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School Attendance and Early Industrialization in a Canadian City: A Multivariate Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Michael B. Katz  and
Ian E. Davey
Michael B. Katz
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Ian E. Davey
Affiliation:
University of Adelaide, Australia
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Extract

The relations between the origins of public educational systems and school attendance remain far from clear. For instance, the proportion of children receiving some sort of formal education did not increase automatically with the extension and elaboration of school facilities. Carl Kaestle has argued that proportionally as many children attended school in New York City in 1750 as in 1850. Elsewhere he and Maris Vinovskis have shown the surprisingly high rate of attendance of children in rural New York and Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century, prior to the so-called common school revival. And our own work has demonstrated that in at least one industrializing city the upward curve of school attendance among adolescent young people was not secular. School attendance, of course, was a differential process. It varied according to place, age, sex, class and ethnicity. However, the exact nature of that variation still has not been delineated. In an earlier article Katz showed why it is important to understand patterns of school attendance and outlined some of the principal ones he had uncovered in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1851 and 1861. Davey developed the analysis much further in his study of working-class school attendance in Hamilton in the latter part of the nineteenth-century. However, both examinations used entirely descriptive statistics, primarily cross-tabulation, and it is possible that some of the relations we uncovered appeared significant only because we had not controlled for other variables. Moreover, our method made it difficult for us to rank with certainty the importance of the various factors that affected school attendance. One major study by Kaestle and Vinovskis has attempted to unravel the complexities of school attendance with multivariate analysis, but their results are rather inconclusive. Indeed, the principal finding is the rather obvious point that age was the most important factor.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , Fall 1978 , pp. 271 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1 Kaestle, Carl F., The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 88–91; Kaestle, Carl F. and Vinovskis, Maris A., Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (NIH Project 3–0825, Final Report, December 31, 1976), pp. 13–54. Katz, Michael B. and Davey, Ian E., “Youth and Early Industrialization in a Canadian City,” in Demos, John and Boocock, Sarane, eds., Turning Points, University of Chicago Press, 1977 or 1978.Google Scholar

2 Katz, Michael B., “Who Went to School?” in Katz, Michael B. and Mattingly, Paul H., ed., Education and Social Change: Themes From Ontario's Past (New York, 1975), pp. 271–293; Davey, Ian E., “Educational Reform and the Working Class: School Attendance in Hamilton, Ontario, 1851–1891” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1975). For a criticism of Katz's piece, which was originally published in the History of Education Quarterly, see George, P.J. and Denton, Frank T., “Socio-Economic Influences on School Attendance: A Study of a Canadian County in 1871,” History of Education Quarterly, 14 (Summer 1974): 223–232. Katz's, reply (233–234) is in the same issue. Clearly, his reply should be modified. Denton and George were correct that multivariate procedures could advance the understanding of school attendance. The problem is that they applied them badly. The intellectual content of Katz's reply remains valid and, indeed, is strengthened by the results to be reported here.Google Scholar

3 On Hamilton, see, Davey, , “Educational Reform;” Katz, Michael B., The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, 1975); Johnston, C.M., The Head of the Lake: A History of Wentworth County (Hamilton, 1966); Campbell, Marjorie, A Mountain and A City (Toronto, 1969).Google Scholar

4 On the central school see Davey, Ian E., “School Reform and School Attendance: The Hamilton Central School, 1853–1861,” in Katz, and Mattingly, , Education and Social Change, pp. 294–314.Google Scholar

5 Katz, and Davey, , “Youth and Early Industrialization”.Google Scholar

6 On MCA see, Andrews, Frank M. et al., Multiple Classification Analysis: A Report on a Computer Program for Multiple Regression using Categorical Predictors (Ann Arbor, 1973); Nie, Norman H., et al., SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (New York, [2d ed], 1975), pp. 409–410, 416–418.Google Scholar

7 Boudon, Raymond, Education, Opportunity, and Social Inequality (New York, 1973), pp. 77, 200–201. See also, Hauser, Robert M., “Review Essay: On Boudon's Model of Social Mobility,” American Journal of Sociology, 81, 4 (1975–76): 911–928 and Boudon, Raymond, “Comment on Hauser's Review….,” ibid., 81, 5 (1975–76): 1175–1187.Google Scholar

8 Thanks to Tyack, David for help with formulating this point.Google Scholar

9 For a summary see Davey, Ian E., “On School Attendance,” ANZHES Journal 6, 1 (Autumn 1977): 1–11.Google Scholar

10 Class is defined here according to relation to the means of production. The two major classes in this definition are the capitalist and the working class. The former included owners, manufacturers, professionals and those associated with them, particularly clerical employees. The latter includes both skilled and unskilled workers. Each class contained a number of distinct strata. All of the foregoing is elaborated in Katz, Michael B., Doucet, Michael J., and Stern, Mark J., “Occupation and Class,” Working Paper No. 24, Social History Project, York University, October 1977. Note the differences in proportions of males and females employed. In 1871, for example, 89% of 19 year old males and 39% of females residing in Hamilton worked for wages. Among employed young men, the sons of men in the capitalist class worked far more often as clerks than did the sons of the working class. Indeed, in 1871 78% of the employed sons of merchants were clerks.Google Scholar

11 For a discussion of the problem of bringing more affluent children into the common schools see, Houston, Susan E., “The Impetus to Reform: Urban Crime, Poverty, and Ignorance in Ontario, 1850–1875” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1974), pp. 348–349.Google Scholar

12 Davey, , “Educational Reform,” p. 94.Google Scholar

13 Katz, , Doucet, , Stern, , “Occupation and Class”.Google Scholar

14 Katz, Michael B., Doucet, Michael J., and Stern, Mark J., “Migration and the Social Order: Erie County, New York, 1855,” forthcoming Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (Spring, 1978): 669–701 and “Population Persistence and Early Industrialization in a Canadian City,” forthcoming Social Science History, 2 (Winter 1978): 208–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Kaestle, and Vinovskis, , Education and Social Change, pp. 264–265. The index is explained in more detail in Katz, Michael B., “The Family and Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario: Cycle, Structure, and Economy,” Working Paper No. 25, Social History Project, York University, September 1977.Google Scholar

16 On feminization in Canada see, Prentice, Alison, “The Feminization of Teaching in British North America and Canada 1845–1875,” Histoire Sociale—Social History, 8 (May 1975): 5–20.Google Scholar

17 The distinction between categories of masters is made in Katz, Doucet, and Stern, , “Occupation and Class,” and in Gray, R.Q., The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976), pp. 131–133.Google Scholar