Urban School Boards and City Councils in British Columbia worked in
tandem with provincial officials in Victoria to expand the state school system in
the 1890s. In discharging their responsibilities, the Boards functioned with
considerable independence. They built and maintained schools, appointed and
ranked teachers, and organized students. During the course of the decade, City
Councils acquired the responsibility for school finance. Nineteenth-century
British Columbia education history, written from a centralist perspective, has
articulated the idea of a dominant centre and subordinate localities, but this
interpretation is not sufficient to explain the development of public schooling in
Nanaimo hi the 1890s. The centralist interpretation does not allow for the real
historical complexity of the school system. Neither does it accommodate the
possibility of successful local resistance to central initiatives, nor the extent to
which public schooling was produced locally.
It is important, then, to examine what kind of context Nanaimo constituted
for state schooling in the last years of the century. This study concludes that civic
leaders and significant interest groups in the community believed schooling
played an important boundary making role in forging civic, racial, gender, and
occupational identities. In carrying out their interlocking responsibilities for
providing physical space and organizing teachers and students, the Nanaimo
School Trustees created opportunities for local girls and, within limits, for women.
The Trustees limited opportunities for local men, and went outside the community
for men who had the professional credentials which were increasingly desirable in
the late-nineteenth century. Both the traditions of self-help and the imperatives
of corporate capitalism intersected in school production in late-nineteenth
century Nanaimo. The focus on securing identities through the differentiating
processes of boundaries and hierarchies which was evident in Nanaimo was
typical of a wider colonial discourse at the end of the nineteenth century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9826 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Brown, Helen Harger |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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