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
- ‘Irregularity of attendance’
- Scared of juvenile crime
- Kids who went to school less had lower grades
- ‘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
- More kids went to school in the winter
- Bad roads
- sickness
- Climatic conditions
- Kids were not always going to schools
- 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
- Helped increase irregularity of attendance
- 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
- Poverty came in the winter when swelled ranks of unemployed in cities and stopped farming in the rural areas
Bibliography
Davey, Ian. “The Rhythm of Work and the Rhythm of School.” In Nancy Janovicek and Joy Parr (Eds.),Histories of Canadian Children and Youth, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003: