We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
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.
1. See, for example, Chief Superintendent Ryerson, Annual Report of Normal, Model, and Common Schools in Upper Canada, for the year 1847 (Montreal, 1849), p. 10, as well as his Journal of Education for Upper-Canada 1, no. 10 (October 1848): 300.Google Scholar
2. Jackie, John A., “Time, Space and the Geographic Past: A Prospectus for Historical Geography,“ American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (October 1971): 1087; see also Harris, Cole, “Theory and Synthesis in Historical Geography,” Canadian Geographer 15, no. 3 (Fall 1971): 157–72.Google Scholar
3. Simmons, James W. and Huebert, Victor H., “The Location of Land for Public Use in Urban Areas,“ Canadian Geographer 14, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 45–56. See also Teitz, Michael B., “Toward a Theory of Urban Public Facility Location,” in Internal Structure of the City: Readings on Space and Environment, ed. Bourne, Larry S., (New York, 1971), pp. 411–20.Google Scholar
4. Wilson, J. Donald also comes to this conclusion in “The Ryerson Years in Canada West,” in Canadian Education: A History, ed Donald Wilson, J., Stamp, Robert M. and Audet, Louis-Philippe, (Scarborough, Ont., 1970), p. 216.Google Scholar
5. The local superintendent advocated abolishing free schools and returning to the rate-paying system when it became clear that free schools had failed. The Board of School Trustees voted 8–3 against such an abolition, and the superintendent resigned (Toronto Board of Education Historical Collection [hereafter cited as TBEHC], Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 2, May 12,1858.Google Scholar
6. My model of bureaucracy owes much to Tyack, David, “Bureaucracy and the Common School: The Example of Portland Oregon, 1851–1913,“ American Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Fall 1967): 475–98, and Katz, Michael B., “From Voluntarism to Bureaucracy in American Education,” Sociology of Education 44 (Summer 1971): 297–332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7. TBEHC, , Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 1 November 1847–January 1851, passim.Google Scholar
8. Board of School Trustees, Report of the Past History, and Present Condition, of the Common or Public Schools of the City of Toronto (Toronto, 1859), p. 73.Google Scholar
9. Cf. Kett, Joseph F., “Growing up in Rural New England, 1800–1840,“ in Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth-Century Social History, ed. Hareven, Tamara K., (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 3–4, 7–9, where an essentially similar pattern of home-school relationships is discussed.Google Scholar
10. The city's school-age population (5–16 years) from 1845 to 1850 was reported in the Annual Report of the Chief Superintendent of Schools. It ranged in these years from 2,033 to 6,149. That given for 1846—4,450—seems accurate enough, as it differs only slightly from that found in Brown's Toronto City and Home District Directory, 1846–7 (Toronto, 1846), p. 22, which reports the 1846 census figure for children ages 5–16 as 4,626. The total enrollment for 1846 was estimated to be 1,600, which is 34.5 percent of the age group 5–16. The average daily attendance was 75.8 percent of the total number registered.Google Scholar
11. Ross, Peter N., “The Free School Controversy in Toronto, 1848–1852,“ (research paper, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Spring 1971), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar
12. TBEHC, , Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 1 December 6, 1847.Google Scholar
13. Annual Report of the Normal, Model, and Common Schools in Upper Canada, for the Year 1848 (Montreal, 1849), p. 35.Google Scholar
14. TBEHC, , Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 1 November 23, 1847.Google Scholar
15. The Act of 1847, 10th & 11th Vic., Cap. 19, was the topic of a circular sent by Ryerson to the heads of city and town corporations, Journal of Education for Upper Canada 1, no. 1 (January 1848): 16–17.Google Scholar
16. Annual Report of the Normal, Model, and Common Schools in Upper Canada, for the Year 1848, p. 36.Google Scholar
17. The impact of urban population growth on educational change was early appreciated by Cubberley, Ellwood P. in his Public Education of the United States (Boston, 1919), chap. 4.Google Scholar
18. Duncan, Kenneth, “Irish Famine Immigration and Social Structure in Canada West,“ in Canada: A Sociological Profile, ed. Mann, W. E., (Toronto, 1968), “Population and Immigration,” p. 5.Google Scholar
19. Lees, Lynn H., “Patterns of Lower-Class Life: Irish Slum Communities in Nineteenth-Century London,“ in Nineteenth-Century Cities, ed. Thernstrom, Stephan and Sennet, Richard, (New Haven, 1969), p. 383. This is also the conclusion of David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1971), p. 117. For the older view see Solomon, Barbara Miller, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (New York, 1956), p. 152, where she states that “these ethnic stereotypes often derived from literary associations of the past, were comic in tone; even when related to real life, they lacked ulterior purpose of malice or insult.”Google Scholar
20. Ward, , Cities and Immigrants, p. 106; see also his article, “The Internal Spatial Structure of Immigrant Residential Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Geographical Analysis 1, no. 3 (October 1969): 337–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21. The conclusions of the Canadian Social History Project's study of nineteenth-century Hamilton, Ontario, powerfully reinforce this line of reasoning, and largely agree with those in Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (New York, 1970).Google Scholar
22. Canada, Board of Registration and Statistics, Census of the Canadas, 1851–52 (Quebec, 1853), 1: 30–31, 66–67; Ward, Cities and Immigrants, pp. 107–9; Shea, Derwyn S., “The Irish Immigrants’ Adjustment in Urban North America,“ (B.A. honours essay, Laurentian University, 1970), pp. 42–43, 45; and Goheen, Peter G., Victorian Toronto, 1850–1890: Pattern and Process of Growth, University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper No. 127 (Chicago, 1970), p. 75.Google Scholar
23. Ross, , “The Free School Controversy in Toronto, 1848–1852,“ pp. 27–35; it should be noted that both the educational reformers and their opponents on the free-school issue held anti-Irish views.Google Scholar
24. Report of the Past History …, p. 56.Google Scholar
25. Ibid., p. 58.Google Scholar
26. Warner, Sam Bass Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Growth (Philadelphia, 1968), p. 54.Google Scholar
27. Report of the Past History …, p. 58; cf. Sutherland, Gillian, Elementary Education in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1971), p. 3, where he notes that the inspector of schools in Great Britain accused educators in 1846 of breaking off “a fragment from the education we suppose necessary for our own children—its mechanical and technical part—and give it to the poor man's child….” Kay, Joseph an English educational reformer whom Ryerson greatly admired, made the function of this utilitarian education perfectly clear when he wrote that the purpose of educating the lower orders was “to diminish our number of criminals, to lessen the dangers of social convulsions, and to unite the different classes of society by bounds of common interests, mutual confidence and satisfaction,” in The Education of the Poor in England and Europe (London, 1846), p. xix.Google Scholar
28. TBEHC, , Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 1 November 5, 1851.Google Scholar
29. Ibid., March 23 and May 25, 1853.Google Scholar
30. Report of the Past History …, p. 48.Google Scholar
31. Katz, Michael B., “Education and Social Development in the Nineteenth Century,“ in History and Education: The Educational Uses of the Past, ed. Nash, Paul, (New York, 1970), pp. 103–4.Google Scholar
32. Report of the Past History …, p. 67.Google Scholar
33. Thernstrom, , Poverty and Progress, p. 51, sees popular education in mid-nineteenth-century Newburyport as “not popular enough … to be a powerful instrument of social control,” in part because of “the compelling economic considerations which kept the sons and daughters of laborers out of school.”Google Scholar
34. Masters, D. C., The Rise of Toronto, 1850–1890 (Toronto, 1947), pp. 33–38, 79–83; cf. Goheen, Victorian Toronto, 1850–1890, p. 75, who simply counts the Irish population as being “English.” By 1861 the Irish were the second largest ethnic group in the city, following only those born in Canada (which must have included large numbers of children of Irish parentage). The residential and religious mixes were roughly similar to those of 1851. Canada, Board of Registration and Statistics, Census of the Canadas, 1860–61 (Quebec, 1865), 1:48–49, 128–29.Google Scholar
35. TBEHC, , Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 1 January 3, 1851.Google Scholar
36. Ross, , “The Free School Controversy in Toronto, 1848–1852,“ pp. 27–28.Google Scholar
37. TBEHC, , Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 1 July 7, 1852.Google Scholar
38. 16th Vic., Cap. 186, Sec. 4 (1853), and 18th Vic., Cap. 131 (May 1855); for a discussion of this and other separate school legislation, see Sissons, C. B., Church and State in Canadian Education (Toronto, 1959), pp. 25–41.Google Scholar
39. TBEHC, , Minutes of Board of School Trustees, vol. 2 June 2, 1858.Google Scholar
40. Ontario Provincial Archives (POA), Education Department Records, RG 2, F-3-F, Box 1, “Half-Yearly Return of the Roman Catholic Separate Schools in Toronto, from the 1st January to the 30th June, 1855.”Google Scholar
41. Journal of Education for Upper Canada 14, no. 9 (September 1861): 144. That anti-Irish opinion had hardly vanished is shown by the comment of one of the Board of School Trustees at the annual convocation for school awards in 1865. In introducing an English commissioner of education to the audience, the trustee related how “the other day the Bishop of Chicago … told him [the commissioner] that one priest was as good as a hundred policemen in keeping in order the Germans and turbulent Irishmen in that city. (Applause)” (ibid., 18, no. 9 [September 1865]).Google Scholar
42. Rubenstein's, David excellent monograph, School Attendance in London, 1870–1904: A Social History, Occasional Papers in Economic and Social History, no. 1 (Hull, England, 1969), and the early but still very valuable study by Abbott, Edith and Breckenridge, Sophonisba P., Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools (Chicago, 1917), constitute virtually the entire literature on the topic.Google Scholar
43. Annual Report of the Normal, Model, and Common Schools in Upper Canada, for the Year 1852 (Quebec, 1853), p. 123 (italics added).Google Scholar
44. Rubinstein, , School Attendance in London, 1870–1904, pp. 64–68; Ward, David, “The Emergence of Central Immigrant Ghettoes in American Cities, 1840–1920,“ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 58, no. 2 (June 1968), pp. 343–59, examines the effect of the expanding CBD on immigrant housing opportunities.Google Scholar
45. Ward, , Cities and Immigrants, p. 119; Thernstrom, , Poverty and Progress, p. 134. For an excellent analysis of the casual labour market see Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar
46. Knights, Peter R., The Plain People of Boston, 1830–1860: A Study in City Growth (New York, 1971), pp. 65–66, and with Thernstrom, Stephan, “Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations About Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1970): 7–35. Work in progress on aged female welfare recipients in mid-nineteenth-century Hamilton, Ontario, indicates that even this unlikely group changed residence on the average of once a year. A recent discussion of residential mobility in nineteenth-century Toronto can be found in Doucet, Michael J., “Sherbourne Street, 1875–1888; A Study in Urban Residential Mobility,” (geographical research paper, York University, 1971).Google Scholar
47. Report of the Past History …, p. 68.Google Scholar
48. Second Annual Report of the Local Superintendent of the Public Schools of the City of Toronto, for the year ending December 31st, 1860 (Toronto, 1861), p. 5.Google Scholar
49. Breckenridge, Abbott and, Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools, p. 101; disturbed by the mobility of students, these progressive social workers reported that “especially difficult are the cases of immigrant children who drift in from other cities and many who have lived in several towns without attending school in any one of them. Unless some system of transfers between cities can be worked out, there is not much hope of catching these more migratory families” (p. 278).Google Scholar
50. Annual Report of the Inspector of the Public Schools of the City of Toronto, for the year ending December 31, 1875 (Toronto, 1875), p. 14.Google Scholar
51. Cochrane, Honora M., ed., Centennial Story: The Board of Education for the City of Toronto, 1850–1950 (Toronto, 1950), p. 71.Google Scholar
52. Annual Report of the Inspector of the Public Schools for the City of Toronto, for the year ending December 31, 1875, p. 16.Google Scholar
53. Fifth Annual Report of the Local Superintendent of the Public Schools of the City of Toronto, for the year ending December 31st, 1863 (Toronto, 1864), pp. 6–8, 46–47; Annual Report of the Inspector of the Public Schools for the City of Toronto, for the year ending December 31, 1875, pp. 12, 63–64.Google Scholar
54. Goheen, , Victorian Toronto, 1850–1890, pp. 1–2, 219–21.Google Scholar
