No keeping one’s haunches still: it’s the greatest pleasure in life.”
It may, we think, be legitimately questioned whether either the study in our secondary schools of a one-sided presentation of the facts of history or the interpretation of poems which ridicule the tenets and ceremonies of any Church conduces to that breadth of scholarship and culture and to the upbuilding of that large-minded Canadian citizenship which we all so heartily desire in our land.
Is it not on the plea that these higher institutions of learning—High Schools and Normal Schools—are broad and just and free from prejudice in their teaching that the Roman Catholic Separate School System has been persistently denied by successive Governments in this Province the right to develop beyond an elementary status, though this right is manifestly inherent or implied in the very pact which made provision for the establishment of Separate Schools for the minorities in the Provinces of Quebec and Ontario. The Government of Quebec has recognized the right; the Government of Ontario refuses to do so.
Now a word as to certain conditions educational which prevail in Ontario and which have not only led to abuses but are contributing factors to the degradation of scholarship as well as to the debasement of the teaching profession.
And first of these is the system of creating “specialists”—a system or method which has not scholarship as its basis. Why should a university graduate whose average is sixty-six per cent. in his examinations be regarded as having the academic standing for a specialist, while the graduate whose average is sixty per cent., though he may have pursued post-graduate work for two or three years, is refused this standing? How large a part does not mere memory play in examination percentages? If specialism were based upon the post-graduate work of one, two or three years it would have some meaning or value, but as it exists to-day in Ontario it is largely a sham.
Then as regards the professional qualifications of a specialist, are they not almost wholly based upon the opinion of an examiner or inspector? Now this opinion may be worth a good deal; it may be worth very little; it may be worth nothing. As a matter of fact the High School inspectors of a few years ago often differed as widely as the poles in their estimate or rating of the High School teachers of this Province, and the High School inspectors of to-day are rating teachers high who had been marked low by the former inspectors.
And what shall be said of educational officials who, lacking a fine sense of duty, dignity and honor, have been playing the part of educational Warwicks in the Province, crowning and uncrowning, making and unmaking teachers, now in one part of Ontario, now in another? We endeavor to keep education out of politics, while gross partisanship is doing its work.
With such conditions educational in our Province, need we wonder that during the past year an inspector refused to permit a French-Canadian girl who held a Normal School Entrance and Normal School Professional Certificate to teach in a school where three-fourths of the children are of French-Canadian origin? Either the Normal School staff, in granting that French-Canadian girl a certificate to teach, did not know what they were doing, or the inspector exceeded his authority. Look at it as you will, the matter is discreditable.
For how, we ask, may the teacher be expected to grow and reach out towards higher things if he be not permitted to enjoy the very first conditions of growth—the right to develop and advance by virtue of his own gifts and toil? Who stands between the lawyer and the acceptance of his brief? Who stands between the physician and the diagnosis of his case? We speak of the dignity of scholarship and the dignity of the teaching profession, but if the law of development be thwarted and its attendant right to advancement be denied, degradation, not dignity, would be the fitting term.