The school trustees pictured here must have been typical of local school authorities in many rural parishes or school sections in nineteenth-century Canada. They were often community leaders or the highest ratepayers in the communities which they served. Although property owning women were in some places permitted to vote at school board meetings, in no place were they eligible to become trustees until the very end of the century. Here, the trustees are interviewing (or being interviewed by) a teacher. Whatever the topic of the conversation, the seriousness of purpose on both sides is made clear by the artist, Robert Harris. The teacher was no doubt trying to live up to the many ideals expressed in the latter half of the nineteenth century about the moral purpose of the school and the superior ability of women to instruct and elevate the young. The trustees, for their part, were no less serious. Their perspective was shaped by their sense of the value of schooling to the local community and its cost; their job was to secure for the rate-paying public the most education for the least money. Many trustees from poor communities were hesitant about adopting educational innovations or hiring expensive graduates of the provincial normal schools.
Courtesy: National Gallery of Canada, National Museums of Canada
