The Idea of Popular Schooling In Upper Canada: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education by Anthony Di Mascio (review)

Reviewed by: The Idea of Popular Schooling In Upper Canada: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education by Anthony Di Mascio Theodore Michael Christou Di Mascio, Anthony – The Idea of Popular Schooling In Upper Canada: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education. Montreal and Kingston; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012. Pp. 257. Anthony Di Mascio’s The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada is a story of education in Upper Canada, the baptismal name of what we now know more familiarly as the province of Ontario. It responds to the following question: why did popular schooling begin in the province? More pointedly, it concerns the origins of the idea of popular schooling. In this distinction lies Di Mascio’s most important contribution to the historiographical record of Ontario’s schools. Educational historians have painted a vivid and detailed picture of the establishment of Ontario’s public system of education, drawing on the rich archival and prosopographical evidence that we can associate with a formal department of education and the great figures that are linked to its establishment, and yet more work needs to be done to explain why public education came to be at all? How was schooling conceptualized in the popular imaginary? The Idea of Popular Schooling begins to answer these questions by inquiring into the evidentiary basis for this system’s origins, proceeding to explore the reasons for its existence. [End Page 572] The narrative begins with a portrayal of Upper Canada that is reminiscent of rags to riches stories. A “backwoods…howling wilderness,” sparsely populated, managed in short order to enact provisions that would establish a public schooling act that would endeavor to reach the entire population. Through lobbying and pressures upon the press and upon the government by its inhabitants, Upper Canada was a forerunner in publicly funded education. The heroes of this story are the Upper Canadians. The author assumes the torch carried for decades by seminal Canadian historians of education such as J. Donald Wilson, Robert Stamp, Neil Sutherland, and Bruce Curtis who challenged the ‘great man’ narratives that frequented this country’s educational history. This is not to neglect the work of Alison Prentice, Jane Errington, Rosa Bruno-Jofré, Paul Axelrod, and other notable Canadian historians of education, who have demonstrated how people’s civic engagement with the state altered the landscape of public schooling. The creation myth of Upper Canadian education posits Egerton Ryerson as a George Washington figure. I am partial to Ryerson. His place in the Canadian pantheon is well deserved; Di Mascio notes, quite correctly, however, that three common school acts had already been enacted in Upper Canada before Ryerson assumed office. Just as Lawrence Cremin sought to tie the history of schooling in the United States to broader social and intellectual movements rather than telling a story of linear progress, so Di Mascio seeks to situate his study within a broader tradition of historical narratives that challenge Whig history. This is a tradition that is decades old. It is revitalized here. Di Mascio’s history begins before the establishment of a formal Department of Education in Upper Canada (at the time, Canada West; Canada East, in broad strokes, designated what is presently referred to as Quebec), which was born in 1841. In 1822, the General Board of Education was created as a central department. As the author notes, this board “was an afterthought to the Common School Act passed in 1816, and although a great deal of information concerning the administrative and institutional developments of the time, they tell us very little about the idea of popular schooling and its advocates” (p. 5). As a result, his archival sources are quite unique. Di Mascio has few government documents to draw upon. Formal correspondence is scant. Rather than pursuing official records or emphasizing the establishment of schooling as system within Upper Canada, the author is primarily interested in explaining what the people of the province wanted out of an educational system, and what – at least with respect to formal rhetoric – its backers promoted. Di Mascio argues, quite convincingly, that civic engagement within Upper Canada was higher than we might expect. High...

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