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Anthony Di Mascio, The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education

2013; Canadian History of Education Association; Linguagem: Inglês

10.32316/hse/rhe.v25i2.4358

1911-9674

Elsbeth Heaman,

Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy

The oppressive, top-down state that provoked a lot of good social history once upon a time has been replaced, in recent years, with a state that was constructed to a surprising degree from the bottom up.People demanded a whole range of services that the private sector couldn't provide, ranging from criminal justice to income support to schooling, and their demands for those state services often significantly outpaced what government officials were prepared to supply.People didn't always get the services on the terms that they wanted -and residential schools aimed at coercive assimilation of indigenous children provide the worst example of ironic outcomes -but they entered passionately and hopefully into the conversations about what could or should be public services.Amongst the excellent social history that the discovery of the demand-led state has been provoking is Anthony Di Mascio's new book on The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education.Di Mascio looks for and finds evidence of popular demand for common schools in Upper Canada that considerably pre-dated the legislation creating such schools.Private schools were expensive and their quality was erratic; only state intervention could bring cheap and decent schools to ordinary people across the province.Reformers and newspapermen took up the cry for popular schooling first, around the turn of the century.Conservative elites only began to respond to that demand in the second decade of the nineteenth century, after the War of 1812 convinced them of the need to cultivate a conservative and loyal identity amongst the people.To no small degree, Di Mascio argues, educational policy offered a rare possibility