The educational history of Upper Canada is commonly written as the succession of an elite group of educational reformers who advocated a centralized system of mass schooling. However, the recent shift in research on Upper Canada away from the narrative of prominent individuals who controlled the social, political, and economic development of the colony, and toward a "deliberative democracy" model of colonial development opens up new avenues of exploration in the history of Upper Canadian education. In his study of public opinion and deliberative democracy in Upper Canada, Jeffrey McNairn argues that public opinion emerged as a new form of authority in Upper Canada. He suggests that the increased publication of newspapers in Upper Canada resulted in public discourses that not only influenced but also shaped the political development of the province. Carol Wilton has examined popular political participation in a study of petitioning movements from 1800 to 1850. Wilton suggests that "ordinary Canadians" were much more involved in the political process than previously believed. Political outsiders, she convincingly demonstrates, often challenged established patterns of paternalism and notions of hierarchy and promoted the development of an expanded public sphere in Upper Canada. In this article, the author builds on the deliberative democracy model and explores how print culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries enabled the emergence of schooling as a central discourse in Upper Canada. (Contains 59 footnotes.)