The State of Tutelage in Lower Canada, 1835-1851

Abstract

Most of the postmortem examinations of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837-38 identified one of its leading causes as faulty political education, but competing interpretations of education existed.1 The British Whigs and Radicals charged with reorganizing Canadian government after the Rebellion argued that the colonial population needed to be placed under far more extensive relations of tutelage than those implied by attendance at school as an antidote to revolution. Their analysis connected reform of governmental institutions, inspection and investigation of local condi? tions, and common schooling with a host of other attempts to reconfigure social solidarities in the colony and to reconstruct the colonial state. An alliance of imperial officials, anglophone capitalists and reformers, and, often grudgingly and ambivalently, sections of the francophone petite bourgeoisie attempted to translate this analysis into practice in the decade ofthe 1840s.2