Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia by Sean Carleton (review)

Reviewed by: Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia by Sean Carleton Alexandra Giancarlo Carleton, Sean – Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022. 331 p. On the eve of Confederation, British Columbia was—in the words of Sean Carleton—a "remote and beleaguered colony" (p. 78). How did this colony, beset by serious economic problems and threatened by American annexation, transform over the course of the next half-century into the thriving and populous province that we recognize today? In Lessons in Legitimacy, Carleton argues that government-supported education played an underappreciated role in creating British Columbia's settler capitalist society. Throughout, Carleton draws on the work of historians, critical education scholars, Indigenous studies researchers, and others to demonstrate how schools in early British Columbia served to legitimize the burgeoning capitalist society by shaping the children of European immigrants "to be effective colonizers" (p. 6) and shaping Indigenous children to take up menial occupational roles. One of the many strengths of Carleton's work, and one which sets it apart from others in the field, is its robust theorizing and theoretical grounding in historical materialism and political economy. This approach encourages the reader to problematize the very idea of state schooling as one way that "state actors … serve the dual roles of facilitating capitalist accumulation and ensuring the continued development and legitimation of society" (p. 11). Capital accumulation was buoyed by waves of [End Page 173] ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands in British Columbia, and in this way, Carleton demonstrates how the province was a "microcosm" of colonial processes that occurred across what would become Canada. The book comprises three parts that are each divided into two chapters. It proceeds chronologically, beginning with 1849 in Part 1, Chapter 1, and ending with Part 3, Chapter 6, in 1930. Parts 1, 2, and 3 are bookended by an introduction and conclusion. In Part 1, Carleton details the vicissitudes of the colony's early educational landscape. On Vancouver Island, by the mid-1850s, common schools for working-class Hudson Bay Company (HBC) families were in operation. Private schools for the children of the colony's elite were also launched; because of the numerous liaisons between elite HBC fur traders and Indigenous women, pupil ranks included upper-class Indigenous children (p. 24). Educational infrastructure on the mainland developed at a slower pace, with only four common schools by the mid-1860s (p. 40). However, by the latter part of the following decade, within the newly merged Colony of British Columbia, the building blocks for a "highly centralized public school system" (p. 47) were in place. In a process of accumulation by dispossession (p. 75), Indigenous lands were sold or leased, and the proceeds went to funding colonization, including common schools for non-Indigenous children and missionary schools that, Carleton contends, functioned largely to teach Indigenous youth to work in and accept the settler state. In Part 2, "Ruling by Schooling, 1871–1900," Carleton examines the transition from fee-based schooling to a publicly funded and administered educational system. The colony had become Canada's newest province in 1871, and in return for its realized western expansionism, the Dominion of Canada eliminated the fledgling colony's debts. The following year, the province passed the Public School Act, 1872, which codified its responsibilities to educate all of the province's children (p. 83). Universal public education, and its promise of social mobility, attracted new settlers, and after the completion of the railway in 1886, a veritable population boom was underway (p. 91). As a trade-off for their substantial financial commitment, Carleton argues, the provincial government gained the authority to control education "in ways that normalized social rules and legitimated state power" (p. 101). Such state power was wielded toward uneven, if predictable, ends, with a system that at times gave less funding to "Indian" education and across the whole period "trained" Indigenous children for low-level labouring positions. Part 3, "Reform and Resistance, 1900–30," delves into the government's revisions to public schooling that began around the turn of the twentieth century. "Progressivism" was...

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