This course is directed at those students interested in exploring the deep connections between education and social change in Canadian history. Before 1941, the majority of Canadian families lived outside of cities. This course will examine institutional structures, popular responses, and community involvement, and the ways that these factors interacted as state-run compulsory schooling was slowly accepted. It invites students to explore the vital, but relatively unknown, relationship that existed between education, social protest, and the search for reform in rural Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings in this course will allow students to explore the ways that various people, kinds of people, and organizations, both rural and urban – First Peoples; recent British, African, and eastern European immigrants; educational bureaucrats and revolutionaries; social reformers; settled farm families and itinerant miners – used various kinds of education to encourage, resist and direct social reform in rural Canada.