Engineering by alienated design: The case of french‐speaking engineers in quebec

French‐Canadian engineering education started in 1873, when the direct ancestor of the École Polytechnique de Montréal opened its door as an add‐on program to a low‐level business school. Retrospectively, the first steps of this new curriculum appear unusual and even puzzling. It began within an unusual institutional setting. Its initial faculty was barely competent. Yet, the Quebec government granted almost every conceivable advantage to the new school. In particular, it even attempted to endow the school with a credible university and professional degree through legislative fiat.

Despite strong, almost unqualified, support on the part of the Quebec government, the Ecole Polytechnique yielded only very modest results for many decades. For one thing, its great reliance on the Government did not facilitate close contacts with the industrial context of the time. In any case, these contacts would have been difficult to achieve as the English‐speaking community did not favor the emergence of French Canadian competition in engineering. Secondly, finding oneself in a socially dominated situation exacts a price; in this case it generates false or fuzzy objectives as well as inappropriate answers to problems. Institutional models are marshalled without a good understanding of what is needed to make them work properly.

In accounting for what amounts to missed steps, strange choices and inadequate responses, the objective is to lay the ground for the historical analysis of technical education in dominated (and not dominant) settings. In this regard, the beginnings of engineering education in Quebec illustrate questions and dimensions that probably recur in most multi‐ethnic contexts.