State of the Nation or Community of Spirit? Schooling for Civic and Ethnic-Religious Nationalism in Insurrectionary Canada

Abstract

This article focuses on the two leading projects in the educational “struggle for the hearts and minds” of the people in the British North American colony of Lower Canada (currently the southern portion of the Canadian Province of Quebec) in the wake of the insurrectionary struggles and armed border incursions of 1837–38. (See Figure 1.) English Radicals and Whigs, with some Canadian allies, promoted a broad-ranging reconstruction of colonial government and legal and cultural institutions. The educational component of their project centered on the “nationalization” of the French- and English-speaking populations through the attendance of young people in common schools, where they would be instructed in a nonsectarian civil religion later known as “our Common Christianity.” The cooperative management of such schools by adult male property holders would train men in the operations of local representative self-government. Most of those involved in promoting this project for a new form of community understood it to be aimed at the assimilation of French Canadians to a broadly “British” nationality.