"By the late 1950s Canada's francophone and Acadian minority communities located outside Quebec were in rapid decline. Demographic, economic, socio-cultural, institutional, and political factors that had sustained both the concept and the reality of French Canada for well over a century were being eliminated or transformed at an unprecedented rate. Convinced that education was one of the essential keys to the renewal and growth of their communities, francophone organizations and leaders lobbied for constitutional entrenchments of official bilingualism and of a mandated Charter right to education in their own language, including the right to governance over their own schools and school boards. From those efforts a new, vigorous francophone pan-Canadian national community emerged, one capable of ensuring the survival of its constituent communities well into the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.