Our city has been buzzing with activity since school started
up again just a couple of weeks ago. The back to school season is something
that has caused excited for citizens of Brandon of all ages, from young
children to university students to parents, for many decades. In this blog I’d like to focus on what the
experience of the back to school season would have been like in the earliest
days of Brandon. It’s amazing how
similar the school experience today is to that of a completely different era.
The
founding of Brandon as a city coincided with a larger movement throughout the
Victorian world towards standardized public education instead of taking lessons
in the home or simply passing down skills generation to generation. Of course, this change did not happen all at
once. The Chautaugua Art Desk pictured
here, donated to the Daly House Museum by Mary Lovatt, was a medium through
which children did lessons at home; they would simply scroll down to see
lessons and copy each lesson onto a chalk slate. Practises like this persisted into the early
20th century.
The
first public school in Brandon, the Old Central School, opened the same year
the city was founded, in 1882. At that time, there were only six classrooms
and four teachers to educate the young people of Brandon’s growing population. However, it was still acceptable during the
first decades of compulsory public school for children to miss school due to
family agricultural labour needs, which kept class sizes down significantly. The number of children attending school in
Brandon gradually increased over the next couple of decades, as did the number
of schools in the city. In 1889 five
hundred children were attending public school in Brandon, and by 1901 that number
had increased to a thousand.
In 1890
a significant change was made to the public schools of Manitoba with the
passing of the Manitoba Schools Act in legislature. This act, now infamous in Manitoba history,
led to the secularization and Anglicization of all public schools in
Manitoba. From that point on, Catholic
and French schools had to be privately run and funded. The material taught in Manitoba schools became
increasingly pro-English. Schools were
designed to make children into good citizens of the Dominion of Canada.
Prairie
schools would have specific standardized textbooks designed to emphasize the
lifestyles of most of the students. For
example, the textbook for spelling, The
Canadian Speller, had a special edition for Prairie Provinces which
included a large number of farming and agricultural words, due to the rural
background of many students. Topics in western editions of The Canadian Readers, a series of books designed to improve
students’ ability to read, include farms, nature, and winter as well as a
series of traditional British fairytales.
Thus, the culture preferred by the schools and government was subtly
imposed upon students. At the beginning
of each Canadian Readers book is a
poem called, “The Dominion Hymn of Canada”, which expresses pride in Canada as
well as the wider British Empire.
The
combination of British and Canadian content is a common theme throughout all
standardized school textbooks written and published during this era. For example, the Manitoba School Song Book published in 1940, which aims to put forth
a collection of “song literature appropriate for use in school classes”,
combines protestant hymns, songs about Canada, and Scottish and English folk
songs. While other countries are briefly
touched upon, the emphasis is put on traditional British culture.
A more
extreme example can be found in the The Manitoba
Readers books, which were provincial versions of The Canadian Readers. In one
edition of The Manitoba Readers, poems
which are studied include “Canadian Timber”, “Canadian Boat Song”, and “England,
My England”. It’s hard to imagine poems
which proclaim the glories of England being part of a core school curriculum
today. Even Canadian content isn’t as
common as it used to be. Of course, the
large amount of Canadian content from this era was likely included as an
attempt to boost national pride in a nation that was only in its earliest
stages of development and identity.
The
types of lessons taught throughout the day would not be that different from the
ones found in a public elementary school today.
Standardized science textbooks, such as this Botany one, were used for
each grade. The content of the courses,
however, was slightly different. Basic
Darwinian principals such as “survival of the fittest” would be included along
with various diagrams and explanations of plant life.
Music
and sports were also important parts of the school experience right from the
beginning. This Christie’s catalogue
from the early 20th century sells a variety of musical instruments and
sporting equipment along with regular school supplies such as pens, paper,
binders, and markers that are required for students today. The school experience that we are so familiar
with today clearly was developing by the end of the Victorian era.
Overall,
the day to day procedures and classroom experiences of school were very similar
in the Victorian era to what they are today. However, the content of the individual classes
as well as the underlying purposes of public education were significantly
different.
