Home Feelings by Jody Mason

Author:Jody Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2019-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.4 Student sketch in register of Earle W. Carr, 1926

Despite the sanguinity with which Fitzpatrick promoted citizenship education to governments and employers, there is little evidence that the pedagogy for liberal citizenship implemented after 1919 enabled the association to reach a greater number of workers. Ironically, I am able to determine this by examining the data that Frontier College began to produce with great vigour after 1919 – data that was meant to convince governments and employers that the Handbook had ushered in an era of educational transformation. The number of men Frontier College claimed to have been able to enrol in classes each season remained more or less constant (at around 1,500 men) between 1923 and 1929.108 To put this figure in perspective, it is helpful to see that in 1923, for instance, 1,440 workers enrolled in classes, but there were roughly eighteen thousand workers in Frontier College camps that season. Thus, only 8 percent of workers reached by the college enrolled in classes.109 The 1924 reports generated for the railways demonstrate similar numbers: of the 5,400 men in railway construction camps visited by Frontier College in that year, only six hundred or 11 percent of men could be classed as “adult pupils.” Such “pupils,” unlike “consistent readers” (19 percent), “part-time readers” (28 percent), and “occasional listeners” (43 percent), actually enrolled in classes.110

Moreover, as the instructors’ registers clearly show, a proportion of “enrolled” students were not regular attendees of classes (an “enrolled” student may well have attended only one or two classes during the season). For instance, in his register for a Hornepayne, Ontario, CNR camp, Earle W. Carr reported thirty-two students enrolled in July of 1926; nine of these attended two or fewer classes.111 A close examination of instructors’ registers for 1921 offers further evidence of the fact that the number of regular students in classes tended to be quite low as a proportion of the men in the camps served by Frontier College (see table 3.1). The twenty-four instructors’ registers for 1921 in the Frontier College archival fonds show that, with an average camp population of 184, labourer-teachers were not generally able to attract more than ten men to each class offered: while individual instructors experienced varying degrees of success, no instructor was able to bring in more than, on average, 36 percent of the workers in his camp; nine of the twenty-four instructors considered here reported averages of 10 percent or less. If one considers only the ten camps where more than 50 percent of the population was constituted by non-British immigrants, the average number of pupils in each class is slightly higher, 10.9, but this is still only 6.2 ­percent of the workers in those ten camps. Moreover, given that the records were kept as part of an employment contract (I have already noted that instructors’ payment was contingent on the keeping of regular classes), instructors’ registers are likely prone to some exaggeration of numbers.112

As countless labourer-teachers noted in their registers, the new pedagogy

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