Public Schooling and the Spirit of Secularism: The Secular Dynamics of Education Reform in Canada’s 1960s

The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the question “what is secular education?” Scholarship and public discourse typically treat secular education as a synonym for either state-run schooling or any educational process that is not explicit formation in a religious tradition. Such views rely on a static conception of the secular as the simple opposite or absence of religion, the neutral substrate of political and social reality that remains once religion has been removed. I argue in this dissertation that the secular is a substantive, dynamic presence in modern mass schooling, whose operations are active and formational. The secular is, crucially, pedagogical — it cultivates certain kinds of subjects and societies. Public education thus represents an underappreciated site of secular activity, demonstrating its formational dynamics with unusual clarity. This dissertation examines these features of secular education through a comparative analysis of Ontario’s “Hall-Dennis Committee” and Quebec’s “Parent Commission,” two influential education reform bodies from Canada’s 1960s, a pivotal decade for the acceleration and entrenchment of Canadian secularism. Drawing on extensive research in the provincial archives of these two commissions, I examine their deliberations, documentation, and reporting through an anthropological lens. I argue that secular education relies on the interactions between distinctly modern conceptions of the students and the structures of public schooling. I describe the dynamics of childhood in the commissions’ vision of secular schooling through the concepts of “the enchanted child” and “the enlightened adult,” which represent influential variations on the meaning of maturation at the individual and societal level in a secular age. I also examine a 20th century view of bureaucratic structures that runs throughout the activities of the commissions, portraying structures as rationalizing, self-standing, relational, and disenchanting. Secular education, I argue, is animated by the tensions that emerge when different configurations of the enchanted child, the enlightened adult, and the structures of modern mass schooling interact within specific cultural and socio-spiritual environments. These constitutive ambivalences have exercised a significant influence on educational development in Canada and beyond, generating durable modes of pedagogy, policymaking, educational administration, and curriculum.

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