ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to describe some of the conditions and events pertaining to the supervision and disciplining of teachers in nineteenth-century Ontario, and to examine these controls within the context of the overall raison d’etre of the schooling system. Among the early school promoters, proper teacher training was held crucial, if a centralized schooling system was to impart the proper “character” on the youth of the province. Among the other regulatory aspects of the ever-enlarging nineteenth-century state school system, ongoing and effective inspection of schools and teachers also weighed heavily in the minds of the schooling promoters. Moral regulation of teachers during the nineteenth century extended well beyond their activities and duties in the school classroom. By the 1870s, provincial regulation of teachers had developed to the point that even their local associations, which to that point had been somewhat independent from direct governmental control, were taken over by the state.
