STATE OF EDUCATION IN UPPER CANADA IN 1847-1849.
From an elaborate report prepared by the Rev. W. H. Landon, School Superintendent, to the Municipal Council of the district of Brock (county of Oxford) in 1849, I make the following extracts. The first refers to the educational supineness of the people:--
"Up to a recent period (say the last two years), the people, generally, seems to have entered upon no enquiries, and to have formed no just conclusion on the subject of education, or the proper means of imparting it. They seemed to think, if they thought at all, that all schools were equal, and that all teachers who could read, write, etc., in a better manner than their pupils were equally good.... As to books, it was supposed that any one, or any ten of the fifty different varieties of spelling books in use, with the English Reader, was all that was requisite for the reading classes, while a few treatises on arithmetic taken at random from the almost endless variety with which the country was flooded, would supply the means of imparting & knowledge of the science of numbers, and two or three grammars by as many different authors, would supply material for the grammar class and complete the stock of text books for the schools."...
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.