Ruling by Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology by Bruce Curtis (review)

Bruce Curtis demonstrates in his latest book, Ruling by Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology, the intimate connections among schooling, state formation, and human subjectivity. He shows how colonial officials in Quebec claimed to be liberal by demanding that freedom meant “‘the people’ was free to educate itself, provided it did so freely” (p. 439). From the Conquest of Quebec to Union of the Canadas, Curtis argues that the Assembly, churches Reform majority, and others justified the preservation of ignorance for the masses in the name of civil and religious liberties (p. 428). While repeated proposals were made, particularly in the 1830s, to support the international “common school” movement, opposition to administrative institutions and practices made the development of a secular public school system impossible (p. 432). Schooling was necessary in so far as it supported systemic colonization – reason for the elite and social engineering of the habitants. Curtis points to the logic of liberal governmentality for ruling through schooling: “Free self-government was possible only by those schooled to the use of a reason which recognized the value of free self-government” (p. 439).

Bruce Curtis sets out four ambitious objectives for this book and he meets all of these objectives with meticulous archival research based on reflexive historical sociology–attentiveness to the way knowledge is deployed in social and political relations in a given moment (pp. 4-5). His first objective is to provide rich documentation of Quebec common schooling. With due reference to the earlier work of Louis-Philippe Audet, Curtis fills many gaps in Quebec’s educational history. Chapters one and two detail an early opportunity lost for a non-sectarian university and later the defeat of denominational boards by imperial intervention. Chapter three explores the under-examined influence of monitorial schooling. These large-scale institutions to transform “masses of ignorant young people into orderly and cheerful readers and writers” were accepted to the extent that they addressed the early nineteenth-century “rise of urban pauper and proletarian populations” (p. 121). Curtis makes clear that monitorialism was an early experiment in liberal governmentality- encouraging social mobility with greater access to schooling, while seeking to discipline social subjects (p. 184). Failure was the result of poor conditions in the countryside, which included, as sketched in chapters four through six, low student attendance, poor infrastructure, and a lack of trained teachers (e.g. Montreal Normal School disappointment).

Curtis’ second objective is to situate schooling where it belongs in colonial politics – at the centre of administrative, legal, and ideological debates for ruling a people. This is inextricable from the third objective to demonstrate how a population was ruled by schooling through emerging techniques in knowledge production. Chapters seven and eight address how royal commissions, in the context of the Rebellions, experimented with the new social sciences to approach “schooling through the lens of population government” (p. 23). The first was the Gosford Commission of 1835–36, which was pioneering in seeking the opinion of “civil society,” rather than that of elites, through personal observation, circulars, and the colonial press (as well as investigations by Jean Holmes of the Irish system) (pp. 338–39). The Commission recommended a “state school system, with central boards of education, inspectors, elected trustees, property taxation, normal schools, and curriculum and pedagogy on the Irish model” (p. 346). Because of insurrection, these recommendations waited for considerationby a second royal inquiry, the Buller Education Commission from 1838–39, established by Lord Durham. For a more exact understanding of the population and territory that an educational “machine” (p. 354) would serve, the commission, through the work of Christopher Dunkin, attempted to compile “complete statistics” (p. 23) with a questionnaire. Despite the lack of desired results, the commission endorsed a centrally regulated, property-tax supported, public school system, most of which Curtis argues “came to be the reality of public education – but not in Lower Canada/Canada East/Quebec” (p. 412...