Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de l'éducation

Front Matter

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Pour une histoire élargie des milieux universitaires au Québec : bilan exploratoire et perspectives de recherche

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This exploratory review seeks to identify key themes, trends, blind spots, and potential horizons in the history of Quebec’s university settings at large, which have never been explicitly stated or treated as a whole in historiography. After discussing this historiography’s three founding subfields (the history of science, the history of institutions, and the history of students), we invite readers to adopt a broad view of university settings at large, which are not limited to the physical locations typically associated with them, particularly administrative offices, departments, schools, and faculties. This would in fact be one of the features of this history, characterized by a considerable expansion of its scope, with university settings at large finding themselves in a favorable light when taken out of their own context and approached from different perspectives (urban, national, international). This approach invites exploring of university milieux actors (institutional or individual) and their ideas, projects or initiatives in relation to the spaces, entities or groups they are connected to outside the university. This exploratory review ultimately seeks to inspire further work by suggesting new avenues of research.

Québec, Dublin et la fondation d'universités catholiques dans l'Empire britannique au XIXe siècle

2026-02-17T02:13:19+00:00

This article analyzes the founding, in the mid-19th century, of Catholic universities in Quebec City and Dublin, under the authority of the Catholic Church and within the context of the British Empire. Laval University was founded in Quebec City and the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin as Catholic responses to the rise of Protestant higher education and the revolutions of 1848. These two universities opened their doors within weeks of each other, in 1854. A segment of the Catholic clergy in Canada and Ireland viewed the creation of Catholic universities as a means of preserving their religion, a minority religion in both British North America and the United Kingdom. The article first examines the Catholic university projects that took shape in Canada and Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. It then highlights the support provided by the Irish Catholic diaspora for the creation of a Catholic university in Dublin, emphasizing how this support indirectly contributed to the founding of Laval University. The article concludes with an analysis of the 1852 European journey undertaken by Louis-Jacques Casault, Superior of the Seminary of Quebec, to obtain charters from the British Crown and the Holy See for Laval University. During this trip, representatives of the proposed Catholic universities in Quebec and Dublin crossed paths in Rome, where the Holy See compared the two projects and evaluated the extent to which each might antagonize the political authorities of the United Kingdom. Casault’s journey, which reportedly included a stop in Belgium, illustrates, finally, the significant role the Catholic University of Leuven played as a model for the Catholic university projects in Quebec and Dublin.

Une guerre sur deux fronts : la rivalité et l'effondrement de l'Association des étudiants canadiens (AEC) et la Fédération nationale des étudiants universitaires canadiens (FNEUC)

2026-02-17T02:13:11+00:00

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Canadian university students were divided between two rival organizations: the Canadian Student Assembly (CSA) and the National Federation of Canadian University Students (NFCUS). Hoping to end this division, the CSA and the NFCUS agreed, at the end of 1939, to unite their members under the banner of a new organization, the Canadian Student Federation (CSF). However, this merger never took place. Unable to reconcile their positions on the war effort and more specifically conscription, the CSA and the NFCUS engaged in a fratricidal struggle that ended with their simultaneous collapse in the summer of 1940. This article argues that this confrontation reveals the existence of significant ideological, identity, and political divisions within the student movement of that era.

La Fondation Rockefeller au Québec : boursiers et officiers au coeur des circulations savantes (1941-1954)

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Universities are privileged channels for many philanthropic foundations, which have sought to advance their causes and ideals through them. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Rockefeller Foundation deployed human and financial resources to integrate French-speaking Quebec into North American networks and promote the emergence of French-Canadian elites capable of forging ties with English-speaking North America. Still little studied to date, Rockefeller’s activities in this province and in academic circles have been analyzed mainly in quantitative terms, particularly through funding and institutional transformations. In this article, we focus instead on the experiences of individuals associated with the Foundation, including Rockefeller officer John Marshall, who made several trips to Quebec, and a number of French-Canadian fellows. Through the creation of formal and informal networks, the promise of funding, and the recruitment of fellows and informants, Marshall demonstrated what could be called firm discretion coupled with suggestive authority. Faced with this authority, scholarship recipients, far from being passive pawns in the great game of transnational circulation, despite the sometimes complicated conditions of their stay in the United States, were able to make the most of the situation, maximizing the symbolic capital of their study abroad experience and, in the cases we have selected, becoming significant cultural mediators.

Les milieux universitaires québécois dans les relations sino-canadiennes. Le rôle des émotions dans les circulations transnationales (1968-1980)

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This article explores the emotional dimension of Quebec universities’ involvement in relations between Canada and the People’s Republic of China during the 1960s and 1970s. It demonstrates how these academic institutions created a space allowing various actors to engage in intellectual, political, cultural, and emotional dialogues with China, while also enabling them to express sentiments related to broader social transformations

De l’Université de Montréal à l’Abri d’Érasme, aller-retour. Le parcours (anti)psychiatrique de Roger R. Lemieux (1919-1999)

2026-02-17T02:12:48+00:00

A modernist psychiatrist trained in the 1940s at the University of Montreal, Roger R. Lemieux (1919–1999) was also a key figure in Quebec antipsychiatry. In 1974, he founded a therapeutic commune seeking to break with the models of care for people with schizophrenia: l’Abri d’Érasme. However, far from the announced break with official psychiatric institutions, and in particular with the University of Montreal where he taught and worked at the time, Lemieux continued to maintain lasting and therefore ambiguous relationships with them. This article focuses on this duality and what it teaches us about the history of Quebec psychiatry, as well as that of the academic community and the counterculture.

Référentiels des politiques publiques qui conditionnent l'évolution et le développement de l'université au Québec (1960-2025)

2026-02-17T02:12:41+00:00

Universities in Quebec are constantly evolving and developing in response to the issues and challenges that arise over time. Between 1960 and 2025, they underwent a multitude of transformations drove by profound changes. What ideas are driving these transformations? The cognitive and normative approach to public policy analysis provides answers to this question because it emphasizes the dimension of ideas, as reflected in the concept of a “reference framework.” Between 1960 and 1981, the welfare state promoted the preservation of the Republic of Science reference framework at universities. From 1981 onwards, the facilitator state encouraged the deployment of the Knowledge Economy reference framework. Since 2008, the Global Efficiency reference framework has characterized Quebec universities, given the dematerialization of public policy and the questioning of the ability of states to regulate sectors through national policies.

Settler Stalling: Integrated Schooling and the "Native Conferences" of the Royal Commission on Family and Children's Law in British Columbia

2026-02-17T02:12:33+00:00

In this article, we examine Indigenous responses to educational integration in British Columbia through the 1974 “Native Conferences” held by the Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law. In the 1950s, Canadian policy on Indigenous education shifted from segregation to integration and by the late 1960s organizations such as Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and the Native Indian Brotherhood rejected both approaches, demanding Indigenous control over schooling. The royal commission, chaired by Justice Thomas Berger, provided Indigenous communities across BC a platform to articulate how public schooling harmed their youth and families. Although the commission’s findings have received scant attention from historians of education, its consultations with Indigenous people through Native Conferences held in the spring and summer of 1974 reveal valuable insights into Indigenous demands for better educational support. These demands aligned with those made by the Native Indian Brotherhood in Indian Control of Indian Education, yet colonial governments largely ignored them for decades. We introduce the concept of “settler stalling” to describe colonial governance that promises reform while deferring meaningful, Indigenous-defined change. Though integration promised equality following the 1951 Indian Act amendments, it failed to address colonial structures, curriculum, and racism within schools, points clearly articulated by Indigenous participants of the conferences.

Campbell F. Scribner, A is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education

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Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel with Sean Carleton, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance

2026-02-17T02:12:18+00:00

Katharine Rollwagen, The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar: Creating the Youth Market in Mid-Century Canada

2026-02-17T02:12:11+00:00

M. Ann Hall, Bruce Kidd, and Patricia Vertinsky, Educating the Body: A History of Physical Education in Canada

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Crystal Gail Fraser, By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories

2026-02-17T02:11:53+00:00

Robert Cohen, Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory, and the University of Georgia in the Twentieth Century

2026-02-17T02:11:46+00:00

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762-1860

2026-02-17T02:11:39+00:00

Bernard M. Levinson and Robert P. Ericksen, eds., The Betrayal of the Humanities: The University during the Third Reich

2026-02-17T02:11:31+00:00

Kim Tolley, Vaccine Wars: The Two-Hundred-Year Fight for School Vaccinations

2026-02-17T02:11:24+00:00

Stuart McKee, Indigenous Enlightenment: Printing and Education in Evangelical Colonialism, 1790-1850

2026-02-17T02:11:17+00:00

Anna-Leah King, Kathleen O'Reilly, and Patrick J. Lewis, eds., Unsettling Education: Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Land

2026-02-17T02:11:10+00:00

Serge Dupuis, 50 ans de conscientization et de collaboration. La Fédération de la jeunesse canadienne-française (1974-2024)

2026-02-17T02:11:01+00:00

Contributors

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Guidelines for Authors

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