Four Barnardo Children in Front of Their Canadian Classmates at Cavan School, Durham County, Ontario, 1912.
Barnardo's children under age eleven boarded with farm and village families, chiefly in Muskoka, Durham, Simcoe and Ontario counties. Homes paid the fee for board so that young children would more readily be released from chores around the farm to attend school. But the classroom was often an unhappy place for young immigrants. The newcomers were teased for their strange accents and mannerisms and taunted about their origins in British slums. Local school trustees resented the crowding caused by alien children whose guardians did not live in the county. Teachers found that the British schooling of the home children had been so interrupted and so different from the Canadian curriculum that the boarders in the district were far behind local children of similar ages.
