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.

You that are men and thoughts of manhood know,
Be Just now to the Man who made you so.
Martyr'd by Scholars the stabbed Cassian dies,
And falls to cursed Lads a Sacrafice.
Not so my Cheever; Not by Scholars slain,
But Praised and Lov'd, and wished to Life again.
Cotton Mather, 1708

In New England, as in the country as a whole, teaching began as a male occupation. The earliest schoolmasters taught in small settlements of religious dissenters who had migrated to the wilderness of New England in the seventeenth century. The gendered meaning of teaching accompanied the social practice of hiring male teachers. Puritan minister Cotton Mather, in his passionate elegy for seventeenth-century New England schoolmaster Ezekiel Cheever, attests to the settlers' belief in the manliness of teachers. To Mather and other English settlers, the very term schoolmaster denoted masculine qualities. In Mather's own words: “He lives as a Master, the Term, which has been for above three thousand years, assign'd to the Life of a Man.” For Mather, teachers were not only male but embodied a particular vision of the masculine as well. Mather's vision of the ideal teacher, as having a specific kind of masculinity, was not unique to him. Drawing on English and Puritan traditions, the early New England colonists embraced an image of the ideal teacher that incorporated masculine virtues.

Reformist educational discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually referred to as the “new education” or progressive education, emanated from the industrialized countries of the United States and Western Europe. They emerged partly as a response to social and economic conditions but also as an attempt by educationists to ameliorate the regimentation and pedagogical limitations of nineteenth-century schooling. A considerable degree of cross-pollination of ideas across different countries occurred through visits, study, and the exchange of publications between educationists, allowing an international focus to emerge. The various discourses that constituted progressive education were at times confusing, even contradictory, and the use of these umbrella-type categories masked and distorted the diversity of pedagogical practices. These discourses also found their way into the Southern Hemisphere including British colonies such as Australia.