Peter Riordon
(Reproduced with permission from Quebec Heritage News)

A Meeting of the People, School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec 1801-1998 . By Roderick MacLeod & Mary Anne Poutanen, McGill-Queens University Press 2004.

In the midst of the political turmoil that thundered into the lives of Quebecers in the latter part of the twentieth century, a few Protestant school commissioners arranged to set aside some funds in a trust to ensure that the proud history of Protestant education in la Belle Province would not be forgotten. The authors, with the aid of that trust, have painted a fascinating view of how the early settlers of British and American origins worked within their communities to ensure their children had access to education even when faced with great challenges.

This is no chronological story. Rather it dips into history and picks out the vignettes about the local Board that hired a particular teacher who taught the community children while living in the garret over the classroom in the log cabin that served as both school and lodgings. It describes the entries in the old minute books relating the challenges of staffing, finding resources, setting and maintaining standards and eccentric personalities. We learn of the parts played by the community leaders, the various churches, the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning and, much later, the provincial government with the Parent Report and a new Ministry of Education in the 1960’s. We gain insight into the Parti Québecois efforts to abolish school boards and, when that failed, to create linguistic boards and how that eventually came about in 1998.

The authors have not told us the entire story. We do not learn about St. Helen’s School for girls, run under the wing of the Montreal Diocese of the Anglican Church for almost a century; we do not see any mention of the Quebec Association of Protestant School Boards which was incorporated in 1929 and was instrumental in fending off the worst of the PQ reform attempts. We learn nothing of the Kenniff Commission that carefully prepared the way for wide acceptance of linguistic school boards.

However, we are given a very broad tour of the province over the two centuries the book covers and we leave with a very good sense of where we came from and how we got here today in education. The book was not conceived to be a best seller, but to those with an interest in English education in Quebec, it offers a delightful insight.