In the past, historians have not written a great deal about either children or schools. Perhaps both subjects were taken too much for granted. Or perhaps historians in Canada, as elsewhere, were too busy writing the history of national economic and political events to concern themselves with seemingly unrelated developments in the history of children and education. Be that as it may, the growth of interest in social and cultural history generally has been accompanied by a special interest in the evolution of childhood and of that institution which now seems to be almost the exclusive domain of children, the school. What were children in the past really like? What was expected of them and what did they do? How were their lives related to those of their parents and other adults in the societies in which they lived? Similar questions have been asked about the schools. What were they like? Who attended them and who did not? How did the idea evolve that all young people should spend most of their childhood and adolescent years in school?
To answer the last question, it is necessary to begin to answer the others; our own experience of almost universal, free, mass schooling only becomes fully comprehensible in the light of what existed before this relatively modern phenomenon. One must go back more than a century, to the experience of British North America in the first half of the nineteenth century when provincial educational systems did not exist, when schooling, for the majority of children, was at the very most erratic and short-lived, and at the least, missing from their lives altogether.
To begin to understand this period in educational history is to realize that early nineteenth-century British North Americans did not necessarily equate education with schooling. A great many children - probably the majority - were educated at home as they worked or played beside their parents. Others, who became servants or apprentices, learned farming, a trade, or the complex lore of household management from families other than their own. Schools and schooling did exist, however, for some children. There were numerous "private venture" schools which "ladies" or "gentlemen" ran in their own households and which were financed entirely by fees. Some were boarding establishments. in many localities, parents, trustees acting on their behalf, or parish councils founded common or parish schools, by renting a room or a house and hiring a teacher. The wages for the teacher were usually raised through an assessment on the pupils' guardians and sometimes were supplemented by a provincial grant. Often the teacher's qualifiactions, on paper at least, were minimal. In some communities, charity schools were founded by religious societies or philanthropists in an attempt to provide formal schooling for children whose parents were too poor to pay for it. All of these schools provided an elementary or basic education and in many communities were accessible to quite large numbers of children. Generally, only the children of the privileged classes were able to attend the few grammar schools, academies and colleges which existed to prepare young gentlemen for professional, business or official careers and young women for careers as ladies. Nearly all such schools were supported by a combination of public funds and fees paid by the parents or guardians of the children; the distinction between strictly private and public education was yet to be made.
Elementary schooling, then, was available in considerable variety in early nineteenth-century Canada. For most children it was an experience very different from schooling today. The majority of schools, to begin with, were very small. A charity school with two or three hundred registered pupils was clearly the exception in an era when most schools probably had fewer than fifty pupils, and many had less than twenty. Most schools depended entirely on one teacher and many ceased to exist when the teacher retired or left the community. The pupils represented nearly all ages, for even thirty-year-olds and married couples were known to attend common schools, while the teachers in any of these early schools were often as young as fifteen. Although in country schools the younger children apparently attended more often in the spring, summer and fall, and older students in the winter, when there was less farm work to be done, pupils of every age could be and usually were schooled together under the guidance of a single teacher. Finally, for the vast majority, attendance at school was extremely irregular and did not last very long. A few months might be the grand total available for formal schooling to the average child.
All of this reflected pre-industrial attitudes both to education and to children. Children had an economic function to perform: they could be useful on the farms and in the shops and households; indeed, they were counted on in many families as essential labour. Many parents and other adults clearly considered themselves competent to instruct the young. With the help, perhaps, of the local clergyman and the occasional itinerant schoolmaster, they believed they could teach children all that they needed to know. Literacy rates for the period confirm that the approach to learning did produce in most people some limited ability to read and write. Teaching was neither the exclusive preserve of professional teachers nor of institutions called schools.
But already forces were at work that were to change this situation. Busy farmers and tradesmen often found little time to engage in the process of educating their children, apprentices, and domestic servants. Then, as the economy became commercially more complex, there seemed, especially in the middle years of the century, insufficient work for children in towns to do. At the same time, attitudes towards children working were beginning to change. The result was a developing uneasiness about the apparently alarming increase in the number of idle and unschooled children. Mass immigration at mid-century, accompanied by poverty and cholera, seemed to increase the dimensions of the problem.
Increasingly, educationally-minded people - teachers, ministers, officials of the government and parents - began to feel that children ought to be protected from the wider world of work and social life; they looked to schools to solve not only the problem of idle children, but also other problems that seemed related to the phenomenon. More schooling and better education, it was thought, would produce a more moral and orderly, a more hard-working and enterprising populace. Crime, especially among juveniles, would be reduced and patriotism and public-spiritedness increased as more children were properly inculcated, through the schools, with the true values of British North American society. The hope was expressed, too, that a schooling common to all children would reduce the latent and overt hostility that existed between rich and poor, Catholics and Protestants, and French- and English-speaking members of society.
With the thrust for more schooling came a movement to improve the common or parish schools. By the 1840s, in most parts of British North America, the voluntary, haphazard and irregular character of much formal schooling, the buildings, and the teaching methods were all desperately in need of improvement. The goals of reformers were uniformity, regularity and efficiency -- better teachers, larger schools and longer and more regular periods of schooling. In order to replace individual instruction by the "simultaneous method" and thus deal with larger numbers of pupils more efficiently, it was thought that the children should be divided into classes based on age and attainment. Consolidation of schools and school systems, it was argued, would make it possible to have more grades and, in larger centres, higher classes or separate high schools for the most advanced pupils. The result was that common, parish, charity and grammar schools were transformed as provincial systems of public "elementary" and "high" schools evolved and the idea that schooling should be free was gradually accepted across the country.
Much of the changing ideology of education in nineteenth-century Canada is reflected in pictures of school children, teachers and schools. Ideal school children were clean and tidy and sat in orderly rows of seats which were fixed to the floor. Ideal teachers were trained in provincial normal schools in correct deportment as well as in the prescribed teaching methods and subjects of instruction. The school buildings, which early in the century had simply been houses, no different except occasionally in size from any other house, gradually took on the character of institutions. Some of the grandest of them even resembled the magnificent prisons and asylums that nineteenth-century reformers designed for the improvement and care of adults temporarily or permanently excluded from society.
To promote and implement educational change, provincial governments created departments of education which were directed in the mid-century years by superintendents and later, in many provinces, by ministers of education. Local superintendents and inspectors, under the direction of provincial departments, increasingly supervised and certified teachers in their districts and communities, gradually enforcing provincial educational regulations and the use of authorized textbooks. With the consolidation of schools and school systems, career patterns were developed for men who could look forward to principalships and other administrative positions. With the expansion of schooling generally, women, whose services could be obtained at much lower wages and often at half of those paid to men, were engaged in the common or parish schools. By the end of the century elementary school teaching was stereotyped as a female occupation.
Like all reform movements, the quest for more and better schooling in nineteenth-century Canada was by no means uniform in its origins or effects. There was serious opposition from a variety of sources to many of the innovations that reformers promoted and not all regions or provinces were equally ready for change or wished it. In provinces where the majority of schools gradually became non-denominational in theory, and more or less Protestant in fact, many Roman Catholic and some Anglican parents and clergy demanded public assistance for separate denominational schools. Solutions to this problem varied from province to province: the colony of Newfoundland had several denominational school systems; Ontario and Quebec had a dual pattern; some provinces gave minimal or no encouragement at all to denominational schools. In some provinces, debates over separate schools affected the course of provincial politics. In the latter part of the century, the Manitoba School Question erupted into national politics, producing one of the most hotly debated elections in Canadian history. Religion was not the only source of conflict. Although many people thought that free schools, female teachers in common schools, blackboards, and the teaching of English grammar were excellent ideas, there were others who were violently opposed to some or all of these innovations, believing that the schools should be maintained as they were, or reformed in other ways.
Problems emerged within the newly created schools and school systems. Critics claimed that long hours of study, enforced silence and inactivity in overcrowded, stuffy or freezing school houses were extremely harmful to children. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, educators increasingly worried about the effects of schooling on adolescent girls - the future mothers of "the race." Kindergartens which encouraged more activity in theory, if not in practice, were seen as the answer to some of these problems for the youngest children. Calisthenics, military drill, vocal music, and art were introduced to provide exercise and variety for older children. Badly ventilated, overcrowded and inadequately heated schoolhouseS were gradually replaced by larger, better ventilated, lighted and heated buildings in regions where boards of education could afford these improvements or education departments insisted on them.
A second order of problems concerned the clientele of the schools. The early free schools had difficulty attracting students from two groups of society; often neither the children of the wealthy nor of the very poor would attend. Some of the former clearly found fault with the common schools, feeling that they were socially dangerous or academically inadequate. Instead, they patronized private schools. Many of these schools, however, were unable to compete with the publicly-financed common and high schools of the latter part of the century and went bankrupt. Still, some private schools, many of them church-affiliated, survived as temporary sanctuaries for the children of those who could afford to pay the fees.
At the other end of the economic scale, the schools found it equally difficult to attract or keep in regular attendance the children of the poor. Sad roads and weather, lack of money for adequate clothing, shoes and books, sickness, the need to care for younger children and to work to help maintain the family kept many children out of school. The problem was especially acute in times of economic stress. As the century wore on, working-class spokesmen began to criticize the schools for their failure to meet the needs of working-class children, some arguing that the schools stressed individualism, materialism and competition rather than adequate vocational preparation and the ability to think critically for oneself. Increasingly, educators also came to believe that the schools were too concerned with academic subjects and did not really provide the right kind of education for those children who would eventually perform manual or domestic work. Thus, at the turn of the century, manual and vocational training (including domestic science for girls) became the great twin causes of educational reformers. Reformers hoped that the introduction of these subjects into the schools would increase respect for manual and domestic labour in society at large as well as among the pupils, and at the same time provide some measure of practical training for children who were not destined for professional or white collar work.
Despite such innovations, for some children regular schooling was still not possible for a variety of reasons. For the majority, growing similarities in schooling meant an increasing similarity in early and adolescent experience. But many children did not complete school and most Black and Indian children, many children who were blind or deaf and dumb, and children who came to be labelled "delinquent" or potentially so, if they attended any school at all, were usually to be found in segregated schools or at special residential industrial schools, or even reformatories. In these separate institutions, efforts were made to fit them for life and work according to educators' perceptions of their special disabilities and needs.
Thus the mid-nineteenth century dream of providing a genuinely common schooling for all children was only partially fulfilled. Schooling in Canada, as elsewhere, was in fact fragmented in a variety of ways as children were segregated by age, and sometimes by sex, race, religion or economic class. By the end of the century, however, schooling of some kind had become basic to the experience of most children, and in most provinces majority opinion was so strongly in favour of the idea that for children in the seven to twelve or seven to fourteen age groups a minimum four months of schooling a year had become compulsory by law. While attendance in most places still remained irregular, and on a daily basis by no means matched the nearly universal enrollments, habitual non-attendance at school, which at the century's beginning had probably been the norm, was by 1900 considered in most places to be delinquent or deviant behaviour.
The links between economic, political, religious and social change and changing educational patterns in the nineteenth century are only beginning to be understood. Clearly, the casual attendance and the voluntary nature of schooling in the early part of the century was well suited to a pre-industrial society, in which the majority of people lived in relatively small, agricultural communities and worked with their hands. With a minimum of formal schooling most girls and boys could acquire the "three R's", the manual skills and social and religious knowledge considered necessary. It is equally certain that the increased length of school attendance by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the growing emphasis on time tables, organization and formal structures within the schools were related to the increasing absence of the male parent from the household and the reduced level of domestic production. The changes may have sprung from a concern to prepare children for adult working lives in the larger, hierarchical work settings that were developing in larger towns and cities. The introduction of domestic science reveals turn of the century educators' uneasiness, however, at the fact that for most girls work in such settings lasted only until marriage, when the location of their work shifted to the home. Equally, the emphasis on academic skills, when schooling stretched to six or eight years instead of one or two, seemed unsuitable for many working-class boys who, it was argued, would benefit more from "vocational" training.
As the schools tended to reflect the changing realities of class and sex roles and the changing nature of the economy (or school authorities' views of what these should be), so too they tended to reflect changes in Canadian religious life and politics. If in the early nineteenth century it was taken for granted that a child would be taught in his or her own language by a teacher of the same language and possibly the same religion, by the end of the century both of these assumptions were clearly in question.
How the social, economic, political and religious climate in British North America and Canada affected the schools and their clientele, the children of these regions, remains a complex story for historians to unravel. Equally complex is the question of what impact the children and the schools had on each other and on their local communities, the provinces and the nation. Certainly, both children and schools have played vital roles in our history, roles which historians no longer ignore.
