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Although gender studies have become a central concern in Canadian universities through women's studies programs or programs in feminist theory, they have not influenced courses and programs in faculties of education to the extent they should. We propose the "mainstreaming" of gender studies and argue that courses and programs should be reconceived and reconstructed to incorporate the findings and approaches developed in feminist and women's studies. We talk of "gender studies" because, unlike "women's studies," we are not advocating a separatist strategy and do not propose a particular theoretical framework, as may be suggested by "feminist" theory. We justify mainstreaming gender studies in teacher education programs because they can contribute to the general education of teacher candidates and can help develop the attitudes, knowledge, and skills central to the practice of teaching.

THE UNITED STATES has produced a lively and impressive body of scholarship on the education of freedmen during Reconstruction (1) The story has a consistently melancholy tone-that of the hopes, aspirations and rhetoric which accompanied the perilous journey from unschooled bondsman to schooled freedman-a journey which culminated in broken promises and repressive realities. It is too frequently forgotten that such an experience had been shared some thirty years previously in the British West Indies after the 1833 Act of Emancipation. The story however is somewhat different in that formal schooling had been available to some of the black population during slavery. (2) When the dubious regulations of servitude were lifted while its real abuses remained, the British Govern ment's Negro Education Grant, which spanned a decade from 1835-45, expanded existing missionary facilities so that during the apprenticeship period, 1834-38, the ex-slaves could be satisfactorily prepared for free dom. This preparation intended that they comprehend the skills, qual ities, and virtues requisite for taking upon themselves the apparently on erous burden of their emancipation, thus becoming a "grateful peasantry." The apprenticeship period assured colonial legislatures a compensation in addition to the twenty million pounds granted by Parliament to be shared among the various West Indian planters. Therefore, a period of indentured labour was deemed a salutory means of compensating the con fiscation of what a plantation economy saw as real property. Thus the planters remained the employers of ex-slaves and their wide authority