John Bullen’s article Hidden Workers: Child Labour and the Family Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Ontario provides an insight of how Ontario’s industrial revolution and urbanization affected working class children’s opportunities for personal growth and social mobility. Bullen’s use of primary sources such as public archives that include statistics of police surveys that uncovered approximately 700 children panhandling, polishing shoes, selling newspapers etc. on the streets of Toronto to support their families, gives the historian a glimpse of the average working class child’s life[1]. Furthermore, the use of news and journal articles written during this era such as The Globe and letters, such as one written by a young girl named Maggie Hall describing her average work day, also add to this insight[2]. However, Bullen’s focus on urban Ontario doesn’t provide an insight into the lives of working class families across Canada during this time and therefore does not contribute to the wider historiography on this topic.

In the article Egerton Ryerson and the School as an Agent of Political Socialization, author Neil Mcdonald’s thesis is Egerton Ryerson’s belief that education should be a medium to influence and control the political socialization of citizens[3]. Ryerson believed in public education as a means to manipulate and control public opinion in favour of constitutional authority as a preventative of civil uprisings occurring such as the American and the French Revolutions[4]. Although Ryerson’s intentions of education reform were good, his efforts came across as a method of subordination as opposed to modern education that supports individualism.

In contrast, Ian Ross Robertson focuses on a different approach for the purpose of education in his article The Prince Edward Island Free Education Act of 1852. Robertson’s thesis is that the main explanation for the Free Education Act is the land question[5]. Primary education should be accessible for all to increase literacy and therefore, prevent people from being taken advantage in lease agreements by proprietors or persons purporting to be their agents. Roberston’s supports his article with the use of sources such as a testimony from an illiterate settler in reference to proprietor agent H.D. Morpeth’s approval for land settlement[6]. In this testimony, the settler said he was given a hand written lease agreement that was read to him by Morpeth which demonstrates how illiterate settlers could be taken advantage of by agreeing to terms and/or conditions they didn’t know they were agreeing to[7].

[1] Bullen, John, “Hidden Workers: Child Labour and the Family Economy in Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Ontario,” Labour/Le Travail, (Fall 1986), 175.

[2] Ibid., 181.

[3] McDonald, Neil, “Egerton Ryerson and the School as an Agent of Political Socialization,” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 44.

[4] Ibid., 42.

[5] Robertson, Ian Ross. “Reform, Literacy, and the Lease: The Prince Edward Island Free Education Act of 1852,” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 58.

[6] Ibid., 63.

[7] Ibid., 63.