Educating the Neglected Majority by Jarrell Richard A.;

Author:Jarrell, Richard A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773599253
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2016-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Institutes faced several challenges to providing evening courses. First, if classes were to be free, institutes would have to pay for the instructor, space, heat, lighting, and disposable materials, but they faced small annual grants and competing demands for books and periodicals and so on. Second, finding qualified teachers was always a problem, especially for drawing, although local clergymen, physicians, or teachers could often teach general subjects. Third, the teaching of art or mechanics required apparatuses or models, and in 1876 the association asked Secretary-­Treasurer William Edwards to write to South Kensington to request examples.23

Directors of the institutes, though often sympathetic, worked on building up libraries and reading rooms, for these were what their members desired. At the time of Confederation, the annual subscription cost for most Ontario institutes was $1 or $2 per annum. For Toronto, with more than 1,100 members, local fees generated a considerable amount; but marginal institutes such as Cobourg (thirty members), L’Orignal (twenty-­eight), and Waterdown (twenty) had few books and no class instruction. In the late 1860s, Toronto, for example, charged $2 a course for members and $3 for non-­members. In 1870, twenty-­four institutes received provincial grants, and at least eight others were operating without grants; of these thirty-­two institutes, only six offered classes in the 1869–70 session (see Table 7.2 for subjects and enrolments). Some of the subjects came from the syllabus: arithmetic and mathematics, chemistry, grammar and composition, mechanical and architectural drawing, ornamental drawing, and penmanship and bookkeeping. Others were of local value: elocution, French, mutual instruction, and phonography. The Paris institute had attempted to form classes but failed; this would occur in many of the institutes.

Table 7.2 Mechanics’ institutes offering classes, Ontario (1869–70)

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