What a picture did the wooden desks and walls of those old-time school houses present, worn smooth with the elbows, smeared with the jackets, variegated with the ink, carved with the jack-knives and stained with the tears of boisterous and blubbering boys and rosy-cheeked, hoydenish or timid girls. What burlesque, too, upon every intelligent idea of education were the processes carried on in them. From nine o'clock to twelve, and from one till four, six long hours, as marked by the sun's shadow on the rude dial marked out on the windowsill, did the work go on.
Murray's Reader, and in the most ambitious districts his Grammar, Walker's Dictionary, Walkingame's Arithmetic, Goldsmith's Geography and somebody's spelling-book, with slate and pencil, a scanty supply of paper and ink, and pen shaped with a keen pen-knife from a quill picked up from the wayside or plucked ruthlessly from the wing of some reluctant "squawking" goose, would complete the scholar's outfit. It is the hour for preparation of the reading lesson. The school room resounds with the loud hum of a score or two of boys and girls all "studying aloud" with a most distracting din, and all the heads and bodies swaying constantly and simultaneously back and forth as an accompaniment to the voice. This voice in the case of perhaps a majority would be modulated without the slightest relation to the contents of the printed page, while the thoughts of the ostentatiously industrious student would be busy with some projected game or trick for the coming recess. And yet how often would the Scotch school master's eye gleam with pride and pleasure when he had, by dint of persuasion or threat, succeeded in getting every boy and girl engaged in the horrible, monotonous chant.
Then the recitation—what a scene of confusion and stripes, tears and bellowings. Perhaps it was the column of spellings. A few, fitted by nature with memories adapted for that kind of work, would make their way in triumph to the head of the long semicircular class. But woe, woe to the dullards and the dunces, under a regime whose penalty for missing a word a foot and a half long would be, very likely, two or three strokes on the tingling fingers or aching palm with the pitiless hardwood ferule, this process being occasionally varied as some noisy or idling youngster was called up from a back seat to be visited with a still sterner chastisement for some trifling misdemeanor.... The writer can recall instances and experiences innumerable, the infliction being sometimes accompanied with a caution to tell no tales at home under pain of a worse infliction. In his own case he well remembers the wrath of his father, who would have thought it wrong and encouraging insubordination to listen to any complaints against the master, when, on occasion of the victim of a tendency to juvenile pranks being dangerously ill with scarlet fever, and that father being called on by the doctor to annoint his back with some soothing lotion, he found said back striped and checked with a network of "black and blue." It is needless to add that at this point ended both the writer's experience under that schoolmaster and the schoolmaster's term of engagement in that district.
As a significant comment upon the moral effects of the regime of the schoolmasters of the old school the writer may add that one of his most vivid memories of the mental status produced by the school training referred to is that of an intense longing for the day when he should be large enough to repay that old schoolmaster in his own coin. That day came. The flagellated boy, transformed into a tolerably lusty youth, found himself face to face with his quondam tormenter. But his long cherished wrath speedily gave place to pity for the decrepit, friendless and lonely old bachelor, whose days were drawing to a close, with no loving hand of wife or daughter to minister to their feebleness.
The Pioneer Teachers, and the Trials of "Boarding Round."
The writer of the foregoing paper pictured roughly the rural Canadian school of forty or fifty years ago. It may not be without interest to have that picture supplemented with a glimpse of rural Canadian life as seen by the schoolmaster of the period. The "boarding 'round" system afforded him excellent facilities for observation. The venerable custom of boarding round died, no doubt, a good many years ago, so far as Canada is concerned.... But thirty or forty years ago it was, in some parts of Canada at least, almost a matter of course that the teacher should "board 'round." When a school became vacant or a new and ambitious settlement had reached the pitch of development at which a school was deemed a necessary sequent to the carpenter's shop, the smithy and the shoemaker's shanty, one of the first steps was, of course, to pitch upon a suitable candidate for the scanty honors and still more scanty emoluments of the village pedagogue. Probably some influential member of the community had a son or a daughter in the teens, who was thought pretty well up in "the three R's." If so, it would usually be deemed quite unnecessary to look farther. In fact it would, in such a case, be useless for an outsider to contest the constituency. It never entered the unsophisticated heads of the trustees to invite competition by advertising for candidates "to state salary expected." This method of putting up professional talent in a kind of Dutch auction is an evolution of our present "best educational system on earth." Our grandfathers went about the business in a different way. The coming teacher being fixed upon, the next step was for the candidate himself, or some interested relative or friend on his behalf, to circulate a subscription sheet. A form of heading would be prepared somewhat in the following style:—"We, the undersigned residents of Smithton District, being desirous of securing the services of Henry Schoolman as teacher of the district school, hereby agree to engage the services of said H. S. for the period of six months, and to pay him at the rate of £1 2s 6d for each and every pupil we hereunto subscribe or send to said school. We further agree to supply the teacher with board in proportion to our several subscriptions; also to furnish our proportions of wood for the use of said school. Signed, etc."
The average juvenile Canadian made, no doubt, a much more merciful, and often much more efficient, teacher than the ex-soldier, or broken-down tradesman from the Old Country. One of the first duties of the newly-fledged teacher would be to go carefully over his treasured list of subscribers and ascertain, by a careful arithmetical calculation, the exact number of weeks and days for which he was entitled to board and lodging at the house of each of his respective patrons. The next step would be to find out, by personal or written enquiries, at what time it would be most convenient for each family to open its doors to him. This process, and the subsequent installation in each home would, it may well be imagined, be trying ordeals to the young and bashful pedagogue.... The receptions accorded the poor itinerant would be, of course, as various as the feelings, dispositions and circumstances of the householders, or, more strictly speaking, of the presiding divinities of the parlor and the kitchen, especially the kitchen. In many cases he would quickly feel at home. The welcome would be cordial, the hospitality ungrudging, the companionship agreeable. In such cases the bashful beginner would soon be able to shake off the intolerably humiliating dread of being regarded as an intruder, an interloper, or half-mendicant. But in numerous instances, as may readily be conceived, the situation would be most galling to a sensitive nature. The over-worked, perpetually tired and fretful mistress of the house would receive him with an ill-concealed frown or an involuntary sigh. To her he represented just so much addition, for so long a time, to her hourly toils and cares, already too heavy to be borne.
Unwashed specimens of "the heritage of the poor" would swarm in every corner. The fear and awe which secured him immunity for a time would soon wear away, and as they were replaced with the familiarity that breeds contempt, he would be exposed to all manner of well-meant advances and indignities. The scorn at the roughly-spread supper table would be a scramble, and the twilight hour, which, if he happened to have a spice of romance in his composition, he would fain have consecrated to quiet thought or fancy, would be made hideous by a juvenile pandemonium, as amidst stripes and cuffs and yells and tears the unruly flock would finally be got to bed. These, of course, were the ill-regulated householders, but they exist.
Well does the writer remember some personal experiences in this delightful phase of the professional life of an earlier day—not much more than half a semi-centennial distant. The old, dingy farmhouse, the bare floors, the hard seats, the utter absence of everything in the shape of books or other literature, the teeming olive branches at every age and stage of development, the little "spare" bedroom, whose sole furnishings consisted of the bed and bedding, on whose hard floor he reclined for lack of chair and table evening after evening for hours after he was supposed to be in bed, reading by the feeble rays of a tallow candle the ponderous volumes of Dr. Dick's philosophies, which had been kindly loaned him by a friend, and which were devoured with an eagerness begotten of a genuine hunger, though out of all proportion to the literary merits of the works.