The Promise of Schooling explores the links between social and educational change in the complex and dynamic period between 1800 and 1914, when Canadian society and its school systems were forged. It raises and seeks to answer a number of questions: How extensive was schooling in the early nineteenth century? What lay behind the campaign to extend publicly funded education? What went on inside the Canadian classroom? How did schools address the needs of Native students, blacks, and the children of immigrants? What cultural and social roles did universities serve by the beginning of the twentieth century? And how were schools affected by the economic and social pressures arising from the Industrial Revolution?