By Dan Bourgeois
This year’s first 4th Line Theatre production is “Schoolhouse”, centered on a fictional 1930s one room rural schoolhouse in a fictional village, somewhere in this part of the world.
This got me wondering about the early history of education in Ontario, and especially in rural Ontario.
In 1816, a year before Cavan and Monaghan townships were surveyed, the Common School Act of Upper Canada was passed. If a community had twenty students and built a schoolhouse, they were entitled to elect three trustees. These were to hire a teacher, and construct a curriculum along with rules and regulations. Once this was done, an annual grant would be provided to support the school. This grant rarely covered all the costs and students were often charged a fee to attend school. On occasion, in order to save money a teacher would board with different families on a rotational basis, moving every week or two.
After the townships of Cavan and Monaghan were surveyed in 1817, settlers gradually made their way north from Port Hope along rough trails to claim their concessions and start homesteading.
When and where the first schoolhouses were built in Cavan is a bit murky. There are records to suggest a school was built in the early 1820s on the 4th(Zion) Line near the current site of St Paul’s Anglican chapel and cemetery. Another school may have been built near the site of St John’s Ida Anglican church. It is more certain that in 1822John Deyell (brother of James, who helped with the original survey and was one of the earliest settlers) provided land to build a school in what is now the hamlet of South Monaghan/Centreville on county Road 10, around where the current Presbyterian church stands. Later in the 1820s schools were built in Cavanville and Millbrook.
The early schoolhouses were primitive structures; usually log cabins of 20 to 25 feet square with a few windows cut into the log walls. Floors were often earthen and heat was provided by a wood stove. There was no indoor plumbing and not all had a well from which to draw water. There were few books and standard textbooks did not yet exist. Of course, every school had a Bible and memorization of biblical passages was a frequent assignment.
The first Whitfield school on the northwest corner of the 7th (Larmer) Line and Middle Road (County Road 10) was built in 1841. In 1863, it was replaced by one of the first brick schools in the area. A slate blackboard was installed, a significant advancement that came with the new schoolhouse. This building is now the Lion’s Den.
A description survives of the first log Whitfield school; “Conditions in the old log school was far from perfect. The floor was made of clay and in the winter on stormy days, snow drifted in through chinks in the walls, powdering the backs of the scholars, who were arranged in backless benches around the walls. In those days, school was dismissed sharply on time and the children hurried home, fearful lest they meet a bear en route”. The last comment reflects the landscape of the time. Concession roads were often little more than rough cart trails. While a farmer’s con-cession was one or two hundred acres, only a small fraction would have been cleared. The remainder remained virgin forest and bears and wolves were still part of the local fauna.
Attendance at school was often irregular. In winter, young children would find getting to school difficult. At other times chores on the farm would often take precedence over learning the“3Rs”. For example, the Cedar Grove School in the northwest corner of the township opened in 1851. An 1852 report records“58 children in the School Section, 49 enrolled, with average attendance of 15 in winter and 22 in the summer”.
The quality of teachers in the early days was variable, to put it mildly. The only qualification required in the 1816 Act was that the applicant be a “British Citizen”. Some teachers were members of the clergy, and at least literate and trained in issues of their religion. Others were certainly competent and caring, but these qualities could be trumped by other considerations. Often, local trustees competed with each other not for the best teachers, but the cheapest. From J.G. Althouse’s book The Ontario Teacher: 1800-1910 “…a teaching post was commonly regarded as the last refuge of the incompetent, the inept, the unreliable”. The income was poor and working conditions were onerous. Often, after a few years out “in the bush”, many of the best teachers left to take up positions in better funded and regarded schools in the larger towns and cities. Many of these were “grammar” (ie- private)schools catering to the upper classes.
By the 1840s, the colonial government in York recognized the need to improve the education system, especially in the rural areas. In 1844, Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist minister born into a prominent Loyalist family in Norfolk County, was appointed Superintendent of Education of Canada West. Shortly after his appointment, he wrote “On the importance of education generally we may remark, it is as necessary as the light; it should be as common as water, and as free as air.”
After travelling to Europe to assess different education systems he wrote a report on his observations. Many recommendations in this report were adopted into the Common Schools Acts in 1846 and 1850. These were the foundation of today’s public education system.
To be continued.