Education in New Brunswick

This occurred in a great number of places; the Catholic church in particular constructed prominent and grandiose buildings, such as the Convent at St.-Louis-de-Kent depicted at right.

The Catholic church, not being restricted by mundane things like taxes and electors, could afford to establish residential schools wherever it seemed propitious.

"[6] Prior to the establishment in 1848 of the Teacher Training School, the appointment (in rural areas at least) of a new master to a position of provincially governed responsibility included the certification of (as the case was) the local magistrate and/or board of trustees that the candidate was known to them to be of good character and repute, and that he could carry out his duties in a proper fashion.

Bennet made his case for larger schools, in which graded levels would be the norm, whereby a greater number of teachers could further specialise their lessons.

But Regulation 21 allowed the teacher to open and close the daily exercises by reading a portion of Scripture and by offering the Lord's Prayer.

[10] In 1893, New Brunswick Supreme Court Justice John James Fraser was commissioned by Lieutenant-Governor Samuel Leonard Tilley to investigate complaints related to the "School Law or Regulations" in Gloucester County.

One item of complaint was that the catechism was taught using school facilities during lunch hour; another, that the application of a Protestant teacher had been discarded without good reason by the administration; and several others.

[14] Since the government of Louis Robichaud during the 1960s, and especially the New Brunswick Official Languages Act (1969), attention on group educational rights has turned toward the linguistic variety.

An Act Recognizing the Equality of the Two Official Linguistic Communities in New Brunswick[21] was passed in 1981 by the government of Premier Richard Hatfield.

(2) The role of the legislature and government of New Brunswick to preserve and promote the status, rights and privileges referred to in subsection (1) is affirmed.Until 28 December 1997, New Brunswick had under the Schools Act, publicly funded school boards which were led by elected representatives and which had been administered at arm's length from the provincial Department of Education.

[27] In 2013, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada sponsored a test called the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, which was administered to a sample of more than 32,000 Grade 8 students from across the country.

[31] Students were asked, for example, "to classify substances according to their physical properties, and to describe how the movement and tilt of the Earth affects cycles such as years, days and seasons".

In that year, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decided in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island that the by-population French-speaking minority of Summerside PEI could exercise their Section 23 Charter right to native-language local education.

[37] However, the SCC decision at paragraph 61 states that "The Appeal Division erred in... concluding that buses could be considered educational facilities.

"[35] Tristin Hopper, a journalist for the National Post observed in 2015 that it "would appear to place [schoolbuses] outside the realm of the Charter", which deals in Section 23 with "minority language educational facilities.

"[36] Still and all, NB Attorney-General and at the time Minister of Education Serge Rousselle mandated his department to eliminate a unified schoolbus service arrangement that had developed organically in Richibucto.

[39] On 17 November 2016, the Gallant government backpedalled and withdrew its reference case on the constitutionality of bilingual school buses, and said it would leave the issue in the hands of District Education Councils (DECs, see below).

[40] On 22 November, the CBC NB Morning TV show hosted a number of students who complained that the policy on "inclusive classrooms" wasn't working and was hurtful to their lives and future well-being.

[42] In May 2023, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development put the policy under review due to "concerns and misunderstandings of its implementation."