The Journal Of The Board Of Arts And Manufactures For Upper Canada

This second of three volumes in theHistory of the Book in Canada demonstrates the same research and editorial standards established with Volume One by book history specialists from across the nation.

Ferry examines a wide selection of voluntary societies - mechanics' institutes, mutual benefit organizations, agricultural associations, temperance societies, and literary and scientific associations. He reinterprets the history of these organizations in terms of their own internal tensions over liberal doctrines and the effect of social, cultural, and economic change and compares the effects of liberalism on rural and urban associations and on societies in both English and French Canada.

Educating the Neglected Majority is Richard Jarrell’s pioneering survey of the attempt to develop and diffuse agricultural and technical education in nineteenth-century Canada’s most populous regions. It explores the efforts and achievements of educators, legislators, and manufacturers as they responded to the rapid changes resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Identifying the resources that the state, philanthropic organizations, private schools, moral reform societies, and churches harnessed to implement technical education for the rural and industrial working classes, Jarrell illuminates the formal and informal learning networks of Upper Canada/Ontario and Lower Canada/Quebec at this time. As these colonial societies moved towards mechanization, industrialization, and nationhood, their educational leaders looked to US and British developments in pedagogy and technology to create academic journals, evening classes, libraries, mechanics’ institutes, museums, specialist societies, and women’s institutes. Supervising these varied activities were legislatures and provincial boards, where key figures such as E.-A. Barnard, J.-B. Meilleur, and Egerton Ryerson played dominant roles. Portraying the powerful hopes and sometimes unrealistic dreams that motivated energetic and determined reformers, Educating the Neglected Majority presents Ontario and Quebec’s response to the powerful industrial and demographic forces that were reshaping the North Atlantic world.