Mr. Landon draws the following graphic picture of the school-house "shanties" of those days. He also gives a vivid view of the interior:
"The school-houses in many instances (though not in all) are miserable shanties made of logs loosely and roughly put together; the interstices filled with clay, portions of which are from time to time crumbling down filling the place with filth and dust. Under your feet are loose boards, without nails, across which, when one walks, a clatter is produced equal to that heard in a lumber yard. Over your head are the naked rafters, stained with smoke and hung with cobwebs and dust. Two or three little windows, generally half way up the walls, admit the light; and a rough door which does not fit the opening, creaks upon its wooden hinges.... The writing desks are generally long sloping shelves pinned up against the walls as high as the breasts of the pupils who sit before them. The seats are without backs and from eighteen inches to two feet high. Sometimes we have a master's desk, but awkwardly constructed, for the most part too high for the sitting posture and too low for the standing one.... We have no blackboards, no maps and no illustrative apparatus of any kind.
"When we enter one of these schools, we behold a picture of discomfort and misery. The children are perched upon the benches before described: but as they have no support for their backs, and as only the taller of them can reach the floor with their feet, marks of weariness and pain are visible in their features and postures. Some to procure rest and ease to their aching frames have drawn up both feet upon the bench and are sitting cross-legged like a tailor on the shop board. Others stooping forward, rest their elbows upon their knees, with one hand supporting their chins and with the other holding up their books before their weary eyes; while all avail themselves of every possible excuse to change their position and so obtain relief. Some asking permission to go out, others to get a drink, and many constantly flocking to the teacher's desk with words to be pronounced, sums to be examined and corrected, pens to be mended, or difficulties to be explained, in connection with grammar, or other lesson, etc. So that the place is filled with noise and disorder, rendering study impossible and anything like the cultivation of cheerful and benevolent affections entirely out of the question."...
Then follows an example of the character of the teaching "in a school in the centre of one of the largest and wealthiest townships" in the district of Brock:—
"This school was taught by a person who in his youth had enjoyed what we term superior advantages, being connected with a family of highest respectability. Notice of my intended visit had several days before been sent to the teacher. The female pupils had ... decorated the place with evergreens and bouquets of flowers. The room, though humble and coarse, was neat and tidy. When I entered, the class in the fourth book of lessons was reading. A book was put into my hands and I desired them to proceed.... When they were done reading I proceeded to examine them on the lesson. Great Britain was mentioned in the lesson and allusion made to her people and institutions. My first question, therefore was—Where is Great Britain? From the vacant and surprised stare with which this question was received I was satisfied that they had no clear conception of what Great Britain was.... I finally asked what is the form of Government in Great Britain? As no answer was given, I ... asked whether a King, Queen or President governed in Great Britain? To this question a pupil, aided by the teacher, who whispered in her ear, replied a Queen. I than asked her name.... After a good deal of hesitation, a young woman of eighteen or twenty years of age, replied "Queen Elizabeth!"
The Old Log School House and Its Belongings.
In connection with the realistic picture of education in the County of Oxford, in 1847-49, sketched by the Rev. W. H. Landon, District Superintendent, the following dual pictures of "The Old Log School" and "The Pioneer Teachers," taken from the Toronto Globe of 1887, will be found to be highly interesting. The pictures are graphically drawn by a teacher, and from a teacher's standpoint. Speaking of the representative teacher of a former generation recalling the past, he said:—
The old days come up vividly before him, when he first engaged in the work in some country district, engaging to devote to it the best energies of body and mind, for, it may be, some such munificent salary as eight or ten dollars a month, said salary to be supplemented by the saving in expense effected through the process formerly so much in vogue of boarding around. How well he remembers the old log school house, with its low ceiling on which a tall man could easily lay his hand; the narrow apertures, fitted with a few panes of 7×9 glass which served for windows; the floor of unplaned boards, whose crevices were either compactly filled with accumulations of dust and litter characteristic of the school room, or worse still, yawning to swallow up pen-knife and slate pencil as they would ever and anon drop from the fingers of some luckless wight, started from the half slumber into which the drowsy monotony of the ill-ventilated school room had beguiled him, by the stentorian tones, or possibly the vigorous cuffs, of the master of ceremonies. Very distinctly the vision of such a school room of the old type, though at a date much less than fifty years ago, rises before the writer as memory carries him back to the little Canadian hamlet in which his boyhood was passed. The desks, so as far any were provided, consisted of a wide shelf fixed at a pretty sharp angle against the wall, and extending all around the room, with an intermission only at the narrow space occupied by the door. This primitive arrangement was sometimes supplemented with a long, flat table composed of three or four loose planks in the rough, supported by wooden benches or horses placed transversely beneath. The seats were of planks or slabs, likewise unsmoothed, constructed by driving rudely hewn legs into holes bored with a large augur, at a suitable angle, in the lower surface of the plank or slab. These legs often projected an inch or so above the surface of the seat. It could not be said of these rude structures as in Cowper's "Evolution of the sofa," that "the slippery seat betrayed the sliding part that pressed it," for between the projecting legs and the innumerable "splinters" the unhappy occupant was in much greater danger of being impaled and pinned fast than of slipping off. Perhaps it was better so, for in view of the great height usually given them, the fall, for a small child, while it would most surely have been a "laughing matter," might yet have proved a serious one.... It was certainly a strange and cruel infatuation which constrained our grandfathers to think that the proper position for a boy or girl at school was upon a narrow perch, without back or arm support of any kind, and with the feet dangling some six or eight inches above the floor.
The picture of the old school bench would not be accurate without reference to the warping of the plank which was pretty sure soon to take place, with the result of raising one or other of the diagonal legs an inch or two from the floor, thus converting the seat, when filled with its living, aching load, into a tilting board, provocation of many a trick from the omnipresent mischievous boy of the school, and resulting in many a blow from the palm or cane of the irate master, which would, of course, generally descend upon innocent ears or shoulders.