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  • Educating the Neglected Majority: The Struggle for Agricultural and Technical Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec by Richard A. Jarrell
  • Theodore Michael Christou
Richard A. Jarre. Educating the Neglected Majority: The Struggle for Agricultural and Technical Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebe. McGill-Queen's University Press. xiv, 418. $37.95

This long-awaited volume opens most poignantly with a foreword drafted by the late author's spouse, Martha Jarrell. It accents the book beautifully, explaining why Richard Jarrell spent a lifetime devoted to the practice and study of education and, what is more, why the history of education matters. Educating the Neglected Majority, which arrived here well after the author's passing in 2016, also represents the volume of time and the patience that is required to pursue such work. What is more, at nearly 400 pages including indexes, it is a weighty work.

Educating the Neglected Majority features well-known characters in the Canadian history of education including E.A. Barnard, J.B. Meilleux, and E. Ryerson, as well as others who may not be as renowned, including an assortment of legislators and manufacturers not associated directly with the educative states that were emerging in Upper Canada and in Quebec. Jarrell frames these two provinces as colonial places that looked internationally for pedagogical and other tools that were depicted as progressive.

Progressive education per se is not the subject of the book. Its focus is on the various efforts made to establish formal and informal agricultural education as well as institutes and schools formed for industrial and mechanical education. The author was educated as a historian and philosopher of science, and it is in these domains that the author's eloquence, perceptive reading of the vast number of sources, and keen observations are most evident. To cite an example, the preface opens: "The ideologies and institutions of education have finite and sometimes surprisingly short lifetimes. Science and technology are human activities that exhibit surprisingly short lifetimes." Jarrell pursues this line of thinking throughout the book, demonstrating that our own fascination with twenty-first-century education – or however its various pursuits are framed – can sometimes be seen as myopic.

His study takes us from the 1830s to the dawn of the twentieth century. Jarrell outlines the creation of libraries, women's societies and various local institutes, and museums as a means by which agricultural and technological education was pursued. Some of these mechanisms have largely faded into history and others persist, albeit in altered form. Technology evolves inexorably and quickly, particularly in our own contextual space as educators in the twenty-first century. Yet, our drive to pursue technological change is both consistent and persistent. This book, one of the author's many legacies, will be a granular reading of this thesis, and it will be useful to education scholars and practitioners. [End Page 433]

In many ways, Educating the Neglected Majority is both comprehensive and not without limitations. A timely case in point is that while there is a discussion of girls' and women's education, First Nations peoples are not represented. Particularly as we rethink and strive towards truth and reconciliation between Canada's Indigenous and settler communities, the text provides an opportunity for new and future scholarship to rethink each aspect of the country's educational history. Any study, like technology itself, is both a new contribution to the way we can understand and question the world around us and a document that begins to age the very moment that we turn its first page.

Theodore Michael Christou
Faculty of Education, Queen's University
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