In 1998 a major reform measure, Bill 180, took effect in the province
of Quebec, reorganizing its school system from a religious to a
linguistic basis. Instead of dual systems based on Catholic and
Protestant, the new arrangement would feature a division based on
French and English. So fundamental was the switch that it required,
in addition to passage of the bill in Quebec’s National Assembly,
the approval of a constitutional amendment by the Canadian Parliament.
Both legislatures endorsed the measure on a bipartisan basis by
healthy margins, but one significant interest group did not form
part of the supportive consensus. The Quebec Association of Protestant
School Boards, reluctant to surrender an historic constitutional
guarantee of minority school rights, launched a court challenge
against the new law. Though ultimately unsuccessful, it made the
point that not everyone with a stake in the issue accepted the modernist
assumption that organizing (and dividing) Quebec’s schools along
religious lines had become outdated.
What was the essence
of the Quebec Protestant school system? This is the fundamental
question addressed by the authors in their scholarly treatment of
developments over the past two centuries. They are at pains to emphasize
that it was more than a thinly disguised vehicle to perpetuate narrowly
religious biases arising out of Anglican and Calvinist worldviews.
They do point out that Quebec’s Protestant school system owed much
to the local school governance traditions of New England, and the
Scottish emphasis on universal literacy, given the predominance
of early settlers from these two geographic areas in the anglophone
community. However, although most of the province’s francophones
were Roman Catholic, and the largest number of anglophones were
Protestant, the emergence in the 19th century of a sizeable English-speaking
community of Irish Catholics prevented any complete identification
of language with religion. Furthermore, the existence of French
Protestants of Huguenot and Swiss ancestry, though less numerous,
completed the picture of complexity in the province’s school system.
Thus, in the authors’ view, the fundamental essence of Protestant
education in Quebec was a belief in public, non-sectarian and liberal
education, as opposed to the conservative, parish-oriented and religiously-based
instruction favoured in the opposing Catholic school system.
A parallel theme of
great importance to MacLeod and Poutanen is the close identification
by scattered rural communities of Protestants with their local schools.
Whereas in sections of Montreal and its suburbs, anglophone Protestants
often formed the majority in their districts, for Protestants in
the rest of the province, minority existence was a fact of life,
even in the Eastern Townships by the turn of the 20th century. The
elementary school, with its elected board, represented an important
community focal point. Often these schools owed their existence
to local initiative, since the first schools to be established,
in most parts of the province, were French and Catholic. Keeping
them up and running through hard times, rural depopulation and Protestant
out-migration was an ongoing struggle. It was with mixed feelings
that many Protestant communities acquiesced in the loss of their
local schoolhouse to larger consolidated schools by the mid 20th
century. The gains in educational quality, as measured by modern
facilities and single grade classrooms, could not disguise the very
real loss of community associated with school centralization. Protestant
parents opted for greater opportunity for their children arising
from larger modernized schools, but in so doing they removed one
of the institutional props supporting their minority communities.
It was not an unmixed blessing.
One of the many virtues
of this book is that the authors are aware of the main currents
of thought in Canadian educational history, and self-consciously
position their own interpretation within the mix of approaches.
They are aware of the main tenets of the social control model, but
are not persuaded that it offers the best set of tools for their
work. While others have written histories of school systems from
a metropolitan perspective, their own bias is in favour of the local
school districts. In part, this is owing to their main sources of
new information about Quebec schooling: namely, the carefully preserved
records of Protestant school boards from across the province. The
legislated termination of Protestant schools in 1998 presented an
opportunity to tell a story with an obvious end point, based on
two centuries of accumulated sources. 1801 was chosen as the starting
point, because it marked the creation of the first public school
board in Quebec, the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning.
With a wealth of local school records at their disposal, MacLeod
and Poutanen find that the characterization of parents and boards
as tending to oppose needed reforms and progressive initiatives
is well wide of the mark. What previous historians under emphasized,
with their reliance on reports by Montreal-based school inspectors
and other elite figures, were the very real hardships faced by local
boards in providing adequate facilities and competitive teacher
salaries, in the face of rural poverty and sparse populations. Far
from downgrading the importance of education, parents and boards
were proud of their schools and the achievements of their students,
and continually sacrificed time and scarce funds to keep the schoolhouses
open.
Only in the final chapters
do the authors lose some of their even-handedness, as they confront
the apparent hostility of francophone Quebec nationalism toward
a school system which had drawn Jews, Greek Orthodox and other non-Protestant
immigrant groups into its orbit. It is evident that MacLeod and
Poutanen regard the apparent victory for liberalism of a school
system based on languages rather than religions as a pyrrhic one.
The growth of a massive educational bureaucracy in Quebec City,
coupled with the loss of constitutional protection for a separate,
yet publicly-funded, school system, has placed anglophone minority
schools at the mercy of the francophone majority. While this book
celebrates two centuries of achievement, it faces the future with
obvious trepidation.
Along the way, the reader
is treated to nearly 100 period photographs, 13 statistical tables,
and 24 maps. Moving anecdotes of specific communities and individuals
are skilfully blended with a penetrating overview that includes
even the school experiences of the Cree and Inuit peoples in northern
Quebec. The tone is authoritative, and deservedly so. If you can
find a better treatment of Protestant schools in Quebec, buy it.