Public Education and the Manufacture of Solidarity: Christopher Dunkin's Design for Lower Canada

Abstract

The organization of systems of public education tends not to figure in Foucauldian genealogies of the social, which focus especially on programs for social insurance that developed at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. An analysis of the plans for educational reconstruction in colonial Lower Canada in the mid- 1800s, however, points to the foundational nature of the analysis of education for liberal political thought and practice.