Free Education

  • Came in the School Act of 1850
    • To bring more children to school
    • Children are able to benefit from education
    • School age population grew from 61.2% in 1851 to 86.4% in 1871
  • Population was misleading
    • Kids were not always going to schools
      • Jobs, moving to other cities,
      • Student population attending class dropped from a total population of 423,033 to 38,535 actually attending school
    • ā€˜Irregularity of attendance’
      • Scared of juvenile crime
      • Kids who went to school less had lower grades
      • ā€˜Criminal apathy and negligence of parents’
      • Associated with the working class and poor
      • Farming parents
    • Attendance influenced by
      • Climatic conditions
        • More kids went to school in the winter
          • More boys attended than girls (for 3 months)
          • Girls were left home to take care of family when it was too cold to go outside
        • Summer
          • More girls went to school than boys
      • Bad roads
      • sickness
  • Opponents of free education
    • Helped increase irregularity of attendance
      • If they paid they would have to go, if they didnt they wouldn’t want to go
  • Appreciation of Educations
    • Culture didn’t care for education in Ontario
    • Children were able to work at a younger age in factories
    • Curriculum didn’t teach children to learn real life knowledge

Work

  • Work patterns
    • Work more so that times of winter or depression would still be economically stable
    • Agricultural labourers (farmers) had become poor if their crops failed
  • Winter
    • Poverty came in the winter when swelled ranks of unemployed in cities and stopped farming in the rural areas
      • People who worked outside were laid off during the winter
    • People who worked in the winter had subsidized wages
    • Food and fuel was more expensive at this time

Bibliography

Davey, Ian. ā€œThe Rhythm of Work and the Rhythm of School.ā€ In Nancy Janovicek and Joy Parr (Eds.),Histories of Canadian Children and Youth, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003: