*text removed pages 111 and 125. / Monitorial schools became popular in nineteenth-century Britain. Under the panoptic control of a single master who was assisted by a cadre of specially selected pupils --monitors --these institutions responded, ostensibly, to the need to "educate" the underclass. I argue that rather than being concerned with the improvement of literacy, the promoters of these schools --The Reverend Andrew Bell, Joseph Lancaster and Matthew Davenport Hill, among others --were driven more by a desire to contain and manage a segment of the population that constituted a perceived threat to social order. The efficient management of the schools' populations demanded of their pupils an unrelenting self-discipline, a seemingly innocuous concept that carries within it chilling implications for the definition of an ideal subject. I refer throughout to the ''literature" of the nineteenth-century English monitorial school --its theoretical and pedagogical treatises, pictorial representations and accounts of educational experiments --and by using Michel Foucauh's theories of power, I determine the actual force relations that obtain there, defining precisely the nature of a discipline that operates, as Bell writes, ''through the agency of the scholars themselves". Having established the educational context out of which monitorial schools emerged, I proceed, in part one of the dissertation, to examine mainly the works of Joseph Lancaster and Matthew Davenport Hill By reference to their tracts, I show how the monitorialists used the emerging technologies ofdetention to create a subject population whose bodies became the point ofapplication not only of "education," but also a complex form ofsocio-political experimentation. In the second part I investigate the attraction for Samuel Taylor Coleridge ofThe Reverend Andrew Bell's monitorial theory, revealing that what some critics have seen as Coleridge's paradoxical attraction to monitorialism is, in fact, a confirmation ofhis own idealistic vision for England's social hierarchy. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Contributing to the work of philosophers of education who have been examining issues of economy and emancipation, this dissertation employs a set of critical lenses drawn from Foucault’s investigation of governmentality to trace correspondences between economic liberalism and public schooling in Upper Canada/Canada West, the historical antecedent of present day Ontario. The analysis adheres to Foucault’s advice that philosophical critique involves a question asked of the present but answered in history. Thus through a Foucauldian genealogy it is argued that a series of transformations in the deployment of governmental power occurred in Upper Canada/Canada West that entailed the entry of an economic rationality into deliberations over the creation of a school system. To support this argument evidence is presented that demonstrates how race, biopolitics, and the burgeoning science of political economy combined in the first half of the nineteenth century to form the conditions of possibility for governmental control of schooling. In particular, it is illustrated how these conditions favoured a pedagogy based in Locke’s epistemology, and were legitimized by the providential status accorded political economy. This pedagogy, which was promoted as mild and so conducive to student engagement, and the authority of political economy are revealed as integral to the methods of instruction and curriculum of the province’s common schools, and indicative of the legacy of economic liberalism that persists, albeit transformed, in Ontario education to this day. The result of this critical analysis is a redescription or, in Foucault’s terminology, a “countermemory” of Ontario educational history that challenges the presumed naturalism of the ideals characteristic of economic liberalism, such as autonomy, accountability, entrepreneurialism, and consumer choice. The dissertation contends that these ideals are active in local educational regimes long legitimized by economy, and dangerously aimed at fostering political consent by manipulating subjects into locations of restricted agency. Providing insight into the historical role played by liberal governmentality and economy in the local context contributes to the study of Foucault and the philosophy of education, and also suggests a change in approach to questions regarding the corporatization or marketization of education.

Contributing to the work of philosophers of education who have been examining issues of economy and emancipation, this dissertation employs a set of critical lenses drawn from Foucault’s investigation of governmentality to trace correspondences between economic liberalism and public schooling in Upper Canada/Canada West, the historical antecedent of present day Ontario. The analysis adheres to Foucault’s advice that philosophical critique involves a question asked of the present but answered in history. Thus through a Foucauldian genealogy it is argued that a series of transformations in the deployment of governmental power occurred in Upper Canada/Canada West that entailed the entry of an economic rationality into deliberations over the creation of a school system. To support this argument evidence is presented that demonstrates how race, biopolitics, and the burgeoning science of political economy combined in the first half of the nineteenth century to form the conditions of possibility for governmental control of schooling. In particular, it is illustrated how these conditions favoured a pedagogy based in Locke’s epistemology, and were legitimized by the providential status accorded political economy. This pedagogy, which was promoted as mild and so conducive to student engagement, and the authority of political economy are revealed as integral to the methods of instruction and curriculum of the province’s common schools, and indicative of the legacy of economic liberalism that persists, albeit transformed, in Ontario education to this day. The result of this critical analysis is a redescription or, in Foucault’s terminology, a “countermemory” of Ontario educational history that challenges the presumed naturalism of the ideals characteristic of economic liberalism, such as autonomy, accountability, entrepreneurialism, and consumer choice. The dissertation contends that these ideals are active in local educational regimes long legitimized by economy, and dangerously aimed at fostering political consent by manipulating subjects into locations of restricted agency. Providing insight into the historical role played by liberal governmentality and economy in the local context contributes to the study of Foucault and the philosophy of education, and also suggests a change in approach to questions regarding the corporatization or marketization of education.