New educationists in Quebec Protestant model and intermediate schools, 1881-1926.

Abstract

This study of Quebec Protestant superior and secondary education in the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century focuses on the professsionalization of the principalship of model schools which were subsidized from the Protestant share of the Quebec Superior Education Fund. The dissertation tries to make a conceptual and historical link between a regulation which prohibited principals from providing the official academy grade curriculum to pupils enrolled in model schools and a series of school consolidation campaigns which the Protestant Committee of the Council of Public Instruction planned and implemented between 1906 and 1926. The dissertation proposes that the "educationists" of the Protestant Committee and the Provincial Association of Protestant Teachers of Quebec created the pre-conditions for the late nineteenth century Protestant rural school problem and subsequently conceptualized school consolidation and pupil transportation as solutions to this problem. The thesis argues that teacher professionalization regulations forced pupils at early ages out of one-room schools into graded, secondary, and graded, secondary, consolidated schools. Those school boards, principals, and pupils who were left out of the network of Protestant graded schools faced the loss of their Superior Education fund grants, their jobs, and their access to school leaving examinations respectively. The nineteenth century model school--a relatively inexpensive and flexible provider of secondary education--was transformed by Protestant Committee initiatives to classify pupils by age-grade, consolidate rural schools, and obtain enabling pupil transportation legislation for the boards of Protestant school municipalities. Professionally certified men teachers developed a graded elementary and secondary system in the context of Protestant minority education rights obtained in 1867 with the British North America Act and the British Canadian nationalism and domestic ideology of Montreal's elites. They used Protestant Committee regulation to reshape the right of the school commissioner to become a dissentient trustee into the right of the board of commissioners to create the separate Protestant school municipality. They did not believe that incumbent men and women principals of turn-of-the century model schools were qualified to defend a Protestant school system, and saw the depletion of Protestant school municipality tax revenues as a consequence of the growth of the Catholic school municipality tax base. However, with their devaluation of the model schools, they limited the possibilities of secondary school provision for principals, teachers, and pupils.