There are five thousand children running around the streets of Montreal who never enter a school. It is now proposed that compulsory education shall be enforced in the great centre of mercantile life, and certainly the principle is necessary. These children are to be our future leaders, and they ought to know something. Toronto Mail, […]
Tag: Literacy
More papers than people in 1836
Almost 430,000 copies of newspapers were circulated in Upper Canada in 1836 among a population of 370,000, of whom it was claimed perhaps one in 50 could read, according to Anna Brownell Jameson in her celebrated travel book, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Despite their shortcomings, Jameson found the Upper Canada newspapers […]
Teach Scots to read their Bibles
Instead of sending missionaries to spread the Christian gospel throughout the endless forests of Canada, a better and cheaper way would be to teach the illiterate highlanders who are leaving Scotland in the tens of thousands to read the Bible, a Reverend Mr. Mcleod tells the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. […]
Need teachers who can read and write
Nova Scotia needs “a general system of education,” financed by direct taxation, with teachers who are better than half-educated “lazy vagabonds,” George Young writes in the Halifax Novascotian. As elsewhere in British North America in the early 19th century, most Nova Scotians were illiterate, and relatively few children attended the only elementary schools, offered by […]