A Meeting of the People: School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801–1998

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

A Meeting of the People is a detailed historical account of Quebec’s
Protestant school system, from its beginnings in 1801, through the
enactment of the Act for the Establishment of Free Schools in this
Province, to the implementation of Bill 180 in 1998. The authors focus
their attention on nine English and two Native school boards. The
history of these school boards encompasses many aspects of community
life, including religious issues, political affiliations, gender and
ethnic questions, and general social conditions that went through many
changes in the nearly 200 years covered in A Meeting of the People.

The book contains more than 80 figures, both drawings and photographs,
archival and current. There are tables of student populations and
listings of school commissioners and schools related to various
Protestant school boards. Maps scattered throughout the book indicate
the locations of both Protestant and Aboriginal schools. Both the
endnotes and the index are very detailed, and the bibliography extends
for 20 pages.

A Meeting of the People would work well as a reference work or simply
as an interesting history of Quebec from a different perspective.