Minutes of the District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 20 December 1965. 52 Turner, “Laurentian Regional School Board,” 27. 53 etsba (Magog), Minutes, District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 12 January and 16 February 1966. 54 etsba (Magog), Minutes, District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 6 January 1970. 55 etsba (Magog), Minutes, District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 30 May 1966. 56 etsba (Magog), Minutes, District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 8 July 1966, 20 March 1967.

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notes to pages 308–30 • 447 57 etsba (Magog), Minutes, District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 27 May 1968. 58 etsba (Magog), Minutes, District of Bedford Protestant Regional School Board, 19 August and 30 October and 4 November 1969. 59 Direction de l’enseignement protestant, Portrait Statistique, 1990–1991, 1. 60 essba (New Carlisle), Minutes, Protestant School Municipality of Chaleur Bay, 13 April 1968. 61 Morrison, “The President’s Report,” 9. c h a p t e r t w e lv e 1 Quebec Home and School News, September 1973. 2 psbgm, Annual Report 1960–1961, 36. 3 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Two Mountains, 28 June 1959. 4 Most of the building-related information found in this and subsequent paragraphs has been distilled from the “Schools Past and Present” section of the Report, of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal, 1925, 47–51. 5 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal 1928, 24. 6 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal 1938, 5. 7 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal 1931, 26. 8 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal 1934, 5. 9 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal 1934, 4. 10 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal 1936, 5. 11 Report, Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Montreal 1943, 5. 12 Sancton, Governing the Island of Montreal, 28. 13 The information on schools given here is taken from the psbgm annual reports, 1950–65. 14 lbpsba, Minutes of a Special Joint Meeting of the Protestant School Commissioners of Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield and the Macdonald Central School Board, 28 May 1948. 15 Baird and Hall, Beaconsfield and Beaurepaire, 89. 16 lbpsba, Minutes of the Protestant School Municipality of Baie d’Urfé and Senneville, 17 August 1950, 17 April 1958. 17 Bland et al., Baie d’Urfé, 1686–1986, 182. 18 lbpsba, Minutes of the Protestant School Commissioners of Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield, 18 March 1958. 19 psbgm, Annual Report 1964–65, 56. Riverside’s population in 1991 was only 600. 20 Direction de l’enseignement protestant, Portrait Statistique. 21 Vallières, White Niggers of America, 92. Vallières was to have a new home only a few blocks away from the future St Mary’s School, which now houses the archives of South Shore Protestant school boards (see chapter 1).

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448 • notes to pages 330–7 22 Rosevear, Chambly County Protestant Central School Board, 1945 to 1955, 55. 23 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 12 April 1948. 24 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 2 June and 30 September 1947. 25 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 4 September 1947. 26 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 3 April 1950, 26 August 1954, 5 and 6 February 1955. 27 Rosevear, 77. 28 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 4 March 1957. The old St Lambert High School, part of which was the original 1896 academy, had become an elementary school by this time. 29 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 23 February 1959, 4 April 1960. Preville is now considered part of St Lambert. 30 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 18 December 1970, 21 June 1971. 31 rsba, Minutes of the Council of Commissioners for the St Lawrence School Board, 16 July 1979. 32 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the Protestant School Municipality of Les Ecores, 13 May 1954. 33 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Two Mountains, 20 September and 8 December 1965, 31 January 1966. 34 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Two Mountains, 7 March 1966. 35 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Two Mountains, 16 May and 7 November 1966. 36 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Two Mountains, 3 March 1971. 37 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Two Mountains, 16 November 1971. 38 swlsba (Laval), Minutes of the School Municipality of Two Mountains, 17 January 1972. 39 Statement Concerning the Report of the Quebec Protestant Education Survey Presented by the Protestant Committee of the Council of Education (1939), 23. 40 Cleverdon, The Women Suffrage Movement, 218–20. 41 The Draft Act Revising Montreal Protestant Central School Board, May 1942, is given in the appendix to Dowd’s The First County Central School Board in Quebec, 111–22. 42 psbgm, Annual Report 1951–52, 7. 43 wqsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Wakefield North, 25 August 1960.

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notes to pages 339–54 • 449 44 Quebec Home and School News, May-June 1960. 45 Quebec Home and School News, June 1964. 46 Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations Newsletter, November-December 1961. 47 psbgm, Annual Report 1965–1966, 8. 48 Sancton, Governing the Island of Montreal, 152ff. 49 psbgm, Annual Report 1973–1974, 8. 50 Quebec Home and School News, January 1974. 51 Quebec Home and School News, September 1973. chapter thirteen 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

McGeer, “The President’s Message,” 4. Interview with Gertrude Katz, 6 October 2000. qfhsa Archives, Minutes of the Board of Directors, 11 August 1947. Quebec Home and School News, January 1951. qfhsa Newsletter, no. 3, 1957. qfhsa Archives, Minutes of the Board of Directors, 18 October 1958. Quebec Home and School News, January 1964. emsba, Minutes of the School Trustees of Outremont, 14 June 1965, 14 February 1966. emsba, Minutes of the Verdun Protestant School Board, 28 April 1965. Cohen, “Religion in the Schools,” 8. Quebec Home and School News, April 1965. Quebec Home and School News, December 1965. Brief submitted to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 29 November 1965, quoted in The School Board, January 1966, 3. Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec, vol. IV, 1966, 85. Quebec Home and School News, November 1966. Quebec Home and School News, August 1967. Sancton, Governing the Island of Montreal, 79. Quebec Home and School News, September 1968. Quebec Home and School News, September 1969. Sancton, 79. Quebec Home and School News, May 1975. Quebec Home and School News, March 1975. Quebec Home and School News, September 1975, December 1976. Quebec Home and School News, December 1976. The tests were not immediately withdrawn; the government argued that they were “the only equitable way to deal with the situation in mid-school year.” (News, February 1977). Quebec Home and School News, Special Edition, July 1977.

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450 • notes to pages 355–71 26 Quebec Home and School News, July and September 1977. 27 Quoted in Quebec Home and School News, September 1977. 28 Kuntz and Potter, Whither the Protestant School System in Quebec?, 19– 20. 29 psbgm, Annual Report 1975–1977, 18. 30 psbgm, Annual Report 1981–1982, 13. 31 Quebec Home and School News, September 1981. 32 swlsba, Minutes of the Lake of Two Mountains School Board, 18 July 1966. 33 Quoted in Kuntz and Potter, Whither the Protestant School System?, 23–4. chapter fourteen 1 See for example, wqsba, Minutes of the Central Pontiac Protestant School Board, 29 July 1971. 2 Fripp et al., Roslyn, 76. 3 Larin, Brève histoire des protestants, 163–6. 4 Quoted in Villard, Up to the Light, 161–2. 5 rsba, Minute Book, “Syndics et contribuables de l’ecole dissidente de la Grande Ligne”, 3 July 1881. 6 Villard, Up to the Light, 165. 7 Villard, 167. anq-q, e13, 1989–05–00483, Letter, M.C. Macdonald to T. Somerville, 21 February 1955. 8 Watson, Protestants in Montreal, 60. 9 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 7 December 1871, 29 March and 22 October 1873. 10 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 29 October 1874. 11 emsba, Minutes, Protestant School Commissioners, Montreal, 24 February and 14 November 1876. 12 Villard, 169–71. 13 anq-q, e13, 1989–05–00483, Letter, M.C. Macdonald to T. Somerville, 21 February 1955. 14 emsba, Minutes of the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal, 22 March 1955. 15 rsba, Minute Book, Dissentient School Trustees of Grande Ligne, 19 May 1947. 16 anq-q, e13, 1989–05–00483, Resolution passed by the board of directors of the Grande Ligne Mission, 14 March 1955. 17 anq-q, e13, 1989–05–00483, “Personal and Confidential” Letter, W.M. Cottingham to Omer Coté, 3 May 1855. 18 rsba, Minutes of the Protestant Board of School Commissioners of Longueuil, 3 December 1956, 2 December 1957, 2 June and 8 September 1958.

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notes to pages 372–6 • 451 19 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Town of Granby, 14 October 1959, 13 June 1962, 12 September 1962, 16 October 1962, 12 December 1962. 20 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of McMasterville, 9 July 1963. 21 wqsba, Buckingham 23.13, District #2 Visitors’ Book, 17 October 1901. 22 wqsba, Minutes of the Trustees of Lochaber and Gore, 9 September 1904. 23 wqsba, Lochaber and Gore Permanent Record Public School, St Sixte, 23 May 1931. 24 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of the Township of Barnston, 26 February 1938. 25 emsba, Minutes of the Trustees Outremont, 3 October 1912. 26 wqsba, Minutes of the Trustees of Aylmer, 15 January 1916. 27 nfsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Hemmingford, 4 August 1944. 28 mua, Box 1 mg1060, Acc.1981, vol. K, newspaper clipping. 29 wqsba, Minutes of the Trustees of Aylmer, 18 April 1918. 30 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Lennoxville, 23 October 1923. 31 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Cookshire, 24 February 1930. 32 emsba, Minutes of the Board of School Trustees of Outremont, 7 May 1936. 33 lpbsba, Minutes of the Protestant School Commissioners of Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield, 10 December 1936, 17 May 1940. 34 etsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Coaticook, 10 July 1950. 35 psbgm, Annual Report 1955–56, 17. 36 lpbsba, Minutes of the Protestant School Commissioners of Pointe Claire and Beaconsfield, 16 November 1954, 16 June 1959. 37 psbgm, Annual Report 1955–56, 17. 38 rsba, Minutes, School Commissioners of McMasterville, 13 October and 15 December 1964. 39 Genesee, “Scholastic Effects of French Immersion,” 1. 40 Quebec Home and School News, March 1964. 41 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of St Lambert, 11 November 1969. At this meeting the principal reported on on a seminar in Saskatoon where the techniques of French instruction pioneered in St Lambert were praised and interest in applying them elsewhere was expressed. 42 Quebec Home and School News, September 1975. 43 Quebec Home and School News, November-December 1972. 44 swlsba, Minutes of the Lake of Two Mountains Protestant School Board, 20 April 1970. 45 psbgm, Annual Report 1969–1970, 16.

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452 • notes to pages 377–86 46 47 48 49 50

psbgm, Annual Report 1973–1974, 16–17. rsba, Minutes of the St Lawrence Protestant School Board, 15 May 1978. psbgm, Annual Report 1982–1983, 12. psbgm, Annual Report 1987–1988, 12. Consider the tone of the chapter on education in Rudin’s The Forgotten Quebecers (223–350), which presents Protestants and their school boards as essentially an impediment to creating unified boards that would serve and reinforce the anglophone community.

chapter fifteen 1 ksba, Minutes of the Council of Commissioners, 24 April 1979. 2 Awashish, Eeyou Control of Eeyou Chiskotamachaoun, 33. 3 Awashish argues this point in his commemorative history of the Cree School Board, Eeyou Control of Eeyou Chiskotamachaoun, 11. 4 Castellano et al., Aboriginal Education, xi. 5 ksba, Brief Submitted to the Standing Commission on Education: The Kativik School Board and Bill 40, 2. 6 Three years after the provincial government endorsed the jbnqa, Quebec and the Naskapi Band signed the Northeastern Quebec Agreement, which established the Kawawachikamach reserve. The Naskapi opened the Jimmy Sandy Memorial School in 1985 under the administration of the Central Quebec School Board. 7 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, Book 1A, 26–8 June 1978. 8 A variety of terms have been used in the documents of both school boards when referring to this committee: parent committee, school committee, and education committee. For brevity and clarity, we have used “school committee.” 9 Kirkness, First Nations and Schools, 10. 10 Awashish, 12–14. 11 The history of residential schooling has been treated by many authors. See for example, Milloy, A National Crime, Assembly of First Nations, Breaking the Silence, and Barman et al., Indian Education in Canada. vol. 1. 12 Callaghan, “Inuit Educational and Language Programs,” 57–60. 13 Salisbury, A Homeland for the Cree, 35–6. 14 swlsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Grande Frésnière/Lake of Two Mountains, 14 September 1954. 15 swlsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Grande Frésnière/Lake of Two Mountains, 25 June 1958. 16 Kirkness, First Nations and Schools, 15. 17 Kenneth Hare is quoted in Callaghan, Inuit Educational and Language Programs, 90–2.

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notes to pages 386–94 • 453 18 Callaghan, 114. 19 A number of Cree negotiators were appointed to key positions on the school board. Future native leaders, such as Matthew Coon Come, served as chair of the Mistissini school committee. Chief Billy Diamond, the chief negotiator of the jbnqa and a signatory, was elected the first chairman of the school board. Ted Moses, the chief negotiator of section 16 of the jbnqa, was appointed director general of the board. Thus, those intimately involved in the mediation of the jbnqa were appointed to paramount positions on the school board. 20 Callaghan, 127–31. 21 Callaghan, 26. 22 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 13, 6–7 April 1983. 23 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 35, 30 January 1996. 24 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 35, 27–8 June 1995, 2 August 1995. 25 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 35, 12–13 September 1995. 26 ksba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, 21 March 1981. 27 ksba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, 24 April 1982. 28 Callaghan, 157. 29 ksba, Procedures for Education Committees, June 1998, 14. 30 In 1988 Hydro Quebec announced its plans to develop the Great Whale River, a hydroelectric project considered at the time to be the largest, most costly, and potentially the most environmentally destructive in the province. Under the leadership of Matthew Coon Come, natives lobbied to protect their hunting and fishing rights. Their efforts paid off when they succeeded in blocking the sale of power to the United States, particularly the State of New York. In 2002, however, the agreement was ratified, giving the Cree control of the region’s development. Dickinson and Young, A Short History of Quebec, 369–70. 31 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 25, 7–8 November 1989. 32 Callaghan, 176–7. 33 Blacksmith, Educational Development in the Cree Schools of James Bay, 28. 34 csba, Minutes of the Cree School Board, book 38, 27–8 January 1998. 35 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 29, 3–5 April 1991. 36 ksba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, 8 March 1978. 37 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 30, 7–9 April 1992.

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454 • notes to pages 394–411 38 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 7, 3–4 March 1981. 39 csba, Minutes of the School Committee of Mistissini, 26 October 1995. 40 ksba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, 24 February 1979. 41 ksba, Minutes of the School Committee of Mistissini, 3 March 1992. 42 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 18, 10–11 September 1985. 43 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 13, 26–7 September 1983. 44 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 6, 17 April 1980. 45 ksba, 13th Annual Nunavik Inuit Elders’ Conference, 1998, 50. 46 Silatunirmut: The Pathway to Wisdom, 28. 47 McGill University, in collaboration with the Cree and Kativik school boards, offered a training program in teaching to aboriginals and a training program for principals. 48 ksba, Nunavik Inuit Elders’ Conference (Tasiujaq, Nunavik, 1996), 28. 49 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 35, 12–14 June 1995. 50 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 28, 20–1 February 1991. 51 csba, Minutes of the Council of School Commissioners, book 35, 5–7 December 1995. 52 Silatunirmut, 51. 53 Nunavik Inuit Elders’ Conference (Tasiujaq, Nunavik, 1996), 14. 54 csba, Minutes of the School Committee of Mistissini, 28 October 1991. conclusion 1 rsba, Minutes of the School Commissioners of Longueuil, 30 June 1903. 2 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Governing Board Minutes, 22 September 1998; interviews with various board members, Spring 1999. 3 Portrait Statistique des commissions scolaires protestantes, 1990–1991, 10. 4 Interview with Cathleen Jolicoeur, 21 June 1999. 5 swlsba (Ste Agathe), Minutes of the Laurentienne School Board, 9 August 1972, 13 June 1973. 6 Interview with Christine Grenier, 11 December 2000. 7 Interview with Jocelyn Thompson, 4 August 1999. 8 Montreal Gazette, 6 June 1998: Jonathon Gatehouse, “Battle lines drawn along old divisions.” 9 emsb, “A Parent’s Choice,” March 1999. 10 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Projects Binder: Letter to the parents from Anne-Marie Léveillé-Shields, 15 March 1999.

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notes to pages 411–15 • 455 11 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Projects Binder: Letter, Anne-Marie LéveilléShields to T. Matheson, 8 June 1999. 12 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Projects Binder: Letter, Anne-Marie LéveilléShields to Ian Stronach, 15 March 1999. 13 Smith and Foster, “Tradition, Democracy and Human Rights,” 2. 14 Quoted in Quebec Home and School News, April 1999. 15 Smith and Foster, “Tradition, Democracy and Human Rights,” 4. 16 emsb Pedagogical Services, “The Harmonization of French Second Language Instruction,” November 1998. 17 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Minutes of the Governing Board, 6 January 1999. 18 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Minutes of the Governing Board: Letter, Ruth Rosenfeld (President mta) to George Vathilakis (Chairman, emsb), 10 February 1999. 19 Elizabeth Ballantyne School, Minutes of the Governing Board: Letter, Charles Levy to chairs of governing boards, 20 January 1999; Letter, Ian Stronach to D. Reid (emsb Pedagogical Services), 12 May 1999. 20 Montreal Gazette, September 1998: “Parents Getting More Powers.” 21 Montreal Gazette, 11 May 2000: Katherine Wilton, “School Board Backtracks on Libraries.”

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bibliography • 471 Jodoin, Alexandre, and J.L. Vincent. Histoire de Longueuil et de la famille de Longueuil. Montreal: Gebhardt-Berthiaume, 1889 Johnston, Wendy. “Contestation et continuité: Les comités confessionels et la gestion des écoles publiques au Québec (1920–1945).” Revue d’Histoire de l’Amérique Française 48:3 (1995): 403–34 – “Aux sources du développement inégal: Le financement de l’enseignement public à Montréal de 1920 à 1945.” Canadian Historical Review 76:1 (1995): 43–80 Keshen, Jeffrey. “One Family’s War: World War Two as seen through the Craig Family Correspondence.” Canadian Military History 7:3 (Summer 1998): 61–76 – “Revisiting Canada’s Civilian Women during World War II.” Histoire Sociale/ Social History 30:60 (1997): 239–66 – “Wartime Jitters over Juveniles: Canada’s Delinquency Scare and Its Consequences, 1939–1945.” In Jeffrey Keshen, ed. Age of Contention: Readings in Canadian Social History, 1900–1945. Toronto: Harcourt Brace Canada, 1997 Kirkness, Verna J. First Nations and Schools: Triumphs and Struggles. Toronto: Canadian Education Association, 1992 Knowles, David. “The American Presbyterian Church of Montreal, 1822– 1866.” MA thesis, McGill University, 1957 Kuntz, Harry, and Calvin C. Potter. Whither the Protestant School System in Quebec? Montreal: Quebec Federation of Home & School Associations, 1989 Lajeunesse, Marcel. “Espoirs et illusions d’une réforme scolaire au Québec du XIXe siècle.” Culture 31:2 (1970): 149–59 Lamontagne, Roland. Monographie sur Saint-Léonard: un cas de conflict social. Montreal: R. Lamontagne, 1971 Lamothe, Bernard, and Louise Lemire. “Scolarité, développement et activité économique chez les inuits du Québec arctique.” Recherches Sociographiques 35:3 (1994): 551–73 Lapicerella, Louise. “Le Groupe anglophone du Québec et l’éducation, 1840– 1870.” Thèse de maîtrise, uqam, 1980 Lapointe, Pierre-Louis. Au coeur de la Basse-Lièvre: la ville de Buckingham de ses origines à nos jours, 1824–1990. Buckingham: Ville de Buckingham, 1990 Larin, Robert. Brève histoire des protestants en Nouvelle-France et au Québec. St Alphonse de Granby, qc: Éditions de la Paix, 1998 Larose, François. “Du Passif à l’actif: L’Amérindien et l’école au Québec.” Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 14:4 (1984): 66–71 Lawr, Douglas A., and Robert Gidney. “Who Ran the Schools? Local Influences on Education Policy in Nineteenth-Century Ontario.” Ontario History 72:3 (June 1980): 131–43

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472 • bibliography Lewis, Norah. ‹Isn’t This a Terrible War?’: The Attitudes of Children to Two World Wars.” Historical Studies in Education 7:2 (1995): 193–215 Linteau, Paul-André, René Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert. Histoire du Québec contemporaine : De la Confédération à la crise (1867–1929). Montreal: Boréal, 1989 Linteau, Paul-André, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard. Quebec since 1930. Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1991 Little, J.I. Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township, 1848–1881. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991 – Ethno-cultural Transition and Regional Identity in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1989 – ‹Labouring in a Great Cause’: Marcus Child as Pioneer School Inspector in Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships, 1852–59.” Historical Studies in Education 10:1–2 (1998): 85–115 – “School Reform and Community Control in the 1840s: A Case Study from the Eastern Townships.” Historical Studies in Education 9:2 (1997) – State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997 Lucas, Sir Charles P. Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912 McAndrew, Marie, and Patricia Lamarre. “The Integration of Ethnic Minority Students Fifteen Years after Bill 101: Linguistic and Cultural Issues Confronting Quebec’s French Language Schools.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 28:2 (1996): 40–63 McAndrew, Marie, and Marianne Jacquet. “Le Discours public des acteurs du monde de l’éducation sur l’immigration et l’integration des élèves des minorités éthniques.” Recherches Sociographiques 37:2 (1996): 279–99 McCabe, Mrs Donald. “The Library: The Heart of Your School.” The School Board (March 1966): 18–22 McCann, Phillip. “Class, Gender and Religion in Newfoundland Education, 1836–1901.” Historical Studies in Education 1:2 (1989): 179–200 McCaw, Jean Darrow. “Refugees on the Last Frontier.” In the Sir John Johnston Centennial Branch United Empire Loyalists, The Loyalists of the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Sherbrooke: Progressive Publications, 1984 MacDonald, Joan. The Stanstead College Story. Stanstead, qc: Board of Trustees of Stanstead College, 1977 MacDonald, Robert H. Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993 McGeer, Dr J.P. “The President’s Message.” The School Board (January 1966): 3–4 McIntoch, Doris Jones. “The Palatines: Some Missisquoi ‘Dutch.› The Sir John Johnston Centennial Branch United Empire Loyalists, The Loyalists of the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Sherbrooke: Progressive Publications, 1984

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bibliography • 473 Mackay, Murdo. “The Language Problem and School Board Reform on the Island of Montréal.” MA thesis, McGill University, 1987 Mackechnie, S. Wyman. I Am What They Were. Shawville: Pontiac Print Shop, 1975 MacLachlan, Angus Campbell. Lochaber Bay, My Well Loved Country Home. Buckingham[?], Quebec: s.n., 1999 Magnuson, Roger. A Brief History of Quebec Education. Montreal: Harvest House, 1980 – Education in the Province of Quebec. Washington: us Government Printing Office, 1969 Mair, Nathan H. Protestant Education in Quebec: Notes on the History of Education in the Protestant Public Schools of Quebec. Quebec: Conseil supérieur de l’éducation Comité protestant, 1981 Manzer, Ronald. “Public Philosophy and Public Policy: The Case of Religion in Canadian State Education.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 7:2 (1992): 248–76 – Public Schools and Political Ideas: Canadian Educational Policy in Historical Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994 Marshall, Dominique. “The Language of Children’s Rights, the Formation of the Welfare State, and the Democratic Experience of Poor Families in Quebec, 1940–55.” Canadian Historical Review 78:3 (1997): 409–41 – “Nationalisme et politiques sociales au Québec depuis 1867 : Un siècle de rendez-vous manqués entre l’état, l’église et les familles.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 9:2 (1994): 301–47 – Aux origines sociales de l’État-providence : familles québécoises, obligation scolaire et allocations familiales, 1940–1955. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1998 Martin, Jean, and Ginette Bouchard. “Les Conditions générales d’enseignement dans le quartier ouest de Chicoutimi, 1896–1927.” Saguenayensia 31:3 (1989): 30–4 Marx, Herbert. An Opinion on Certain Points of Constitutional Law with Reference to the m.c.s.c., the p.s.b.g.m. and the Right to Dissent. Montreal: School Board Reorganization Committee, 1975 Medres, Israel. Montreal of Yesterday: Jewish Life in Montreal 1900–1920. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2000 Millar, Peter. “The Future of English Education in Quebec.” The School Board (Spring-Summer 1968): 18–22 Miller, J.R. Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996 Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999

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474 • bibliography Milner, Henry. The Long Road to Reform: Restructuring Public Education in Quebec. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986 Moir, John S. The Church in the British Era, From the British Conquest to Confederation. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972 Mondelet, Charles J.E. Letters on Elementary and Practical Education in Canada East. Montreal: John James Williams, 1841 Moore, J. Clifford. The Life and Times of a High School Principal in Rural Quebec. Lennoxville: The Townships Sun, 1996 Morrison, J.E. “The President’s Report.” The School Board (November 1965): 7–11 Morton, Desmond. “The Cadet Movement in the Moment of Canadian Militarism, 1909–1914.” Journal of Canadian Studies 13:2 (1978): 56–68 Moss, Mark. Manliness and Militarism: Educating young boys in Ontario for war. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2001 Neil, Graham. “A History of Physical Education in the Protestant Schools of Quebec.” MA thesis, McGill University, 1963 Nelles, Vivian. The Art of Nation Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Quebec’s Tercentenary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999 Nelson, Wendy. “The guerre des éteignoirs: School Reform and Popular Resistance in Lower Canada, 1841–1850.” MA thesis, University of Ottawa, 1991 – ‹Rage against the Dying of the Light’: Interpreting the Guerre des Éteignoirs.” Canadian Historical Review 81:4 (December 2000): 551–81 Noel, Françoise. Competing for Souls: Missionary Activity and Settlement in the Eastern Townships, 1784–1851. Sherbrooke, qc: Dép. d’histoire, Université de Sherbrooke, 1988 Noel, Jan. Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades Before Confederation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995 O’Brien, Mike. “Manhood and the Militia Myth: Masculinity, Class and Militarism in Ontario, 1902–1914.” Labour/Le travail #42 (Fall 1998): 115–41 Oiwa, Keinosuke. “Tradition and Social Change: An Ideological Analysis of the Montreal Jewish Immigrant Ghetto in the Early Twentieth Century.” PhD thesis, Cornell University, 1988 Oliver, Hugh, Mark Holmes, and Ian Winchester. The House that Ryerson Built: Essays in Education to Mark Ontario’s Bicentennial. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press, 1984 Padolsky, Enoch, and Ian Pringle. A Historical Source Book for the Ottawa Valley. Ottawa: Linguistic Survey of the Ottawa Valley, Carleton University, 1981 Parmalee, George William. Education in the Province of Quebec. Quebec City: Quebec Department of Public Instruction, 1914 Patrick, Donna. “Minority Language Education and Social Context” Etudes/ Inuit/Studies 18:1–2 (1994): 183–99

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bibliography • 475 Peabody, George. School Days: One-Room Schools of Maritime Canada. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1992 Percival, W.P. Across the Years: A Century of Education in the Province of Quebec. Montreal: Gazette Publishing Co. Ltd, 1946 – Education in Quebec: An Explanation of the System of Education in the Province of Quebec. Quebec City: Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1951 – Life in School: An Explanation of the Protestant School System of the Province of Quebec. Montreal: Herald Press, 1940 – Why Educate? Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1943 Perras, L.G., Lorne Marshal, and H.W. Clowater. “Lindsay Place High School: An Experiment in School Design.” The Educational Record, August 1962 Phillips, Dorothy. A History of the Schools Around Gaspé Bay. s.n., 1990 Pierson, Ruth Roach. “Wartime Jitters Over Femininity.” In J.L. Granatstein and Peter Neary, eds. The Good Fight: Canadians and World War II. Toronto: Copp Clark Ltd, 1995: 141–68 Prentice, Alison. The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in MidNineteenth Century Upper Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977 Protestant Committee, Statement Concerning the Report of the Quebec Protestant Education Survey Presented by the Protestant Committee of the Council of Education, 1939 Ramirez, Bruno, and Michael Del Balso. The Italians of Montreal: From Sojourning to Settlement, 1900–1921. Montreal: Les Éditions du Courant Inc., 1980 Rawlyk, G.A., ed. The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760 to 1900. Burlington, Ont.: Welch, 1990 Rexford, Elson I. Our Educational Problem: the Jewish Population and the Protestant Schools. Montreal: Renouf Publishing Co., 1924 Rexford, E., I. Gammell, and A.R. McBain. The History of the High School of Montreal. Montreal: The Old Boys’ Association of the High School of Montreal, 1950 Richard, Flora J. “Old Bedford High.” In Paige A. Knight et al., eds. Reflections of Yesterday: Missisquoi Historical Society Reports #19. Sherbrooke: Progressive Publications, 1986 Richer, Eric W., and B. Anne Wood, eds. Historical Perspectives on Educational Policy in Canada: Issues, Debates, and Case Studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1995 Rigby, G.H. History of Lachute. Lachute: Giles Publishing House Ltd, 1964 Robinson, Ira, and Mervin Butovsky. Renewing Our Days: Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1995 Rome, David. The Canadian Story of Reuben Brainin, Part 2. Montreal: National Archives, Canadian Jewish Congress, 1996 – The Drama of Our Early Education. Montreal: National Archives, Canadian Jewish Congress, 1991

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476 • bibliography – The Heroes of Montreal Jewish Education. Montreal: National Archives, Canadian Jewish Congress, 1992 – Inventory of Documents on the Jewish School Question, 1903–1932. Montreal: National Archives, Canadian Jewish Congress, 1975 – On the Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1903–1931. Montreal: National Archives, Canadian Jewish Congress, 1975 Rosevear, John Newton. “Chambly County Protestant Central School Board, 1945–1955: The Problems of a Central School Board in the Province of Quebec.” MA thesis, McGill University, 1956 Ross, Harold. “The Jew in the Educational System of the Province of Quebec.” MA thesis, McGill University, 1947 Rudin, Ronald. The Forgotten Quebecers: A History of English-Speaking Quebec, 1759–1980. Quebec City: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1985 Rumilly, Robert. Histoire de Longueuil. Longueuil: Société d’histoire de Longueuil, 1974 Salisbury, Richard F. A Homeland for the Cree: Regional Development in James Bay, 1971–1981. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986 Sancton, Andrew. Governing the Island of Montreal: Language Differences and Metropolitan Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 Schull, Joseph. Laurier: The First Canadian. Toronto: Macmillan, 1965 Sellar, Robert. The History of the County of Huntingdon and of the Seigniories of Chateauguay & Beauharnois: From their first settlement to the year 1838. Huntingdon, Quebec: Canadian Gleaner, 1888 Sheehan, Nancy M. “Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Practice: The i.o.d.e. and the Schools in Canada, 1900–1945.” Historical Studies in Education 2:2 (1990): 307–21 Sheehan, Nancy M., J. Donald Wilson, and David C. Jones, eds. Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1986 Shi, David E. “Ernest Thompson Seton and the Boy Scouts: A Moral Equivalent of War?” The South Atlantic Quarterly 84:4 (Autumn 1985): 379–91 Silatunirmut: The Pathway to Wisdom. The Final Report of the Nunavik Educational Task Force. Lachine, Quebec: Le Groupe de travail, 1992 Simard, Jean-Jacques. “Les Dépenses de l’état chez les cris et les inuits du Québec depuis la convention de 1975.” Recherches Sociographiques 35:3 (1994): 505–50 Smith, Mackay L. The Jews of Montreal and Their Judaisms: A Voyage of Discovery. Montreal: Aaron Communications, 1998 Smith, Willard. Silver Creek: The Centre of the World. Wawa, Ont.: s.n., 2001 Smith, William J., and William F. Foster. “Tradition, Democracy and Human Rights: A Response to the Proulx Task Force Report on the Place of Reli-

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bibliography • 477 gion in Quebec Schools.” Montreal: McGill University, Office of Research on Educational Policy, 1999 Smith, William J., William F. Foster, and Helen M. Donahue. The Contemporary Education Scene in Québec: A Handbook for Policy Makers, Administrators and Educators. Montreal: McGill University, Office of Research on Educational Policy, 1999 Smith, William J., and Helen M. Donahue. The Historical Roots of Québec Education. Montreal: McGill University, Office of Research on Educational Policy, 1999 Solms, Dr Hugo. “Youth and Drugs.” The School Board (Winter 1970–71): 12–17 Somerville, Alistair. Hemmingford Then and Now. Hemmingford, qc: S.S. Mark, 1985 Sourkes, Theodore L., and Gilbert Pinard, eds. Building on a Proud Past: 50 Years of Psychiatry at McGill. Montreal: McGill University, Department of Psychiatry, 1995 Stamp, Robert M. “Empire day in the schools of Ontario: the training of young imperialists.” Journal of Canadian Studies 8:3 (1973): 32–42 – The Schools of Ontario, 1876–1976. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982 St James Anglican Church, Port Daniel. One Hundred Years of Wildness. Port Daniel: The Centennial Committee, 1969 Sweeney, Laureen. Polishing the Jewel: A History of the Renewal Project, Westmount Public Library. Westmount, Quebec: City of Westmount, 1995 Talbot, Allan D. p.a.p.t.: The First Century: A History of the Provincial Association of Protestant Teachers of Quebec. Montreal: papt, 1963 Taylor, The Rev. Ernest M. History of Brome County, Quebec, From the Dates of the Grants of Land Therein to the Present Time. Montreal: J. Lovell & Son Ltd, 1908 Thomas, C. History of the Counties of Argenteuil, Quebec, & Prescott, Ont., from the Earliest Settlement to the Present. Montreal: J. Lovell, 1896 Tulchinsky, Gerald. Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community. Toronto: Stoddart, 1998 Turay, Harry. “The Process of Settlement and Land Clearance in Papineau County, Quebec, 1800–1967.” MA thesis, University of Ottawa, 1969 Turner, J.M.A. “Laurentian Regional School Board.” The School Board (Spring-Summer 1968): 27–9 Tuttle, William M. Jr. “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 Underwood, Kathleen. “Schoolmarms on the Upper Missouri.” Great Plains Quarterly #11 (Fall 1991): 225–33

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478 • bibliography Vallières, Pierre. White Niggers of America. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971 Villard, Paul. Up to the Light: The Story of French Protestantism in Canada. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1928 Watson, David. Looking Back: A Pictorial History of the Town of Montreal West, Quebec. Montreal: King Press af Ltd, 1997 Watson, J. Ralph. Protestants in Montreal, 1760–1992: A contribution to the celebration of the 350th anniversary of the founding of Montreal 1642– 1992. Hantsport, ns: Lancelot Press, 1992 Weintraub, William. City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and 50s. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996 Wilson, J. Donald, ed. An Imperfect Past: Education and Society in Canadian History. Vancouver: Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education, UBC, 1984 Wilson, J. Donald, and Paul J. Stortz. ‹May the Lord Have Mercy on You’: The Rural School Problem in British Columbia in the 1920s.” BC Studies #79 (Autumn 1988): 24–58 Wilson, J. Donald, Robert M. Stamp, and Louis-Phillipe Audet, eds. Canadian Education: A History. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1970 Yelin, Shulamis. Shulamis: Stories from a Montreal Childhood. Ste Anne de Bellevue, qc: Shoreline, 1993 Young, Alan R. ‹We throw the torch’: Canadian Memorials of the Great War and the Mythology of Heroic Sacrifice.” Journal of Canadian Studies 24:4 (Winter 1989–90): 5–28

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Index

Abbotsford, 49 Abbott, Joseph, 43–4 Aberdeen School (Montreal), 128–9, 134, 201, 203, 226, 291–2; strike by Jewish students, 204–5 absenteeism, in native communities, 392, 397–9; owing to family economy, 131, 143; owing to illness, 244; owing to poverty, 143, 253 academies, affiliation with school boards, 171; becoming high schools, 177; building of, 62, 165; in church basements 170; curriculum of, 169–70; departments of, 165, 167, 178, 191; gender of teachers, 178, 191, 193; enlargement of, 287; high school classes in, 165, 167; intermediate classes in, 165, 167; location of, 25, 175; non-denominational aspects of, 168; origins of, 168; physical education in, 291–3; primary classes in, 165, 167; principals of, 191–4; in private homes, 170; Protestant clergy as teachers in, 170; public

funding for, 171; teachers of, 169, 191–4; teachers’ training in, 168; trustees/directors of, 168 Adams, John/Adams Report, 153–4, 157, 266, 403 Ahuntsic, 318, 320 Akulivik, 381–2 Alexander, Frances, 258–9 Alexander Galt Regional High School, 310 Alexandra School (Montreal), 318 Alfred Joyce School (Outremont), 218 American Presbyterian Church (Montreal), 113 American Revolutionary war, 26 Americans, 22, 30, 34–5, 39 Amherst Park School (Montreal), 320 Anderson, Rev. William, 85 Anglican church (Church of England), 19; clergy on city boards, 112; Colonial Church and School Society, 86; and colonial elite, 23, 42; condemnation of racism, 221; creation of parishes, 43; early indifference to

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480 • index public schooling, 22, 25; “established” church status, 25, 89; and McGill University, 122; missions and missionaries, 31, 36, 42–4, 56, 67, 86, 364, 384; and native schooling, 384; and Royal Grammar School, 106; and Royal Institution, 22, 26, 31, 41–5; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 108; solidarity with other Protestants, 71; teaching of doctrine in schools; 44, 61, 67 anglophones, cultural survival of, 378; solidarity among, 352, 404 Ann Street School (Montreal), 116, 120–1, 128–9, 132 anti-Semitism, 6, 201, 204, 220 Argenteuil, Anglican influence in, 34, 43; central school board, 269, 274, 278–9; dissentient board, 173; early schools in, 34, 36, 38; links with Deux Montagnes area, 334; regional school board, 283; relations with the Royal Institution, 48; school commissioners of, 64; Scots settlers of, 34, 39, 43; seigneury of, 33. See Lachute, St Andrew’s Arnold, Hezekiah, 58 art classes, 287–9, 297, 302, 304, 332, 374 Ascot Township, 30, 48, 175 Asherman, William, 347–8 Assembly of Lower Canada, 15, 29; and Fabrique Act, 43; as funding source, 22, 56, 83, 105; involvement in public schooling, 45–9, 51; liberal tendencies of, 45, 47 Astbury, Dr, 220 Auclair, Albert, Ludger, and Philbert, 89 Audet, Louis-Philippe, 9 auditoriums/assembly halls, 124, 280, 287–9, 291–2, 307, 365

Aupaluk, 381–2 Awashish, Philip, 380, 387 Ayer’s Cliff high school, 271, 301, 312 Aylmer, 12, 98, 170, 174, 373–4, 405 Baden-Powell, Robert, 229 Baie Comeau, 283, 405–6 Baie d’Urfé, 328–9 Baldwin Mills, 156, 273 Ball, Elizabeth, 374 Balls Mills, 32 Bancroft, Rev. Charles, 113 Bancroft School (Montreal) 203, 206, 319 Bannantyne School (Verdun), 376 Baptist College (Montreal), 113 Baptists, 31, 109; French-speaking, 89; of Lochaber Township, 142; missions, 115, 364–6, 369 Barclay, Rev. James, 204, 221 Barclay School (Montreal), 320–1, 375, 377, 407 Barnston, 30, 48, 144, 156, 157; academy, 169, 178; conflict with central board, 267, 273; conflict with Royal Institution, 44; consolidation of schools, 271, 273–4; French taught in, 373; and qualified teachers, 149 Baron Byng High School (Montreal), 203, 241, 288–9, 321 Baron de Hirsch Institute, 199, 204 Baron de Hirsch School (Montreal), and employment of Jewish teachers, 201; end of, 127; transfer to pbsc, 127, 198–9; withdrawal of pbsc subsidy, 200 Barrett, Esther, 296 Barrett, William, 50, 65, 67, 69–70, 76 Baudouin, Dr, 244

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index • 481 Beaconsfield, 12, 96, 328; elementary school, 377; French language instruction, 375; handed over to francophones, 407; high school, 304, 328–9; train links with Montreal, 183–4 Beauce, 7, 159; Protestants in, 377 Beaudry, Louis, 368 Beauharnois (seigneury), 33, 48 Beauharnois County, 71–2, 83 Beauport, 88–9 Beaurepaire, 183, 328 Bedford, 29, 285, 293, 305 Beebe Plain, 32, 271–3 Beek, Elizabeth Ann, 46 Belle Rivière, 83, 86, 90–1, 365–6 Belmont School (Montreal), 203 Berri Street School (Montreal) 128, 319 Berthelet Street School (Montreal), 127–8 Berthier, 33, 36, 38, 40 Bethune, Rev. John, 122 Bible, and Jewish students, 200; use of in Protestant curriculum, 22, 72, 346 bilingualism, 307–8 Bill 3 (1984), 359–60 Bill 22/Official Language Act (1974), 353–4 Bill 27 (1972), 264, 283, 316 Bill 63 (1969), 353, 355, 361 Bill 71, 341 Bill 86, 340 Bill 101/Charter of the French Language, 354–5, 378, 389 Bill 180, 18, 403, 408, 412 Billings, Howard S., 275–6, 301, 308, 340 Bishop’s College/University, 170 Black, Eliza, 106 Black, Rev. Edward, 106–7 Blacksmith, George, 391, 396

Blampin, Caroline, 191 boarding, high school students, 167, 173, 178, 182–3, 262; at native schools, 393; parental concerns about, 182–3; School Home in New Carlisle, 188–91. See Feller Institute, Pointe aux Trembles school Boer War, 225, 228 Bonaventure, 188, 312–13, 405 Booker, Roland, 332 books, 106, 132, 139, 226 Bordeaux, 318 Bosworth, Rev. Newton, 109–10 Bouchette, Joseph, 27, 30 Boudreault, Thomas, 391–2 Bourlamaque, 12, 160 Boulevard School (Montreal) 128, 319 Bourassa, Robert, 353, 380 Bourget, Ignace, 75 Boy Scouts, activities in schools, 237, 295; and citizenship, 229; and masculinity, 228, 239; military training of, 238; participation in Armistice Day ceremonies, 230, 239; and sex education, 261; weapons of, 238 Britannia School (Montreal), 122, 127–8, 226 British and Canadian School, as charity school, 109; end of, 109, 115, 128; French-Canadians in, 108; Jewish students in, 198; nondenominational nature of, 108; number of students attending, 129; as public school, 109, 112, 116, 120 British and Canadian School Society, 108, 115 British North American School Society, 56–9 Broadhurst, Miss, 191 Brome Township, 74, 77, 81

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482 • index Brossard, 332 Buchanan, Judd, 380 Buckingham, 28–9, 140–1; academy, 174, 179; dissentient board, 173; French taught in, 373; petition to Royal Institution, 45 Buller, Arthur, 420n4 Burnside Hall, 122–4, 126 Burrage, Rev. Robert, 42, 48, 105 cadets, 16, 293, 295; and citizenship, 229; and masculinity, 228; participation in Armistice Day ceremonies, 230; in schools, 223, 227–8, 236–8; uniforms of, 228, 238; weapons of, 227–9, 238 cafeterias, 300, 302, 304, 307 Cain, Tommy, 386 Caldwell, Sir John James, 36, 39, 85 Cameron, John A., 142 Campbell, Rev. Malcolm, 335 Campbell’s Bay, 12 Canadian Legion, 220 Canadian nationalism, 201, 206, See citizenship, patriotism Candiac, 5, 333 Cap Santé, 38, 48, 84 Caroline School (Longueuil), 182, 295, 330, 333 Cartierville, 320, 327 Catholic church, conservative tendencies of, 52, 72, 75; and cultural identity, 90; leadership of, 25; missions to townships, 69; and native education, 384; opposition to Durham Report, 53; promoting confessional school boards, 71; support for public schooling, 71 Catholic clergy, 33, 40, 48, 78, 84 Catholic Committee of the Council of Public Instruction, 95, 340 Catholic dissentient school boards, 69–71, 74, 93

Catholic religious orders, churches and chapels of, 25; landholdings of, 25, 29, 40, 75; teaching by, 22–3, 40, 55, 72, 78, 80, 109 Catholic school boards, catechism in, 80; relations with Jewish community, 197–8 Catholic school municipalities, 70, 97, 99 Catholicism, and French Canadian survival, 14, 364; Protestant view of, 22, 40, 75, 90, 110, 113, 346, 360 Catholics, attending Protestant schools, 6, 89, 93, 355–9, 363; English-speaking, 7, 14, 70, 352, 364; importance of schooling to, 23; opposition to school taxation, 66; on school boards with Protestants, 78, 94 Cedar Park School (Pointe Claire), 92, 238, 374 Centennial High School, 333, 377 central boards, 17, 264–5, 266, 269– 70; achievements of, 270; conflict with local boards, 267, 270–3; and consolidation of rural schools, 267–8, 270, 278–9; dissolution of, 281; and financial equalization, 265–6; improvement of high schools, 278–9 Central Quebec School Board, 406–7 Central School Board Act (1944), 269 Chaleur Bay, communities along, 26, 35, 42, 149, 166, 186, 312; Protestant school municipality of, 280, 313, 405 Chambly, village of, 41 Chambly County, Central School Board, 269; High School, 333, 377; Protestant School Committee, 268–9 Channel Islanders, 26

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index • 483 charity, 110, 113 Charland, Jean-Pierre, 10–11 Charleston Academy (Hatley), 166, 168 Chateauguay, regional high school, 309 Chateauguay Valley, 7, 41; regional high school (Ormstown), 309; Regional School Board, 282 Chatham Township, 30, 35, 48 Chauveau, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier, 75, 77, 86, 90, 94 Chicoutimi, 377, 406 children, British guest children, 219, 233; in Catholic schools, 109; in common schools, 110; cost of educating, 131, 138; in public schools, 90, 103, 114, 115, 120, 130, 133, 134, 140; and school attendance, 138; and school holidays, 227; unschooled, 109; of urban working class, 107 Chisasibi, 381, 383, 389, 393–4, 396 Chomedy, 333, 335, 377 Chrétien, Jean, 380 Christ Church Cathedral (Montreal), 134 Churchill, Elizabeth, 58 Ciaccia, John, 380 citizenship, Canada Citizenship Act (1947), 222, 347; and Canadian nationalism, 206; and constitutional rights, 118; and health, 244; and multicultural values, 242; Parti Québécois and, 354; Protestant aspects of, 16, 346; and Protestant schools, 119, 120, 135, 218 city boards, businessmen on, 112–13, 117; clergy on, 103, 112–13, 117, 204; confessional nature of, 103, 109, 112; democratization of, 340, 341; formation of, 103, 112; Jewish representation on, 340; undem-

ocratic nature of, 102–3, 104, 112, 114, 134, 204, 335 Clancy, Thomas, 68 Clarendon Township, 12, 45–7; consolidation of schools, 159; model school, 177; See Shawville Classical and Mathematical School (Montreal), 106 Cleland’s Corners, 32 Cleveland, Edward, 32 Cleveland Township, 29 Coaticook, 12, 98, 178; academy/ high school, 165, 169, 178, 271; complaints about quality of French, 374; school municipality of, 169, 283 Cochran, A.W., 112 Collège de Montréal, 109–10 colonial government, 23; control of land grants, 25, 29; mistrust of Nonconformists, 26; petitions for schools, 35–9, 41; relations with school commissions, 60 colonization, 26, 30–1, 46 Commercial and Technical High School (Montreal), 126, 203, 288– 9, 321 Commission des écoles de Montréal, 407 Commission scolaire Marguerite Bourgeois, 407 Commission scolaire regionale de Missisquoi, 306 Committee for Neutral Schools, 344, 348–9, 355, 357 Common School Fund, 50, 53, 59– 60, 78, 82 common schools, Anglican opposition to, 55, 67–9; Catholic opposition to, 52, 55, 71; Catholics and Protestants on school board, 422n2; ethnic and religious tension in, 67–70; identification with Protestant

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484 • index values, 52; marginalization of Protestants, 90; non-denominational character of, 15, 50–2, 55, 80; Protestant satisfaction with, 71; Sicotte commission’s criticism of, 75; under city boards, 103, 105 Compton Township, 48 compulsory education, 236–7, 259, 321 Concordia University, 126 Confederation, 52; British North America Act, 76; new Province of Quebec, 94; Protestant opposition to, 76–7; See section 93 of the bna Act confessional school boards, abolition of, 6, 14, 400, 402–3; 1841 Act’s silence regarding, 55; Conservative Party’s support for, 75; creation of, 94; disadvantages for Englishspeaking Catholics, 364; disadvantages for French-speaking Protestants, 364; Quebec governments’ opposition to, 358–60 Congregationalists, 25, 31–2, 37 Connaught School (Côte St Paul), 292 conquest, 1760, 23–5 Conservative Party, Quebec, 75, 208 consolidation of rural schools, 16, 146, 158; first consolidated school, 155–6; and model schools, 156–7; reasons for, 294, 299–300, 372; resistance to, 138, 140; and transportation of pupils, 153–4, 155–6; under central boards, 268, 270 Constitutional Act, 1791, 29 Cook, John, 112, 170 Cookshire, 169, 297; academy/high school, 168–9, 301, 308, 374 Coon Come, Matthew, 453n19 Cooper, Mr, 240–1

Corbin, Delia, 60 Corrigan, Patrick, 69 Côte des Neiges School, 319 Côte St Luc, 327, 400 Côte St Paul school, 318–9 Côteau de Lac, 38 Côteau de la Visitation, 318 Côteau Rouge, 329–30 Côteau St Louis, 318 Côteau St Paul, 318 Côteau St Pierre school board, 96, 292, 325 Cottingham, W.M., 369–70 Council for School Reorganization on the Island of Montreal, 341 Council of Public Instruction, 9; confessional nature of, 76; creation of, 75; end of, 340; equal representation on, 76–7; Jewish representation on, 208. See Protestant Committee counties, formation of, 29 Cowansville, 285, 306, 309, 329 Cox Township school board, 165, 186, 188–91. See New Carlisle Cramp, John Mockett, 113 Cree, Grand Council, 386 Cree School Board, 8, 380–1, 383, 388–93, 398–9. See native school boards Cross, Robert, 78–9, 80, 86, 92 Crystal Springs School (Montreal), 320 Cummings, D.G., 347 curriculum, of early academies, 169; non-denominational aspect of, 71, 76, 80, 108; religious aspects of, 67, 76; of Royal Grammar School, 106; under Royal Institution, 40; under school commissioners, 60; use of the Bible in, 72, 346. See Protestant curriculum Currie, Sir Arthur, 231

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index • 485 Curtis, Bruce, 10 Cushing family, 20–1, 30; Elmore, 20, 26; Lydia, 20 Cuthbert, James, 36 Danville, 29, 172–3 Dawson, Sir John William, 77, 123, 132 Delorimier, 318–9 Department of Education/Public Instruction, establishment of, 53; religious composition of, 55 Depression of the 1930s, building schools during, 293, 321; and collection of school taxes, 152; and immigration, 321; impact on rural school boards, 265; social welfare at school, 252–4 DeSalaberry Street School (Montreal), 120–1, 128 Deux Montagnes/St Eustache sur le Lac, 185, 365 Devonshire School (Montreal), 203, 292 Diamond, Billy, 380, 391–2 diphtheria, 244, 247–9, 250 discipline in schools, 13, 191, 384; corporal punishment, 106, 147, 193; parents attitude to, 131, 147– 8; school board and, 213 dissentient clause, 15, 55, 68, 76, 79, 81–5 district councils, 53, 59. See Hemmingford District of Bedford Regional School Board, creation of, 282–3, 285; and Massey-Vanier Regional High School, 286–7, 305–10 Dixon, Ethel, 268 Dollard des Ormaux, 329 Dorchester Commission, 26 Dorchester Street School (Montreal), 121, 128

Dorval, High School, 326–7, 377; and Kativik school board, 392–3, 395 Doucet, J.A., 385 Dougall, John, 113 Dougall, Miss, 132 Douglastown, 38 Driscoll, J.C., 43 Drummond School (Montreal), 319, 321 Drummondville, 38, 41, 49 Dufferin School (Montreal), 128, 201, 226, 318, 321 Dufour, Andrée, 11 Duke of Connaught School (Côte St Paul), 319 Dumont, Micheline, 10 Duncan, Rebecca, 58 Dunham Township, 30, 36, 38, 48, 169 Dunn, Thomas, 26, 29, 34 Dunstan, 163 Dunton High School (Montreal), 326–7, 377, 407 Dunton, W.E., 240 Duplessis, Maurice, 221, 256, 282, 369–70 Duranceau, Antoine, 40, 84–5 Durham, Lord (Jack Lambton), 53 Durham Report, 52–3, 110 Duvernay, 333 Earl Grey School (Montreal), 319 Eastern Quebec Regional School Board, 282, 406 Eastern Shores School Board (New Carlisle), 406 Eastern Townships, 11, 29–30; academies of, 166, 168–9; Anglican missionaries in, 31, 36, 42; Catholic population of, 71; early ethnic homogeneity of, 56; Jews of, 197; Nonconformist tradition of, 31, 42; prosperity of, 141, 149;

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486 • index Regional School Board, 282; success of Royal Institution in, 34–5 Eastmain, 381, 383, 393 Eaton Township, 30, 36, 38–9, 44, 48, 169 Echenberg, Bertha, 209; Clara, 209; Rebecca, 209, 232 Education Acts, 1801, 34–5, 40, 43; 1824 (Fabrique Act), 43, 78; 1829 (Syndic’s Act), 45–9; 1841, 15, 51, 53, 55, 63, 78, 111–12; 1845, 15, 51, 60, 63, 78, 103; 1846, 15, 51, 60, 63–4, 66, 68, 78, 81–3, 85, 103, 112, 117, 165, 167, 169; 1851, 60; 1856, 75; 1869, 87, 95, 118, 171; 1875, 95; 1903, 200, 207; 1931, 215 Edward VII School (Montreal), 203, 319, 321, 377, 407 Elizabeth Ballantyne School (Montreal West), 292, 414; governing board of, 400–1; Home and School Association, 400; mre in, 409–11 Ellis, Sargeant, 293 English-language schooling, access to, 352–5, 360, 363 English Montreal School Board (emsb); character of, 400; and French language instruction, 401, 414–15; loss of schools, 407–8; proposes elimination of central libraries, 415 Escuminac, 275 Esson, Rev. Henry, 106 Estates-general on Education, 403 exams, high school leaving, 232 Expo 67, 242–3, 308 Fabreville, 333 Fabrique Act, 43, 47, 78, 80 factory work and school attendance, 131

Fahmy-Eid, Nadia, 10 Fairmount School (Montreal), 203, 206, 318–19, 343 families, attitude towards children’s education, 31–2; increasing expectations for children’s education, 166–7, 285 farming, and school attendance, 31– 2, 143; subsistence, 140 Farnham, 285, 294 Fascism, 208, 218 Feller, Henriette, 365 Feller Institute, 90, 365–6, 369 Ferrier, James, 110, 112, 117, 123 Fineberg, Victor, 197 Fitch Bay, 272–3 flags, 344, 349 Frampton, 48 Fraser Highlanders, 23 Fraser Institute Library, 296 Frelighsburg, 43–4 French Canadian Missionary Society, 366–8 French-Canadians, 11; anti-clericalism of, 14; lack of public schooling experience, 22; petitions to Royal Institution, 37; Protestant view of, 265; view of British Empire, 225 French Evangelical Church (Montreal), 367–8 French language instruction, conversation classes, 375; elimination of, 374–5; French immersion, 18, 362, 375–7; parents’ objection to, 373; parents’ promotion of, 6, 17–18, 361–3, 374–5; to promote linguistic harmony, 361, 369; quality of, 362, 373; teachers’ specialization in, 191, 362, 371, 373 French Methodist Institute, 368 French sectors of Protestant school boards, 372, 377–8

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index • 487 French-speaking Protestants, 6–7, 89, 120, 363–72; cultural survival of, 366; evangelical character of, 370, 404; pbsc school, 121; within linguistic boards, 357, 407 French specialist, 372–5 funding sources for education, Assembly of Lower Canada, 22, 47– 9, 85, 86, 108; Common School Fund, 50, 53, 59–60, 63–4; Department of Education/Protestant Committee, 102, 105, 114, 117–18, 162, 165; governor, 35–6; of poor rural municipalities, 212; private contributions, 78, 86; property tax, 50, 64; public subscription, 31, 34, 48, 56; Royal Institution, 22, 39, 48; special assessment, 63, 66; Special Council, 49 Gagnon, Robert, 11 Galley, Elsie, 373 Galt, Alexander Tilloch, 77 Garayt, M., 368 Gaspé peninsula, 5, 7, 26, 99, 189, 313; Anglican missionaries on, 42; busing along, 190–1; regional board serving, 282; relations with the Royal Institution, 48–9; school consolidation, 190; secondary schooling as survival strategy, 166, 188, 190; sector board for, 405; time zones and schooling, 280; train connections, 186 Gaspé, town of, 279–80, 405; regional high school, 312–13 Gaspesia, Protestant regional school board of, 312, 405 Gavazzi, Alessandro, 75 gender, and academy teachers, 178, 191, 193; division of Protestant curriculum, 287–8; of elementary teachers, 31, 37, 47, 62, 131–4,

143, 152, 218; parent committees, 341; physical education and, 293; of rial teachers, 37, 47, 191; of school commissioners/trustees, 285, 336; of school principals, 191, 194, 296; of science teachers, 191, 193, 296; of teachers in secondary schools, 191, 193; and war, 225, 228–9, 239 gender roles, in curriculum, 240; in extracurricular activities, 235; in post-war Quebec, 236; and youth, 295–6 Gendron Commission, 353 Gidney, R.D., 10 Giles, Dr, 315 Gilman, A.L., 136, 372–3 Gilmour, Principal, 400 Godmanchester, 30 Goldstein, Maxwell, 200, 204, 206 governing boards, 400–2, 415–16 Grace Church School (Montreal), 121, 127 graded schools, academies as, 165, 178; in minority Protestant areas, 179; network of, 167–8, 193, 310 Granby, academy, 169, 171; and French Protestants, 371; relations with the Royal Institution, 48; school board, 226, 285, 298; township, 41 Grande Fresnière school board, 183, 185–6; See St Eustache Grande Ligne dissentient school, 366 Grantham Township, 48 Gray, Jacob, 197 Greek Orthodox students, 6, 135, 203, 323, 344 Greenfield Park, 5, 180, 182, 268, 333 Greenshields Avenue School/Barclay School, 320 Gregg, Richard, 68

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488 • index Grenville, 48, 279 Grosse Ile, 159 guerre des éteignoirs, 11, 66, 70–1 guest children, 233 guidance and guidance counsellors, 259–60, 281, 287, 306 Guy Drummond School (Outremont), 218, 407 Halifax township, 45, 178 Hamel, George, 66–7 Hamilton Street School (Côte St Paul), 319 Hampstead, 325, 343 Harold Napper School (Brossard), 332–3 Hart, Samuel, 61 Hatcher, H.G., 234, 235, 244, 254–5, 258, 349, 441n35 Hatley, 30, 43, 48, 149, 156, 166, 283. See Charleston Academy Hayes, Richard, 65, 69–70, 76 Hazard, Henry, 67–9 health of children, and citizenship, 244; and conditions in classrooms, 251; and government response, 248, 256; and mental hygiene, 246–7; promotion by school boards, 244–60; role of doctors and nurses, 251–3; role of social workers, psychologists, guidance counsellors, 16, 246, 259–60; and sex education, 256–7, 261, 356; and social reformers, 246, 248, 255; and substance abuse, 260–1; vaccination and, 16, 248–9 Healy, Mrs Gilbert, 31 Hebrew, teachers of, 198; teaching of, 209–10, 215 Heffernan, Daniel, 50 Hemmingford, 11, 30, 32, 35, 56; Anglicans in, 50, 56, 63, 67–9; and British North American School So-

ciety, 56–7, 67; Catholic schools in, 69–70; common schools of, 56–9; consolidation of schools, 156, 158; ethnicity in, 55, 61; French Canadians of, 70; high school of, 279, 301, 312; Irish Catholics of, 50, 56, 67–9; local disputes in, 63, 65– 9; Methodists in, 50, 63; model school, 174–5; petition to Royal Institution, 45, 56; Presbyterians in, 50, 63; school bus routes, 277–8; settlement of township, 30, 56; teachers of, 56–61 Hemmingford school board, building and repairing schools, 59–60, 63, 294; Catholics on, 50, 68; election of, 51, 65; first school commission, 50–1, 55–6, 59; local resistance to, 65–6; promotion of common schools, 55–6, 67–9; relations with district council, 60; relations with teachers, 60–1; support of property taxes, 50, 64–5; want Catholic French teachers, 373 Henry, Miss, 132 Henry, Thomas 170 Hepburn, W.A., 266, 403. See Protestant Survey Herbert Symonds School (ndg), 292, 320 Hester, Hugh, 390 higher education, access to, 110, 166; Royal Institution’s involvement in, 21, 42; See McGill College/University High School for Girls, 121, 124–5, 241, 321 High School of Montreal, 110, 112, 121, 240, 321; buildings of, 124, 125, 287–90; curriculum of, 125; directors of, 168; primary grades of, 126; Protestant nature of, 103; relation with McGill, 123, 170,

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index • 489 291; teachers of, 100; transfer to pbsc, 122–4 High School of Quebec, 170–1, 279, 301 Hill, Major S.H., 227 Hingston, Maurella (McCagg), 145, 163 Hobson, Benjamin, 35–6 Hochelaga School, 127, 129–30, 133 holidays, Christmas, 346, 348; Jewish, 201, 208, 218, 221 Holland School (Quebec City), 357 Holmes, A. Lee, 173 Home and School movement, 16; advocacy role for parents, 337; arts programs in schools, 255; and child welfare and health programs, 246, 251, 255–6, 260–1; creation of, 153; improving level of French instruction, 375; music programs in schools, 255; non-denominational nature of, 255; in Outremont, 219, 220; promoting sex education in schools, 256, 261; role of teachers in, 219; role of women in, 255, 342; sports programs in schools, 255; support for French immersion, 361, 375; welcoming postwar immigrants, 17, 347–8, 352 home economics/domestic science, facilities for, 287–9, 296, 302, 332; teaching of, 191, 236, 240 Honeyman, Inspector, 145 Hood, John, 57, 68–9 Hope, 99 L’Hote, Madame, 374 Houston, Susan, 10 Hull, 31, 35–6, 38–9; Jews of, 209; relations with Royal Institution, 44, 48; secondary schooling in, 174, 301, 309; sector board of, 405

Hunter, Inspector, 144, 149 Huntingdon, 32, 41, 83; academy/ high school, 170, 174, 312 Hyatt School (Milby), 146–7 immigrants, acquiring Protestant values, 346; British, 41, 45; Eastern European, 199, 209; hostility towards, 197, 201, 205; Irish, 45–6; Jewish, 116, 198–9, 325; learning English, 201–3, 346, 352; links with anglophone community, 352– 5; non-European, 344, 372; obliged to attend French schools, 352, 377; Orthodox Christians, 325; post-war refugees, 325; Protestant Europeans, 325; within Catholic school system, 345. See Jews, Loyalists, Protestant settlers Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (iode), 16, 223, 227, 246, 251–2, 261, 295 industrialization, 15, 179, 226 infectious diseases, 244, 246, 248; government’s response to, 250; parents’ response to, 249–50; school boards’ response to, 244–8; and school closings, 245, 247–8; urban causes of, 246–8. See diphtheria, smallpox, Spanish flu, tuberculosis Institut canadien, 75, 112 Interracial Committee for Democratic Action, 220 Inuit Association of Northern Quebec, 380, 386 Inukjuak, 381–2 Inverness, 45, 178, 262, 265, 284 Inverness Academy/High School, closing of, 262–4; establishment of, 178; secondary school of Megantic County, 178–9; teachers of, 178, 191–3, 262

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490 • index Iona Avenue School (Montreal), 298, 319, 321, 323, 407 Ireland, township of, 178, 284 Irish, 45–6, 364 Irvine, Christopher, 50 Island Council, 342 Italians, 427n59 Ivujivik, 381–2, 389 Jacobsen, James A., 194 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (jbnqa), 380–1, 388– 90, 392 Jenkins, Rev. John, 113–15, 117, 119, 318, 335 Jewish Colonization Association, 209 Jewish community, and anti-Semitism, 197, 201, 204, 220; and cultural identity, 206–7, 343, 378–9; divisions in, 197; and Jacob Pensler affair, 200; students’ strike, 204–5. See under specific towns/villages Jewish Community Council, 206 Jewish school board, 205–8 Jews, attending Protestant schools, 5, 16, 90, 135, 198–9, 203, 321, 323; equality with Protestants “for school purposes,” 16, 200, 210–12; immigration of, 198–9; impact on Protestant schooling, 199, 206; public funding for schools of, 370; representation on school boards, 195, 335; school taxes paid to Protestant board, 208; segregation of, 206; as teachers,135, 195, 201, 205, 208 John Jenkins School (Montreal), 320 John Rennie High School (Pointe Claire), 329 Johnson, Andrew, 267 Johnson, John, 36 Johnson, Thomas, 43 Joliette, 88–9, 182–3, 186, 191, 282 junior high schools, 313

Kahansky, Harry, 197, 218 Kahn, Carol, 362 Kangiqsualujjuaq, 381–2 Kangiqsujuaq, 381–2 Kangirsuk, 381–2, 386 Kativik School Board, 8, 380–2, 387– 93, 398–9. See native school boards Kativik Senior Education Centre (Dorval), 393, 395 Katz, Gertrude, 343–5 Katz, Linda, 343, 355 Kensington School (Montreal), 320 Kildare Township, 41, 48 Kimball, Miss, 20–1, 31 kindergarten, French immersion, 362; and Hochelaga school fire, 130, 133 Kingsey, 30, 155 King’s School (Westmount), 374 Kinnear’s Mills, 158, 179 Knowlton, 74, 285 Kuntz, Harry, 9 Kuujjuak, 381–2, 384, 386, 392–3 Kuujjuarapik, 381–2 l’Acadie, 5, 82, 88, 365 Lac des Deux Montagnes area, gerrymandering of, 334; Protestants in, 183–6, 315, 334, 335; Protestant regional board of, 334; Protestant schools of, 316, 334 Lachine, 38, 40, 48; health measures in schools, 244–6, 250–1, 258; new schools of, 325–6; opposition to neutral schools, 349; unemployment in, 254 Lachine Canal, 120, 124, 129 Lachine Rapids School (Lachine), 377 Lachute, 173 Lachute Academy, 170, 173, 178, 279, 302 Ladysmith, 159

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index • 491 “lady teacher,” image of, 132–4, 137 Lake of Two Mountains Protestant High School, 186, 294, 377; accommodation of native children, 385 Lakeshore School Board, 341 Lalanne, Leon, 50, 67–8, 76, 364 land grants, 23, 25 land tenure, 29, 66 L’Ange Gardien, 87, 89 Lansdowne School (Montreal), 127– 9, 226, 318, 321 Laprairie, 79, 332 Lasalle, 326, 400 LaTuque, 384 Laurentia Protestant School Board, 215 Laurentian Regional High School (Lachute), 311, 314 Laurentians, 41, 45, 88, 92, 195; Jews of, 197, 209; and regional school board, 282, 306, 310; road conditions of, 262; tourism in, 215 Laurentian School Board, 4–7 Laurenval School Board, 406 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 89, 195, 225 Lauzon (seigneury), 33, 36, 38 Laval (Ile Jésus), 7, 183, 282, 316, 333–4; school boards, 306, 309, 406 Laval West, 186, 315 Lawr, D.A., 10 Lawrence School (Sherbrooke), 295 Leeds, 45, 158, 178, 284 Lemoyne-d’Iberville, high school, 331, 377, 407; school, 331–2 Lennoxville, academy/high school, 175–6, 193–4, 312, 346; Bishop’s College/University, 170; establishment of school board, 174; and French language instruction, 374; model school, 174–6; and regional board, 283, 309–10

LeRoy, Osmond E., 230 Lessard, M., 371 Letson, Anne, 62 Lévesque, René, 354 Lewis Evans School (Montreal), 320 liberalism/reform, Catholic opposition to, 52, 75; economic, 53; French-Canadian involvement in, 52; identification with Protestantism, 52, 89; promotion of public schooling, 45; secular education, 14 Liberal Party of Quebec, 308, 404 libraries in schools, access to, 299; central, 17, 183, 285, 287–8, 296– 7, 300–2, 307, 332, 365; donations to, 226, 298; librarians, 299; loss of, 298; promoted by teachers and parents, 298, 300; proposed elimination of, 415 Lilly, Otto Frederick, 92 Lindsay Place High School, 304–5, 329 linguistic school boards, 7, 18; advocated by Protestant groups, 350; boundaries of, 406–7; disputes within, 402, 414–15; elections to, 408; loss of schools under, 407–8; opposed by Protestant groups, 378–9, 404–5; religious instruction under, 18, 404, 408–14 literacy, 20, 52, 131, 140, 296 Little, J.I., 11 Lloyd, William, 66–7 Lochaber, 12, 45, 88, 140, 144; closing of schools, 278; dissentient school board of, 141, 149; Gore of Lochaber, 141–2; and high turnover of teachers, 149–150, 152; and local elite, 142; Lochaber Bay, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 163, 229; Protestant schools of, 142, 160, 162

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492 • index Longueuil, 3, 5, 12–13; Côteau Rouge, 329; and French Protestants, 371; high school, 181–2, 268–9, 296, 400; industrialization of, 181; model school, 227; origins of, 33, 38, 78–9, 83, 85, 92; Protestant School Municipality of, 98, 180; rivalry with St Lambert, 179–80, 293; school board, 179–81, 229, 231, 266–8, 292, 295, 330, 332–3 Longueuil Episcopal Church, 87 Longueuil Rifle Association, 228 Lord, Minnie, 148, 178 Loretteville, 97, 160 Lorne School (Pointe St Charles), 122, 127, 129, 203, 226, 292, 319, 321 Lower Chute, 34, 38 Lower North Shore, 5, 23, 159, 406, 444n51 Loyalists, 26, 30, 146 Lunn, William, 108, 110, 113, 115, 117 McBurney, 374 McCagg, Maurella. See Hingston McCardell, Nora, 259–60 McCormack, James, 61 McCrea, Nora, 148 MacDavid, Stanley, 277 Macdonald, William Christopher, 155 Macdonald Central School Board, 327 Macdonald College School for Teachers, 92, 111, 148, 155, 156, 162, 163, 164, 212; French summer school, 375; graduates as principals of academies, 191; importance to the Gaspé, 190; specialized training, 192, 373 Macdonald High School (Ste Anne), 183, 327, 329 McFee, Donald, 50, 67

McGeer, J.P., 343 McGill, James, 23, 42–3, 46 McGill, Robert, 113 McGill College/University, 21, 42, 46, 77, 89, 103, 113, 122–3, 170, 217, 291, 300. See Normal schools McGill Model School, 100 McGill Normal School, 77, 100, 111, 123, 125, 132, 148; attendance at, 162, 191; Jewish graduates of, 201 McGreer, Dr, 298 Mackayville School/Cote Noir (Longueuil), 182, 330–1, 371, 377 McKenzie, Miss, 226 Mackenzie, Roderick, 36 MacLachlan, Dr Peter, 229 McManus, Mr, 132, 132 McMasterville, 5, 12, 147, 269 McNaughton, Finlay, 65 McOuat, Inspector J.W., 88, 180, 210–11, 373 McQuaig, Mary, 193 McTavish, Simon, 23 McVetty, Elsie and Rachel, 148 MacVicar, Rev. Donald, 117, 318, 335 MacVicar School (Montreal), 319 Magdalen Islands, 7, 159–60, 283, 312 Magog, 30, 273, 283, 312 Main/St Lawrence St, 343 Mair, Nathan, 9 Maisonneuve School (Montreal), 320–1, 377, 407 Maitland, John, 46–7 Malcolm Campbell High School (Montreal), 326–7 manual training/industrial arts/sloyd; facilities for, 183, 237, 286–9, 296, 300, 302, 307–8, 332, 365–6; teaching of, 191, 236–7 Margaret Pendlebury School (St Lambert), 375

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index • 493 Marois, Pauline, 403, 408 Mascouche, 333 masculinity, 194, 223, 225, 228–30, 239 Mâsse, Father (of Pointe Lévis), 39, 43 Massey-Vanier Regional High School, building of, 286, 308–10; planning of, 305–8; population of in 1991, 314, 329. See polyvalent schools Matapedia, 149, 262, 280–81, 299, 405; and transportation, 275–6, 278, 313. See St Laurent de Matapedia Maxwell, Sarah, 133–4 Meadowbrook School (Lachine), 376 Mechanics’ Institute, 296–7 medical rooms in schools, 289, 301–2 Megantic County, 30, 45, 148, 178, 283–4; Central School Committee, 267–9 Meilleur, Jean-Baptiste, 53, 55, 60, 64–6, 69–71, 75 Mélanges Religieuses, 72 Melbourne, 30, 33, 38, 44, 48, 172; local resistance to school board, 66–7; model school, 66, 174 Mental Hygiene Institute, 258–9 Methodists, civil rights of, 25; clergy on city boards, 110, 117; conflicts with Royal Institution, 44; French speaking, 89; on Gaspé coast, 26; influence on Eastern Townships, 31; missionaries, 364–6, 368; in Montreal, 25 Métis Beach, 406 Milby, 146–7 Mill Street School (Montreal), 121 Millar, W.P.J., 10 Mills, Joseph, 42–3, 45 Milne, Rev. George, 90, 95, 99 Ministry of Education, 8; creation of, 282, 340; and mre, 356, 401–2;

and native schooling, 380, 382, 386–7, 389–91, 398 Ministry of Public Instruction, 95, 118 missions and missionaries. See Anglican, Baptist, Catholic Missisquoi, 26, 29, 42, 71, 73 Mistissini, 381, 383, 385, 390, 393– 4, 397 model schools, acquiring skills to teach at, 62; building of, 62, 173, 177; as consolidated schools, 176, 178; converted to academies, 176, 179; development of, 174; finding space for, 175; location of, 25, 156, 165, 175, 177 Molson Stadium, 232, 240–1 Mondelet, Charles, 53 Monklands School (Montreal), 326 Monnoir (seigneury), 33, 36, 38, 48 Montebello, 140 Montreal, 7, 12, 14–15, 17, 20, 23, 25–6, 30, 79, 85, 317; board of examiners, 62; Board of Health, 248; communities annexed to, 104, 128; Côte des Neiges, 319, 321, 323, 326, 327; Côte St Paul, 323; early churches in, 23–5; early schools in, 35, 38; ethnic violence in, 75, 111; Griffintown, 102, 120, 124, 323; Hochelaga, 129; Maisonneuve, 318, 323, 326; Notre Dame de Grâce (ndg), 318, 321, 326; Park Extension, 318, 321, 326; Pointe St Charles, 101–3, 120, 122, 128, 323; Rosemount, 318, 321, 326; St Ann’s ward, 115, 122; St Antoine ward, 110, 124, 292, 323; St Gabriel,129; St Henri, 318, 323; St Jean Baptiste, 129; St Joseph ward, 120; St Laurent ward, 120; St Louis ward, 120; St Mary’s ward/ Quebec Suburb, 115

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494 • index Montreal Academical Institution, 106 Montreal Catholic School Commission, 11, 115, 118–19, 415 Montreal Local Council of Women (mlcw), 336 Montreal Protestant Central School Board, 325, 335–7 Montreal South (South Shore), 83, 96, 179–82, 371 Montreal West, 183–4, 292 monuments, to Sarah Maxwell, 134; to war dead, 224, 229, 230 Moore, Mr, 178, 191–3 Moral and Religious Education (mre), 9, 401–2; Catholic demands for, 356; Human Awareness, 356, 412; no Protestant tradition of, 344, 350; Protestant, Catholic, and Moral options, 408–14; Proulx Report recommendations regarding, 411–12; Rainbow solution, 412– 13; roots of, 108, 111, 113 Morell, Mrs D., 298 Morgentaler, Henry, 344, 349 Morin Heights, 263 Morrin College, 170 Morrison, Eric, 313 Mount Royal Cemetery, 134, 216, 219, 231 Mount Royal High School, 326 Mount Royal School, 127, 129, 134, 201, 203, 206, 319 Mouvement pour l’intégration scolaire, 352–3 movies in schools, 292 multicultural society, 17, 355, 357– 60 municipal government, 52–3, 92, 205 Munro, Hector, 117, 132 Murdochville, 312–3 Murray Bay, 23 music classes, 191, 236, 332, 374, 397

Namur, 89 Napoleonic wars, 41, 46 Napper, Harold, 332 National Indian Brotherhood/Assembly of First Nations, 385 National schools, 35, 108 nationalism, Canadian, 243, 347, 349; imperial, 349; Quebec, 243, 349, 353 native school boards, budgets of, 390–1; building schools, 387, 392, 398–9; characteristics of, 387–8; curriculum, 382; establishment of, 381, 387; fostering native language and culture, 388–90, 392–4, 398– 9; and French language instruction, 388–90; high schools, 392–4; nondenominational status of, 381; powers of, 380–1; Protestant character of, 381; relations with community, 382, 391–2; relations with Ministry of Education, 380, 382, 386–7, 389–91, 398; relations with non-native teachers, 388, 395–6, 398; relations with school committees, 382, 387, 391 native schooling, 6, 18; early history of, 384–7; parental involvement in, 394, 397; religious element in, 384, 386–7; student attendance, 392, 397–9; supply of native teachers, 385, 387, 390, 394–6, 398 Nelson, Wendy, 11 Nemiscau, 381, 383 New Carlisle, 26, 42, 99, 186–91; Academy/High School, 12, 165, 167, 186, 188, 190–1, 193, 279– 80; distance to regional high school, 313; early schools of, 35–6, 38–9; school commissioners of, 64, 165; School Home, 188–90. See Cox Township

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index • 495 New England influence, 20, 22, 25–6, 31 New France, 23; Protestants in, 364; schooling in, 22 New Frontiers School Board, 407 New Glasgow, 45; dissentient school, 83–4, 89, 195–7, 215; model grades taught in, 183; Protestants of, 210–11 New Richmond, 405 Nonconformists, 19, 22, 25–6, 31–2, 37, 44. See individual denominations Normal schools, 62, 75. See McGill Normal School Norris, Jessie, 153 North Hatley high school, 273, 312 North Island regional board, 282, 334–5 Northmount High School (Montreal), 303, 326–7 Northwestern Quebec, 7, 405 Notre Dame de Grâce (ndg), parish of, 96 Nunavik Educational Task Force, 393 Nungak, Zebedee, 386 October Crisis, 283 Oka, 385 O’Malley, Anthony, 69 Ontario Street School (Montreal), 120–1 Operation 55, 281–2 Orange Order, 75 Ormstown, 12, 41, 136, 155, 163, 176, 191, 373 Osgood, Thaddeus, 37 Ottawa Valley (Outaouais), 7, 30, 34, 42, 45, 87, 89, 98; regional school board, 282 Otter Lake, 160 Oujé-Bougoumou, 381, 383

Outremont, 12; Christian character of, 222; high school, 326–7, 407; Jewish school question, 216, 218–21, 344; Protestant character of, 216–18 Outremont school trustees, community criticism of, 220; criticism by clergy, 220; hiring/firing French specialist, 373–4; opposition to neutral schools, 349; segregation of Jewish students in, 219–20 Pagé, Joseph, 341 Panet Street School (Montreal), 115– 16, 120, 128, 132 Parent Report, 16–7; abolition of confessional boards, 403; and aboriginal language instruction, 386; advocates regional boards, 281, 283; advocates regional high schools, 306; advocates religious options for schools, 351; influence of Protestant school system on, 281, 287, 300, 345, 402–3; promotes modern school facilities, 300–1 parents, 41, 80, 136; in Home and School associations, 255–6; involvement in children’s schooling, 104, 110, 129, 138; in native communities, 394, 397; opposition to consolidation, 158–9, 182, 273, 275–6; promotion of French language instruction, 361–2; promotion of secondary schooling, 167; relations with teachers, 8, 11, 13, 16, 37, 191–3, 146–7 parishes as units of school administration, 29, 52, 55 Parmalee, George, 100, 210 Parti Québécois, 18, 317, 345, 354, 403 Paspébiac, 42, 90, 95, 99, 186, 280 patriotism, 13, 16; books about, 233; British symbols of, 226, 233, 238,

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496 • index 240, 298; Canadian symbols of, 241; Dominion Day, 242; during wwi, 217–18, 225, 231–2; during wwii, 232–40; Empire Day, 226, 233, 242; Remembrance Day, 240 Patterson, H.C., 234, 235 Peace Centennial School (Montreal), 320–1, 370, 377 Pearson, Lester, 350 Penfield, Wilder, 375–6 Pensler, Jacob, 200 Percival, Walter, 157, 158, 160, 215, 233; promotes central boards, 265; promotes French Protesants, 370; relations with small communities, 270, 273–4, 294, 301, 373, 405 Phelps, Dr F.L., 251 Philipsburg, 38, 44 physical education, 172, 374; beginnings of, 227, 291; and gender, 293; gymnasiums, 17, 129, 186, 217, 224, 287–96, 300–2, 304–5, 301, 307, 328, 332, 365; rifle practice, 293; swimming pool, 217, 288–9, 291, 307; teachers of, 293, 300; tennis court (Ste Agathe), 183, 293; use of facilities by community, 294–5; and ymca, 295 Piché, Sarah, 367 Pierrefonds, 329 Pimeau-Robert, Professor, 373 Plage Laval, 215 Pointe aux Trembles, 325; French Protestant school of, 366–70 Pointe Claire, 92, 96; elementary school, 377; French language instruction, 375; high school, 304–5, 328–9; train links with Montreal, 183–5 Pointe Lévis/Lévis, 37–9, 41, 43, 48, 83, 279 Pointe St Charles School (Montreal), 121

Poltimore, 159 polyvalent schools/shared campus, 306–7, 314, 356, 372 Pontiac, 5, 45–6, 145, 159, 405 Pontiac County Protestant Central School Board, 269 Pontiac Protestant School Board, 3 Pontiac Regional High School (Shawville), 311 Port Cartier, 406 Port Daniel, 280, 313 Portneuf, 38, 48, 284 Potter, Calvin C., 9 poverty, burden of schooling, 22, 49, 60, 81, 139, 152; and guerre des éteignoirs, 66; in rural Protestant communities, 141, 149, 150; and school attendance, 143, 253 prayers and hymns, 344, 348, 355; and Jewish children, 343, 346; at native schools, 395 Prendergast, James, 46–7 Prentice, Alison, 10 Preparatory School (Montreal), 121, 125, 127 Presbyterian church (Church of Scotland), 19, 22–3, 25, 89; and New Carlisle School Home, 188–9; and Pointe aux Trembles school, 366– 8; and Royal Grammar schools, 105 Presbyterian clergy, on school commissions, 112, 117; as teachers, 44 Presbyterian missionaries, 365 Préville School (South Shore), 332, 407 Prince Albert School (Montreal), 320 Privy Council, 207 Protestant architecture, 285, features of, 287, 292, 294, 302–4; landscaping of school grounds, 302–4 Protestant Board of School Commissioners for the City of Montreal,

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index • 497 12; appointment of commissioners to, 112; and central libraries, 285; early members of, 113, 114; election of women to, 341; employment of Jewish teachers by, 195, 208; employment of nurses by, 256–7; and French Protestants, 368; and Jacob Pensler, 200; and Jewish holidays, 201, 208; Jewish school question, 205; and Jewish students, 200–4, 208, 343; Jews elected to, 195; legal status of, 359; opposition to Jewish representation on, 203–4; reform of, 203, 266. See High School of Montreal Protestant Board of School Commissioners, Quebec City, appointment of commissioners to, 112; legal status of, 359; and St Andrew’s School, 106; subsidies to private institutions, 115; See High School of Quebec Protestant Board of School Examiners, 114 Protestant Committee/Department of Education, and academies, 167, 191, 271; and francophone Quebec, 264–5; and French Protestants, 369–70; powers of, 95, 160; and Protestant Survey/Hepburn Report, 265–6; relations with rural communities, 8, 91, 140, 158, 160, 162, 271, 274, 294, 299; resistance to, 138, 150, 159, 161; role in shaping Protestant identity, 99– 100; and school consolidation, 176; standardization of curriculum, 162; standardization of school buildings, 151, 160–1; and teacher training, 148, 149, 163 Protestant Committee of the Superior Council, 340

Protestant communities, and cultural identity, 80, 81, 94, 103, 218, 225; decline of, 199, 263–5, 313, 378; and social reform, 246–7; survival of, 81, 86, 96, 99, 182, 186, 188, 262, 281, 283, 286, 345, 363 Protestant curriculum, and French language instruction, 361–2, 372; gender division of, 240, 287–8; of high school, 105, 126, 131; liberal character of, 18, 348, 350, 355–7, 360, 401–3; and military training, 229, 238; and the “Montreal standard,” 183; and multicultural society, 357–8, 402; and patriotism, 227, 237–9; standardization of, 95, 162; temperance and science in, 246; use of the Bible/scripture, 72, 201, 346; use of Enterprise Method, 298–9. See curriculum, Superior Council of Education Protestant education, characteristics of, 401; disappearance of, 414; non-denominational character of, 14, 52, 69, 71–2, 77, 348, 357, 370, 413; and Protestant cultural identity, 345–6, 351; religious aspect of, 40, 197, 206, 345, 357; similarity to public education, 52, 344–5, 402–3 Protestant missions to French Catholics, 364–9 Protestant Parents for a Bilingual Education, 376 Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal (psbgm), 7; and Board of Health, 248; commissioners of, 361; control over English-language instruction, 360; ethnic representation on, 340; expansion of, 318, 329; and French language instruction, 375–6; and French Protestants, 369–72; French sector, 377–8; and

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498 • index mre, 356; and neutral schools, 349; and school libraries, 300 Protestant School Board of Greater Quebec, 283, 405–6 Protestant School Board of Greater St Martin, 333 Protestant school municipalities, 97– 9, 179 Protestant settlers, importance of schooling to, 20–3, 31–2, 34, 49, 166, 168, 175–6; relations with Catholics, 23, 33; work ethic of, 34 Protestant Survey/Hepburn Report, Percival’s recommendations to, 265; reforms proposed by, 266, 335–6 Protestantism, and the British Empire, 225; concern for fitness in, 217; and cultural identity, 125, 140; importance of efficiency in, 264–5; values of, 356–7, 370 Proulx Report, 408, 411 Provincial Association of Protestant Teachers (papt), 77, 153 Provincial School Library Service, 300 public schooling, access to, 102; administration of, 25, 29, 47, 51, 55; Anglican indifference to, 22, 25; Catholic nature of, 55, 80, 89; Catholic support for, 71; Christian principles in, 31, 61, 72, 76, 195; confessional division of, 23, 52, 76, 207; and the Durham Report, 53; government funding for, 22, 25, 47, 51; liberal character of, 52, 70, 76; local control of, 51–2; origins of, 22; non-denominational aspects of, 26, 31, 34, 40, 45, 67, 69, 76, 364 Puvirnituq, 381–2, 389 Quaqtaq, 381–2 Quebec Act, 1774, 25, 29

Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards, 313, 343, 350–1, 354, 404 Quebec City, 7; board of examiners, 62; confessional boards in, 15; early churches in, 23–5; early schools in, 35, 38; ethnic violence in, 75; French Protestants in, 377; Jews of, 197, 208; St Jean Baptiste, 115; St Roch, 115 Quebec Committee for Allied Victory, 234 Quebec conference, 76 Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations (qfhsa), 9; child welfare and health programs, 256, 258–9, 260–1; citizenship committee, 347–8; and confessional boards in, 15; and education reforms, 345; and French immersion, 375; and language politics, 353–4; and mental hygiene, 258–9; and neutral schools, 349–51; and non-denominational schooling, 222; and Operation Bootstraps, 339; and Outremont school question, 220–1; and Parent Commission, 280–1, 339; and public libraries, 300 Quebec government, conflict with Protestant school boards, 350; and linguistic boards, 352, 358–60, 402–3; prohibits early English instruction, 363; wary of French Protestants, 369–70 Quebec nationalism, 14, 18, 243; Catholicism and, 90; and conscription crisis, 225 Quiet Revolution, advocates nonconfessional boards, 317, 349; centralizing tendencies of, 286, 354; opposition to confessional schooling, 349; Protestant enthusiasm for,

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index • 499 281, 361–2; promotes democracy in school administration, 340 racism, 6 Rawdon, 41 rebellions of 1837–38, 15, 22, 43, 49, 52, 106, 109–10 Red Cross, 223, 234 Reformatory school for girls, 120 Régime Pedagogique, 378 regional boards, 17, 281–2; efficiency of, 260, 264–5, 313; enthusiasm of Protestant school boards for, 281– 2; psychological services, 281; relations with sector boards, 405–6; representation on, 282–3 regional high schools, establishment of, 283, 329; impact on local communities, 309–12 responsible government, 53 Rexford, Elson, 100 Richelieu Valley, 3, 26, 30, 41, 83, 89–90; school board, 405 Richmond, 20–1, 29, 31–2, 41, 172, 224; school board, 282. See St Francis College Richmond County Regional High School, 309–10, 314 rifle ranges/shooting galleries, 16, 228, 238, 287 Rigaud, 83 Riverdale High School (Pierrefonds), 326, 329 Riverside School (Pointe St Charles), 102, 121–2, 128, 203 Riverside School (St Lambert), 92–3, 375 roads, and colonization of Eastern Townships, 30–1, 41; conditions of, 143–4, 263, 273–4; and school attendance, 143–4 Roberval High School (Montreal), 377, 407

Robin, Charles, 95 Robins, S.A., 119, 132 Robinson, W.H., 298 Rock Island school board, 173, 269 Rose, Rev. V.C., 261 Rosedale School (Montreal), 320–1 Rosemere, 333 Rosemount High School (Montreal), 326 Rosemount School (Montreal), 292, 319, 321 Rosenberg, Nathan, 183 Roslyn School (Westmount), 361–3, 375–6 Rothman, Joan, 361–2 Rouges, 75 Roussy, Louis, 365–6 Roxboro, 329 Roy, John, 219–20 Royal Albert School (Montreal), 320 Royal Arthur School (Montreal), 120, 121, 132, 226 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, impact on French language instruction, 361, 371–2; input from qapsb, 350–1; input from qfhsa, 350; redefines Canadian identity, 350 Royal Commission on Education, 16– 17, input from qfhsa, 280–1; input from school boards, 280–1. See Parent Report Royal George School (Montreal), 320 Royal Grammar schools, 42, 105–6, 110 Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning (rial), 20, 34; Anglican influence in, 22, 26, 31, 37, 41–5, 67, 166–7; appointing school commissioners, 34, 37; appointment of teachers by, 34, 37, 44; board of directors/trustees for, 21, 35, 41–2, 112, 123; Catholic

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500 • index view of, 22, 34–5, 40, 43, 45, 84; complaints from parents, 41, 49; conflict with, 44, 48–9; decline of, 45–6, 48, 51; gender of teachers, 37, 47, 191; and McGill College/University, 21, 43, 113; official non-denominationalism of, 34–5, 39; ownership of schoolhouses by, 22, 44, 63–4, 84–5; relations with French-Canadians, 37–40, 43; relations with Nonconformists, 37, 44– 5; relations with Scots, 34; religious agenda of, 22, 42; as school inspectors, 22, 42, 44; schools in francophone communities, 37–40; as source of funding, 15, 22, 39, 44, 48 Royal Vale School (Montreal), 320 Royal Visits, of King and Queen in 1939, 231–2; of Princess Elizabeth in 1951, 240–1 Rudin, Ronald, 9 Rudy, Willie, 214–15 rural schools, 16; architectural designs of, 151, 160–1; attendance at, 143; building of, 21–2, 32, 34, 37, 59, 63, 83, 84, 88, 92, 96, 142, 159–60, 210; burning of, 44, 65–6; closing of, 22, 149, 161, 263; conditions in, 88, 137, 138, 150, 160; consolidation of, 176; custodial work by trustees in, 88, 213; donation of land for, 32, 34, 36–7, 63, 68, 88, 92, 140, 142, 210, 252; female teachers in, 31, 47, 138; French taught in, 373; gender division of tasks in, 143; Grade 8 classes in, 176; heating of, 61, 139, 143, 150, 160, 213, 293; held in other buildings, 32; held in private homes, 32, 35; held in Protestant churches, 87, 142; length of school year in, 143–4; and libraries, 299– 300; lighting of, 84, 143, 160; loca-

tion of, 63; male teachers in, 37, 47; multiple grades in, 145; other buildings as, 83, 86, 88, 92, 159; physical education in, 292–3; repairs to, 59–60, 63, 85, 150; sanitation in, 139, 150, 160; social uses of, 22, 32, 93; teacher’s residence in, 32, 151; unfit for habitation, 150; worship in, 22, 32–3, 56, 69. See individual communities rural school boards, consolidation of, 264, 268; difficulty finding teachers, 273; insufficient funding of, 162; local democracy of, 102, 263– 4; resistance to educational reform, 140, 149; role of commissioners on, 140; strategies to reduce costs of schooling, 144, 273 Ryan, Jeremiah, 68 Saguenay Valley, 5, 7 St Ambroise, 97 St Andrew’s (Argenteuil), 34, 43–4, 178 St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Quebec City, 23, 105, 112, 170 St Andrew’s School (Quebec City), 105–6 St Angelique, 279 St Ann’s School, Montreal, 115 St Antoine de Longueuil, parish of, 87, 180 St Armand, 26, 29–30, 33–4, 43–4, 48; early schools of, 36, 38 St Blaise, 90, 365 St Etienne de New Carlisle, 99 St Eustache, 12, 83, 98, 315; elementary school of, 377; and French school board, 407; on regional board, 282; relations with central board, 269; train links to Montreal, 183–6. See Grande Fresnière, Lake of Two Mountains school board

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index • 501 St Eustache sur le Lac, 315, 316 St Francis College (Richmond), 170; control by Richmond school board, 172; as elementary school, 310; as high school, 172, 302, 310 St Francis Valley, 20, 25, 30, 32, 155, 172; and regional school board, 282–3 St Gabriel School (Montreal), 127, 129 St Gabriel Street Presbyterian Church, Montreal, 23, 106 St George’s Church School (Montreal), 121 St Gerard, 97 St Grégoire de Monnoir, 84 St Hubert, 268, 333 St Hyacinthe, 48 St Jacques de Leeds, parish of, 178 St Jean Baptiste de Rouville, 89 St Jean Baptiste School, Montreal, 127, 129 St Jean Chrysostome, parish of, 70 St Jean sur Richelieu, 33–5, 38, 82 St Jerôme, 212 St Joseph de Pointe Lévis, 85 St Lambert, 5, 13, 79, 92, 93, 180, 225, 330, 333; academy/high school, 179–80, 223, 233, 330–2; and central board, 268–9; and French language instruction, 374– 6; rivalry with Longueuil, 179, 293; schools of, 92, 182 St Laurent de Matapedia, 274, 277 St Lawrence Protestant School Board, 3, 405 St Lawrence River valley, 23, 25, 29 St Lawrence School (Montreal), 121, 407 St Lawrence School (South Shore), 333 St Lawrence school board, 316, 333 St Lawrence Street/The Main, 116, 199, 203, 205, 206, 209, 323

St Laurent, 325, 327 St Leonard crisis, 352–3, 355 St Lin, 83, 84, 195, 196, 210, 211 St Louis de Mile End, 318 St Mark’s Anglican Church, Longueuil, 86 St Martin, 333 St Matthew’s Church School, Montreal, 121 St Maurice school board, 406 St Michel de Lachine, 84 St Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Montreal, 107, 113, 117 St Paul’s School, Montreal, 106 St Philip’s Anglican Indian Residential School, 384 St Pierre Baptiste (Halifax Township), 268 St Pierre de Sorel, 83 St Roch des Aulnais, 37–9, 84 St Romain de Hemmingford, parish of, 69–70, 99 St Scholastique, 83, 269 St Télésphore de Montjoy, 161 St Thomas (Montmagny), English school in, 38, 41, 45; French school in, 37–8 St Valentin, 5, 365 Ste Agathe, 92; academy/high school, 186, 194, 293, 297–8; Catholic children attend, 406; dissentient status, 215, 283, 405–6; Jews of, 7; model school, 183 Ste Anne de Bellevue, 92, 183, 327–8 Ste Foy, 294 Ste Sophie, 84, 195–7, 211, 214; Catholic settlers of, 195; election of school board, 210; ethnic tensions in, 214; Jewish teachers of, 212; Jewish tourism in, 209; Jews of, 7, 197, 200, 209; and New Glasgow, 183; rabbi of, 213; school municipality “for

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502 • index Protestants only,” 211–12; and shoichet, 212 Ste Thérèse, 333 Salluit, 381–2 Sarah Maxwell Memorial School (Montreal), 134, 319 Sault aux Recollets, 325 Savage, Mary, 209 Sawyerville, 235 scholarships, to attend High School of Montreal, 123, 200; from iode, 227 school commissioners/trustees, 8, 11, 16; attitude towards teachers, 60– 2; criticism from teachers, 61; custodial work in schools, 88, 213; election of, 53, 65–6, 69; establishing secondary schools, 165; as examiners, 62; gender of, 285, 336; local resistance to, 65–8; as owners of property, 63; promotion of secondary schooling, 167, 174; as school inspectors, 59–60; under Royal Institution, 34. See specific communities and school boards school equipment, 61, 132, 139, 179 school fees, 13, 60, 62, 82, 88–9, 97, 115, 123, 126, 131, 172, 200, 253– 4, 337 school inspectors, 12, 82, 119, 132, 146; attitude towards parents, 31; attitude towards school commissioners, 60, 180; complaints by, 88, 137, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152; school commissioners as, 59–60; Sicotte commission and, 75; and teachers, 60. See Royal Institution, 1851 Education Act school municipality, basic unit of school administration, 51; changes in boundaries to, 95, 97; and the Depression, 265; formation of, 81, 94, 95, 96, 99, 103; graded school

system in, 165; non-confessional school commissions, 76; subdivision into districts, 55 School of Industry, 110 school principals, as administrators, 194; behaviour of, 169; gender of, 191, 194, 296 school taxes, 13, 64–5, 82, 90, 92, 213; during the Depression, 265; inadequate income from, 117, 124, 151, 154, 325; inequalities between school systems, 103, 117–19, 135, 415; from Jewish ratepayers, 207, 208; and mill rate, 213; nonproperty owners, 103, 117; panels, 94–5, 97, 118, 198, 207; prosecution for non-payment of, 65–6, 152; Protestant attitudes toward, 114, 118; Protestant control over, 77; resistance to payment of, 12, 65–6, 165, 198; strategies to reduce payment of, 89, 98; used to operate bus service, 262, 274 science laboratories, 17, 182, 217, 280, 287–9, 291, 296, 300, 302, 304, 332 science teachers, gender of, 191, 193, 296 Scotland School (Ste Sophie), 196, 212–13, 215 Scots, 11, 140; and public schooling, 22, 34, 42, 83–4; relations with Royal Institution, 34, 39, 44–5; rivalry with Anglicans, 25; and Royal Grammar School, Montreal, 106; as teachers, 106; view of education, 106 Scriver, William, 50–1 secondary schooling, 16; access to, 110, 167; accommodation of students outside municipality, 321; building of schools, 326–7, 335; economic benefits to communities,

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index • 503 165–8; expansion of, 323; gender of teachers, 191, 193; girls and, 124; growing demand for, 321; mandatory attendance at, 166, 281; parents’ expectations of, 124, 321; relation to McGill, 123; standardization of, 171 section 93 of the bna Act, 7, 15, 77, 90, 92, 94, 118, 198, 207–8, 344, 358–60, 405 sector school boards, 17, 55, 283, 405–6 seigneuries, 26–7, 29, 33–4, 36, 39– 40, 66, 82 Sellar, Robert, 32 Senior School (Montreal), 121, 126 Senneville, 327 Sept Isles, 406 Service, Robert, 57 sex education, 256–7, 261, 356 Shaposnick, Harry, 197 Sharman, Thomas, 57 Shawinigan high school, 301 Shaw Memorial Church School (Montreal), 320 Shawville (Clarendon Mills), 12, 47, 159, 177; academy/high school, 191, 238, 278, 294, 301–2; Dr McDowell elementary school, 311–12 Shefford, 41, 48, 71, 73 Sherbrooke (Hyatt’s Mills), 12, 30, 41, 71, 73; academy/high school, 168, 172, 295–6, 298, 312; Jewish teachers in, 209, 232; Jews of, 7, 209; opposition to central boards, 267; and regional board, 283 Sherbrooke Street School (Montreal), 120–1, 128 Shields, Edward, 63, 68 Shingsby, Mr, 181 Shipton Township, 20–1, 29, 30–1 Shortly, William, 88 Sicotte, Louis-Victor, 75

Sillery, 406 Silver Creek school (Lochaber), 141– 2, 160 Simpkin, M., 197, 210 Simpson, Eliza, 251 Simpson, Grace, 136–7, 145, 149, 163–4, 191, 373 Sir Winston Churchill High School (St Laurent), 326–7 Skakel, Alexander, 42, 106, 110 smallpox, 247 Smith, John, 85 Smith, William (Chief Justice), 26, 34 Smith, William (Hemmingford teacher), 57, 62 smoking in schools, 295–6 Snodgress, Rev. William, 113, 117 social control, 8–11 Society for the Promotion of Public Education, 108, 113 Soeurs du Bon Pasteur, 120 soldiers of the soil, 224, 229 Sorel (William Henry), 26, 29, 35, 38, 83, 85 Soulange (seigneury), 38 South Central Protestant School Board, 3, 405 South Shore, 3, 7, 79, 92, 316, 329, 330; demographic shifts on, 179, 182, 268; development of graded school system on, 179–82; French Protestant community of, 370–1, 407; industrialization of, 179; regional high school, 309; regional school board, 282, 332–3, 405 South Shore Patriotic Fund, 223 Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, 197–8 Spanish influenza, 245, 249 Special Council, 49, 52–3 Speck, Mary, 62 Stanbridge, 30, 36, 38 Stanbridge East, 285

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504 • index Staniland, Reginald, 332 Stanstead, 12, 30–1, 36–9, 42–4, 46, 71, 73, 168 Stanstead College/Seminary, arrangements with local school boards, 173, 269–73; and British guest children, 233; Holmes Model School, 173, 270; origins of, 168, 173; and survival of local community, 271 Stanstead County Central School Board, 262, 269–73, 285, 301, 310 Stanstead Plain school board, 173, 270–73, 283 Stanstead Township school board, 173 Starkman, Henry, 214 state, 89; deficit spending by, 152; intervention in education, 80; local resistance to, 65; promotion of education by, 21; Protestant unease at power of, 75; regulation of schools, 60–1. See colonial government, Special Council Stewart, Charles, 43, 168 Strathcona Academy, 217, 327; and cadet corps, 238; Lady Drummond trust fund, 349; and patriotism, 238; promotion of Protestant values in, 219; and war effort, 234 Strathcona Fund, 227 Strathcona, Lord (Donald Smith): 217 Strathearn School, 203, 321 Strong, Rev. Caleb, 113 Stukeley Township, 41 suburban schools, building and maintenance of, 328–9, 331, 332–4; in church halls, 181, 183; in country club, 185; network of, 332; overcrowding of, 330, 335; physical education in, 291–2; in private homes, 181; toilets in, 331 Suffolk Township, 89

Sunnyside High School (Rock Island), 270–3, 312 superintendent of education, establishment of office, 53, 77; relations with Protestant communities, 80, 85, 90, 100, 114, 143; relations with school inspectors, 60; statistics on schools, 71–3, 83 Superior Board of Health, 244 Superior Council of Education, 340, 351, 356 Sutherland, J.M., 149, 299 Sutton, 285 synagogues, 198, 210 Syndics’ Act, 45–9, 51 Tanner, J.C., 367 Tasiujaq, 381–2, 386, 395 teachers, acquiring additional skills, 62; advertising for, 62, 373; appointed by Royal Institution, 34, 37, 43–4; authority of, 131, 132, 146, 148; boarding of, 145; certification/licencing of, 37, 47, 62, 132, 148, 149, 174, 191, 373; of common schools, 108; community expectations of, 37, 61–2, 136, 145; drunkenness of, 37, 191–2; gender of, 15–16, 31, 37, 47, 62, 131–4, 143, 152, 218; health of, 251; hierarchy amongst, 131, 132; high turnover of, 137, 149, 152; hiring of, 142; Jewish, 135, 195, 201, 205, 208; lack of, 49; length of contracts, 60, 144; local appointment of, 47, 61; and marriage, 152; menial work in the school, 132, 143; model school, 174; and “Montreal scale,” 132, 144, 153; in native communities, 385, 387–8, 390, 394–6, 398; organization of work, 145; qualifications of, 61, 132, 138, 152; relations with inspectors, 138;

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index • 505 relations with parents, 8, 11, 13, 16, 61; relations with school commissioners, 8, 11, 16, 59–61, 218; religion of, 23, 40, 43–4, 355; specialization, 167, 177, 191; and student ratio, 129; termination of, 61– 2, 144, 161; training of, 108, 139, 148, 162; under central boards, 266; under linguistic boards, 415; violent behaviour of, 37, 191–3; wages/salary of, 22, 34–5, 49, 56, 60, 68, 82, 86, 115, 131–3, 137, 143, 144–5, 163, 177, 265. See “lady teacher” Tercentenary of Quebec City, 225 Terminal Park School (Montreal), 320 Terrebonne, 33, 83, 269, 333; English school in, 34, 36, 38, 45; French school in, 38, 41 Tétreaultville School (Montreal), 320, 377 textbooks, 44, 56, 61, 67, 194, 371; choice of by school commissioners, 56, 60; fight for free textbooks, 337–9 Therrien, E.A., 366 Thetford/Thetford Mines, 12, 178–9, 284; high school, 158, 179, 262–3, 267, 301. See Central Quebec School Board Thibeau, Miss G., 374 Thorn school board, 159 Thurso, 140–2, 278–9 Tibbits Hill Schoolhouse, 74, 77 toilets, conditions of, 293; pupils’ access to, 181, 301, 304 Town of Mount Royal, 185–6, 325– 6, 377, 407 townships, 25, 27, 29, 51 transportation of students, bus, 16– 17, 262–3, 270–1, 274–80; contracts with other municipalities,

262; costs to school boards, 17, 262, 371; hiring of private drivers, 274; horse and cart, 155–6, 267, 274; motor trucks, 274; opposition of parents to, 155, 182, 273, 275– 6, 330, 334; problems with drivers, 276–7; rural bus routes, 277; snowmobiles, 263, 270, 274–5; trains, 167, 183–6, 328; use of Catholic bus, 278 Tremblay, Arthur, 355 Trinity Church school (Montreal), 115 Trois Rivières, 38, 40, 365, 406; Jews of, 209 Trudeau, Pierre, 349 tuberculosis, 251–2 ultramontanism, 75, 197 Umiujaq, 381–2 Union of the Canadas 1841, 15, 52–3 Union Jack, 227, 241–2 United Church, 261 urban schools, 119, 253; access to, 104, 129; accommodation of Jews, 5, 16, 90, 135, 198–9, 200, 203, 321, 323; allocation of space for war effort, 235; building of, 98, 115, 120, 135, 318, 319–320, 321, 326, 327; changing demography of, 104, 134; charitable nature of, 112; class divisions of, 125; closing of, 128, 319–320, 321, 327; expansion of, 318, 319–320; and health rooms, 256–7; heating of, 132; network of, 98, 104, 112, 119, 128, 134, 135, 327; other buildings as, 120, 122; overcrowding of, 135, 206, 291, 315; post-war building campaign of, 326–7; religious affiliation of, 105; renting space for, 115, 128; repairs to, 132; rules and regulations of, 131, 134; segrega-

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506 • index tion in, 206, 219–20; teachers’ quarters in, 132; use of church halls, 120, 122, 128, 370 urbanization, 226, 228–9 Val d’Or, 393 Vallières, Pierre, 329 Valois, 183, 185, 328 Veaudry, Miss, 194 Verdun, 234, 318, 325, 349. See working class Verdun United Unemployed Workmen’s Association, 252 Victoria School (Montreal), 126–7, 203, 226, 292 Victorian Order of Nurses (von), 251 Ville St Pierre, 400 Vincent Massey School (Mackayville), 332 vocational training, 126, 236, 280, 285, 296, 306 Voirol, Miss, 371 Voyageur Memorial School (Nunavik), 391, 397 Wagar High School (Côte St Luc), 326 Wakefield North, 337–8 Wakeham, 160 Waltham, 146, 163 Waskaganish, 381, 383, 391 Waswanipi, 381, 383, 390, 397 Waterloo, 168, 172, 285 Watt, Charlie, 380, 386, 392 Way’s Mills, 156 Wemindji, 381, 383, 393 Western Quebec, regional board, 405; school board, 12, 407 West Hill High School (Montreal), 288–9, 292, 303–4, 320–1, 326 West Island, 7, 90, 96, 183–5, 316– 17, 327 Westmount, 86, 103, 318, 325, 361; French immersion, 361–3, 377;

high school, 183–5, 292, 326–7; Home and School association, 361; public library, 297; train links to West Island, 183–4 Whapmagoostui, 381, 383, 393, 395 White, Dr A.R.V., 271 White Paper (1969), 385 William Dawson School (Montreal), 203, 318–9, 321 William Henry, See Sorel William Lunn School (Montreal), 128 Williamson, Mr, 132 William White School (Longueuil), 182, 330–1 Willingdon School (Montreal), 298, 320–1 Wilsie, John, 50 Wolfe, James, 23 Women’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu), 246 Women’s Institute, 16, 146, 153, 246, 252 working class, 117, 198, 318; cost of educating children, 131; living along Lachine Canal, 124, 129; schools and immigrants, 126, 134, 203; and secondary education, 203; in Verdun, 234, 250, 252, 325; women, 295 World War I, 135; Armistice Day ceremonies, 230; and gender, 225, 228–9; promoting fitness, 224, 294; war effort in schools, 223 World War II, and British guest children, 219, 233; and gender, 239; and idle youth, 110; organized sports, 239; and post-war planning, 294, 323; and recruitment, 234; and salvage campaigns, 234, 235; and school dances, 234; supervision of youth, 234; war effort in schools, 218, 231–2, 234, 239. See Boy Scouts and cadets

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index • 507 Wright, Philemon, 31 Yarm, 145 Yiddish, 212 ymca, 234–5, 239 Young, Mary, 62 youth, 129; corruption of by urbanization and industrialization, 228, 229; and crime, 108, 110, 111–12, 113, 229, 234, 255, 260–1; emerging concept of teenager, 234; and

militarism, 225; and morals, 155, 234–5; native, 382; and regional high schools, 310; reinforcement of gender roles, 295–6; and school dances, 295–6; supervision of, 16, 295–6; and truancy, 259 Zaritsky, Mary, 213 Zaritsky, Max, 197 Zwick, David, 213

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