With the quest for educational improvement came a new breed of educator, the school superintendent or inspector, who promoted the new ideas, books and equipment and the general expansion and improvement of schooling. By the middle of the nineteenth century, all provinces in eastern British North America had begun the process of developing central administrative systems for their common schools, each with its chief administrative officer or superintendent of education. With the assistance of local inspectors or superintendents, these gentlemen promoted educational reform and administered the increasingly complex provincial laws governing the schools. Alexander Forrester, whose portrait this is, was appointed Superintendent of Education for the province of Nova Scotia in 1855. He combined the job with the principalship of the provincial Normal School until the two positions were separated in 1863 and held the latter post until his death in 1869. Like superintendents of schools in the other provinces, Forrester not only sent out information, he gathered it in. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, therefore, teachers and local superintendents were required to keep registers and records, to feed the information mills of provincial education departments, which in their turn, churned it out to the public in the form of annual and special reports designed to promote the cause of more and better schooling.
