Education in North America

The nineteenth century was a time of expansion and change on the North American continent. Expansion of the white population westward brought more and more native peoples into contact with settlers and their brand of civilization. Displacement, disease, and successive wars of conquest decimated the native peoples from Florida to Saskatchewan and brought those who survived into a strongly paternalistic relationship with the governments in the United States and Canada. Across North America, state-run schools for indigenous peoples or state-supported missionary schools sought to teach their charges their appropriate role in the polity and the economy. Typically these schools taught habits of deportment and hygiene, the English language, loose Protestant catechism, the rudiments of politics, and, most importantly, a set of vocational skills appropriate to a subservient class. This model, one of providing education to support political stability and training for appropriate roles in the economy, bolstered the universalist impulse among elites, who saw it as a way of promoting stability. Among emerging groups, the picture is less clear. Some saw the provision of any education as an advance. Others saw the internal limits to this kind of learning.

Throughout the nineteenth century, state-sponsored education replaced the more informal arrangements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, built upon the twin pillars of political necessity and economic stability. By mid-century in Canada and the United States, education came to be seen as the most powerful tool in creating stable, well-ordered societies in the face of increasing mobility and immigration. Yet this rise of the public school and its hegemonic construction of a political and social narrative aimed primarily at immigrants and non-elites did not go uncontested. Across North America, religious groups, particularly Catholics, protested the growing incursion of state-written (British Canada) or state-influenced (United States) curriculum that either explicitly or implicitly supported Protestantism. Ethnic groups in the midwestern regions of the United States and Canada created strong regional schools where subjects were often taught in German or Polish. And finally, elites, who supported public schools for the general stability they generated, supported independent schools and sent their children there in preparation for matriculation at colleges and universities.