End of the line for one-room schools

Sunday, 25 October 2009 05:00

October 25, 1929. It's time for the fondly remembered one-room rural schools to give way to larger consolidated schools, says the Social Service Council of Canada. It also wants school costs levied at the provincial rather than district levels, it says in a column published in the Saint John Telegraph Journal.

"The one-room school, planned by pioneers struggling to discover a means of educating their children, cannot be expected to meet the much more difficult situation confronting the rural life of this day… The consolidated school, with its graded classes and trained experienced teachers, is the most hopeful sign of progress in rural education in this generation."

The consolidated school, says the council, makes the student "a member of a class sufficiently large to create interest and incentive to work." It provides "the inalienable rights of country children… to an education equal in standard to that of the town child, and the right to receive that education without having to leave home." With trained teachers and adequate equipment it is also expected to best fit the student for his life's work.

But the movement to consolidated schools has been slowed by cost. They are said to be "slightly more expensive, and Canadian farmers have been under such economic disabilities during recent years that any new thing that tends to increase taxes is bound to be unpopular."

To solve that problem, the Council advocated "the adoption of the provincial levy for school purposes, in place of the district levy which now prevails. The cost of educating all the children of a province is properly a charge upon all the citizens of that province, but under the present system the cost falls most heavily on those who are least able to bear it."