Rural Protestant Schools

Abstract

Schooling for rural Protestant settlers prior to the seminal education legislation of the 1840s was largely community-driven, although local families responded to government initiatives to fund their schools. With the rise of public education, rural Protestants took full opportunity of available governance structures, creating school boards that stood independent from those of the Catholic majority. Protestant boards presided over the establishment of one-room school houses, academies, and later consolidated schools and regional high schools. These schools had to be supplied with teachers, for whom work in remote villages was often highly challenging, and such teaching had to conform to a carefully negotiated Protestant pedagogy. By the twentieth century, as rural Protestant communities began to dwindle in size, boards adopted new strategies to provide children with schooling, from busing to building residences to creating huge regional high schools.