The School Promoters: Egerton Ryerson and His Circle, Second Edition

Alison Prentice’s 1977 groundbreaking monograph The School Promoters is a revisionist account of public education’s emergence. This latest edition includes a foreword and appendices by editors Bruce Curtis, Jennifer Henderson, and Mythili Rajiva, offering updated analysis and primary documents that deepen the understanding of Egerton Ryerson’s role in shaping Ontario’s educational system.

Using a wide range of archival and published sources, The School Promoters provides a lucid account of the preoccupations of the White, mostly middle-class reformers connected to Ryerson, who were responsible for the advent of public education in Ontario as part of their concern with the future of Canadian society. This edition situates Prentice’s analysis of class domination within the context of settler-colonialism, exploring how education worked as a project for genocide as well as a means of social discipline. In particular, the editors expose how the proclaimed universality of public education was contradicted by the reformers’ logic for targeting paupers and Indigenous peoples with religious schooling.

A reparative reading of Prentice’s influential work, The School Promoters: Egerton Ryerson and His Circle, Second Edition highlights the relevance of this groundbreaking social history to contemporary analysis of Canada.

Alison Prentice was a Canadian historian, a member of the Order of Canada and the founding head of OISE’s Centre for Women’s Studies in Education. Bruce Curtis is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. Jennifer Henderson is a professor in the Department of English and the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University. Mythili Rajiva is an associate professor of feminist and gender studies at the University of Ottawa.