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Priority in educational
matters was reserved for the colony’s boys. Although the majority did not
pass primary school, they could fall back on schools which taught arts and
trades. Others, in much smaller numbers, moved up to the Classics course, which
might lead them to the priesthood or to the practice of a profession such notary
or doctor, or to a career in the royal
adminstration.
The education of girls, despite the fact that religious authorities extolled its virtues, was of secondary importance when compared to the education of boys. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the instruction of girls remained at the elementary level, and consisted primarily of lessons in catechism to round out their domestic training and, for a small number, some notion of reading and writing. It must be emphasized that prejudices and suspicion towards “learned” women remained strong throughout the period. Schools for BoysThe principal religious communities charged with educating the colony’s boys were the Jesuits, priests from the Séminaire de Québec, the Charron Brothers and the Sulpicians. |
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The JesuitsIn the colony’s earliest days — in this case, 1635 — the Jesuits opened an infant school for the sons of colonists. Over the years, they added a secondary level of education in their Classics course. In 1653, they had only 16 students, divided into two classes: one for grammar, the other for mathematics. Despite its modest beginnings, however, the Jesuit college in Quebec City remained the only one, during the entire French regime, to offer a complete primary and secondary education. The Jesuits taught catechism, French and arithmetic, then, little by little, the entire Classics course. During their studies, students of the college even presented philosophical theses at public events which were attended by most of the lay and clerical elite of the colony.In order to respond to the King’s wish that navigators be trained for the colony, the Jesuits launched a hydrography class in 1671. The programme included the teaching of mathematics, astronomy, navigation, cartography, and the use of scientific instruments. Closed between 1759 and 1761 because of the war, the Jesuit college afterwards functioned with a reduced complement of teachers and facilities. Almost all of the teachers had returned to France, and the British army occupied the two floors of their building. The college closed for good in 1768, but the primary school continued to exist until 1776. |
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Monseigneur de Laval and Priests from the Séminaire de QuébecIn order to provide the colony with a native-born clergy, Monseigneur de Laval founded a large seminary in Quebec City in 1663, where young novices were initiated in the administration of the sacraments, the teaching of catechism, the conduct of religious ceremonies and the singing of Gregorian chants. Desirous of ensuring its financing and its teaching personnel, Monseigneur de Laval affiliated the institution to the Séminaire des Missions étrangères in Paris (SME) in 1665.In 1668, Monseigneur de Laval founded the small Enfant-Jésus seminary in Quebec City, with the original goal of ensuring support workers for the larger seminary — a purpose which would be transformed over the years. In 1688, his successor, Monseigneur de St-Vallier noted that, in addition to training clerks to help the priests of the Séminaire de Québec, the smaller seminary also taught courses in letters and the social sciences, in addition to arts and trades such as cabinetmaking, and the painting and sculpting of church ornamentation. “Those who have the vocation for this will pursue it to the priesthood,” he continued. Ravaged by fire in 1701 and 1705, the small seminary was rebuilt each time, but left its priests with such large debts that they didn’t fully recover until around 1731. In 1668, at Saint-Joachim on the Côte de Beaupré, Monseigneur de Laval established a trade school which doubled as an infant school to teach local boys how to read and count. In 1685, 31 students attended the institution, of whom 19 applied themselves to studies, while the others learned a trade. Sculpture was taught by master-sculptor Jacques LeBlond de la Tour between 1690 and 1706. With his students, he enriched Quebec’s cultural heritage by creating the reredos of the churches of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Château-Richer and l'Ange-Gardien. Beginning in 1706, and throughout the rest of the French regime, this establishment became an agricultural school, in which the first six students were qualified as «mitoyens» (“semi-detacheds”) because, after their lessons in reading and writing, they would be going to work in the fields. Finally, around 1691, Monseigneur de Laval put together a class for the instruction of young boys in Lower Quebec City. It was located in the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and placed under the authority of the curé of Quebec City. The Charron BrothersBorn at Quebec City in 1654, Jean-François Charron — founder of the Charron Brothers — opened a charity home at Montreal in 1692, which he dedicated to the service of the sick, the infirm and the orphaned. Two years later, he obtained permission to transform this first institution into a regular hospital — including a school for orphans, which would teach reading, writing and arithmetic. In 1699, the King granted François Charron new letters of patent permitting him to establish arts and trades workshops. Around 1718, the Charron Brothers were authorized to train teachers destined for rural schools. Throughout the 1720s, the Charron Brothers were thus found at Pointe-aux-Trembles, Boucherville, Longueuil, Batiscan, Trois-Rivières and Louisbourg, where they kept a hospital which also looked after the teaching of boys and the training of schoolmasters. Unfortunately, several years after the death of their founder in 1719, the enterprise declined, lacking a competent replacement and sufficient financial means. The grey nuns of Marguerite d’Youville replaced them in the treatment of the sick at the Hôpital général de Montréal, but the Charron Brothers’ schools were closed in 1747.The SulpiciansAnother Parisian community, the Séminaire de St-Sulpice, sent out a group of priests, who arrived in Montreal in 1657 under the direction of the Abbé of Queylus, their vicar-general. The first Sulpician seminary was founded the same year, and the Sulpicians acquired the seigneury of the Île de Montréal in 1664. They served as curés of the city and its environs, superiors of female congregations such as the Hospitallers and the sisters of the Congrégation Notre-Dame, teachers, priests, missionaries and explorers. Opposed to recruitment among the colonists, they are estimated as numbering around 30 in 1760 — all French.In 1666, the Sulpicians opened an infant school “where children from all walks of life can learn, for free, to read and write.” Abbé Souart, superior of the Sulpician seminary in Montreal from 1661 to 1668, served as its first instructor. In 1686, an association of devout laymen was trained at Montreal. They were to come to the support of the Sulpicians by providing them with teaching personnel for their infant schools. This group, under the direction of Mathurin Rouillé, aimed in the medium term at creating a community of teaching brothers. The Sulpicians gave them a house on rue Notre-Dame in Montreal for this purpose. Because of grave financial problems, however, the project lasted only seven years, although its educational work continued after its dissolution. The Sulpicians opened small Latin schools at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Around 1730, they ordered Latin manuals for 28 students. In 1742, other book orders in France attest that the Sulpicians still operated an elementary school and a Latin school. Schools for GirlsPrejudices regarding the education of girls were numerous during this period. Access to knowledge — according to the authors of pedagogical treatises — would overheat the feminine spirit and result in the destruction of morals from the reading of sinful books, combined with the propensity towards such female faults as speaking too much, meddling in everything and being argumentative. The greatest prudence was thus recommended to female educators. |
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The UrsulinesIn 1639, three Ursuline nuns from Tours and Bordeaux disembarked at Quebec City, under the direction of Marie de l’Incarnation. At the request of the Jesuits, they had come to convert Native women and girls, and to instruct the daughters of early colonists. Their clientèle was formed of boarders and day pupils from all social classes.At the beginning of the eighteenth century, a constant drop in the numbers of Native students led the Ursulines to devote themselves solely to the education of colonists’ daughters. Over the years, they added new subjects to their programme, including history, geography, music and the sciences. Following the Conquest, they willingly welcomed the daughters of British administrators, and began to study this language as their precursors had done for the Algonquin, the Montagnais and the Huron in 1639. It was, for that matter, an Englishwoman — Sister Esther Wheelwright, a former captive of the Abenaki — who was elected Mother Superior of the Ursulines of Quebec City in 1760. In 1697, Monseigneur de St-Vallier, who did not have the financial means to support two establishments, sent several Ursulines to Trois-Rivières to found a hospital-school. An institution was also founded in Louisiana in 1727, when Ursulines came to teach, in addition to the ladies of the young colony, female “savages, negroes and slaves”. The HospitallersArriving on the same ship as the Ursulines in 1639, the Hospitallers of the Miséricorde de Jésus, from Dieppe, founded l’Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec City that same year. Their composition enabled them to devote themselves to the education and religious instruction of girls, depending on the room and teaching personnel they had. Seigneur Robert Giffard placed his own two daughters as boarders with the nuns at the beginning of the 1640s, and the names of Anne Bourdon and Marie-Madeleine Bellanger also appear as students for 1653.In 1693, Monseigneur de St-Vallier established the Hôpital général de Québec, located in Lower Quebec City, where the Hospitallers took care of invalids, the elderly and the insane. In 1725, the Hospitallers opened, within the Hôpital général, a boarding school for the education of girls, which stayed in operation until 1868. |
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The Congrégation Notre-DameThe Congrégation Notre-Dame was made up of laywomen, which had been assembled into a community in 1658 under the direction of their founder Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620–1700). This teaching community, although secular, was officially approved by King Louis XIV and Monseigneur de Laval in 1671. From his first day in 1685, Monseigneur de St-Vallier, second bishop of the colony, insisted that the founder make it into a religious community, which went on to receive canonic recognition in 1698, despite the strong reservations of Marguerite Bourgeoys.In 1760, the Congrégation Notre-Dame numbered 215 nuns, all born in Canada. They spread out across the colony, first to Montreal, where in 1658 Marguerite Bourgeoys opened a mixed school — mixed because there weren’t yet enough children of each sex for two schools — in a stable fournished by the colonists. The mixed school lasted until 1666. Ten years later, the Congrégation opened a boarding school at Ville-Marie for the daughters of the nobility and the middle class, as well as an “Ouvroir de la Providence” at Pointe-Saint-Charles. This Ouvroir de la Providence consisted of a domestic sciences school, in which the nuns taught older girls the skills they would need to gain a livelihood as servants. An Active PeriodIn 1676, a mission for Native girls was created at Montagne (on the southern slope of Mont-Royal) by Marguerite Bourgeoys herself, called the Mission of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (“Our Lady of the Snows”). The mission would be transferred to Sault-au-Récollet in 1701 then to Oka in 1721. Infant schools for girls were opened in 1686 at Lachine, in 1690 at Pointe-aux-Trembles (Montreal), in 1703 at Boucherville and in 1705 at Prairie-de-la-Madeleine, once more financed by the clergy.Under the government of New France, the sisters of the Congrégation opened a school in 1686 at Sainte-Famille, on Île d'Orléans, entirely financed by the curé Lamy, and an Ouvroir de la Providence in Lower Quebec City. In 1759, the sisters were forced to abandon their Île d’Orléans convent, and to return to Montreal. Following the Conquest, Governor Murray permitted them to resume their work as schoolmistresses. The convent at Sainte-Famille remained open into the twentieth century. Other schools for girls were inaugurated in 1691 in Lower Quebec City, and in 1693 at Château-Richer. The latter was financed by major landowners, the priests of the Séminaire de Québec, and by Monseigneur de Laval. The school in Lower Quebec City, located on the rue St-Pierre, welcomed a hundred or so students in 1701, at which time it was also expanded to include a boarding school. To help with the financing of this institution, the students made handicrafts (embroidery, lace), for sale outside. The convent was burned down during the siege of Quebec City in 1759, and the sisters of the Congrégation returned to Montreal. They would not re-establish themselves in Quebec City until 1769, under the British regime. The parish of Pointe-aux-Trembles, in the seigneury of Neuville, opened its first school in 1713, thanks to the generosity of its curé, M. Basset, and of Seigneur Nicolas Dupont de Neuville, who furnished the land. Occupied by British troops in 1759 and 1760, it was returned to the sisters of the Congrégation Notre-Dame en 1761 “so that they can, as they did before, give instruction to the young girls of the country.” As for the region of Trois-Rivières, two of the Congrégation’s schools were opened there — one at Trois-Rivières itself in 1664, and the other at Champlain in 1676. Burned down in 1687, the Champlain school was reopened in 1702, by Abbé Louis Geoffroy, the local curé, who built the schoolhouse at his own expense. This school lasted until the British regime. The Sisters of the Congrégation Notre-Dame in LouisbourgLouisbourg is a fortress city which was built in stages at the beginning of the eighteenth century on Cape Breton Island — formerly known as Île Royale — in Nova Scotia. In May 1727, Montreal sent a lone nun there, Sœur de la Conception who, along with two lay assistants, undertook the education of girls. It seems that they enjoyed a certain success, since in December of that same year they were already teaching 22 boarders.Sœur de la Conception remained alone with her two assistants until 1734, when their number was increased by the addition of two new nuns and a secular girl for the “heavy work”. The sisters of the Congrégation underwent considerable hardship at Louisbourg. In 1745, during the first taking of this supposedly impregnable fortress by British troops, the nuns were deported to France, despite the fact that they were from Montreal. In 1749, a year after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, they returned to Louisbourg, where they had to rebuild their work from nothing — their house, their furniture and their clothing having been pillaged by the British. The second taking of Louisbourg (1758) would be a fatal blow, as it was for the rest of the population. Once more deported to France on English ships, the nuns would never obtain the necessary funds to recover from 1745. |
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Schools for Boys
