The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People | Page 9

a remarkable effect in stimulating the
public intelligence and especially in improving the mental outfit of the
people. The press increased in influence and ability; but, more than all,
with the concession of responsible government, education became the

great question of the day in the legislatures of the larger provinces. But
to so important and interesting a subject it will be necessary to devote a
separate chapter.

CHAPTER II.
EDUCATION.
The great educational advantages that the people of Canada now enjoy,
and more especially in the premier Province of Ontario--as the splendid
exhibit recently made at Paris and Philadelphia has proved to the
world--are the results of the legislation of a very few years. A review of
the first two periods of our political history affords abundant evidence
that there existed in Canada as in Europe much indifference in all
matters affecting the general education of the country. Whatever was
accomplished during these early times was owing, in a great measure,
to the meritorious efforts of ecclesiastical bodies or private individuals.
As long as France governed Canada, education was entirely in the
hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The Jesuits, Franciscans, and
other religious male and female Orders, at an early date, commenced
the establishment of those colleges and seminaries which have always
had so important a share in the education of Lower Canada. The first
school in that province was opened in 1616 at Three Rivers, by Brother
Pacifique Duplessis, a Franciscan. The Jesuits founded a College at
Quebec in 1831, or three years before the establishment of Harvard and
the Ursulines opened their convent in the same city four years later.
Sister Bourgeoys, of Troyes, founded at Montreal in 1659 the
Congregation de Notre Dame for the education of girls of humble rank,
the commencement of an institution which has now its buildings in
many parts of Canada. In the latter part of the seventeenth century Mgr.
Francois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, a member of one of the
proudest families in Europe, carried out a project of providing
education for Canadian priests drawn from the people of the country.
Consequently, in addition to the Great Seminary at Quebec, there was
the Lesser Seminary where boys were taught in the hope that they
would one day take orders. In this project the Indians were included,

and several attended when the school was opened in 1668, in the
humble dwelling owned by Mme. Couillard, though it was not long
before they showed their impatience of scholastic bondage. It is also
interesting to learn that, in the inception of education, the French
endeavoured in more than one of their institutions to combine industrial
pursuits with the ordinary branches of an elementary education. For
instance, attached to the Seminary was a sort of farm-school,
established in the parish of St. Joachim, below Quebec, the object of
which was to train the humbler class of pupils in agricultural as well as
certain mechanical pursuits. The manual arts were also taught in the
institutions under the charge of the Ursulines and Congregation. We
find, for example, a French King giving a thousand francs to a
sisterhood of Montreal to buy wool, and the same sum to teach young
girls to knit. We also read of the same Sovereign maintaining a teacher
of navigation and surveying at Quebec on the modest salary of four
hundred francs a-year. But all accounts of the days of the French
regime go to show that, despite the zealous efforts of the religious
bodies to improve the education of the colonists, secular instruction
was at a very low ebb. One writer tells us that 'even the children of
officers and gentlemen scarcely knew how to read and write; they were
ignorant of the first elements of geography and history.' These were, in
fact, days of darkness everywhere, so far as the masses were concerned.
Neither England nor France had a system of popular education. Yet it is
undoubted that on the whole the inhabitants of Canada had far superior
moral and educational advantages than were enjoyed during those times
by the mass of people in England and France. Even in the days of
Walpole and Hannah More the ignorance of the English peasantry was
only equalled by their poverty and moral depravity. [Footnote: Green in
his 'History of the English People' says:--Purity and fidelity to the
marriage vow were sneered out of fashion; and Lord Chesterfield, in
his letters to his son, instructed him in the art of seduction as part of a
polite education. At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of
the poor. They were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to
conceive, for the vast increase of population which followed on the
growth of towns and the development of manufactures had