My brothers were all ‘learnt out’ and my sons soon would be: Public debate over schooling in Quebec, 1814–1823

Abstract

A public debate over the market provision of schooling and the possibilities of monitorial pedagogy raged in the city of Quebec during the second decade of the nineteenth century. Debate intensified when a group of small merchant manufacturers organised a school association in 1818. The group was denounced by private venture schoolmasters as attempting to create an unfair monopoly, in a debate in the pages of the Quebec Mercury newspaper. Others warned of the dangers to society of universal education for the ‘lower orders’. The School Association failed in its immediate objectives, but it was a precursor to the Quebec British and Canadian School Society, organised in 1823 and associated with the British and Foreign School Society in London.