In the last few years Canadians have begun to rediscover their educational past. For the most part the movement to revitalize the history of Canadian education has been the work of younger scholars, and the results of their thought, energy, and research are just now reaching the point of visibility. The purpose of this collection is to make some of that work public.

The Victorian social conscience was troubled on many accounts, and perhaps no more so than by the plight of delinquent youngsters. Few causes cut so deeply into the delicate weave of moralism and economy out of which much nineteenth-century social policy was fashioned.

The condition of the family was a subject that much preoccupied school promoters in Upper Canada. Like educators in other times and places they blamed the weaknesses of the family for many social ills; at the same time they put forth an idealized portrait of domestic relations as a major hope for social progress. Besides the usual vague complaints and exaggerated hopes, they also had some very specific anxieties about the family, among them two that were clearly associated with the spread of formal schooling and that occurred in many parts of the United States as well as in Canada. The first was the recurring suspicion that some kinds of schools, especially those controlled increasingly by the state, were gradually undermining family authority. The second, which is the subject of this essay, was intimately related to the first and concerned the education of children and adolescents away from home. How could schools and colleges replace the authority, affection, and advice normally provided by families, for these absentees from the domestic fireside?

BETWEEN THE 1880s and the 1920s a growing band of English Canadians created and began to test a new consensus on the situation of the child in their society. In the four major dimensions of their enterprise they worked to change the nature and improve the quality of family life, to establish new systems of child and family welfare, to transform Canadian education, and to organize child and family health care. Of these reform efforts the public health movement had the most immediate, the least ambiguous, and the most accurately measurable positive effects on the lives of Canadian children.

In 1870 John Carling, Ontario's Commissioner of Public Works and Agriculture, repeated one of the most persistent ideas of the nineteenth century: what this country needed, he said, was some kind of agricultural education in “the science of farming.”

In 1902 the University of Toronto joined American universities in celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Johns Hopkins University. For the occasion, A. Bruce Macallum, Professor of Physiology and holder of the Johns Hopkins' Ph.D. (1888), wrote a short essay in commemoration of the American institution. He acknowledged the contemporary debt owed to Johns Hopkins and, by inference, the obligation of Toronto to its example:

But what the Johns Hopkins University lacked in age it made up in service to American scholarship and higher education. In those few years it completely reformed American university ideals, and it developed the higher university work on this continent to a degree that no other university succeeded in doing.

With the introduction of free schools into Canada West in 1850, school attendance became, as it had for American educators, both the greatest obstacle to the successful implementation of the new system and the greatest justification for its future growth. Once the education of all school-age children became the primary goal of educational reform, the days of the district common school in the city were numbered. The district system had encouraged patterns of attendance attuned to the interests of the family and not those of the state. Schoolmen accused this more informal education of inefficiency and discrimination against the poorer classes and also objected to the large numbers of parents who kept their children out of school. To its proponents, the extension of free schooling would not only ensure a higher rate of attendance, but would also serve to assimilate the “famine Irish” who had flocked to the cities of Canada West in the late 1840s, and whose mere physical presence mid-nineteenth-century educators perceived as a direct threat to social order. To men like Dr. Egerton Ryerson, the Chief Superintendent of Education in Canada West, it was therefore doubly important to make operative as soon as possible the forces of social levelling, acculturation to work values, and diminution of crime inherent in universal primary education.

Despite its relevance to many kinds of historical study, literacy does not feature very often in historical discussion, and when it does appear a certain vagueness surrounds its meaning.

“Calmly, deliberately, and advisedly, I give it as my opinion that no one other anti-progressive agent exercises so pernicious and clogging an influence on the educational growth and prosperity of Canada as irregular attendance of children in school.” The aura of profundity and revelation with which the author of this statement surrounded his remarks surely was unnecessary; by 1861, when it appeared, virtually no one associated with schools would have disagreed. Nearly all of the writers on educational problems during the last two decades had made the same point. After all they believed, as Mr. G. A. Barber, the superintendent of schools in Toronto, put it in 1854, that “a numerous and regular attendance of scholars” was “the keystone of successful popular education.” If that were the case, the success of popular education remained problematical. Judge Haggarty might have substituted the name of almost any other North American city when he told a grand jury that “the streets of Toronto, like those of too many other towns, still present the miserable spectacle of idle, untaught children, male and female—a crop too rapidly ripening for the dram-shop, the brothel and the prison—and that too under the shadow of spacious and admirably kept school houses, into which all may enter free of cost.”