Education

Though literacy rates in the western world in the seventeenth century are a subject of debate, certain things are clear. The ability to read was more common than the ability to write and, in fact, the two skills were often taught separately until the end of the eighteenth century; the poor were educated to a much lesser extent than the more affluent; schooling was provided most often through religious institutions and was frequently more formal for boys than for girls; and, for the majority of the population, reading, writing, and some knowledge of arithmetic, with a seasoning of religious instruction, was the basis of the curriculum.

Before 1755 there were a number of schools in Acadia, mostly of intermittent duration and mainly in Port Royal. A sister of the Congrégations des Soeurs de Notre-Dame was sent to Port Royal as a teacher for girls in 1658 and she was joined by a sister of the Filles de la Croix in 1701. The priests usually contrived to offer some instruction for boys in the parishes they served. Many Acadians could read, write, and keep records and within almost all the villages there were some who were capable of reading official instructions in both French and English. During the years of exile there was considerable correspondence between Acadians deported to different parts of the Atlantic seaboard. All in all, it would seem that Acadia was a literate society but not all Acadians were literate. Within each group of Acadian exiles, some were sufficiently educated to draw up petitions about their circumstances that were presented to the various political jurisdictions that had them in their charge.

On their return to the Maritimes, the Acadians found themselves left to their own resources as far as education in French was concerned. Father Jean-Mandé Sigogne, a French priest who fled the French Revolution and then lived out his life at St Mary’s Bay, reported in 1798 that some 20 percent of the Acadian population there could read and write. In all three provinces, Acadians organized their own elementary schools, outside the anglophone system. But in 1854 an amendment to the School Act in Prince Edward Island required teachers to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic in English. Other reverses followed. In 1864 Nova Scotia banned all French or parochial schools, and in 1871 the New Brunswick legislature passed a common schools act that made public funds available only to schools which prohibited the display of religious symbols, submitted to government inspection, and abided by government rules concerning pedagogy and curricula. The end result of such measures was that the public school system in all three provinces denied Acadians the right to provide a Catholic context for the education of their children. Despite much hard work by Archbishop Thomas Louis Connolly of Halifax to have the educational guarantees provided Quebec Catholics under the British North America Act of 1867 extended to the Maritimes, his efforts proved fruitless. Another characteristic of the changing educational order in the Maritime provinces was the relegation of French to a secondary position with a curriculum formed by the anglophone majority.

The complex links between language and religion have made the history of Acadian education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries particularly intricate. There is no doubt that until the mid-twentieth century most Acadians considered language and religion inseparable and the phrase “he/she who loses the language, loses their faith” is an oft-repeated expression of this belief. It is also clear that, throughout the nineteenth century, the Catholic hierarchy of the Maritime provinces, which until 1912 was drawn entirely from Scottish and Irish clerics, found the Acadian insistence on the preservation of French as their mother tongue exasperating beyond belief. At the time of Confederation, when the Acadians were beginning to articulate a sense of their own unique identity, based upon a French and Catholic heritage, two Irish-born bishops conducted all their pastoral affairs in English. Both Monseigneur James Rogers of Chatham and Monseigneur John Sweeney of Saint John would see to it that their successors would be Irish Canadian. Of the two, Rogers, who denied Acadian priests the right to attend the national convention in the 1880s, was the most harassed by Acadian obduracy. The schism between Irish and Scots Catholics, on the one hand, and between these anglophone Catholics and Acadians, on the other, coloured the way in which the Acadians battled for their educational rights in the Maritimes.

Their struggle was greatly aided by the emergence of francophone colleges and universities. These institutions had their beginning with the work of two priests from Quebec. Father François-Xavier Lafrance, who was ordained in Rustico, P.E.I., in 1841, took the first steps when in 1854 he opened the doors of the Séminaire Saint-Thomas in Memramcook to some thirty Acadian and twenty Irish Catholics. Eight years later, however, the seminary closed for lack of funds. In 1865 Father Camille Lefebvre reopened it under the name of Collège Saint-Joseph de Memramcook, where he spent the rest of his working life. Within three years the institution received provincial recognition as a college and was promised a grant of $800 per annum. This support was doubly welcome because, in that same year, the college buildings burnt down. In 1871, with the passage by the New Brunswick legislature of the common schools act mentioned above, government financial assistance to Collège Saint-Joseph came to an end. As a result, in the years that followed the college was always in grave financial difficulty. However, it managed to survive and, throughout its troubles, attracted sizable numbers of students. The student body of 1865 had been 69, while that of 1875 was 200; between 1865 and 1878 the college graduated 260 English-language students and 240 Acadians.

Eventually, in 1888, the legislature confirmed the college’s right to grant degrees, an act that formally transformed the institution into a university, and medals to celebrate the occasion were given to two Acadians and two Scots-Irish Catholics. The committee that organized the celebration of the college’s 25th anniversary, in 1890, had 61 Acadian and French-Canadian members and 57 English-speaking ones. Until the 1930s the majority of both faculty and administrators were recruited in the province of Quebec but, since 1944, the principals of the institution have been Acadian. Over time, the college has become the centre for the education of the Acadian elite: lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and politicians.

Partly because of the scattered nature of Acadian settlement in the Maritimes, and partly because of regional variations in Acadian identity, other local colleges emerged to provide a combination of Catholic and French high school education and some post-secondary instruction. In Nova Scotia, the Eudiste fathers established the Collège Sainte-Anne in the presbytery of St Mary’s Bay in November 1890. In 1892 the province granted the tiny enterprise the right to claim university-credit standing for the courses taught. Until 1931, it was the support of French- trained Eudistes that maintained the college; after that date, Acadians both administered the college and filled most teaching posts. In 1952, out of a total of 188 students, 100 were from Nova Scotia, 45 from Quebec, 35 from New Brunswick, and 8 from the United States. In 1961 women were admitted for the first time. A decade later the province’s newly elected Conservative government, under the premiership of Richard Hatfield, decided to support the development and expansion of the college as a bilingual university, and its administration was secularized. At the time of its centenary in 1990, the Université Sainte-Anne was the only post-secondary Acadian institution in Nova Scotia. With a total enrolment of about 350, it offered programs in cooperation with the Université de Moncton and the Université de Montréal. It has a major collection of Acadian archives, which is housed in the Centre Études Acadien.

There were other colleges serving New Brunswick’s Acadians. In 1899, at the invitation of Caraquet’s parish priest, Theophile Allard, the Eudist fathers established a college there, the Collège du Sacré-Coeur de Caraquet, and the following year this institution received the right to grant degrees. Destroyed by fire in 1915, the college was then resurrected at Bathurst and French-trained Eudistes managed its affairs until 1935. In 1943 New Brunswick gave it full recognition as a university. Three years later the Eudiste fathers founded yet another college, Saint-Louis in Edmundston, which received its charter as a university in 1947. Two other francophones colleges had brief lives: Collège l’Assomption in Moncton, from 1943 to 1964, and the Collège Saint-Joseph, also located in Moncton, which existed from 1956 to 1968.

The provision of education for women occurred much more slowly. In 1873 Father Camille Lefebvre, the founder of Collège Saint-Joseph in Memramcook, had established there a parallel institution for young women, the convent of Notre-Dame du Sacre-Coeur, which provided schooling at the high school level. It was not until 1943 that the curriculum was expanded to include college-level courses. In 1949 the order of the Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph opened the Collège Maillet for women at Saint-Basile, New Brunswick. Another women’s order, that of Jesus and Mary, founded in 1960 a college at Shippegan, which in 1963 elected to join Bathurst University. That year there were eight establishments involved in some form of francophone postsecondary education in New Brunswick: five for men and three for women. The total number of students attending these institutions was less than 2,000 in 1960.

In 1963 under the aegis of Clement Cormier, a member of the Holy Cross fathers, and with the aid of the Acadian premier of New Brunswick, Louis Robichaud, the Collège Saint-Joseph in Moncton began its transformation into a university. The Université de Moncton was officially founded in 1967 as a secular institution and with Adélard Savoie as its first president. One of the most important of its early initiatives was the organization of teacher training in French in 1969. Until that time, the Normal School at Fredericton had provided what little French-teacher education there was. Plans soon went ahead for the reorganization of the other francophone post-secondary institutions. In 1974 Bathurst moved its enterprise to Moncton and became part of the growing university, and in 1977 the Université de Moncton became the centre of a three-campus system which included the Centre Universitaire Saint-Louis-Maillet in Edmundston and the Centre Universtaire Shippegan. This development concentrated resources and allowed the emergence of effective science programs, whose equipment costs could never have been met by any of the small colleges on their own. In 1991–92, the Université de Moncton had 5,425 students, almost a tripling of enrolment within a generation, and by then it had graduated 20,000 students since its founding.

One of the most important links between the Acadian elite who had been able to take advantage of the small, private colleges before 1960 and the Acadian population as a whole was, in all provinces, the associations of francophone teachers. In Prince Edward Island, they were the backbone of La Société Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, founded in 1919, and in Nova Scotia they were a criticalpart of the Federation Acadien de la Nouvelle-Écosse, which emerged in 1960. In New Brunswick, organizations exclusively of teachers were preceded by more broadly based bodies. People such as Dr Albert Sormany of Edmundston fought for the recognition of Acadian schooling needs. In 1935, as a member of Edmundston board of school trustees, he refused to hire as principal for the secondary school a man who spoke not a word of French, on the ground that 90 percent of the students were francophones. In conjunction with other Acadians, he founded L’Association Acadienne d’Éducation au Nouveau Brunswick in 1936, which became a powerful lobbying group at the provincial level for francophone education. It was joined in 1946 by L’Association des Institueurs Acadiens, a body that in 1969 became l’Association des Enseignants Francophones du Nouveau Brunswick.

In their political-lobbying efforts, such associations have had their share of successes. After 1972 the Evangeline regional district in Prince Edward Island, centred upon Abram Village and encompassing the parishes of Mont-Carmel, Baie Egmont, and Wellington, was recognized as a francophone school and it has attempted to ensure that Acadians in that area are supported in their efforts to retain French as their mother tongue. A French school was created in Charlottetown in 1980. Elsewhere on the island, French is taught as a second language, even though there are many students in a number of schools for whom it is their first language.

In Nova Scotia Premier Gerald Regan appointed a royal commission on education, public services, and provincial-municipal relations that devoted a full chapter of its 1974 report to francophone education in the province. Yet it was not until the election victory in Quebec of René Levesque and the separatist Parti Québécois in 1976 that this part of the report became of interest to those in power. In 1981 the Nova Scotia legislature passed Bill 65. It gave formal recognition to Acadian schools, which were defined as schools in which instruction is given mainly in French and in which the principal language of administration and communication is French. It also provided an impetus to the development of French textbooks; Université Sainte-Anne now prepares programs for the Acadian schools in the province. During the school year 1988–89, there were 167,600 school children in Nova Scotia, of whom roughly 3,400 were enrolled in schools where French was the principal language of instruction. In the Clare-Argyle school districts, Acadian children have the opportunity of attending francophone schools from the primary level to grade 12.

In New Brunswick, the educational structure in place today owes much to the work of Louis Robichaud, who became premier of the province in 1960. The educational reforms he introduced were part of a general effort to overhaul the province’s taxation system. On 9 March 1962 Robichaud appointed a royal commission on municipal taxation headed by Edward J. Byrne from Chatham. A brief from L’Association des Instituteurs Acadiens noted that 83 percent of the most poorly trained teachers, those with permits from their local school boards, were to be found in Kent, Northumberland, Gloucester, Restigouche, and Madawaska counties, the regions most heavily populated by Acadians. It was clear that these areas did not have the economic capacity to provide an effective school system, in either French or English.

The commission’s report would affect many aspects of New Brunswick life but its impact upon the school system was fundamental. After 1967 elementary and secondary education was funded through a central provincial bureaucracy, and 423 school districts were consolidated into 33. By 1971 the province had organized these districts into French, English, and bilingual ones. While the extent to which this public system offered equality of opportunity to both francophone and anglophone students can be debated, there is no doubt that the general level of education rose for all New Brunswickers as a result of Robichaud’s actions. In 1954, 1,405 students completed grade 12 in the province; in 1990 the number was 11,293.