Overview

Alison Prentice's 1977 groundbreaking monograph The School Promoters is a revisionist account of public education's emergence. This latest edition includes a foreword and appendices by editors Bruce Curtis, Jennifer Henderson, and Mythili Rajiva, offering updated analysis and primary documents that deepen the understanding of Egerton Ryerson's role in shaping Ontario's educational system. Using a wide range of archival and published sources, The School Promoters provides a lucid account of the preoccupations of the White, mostly middle-class reformers connected to Ryerson, who were responsible for the advent of public education in Ontario as part of their concern with the future of Canadian society. This edition situates Prentice's analysis of class domination within the context of settler-colonialism, exploring how education worked as a project for genocide as well as a means of social discipline. In particular, the editors expose how the proclaimed universality of public education was contradicted by the reformers' logic for targeting paupers and Indigenous peoples with religious schooling. A reparative reading of Prentice's influential work, The School Promoters: Egerton Ryerson and His Circle, Second Edition highlights the relevance of this groundbreaking social history to contemporary analysis of Canada.

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9781487570248

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Reviews

“The School Promoters remains an essential contribution to the field of education history. More than a reprint of a classic work, this new edition brings Prentice’s original insights into conversation with growing debates about Egerton Ryerson and schooling’s role in building and maintaining Canada’s settler- capitalist status quo.” -- Sean Carleton, Associate Professor of History and Indigenous Studies, University of Manitoba “This edition introduces a new generation of students and scholars to Alison Prentice’s The School Promoters (1977), which brought the emergent tools of social history to bear on the history of public education in nineteenth-century Ontario. Updated with appendices and a foreword that bring Prentice’s focus on schooling as class domination into conversation with its function as an instrument of settler-colonial rule, this edition is crucial reading for those who want to understand ‘Egerton Ryerson and his circle,’ as well as the ongoing effects of their legacies.” -- Jody Mason, Professor of English, Carleton University, and author of <em>Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement</em> “This new edition of The School Promoters makes for an important new look at a classic work in Canadian social history. The original work established that property owners in what became Ontario supported the creation of public schools to consolidate their position by changing the knowledge, habits, and loyalties of the lower classes. The new foreword and appendices shows that settler property owners proposed residential schools to reshape Indigenous peoples in the same way. Schooling and its genocidal consequences have been integral to the settler-colonial project.” -- Timothy J. Stanley, Professor Emeritus of Education, University of Ottawa

Author Information

Alison Prentice was a Canadian historian, a member of the Order of Canada and the founding head of OISE's Centre for Women's Studies in Education. Bruce Curtis is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. Jennifer Henderson is a professor in the Department of English and the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. Mythili Rajiva is an associate professor of feminist and gender studies at the University of Ottawa.

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