Struggling with diversity, the state education of the pluralistic, Upper Canadian population, 1791-1841

grantor: University of TorontoThis dissertation concerns the birth of the spirit of a tolerant State policy toward the education of a pluralistic population in the polity of Ontario during its Upper Canadian period, 1791-1841. During this formative, fifty year period, a general spirit arose amongst the diverse Confessional, denominational, sectarian, and ethnocentric groups as they fought first against the rugged environment, then against innumerable transportation difficulties that denied access into the interior (the bush or the backwoods) to all but the determined and the desperate, and finally against the ruling political clique, the Family Compact. Comprised largely of what E. P. Thompson called Church-and-King men in English context, the Family Compact held all the cards in the fledgling polity--political, ecclesiastical, cultural, legal, judicial, financial, military, and educational. In its efforts to Establish the Church of England (the Anglican Church) in Upper Canada--as it had been so established, to the extent of collecting tithes, in Ireland, for example--the archly-conservative Family Compact sowed the seeds of its own eventual demise by creating broad popular opposition to its sectarian actions and policies after 1820, especially in regard to the education of the rising generations, for whom the State's role in education was of rapidly increasing importance. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Anglicans having lost the struggle to create an education system in their own image, began opening their own private schools and College (Trinity) under the aegis of their fearless though bigoted leader, Bishop John Strachan (Toronto).Ph.D