Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
56419066
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Lei, Christine,1960-
Title
Academic excellence, devotion to the Church and the virtues of womanhood : loretto Hamilton, 1865-1970.
Degree
Ph. D. -- University of Toronto, 2003
Publisher
Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, [2004]
Description
4 microfiches.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
This study of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary's (IBVM) convent school in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is a microhistorical examination of the teaching Sisters and their students. Loretto Hamilton is both a mirror and a window. It offers a reflection of a Loretto convent school in Ontario throughout the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries and a view into the operations of the Sisters, students and school. Forty students attended in the school's first year, 1865; the following year, enrollment surged to 100 pupils. Loretto Academy closed in 1970 with a capacity of almost 400 students. It remains the longest continuously operating private girls' school in the city's history. This study contributes to and substantially revises the existing body of historical research by examining the IBVM's critical role in the process of establishing convent schooling in Hamilton, Canada West, in 1865. Without the diligent work of women religious, and in particular that of the Loretto Sisters (the name by which the IBVM were known colloquially), the history of higher education of Hamilton girls in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries would have been markedly different. This study adds to our understanding of nineteenth and twentieth-century education by examining the experiences of those students and teachers who participated in the day-to-day life of Loretto Hamilton. It enriches in minute detail how the Academy functioned in terms of the pedagogy and curriculum of a secondary school. There was a distinct difference in the goals the Loretto Sisters established for their school, and those desired by the local public high school that had as its goals preparation for the world of work and civil obedience. Yet, in order to survive, Loretto Hamilton had to parallel its local public high school in curricular offerings and building expansions in order to retain and attract students. When it could no longer compete, the school closed.
ISBN
0612784843
9780612784840