The concept of continuing education must have originated on the farm. When I was a boy I noticed how men with only a grade school education never missed a soil and crop meeting and their wives trotted off on the same night to a horticulture or an Institute meeting.
“All book learning and no common sense,” might have been their common complaint about me, but I never doubted that they respected curiosity about the world and the value of a good education.
Southern Ontario was settled by the most literate population in any nation’s history. As soon as the log shanties were pulled down in favour of brick farmhouses, the women of the house insisted on a parlour with an upright piano and bookshelves. My own public school education began at SS# 17, the two-room school on the hill outside the village of Rosemont in the 1950s. Lessons followed the rhythm of the seasons and absence was always excused by the demands of the farm. The school may have been weak on the academic front but it left me with vivid memories and a profound sense of place.
Our teacher, Mrs. Raeburn was approaching retirement and wore a set of Coke bottle-bottom glasses that made her look like Mr. Magoo. Every time she opened her mouth another one of my mother's sacred rules of grammar went up in flames. I remember our first lesson in geography where she pointed out the countries of the British Empire on a faded 1940s era map on the wall. “All the pink parts,” she declared. No one had told her that many of those countries had long since broken the colonial shackles and achieved independence. She announced solemnly that people who lived in hot climates never achieved anything in particular and that's why the British ran the world. "People of the British Empire live together real peaceable," she insisted and then ordered us to parse that sentence.
She loved reading emotional sports stories to us, the book in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. She would weep as she read the story of the injured quarterback who had to follow the team around all season as a lowly water boy but who received the highest award at the football banquet for "playing the man". She would hear no criticism of John Diefenbaker or the Toronto Maple Leafs and railed about socialists and their ‘funny money.’
Mrs. Raeburn believed no-one could read a book properly in less than two weeks and if you selected a book from the shelf at the back of the room, you were stuck with it. Fortunately, she had another rule that you could spend as long as you wanted at the back of the class choosing a book. I read everything from Tom Sawyer to Fang of the North standing up at that bookshelf, which trained me well for later life in book stores.
Academically, the little red schoolhouse of my youth would be judged a flat failure. I have a school photo from 1962 and only two people, me and my brother, went on to university. I know for a fact that three people in my Grade Eight class of seven could not read and write, because I was assigned to tutor them. That put the literacy rate for my class at 60 per cent. Nostalgic visions aside, the three R's didn't really exist in the little red schoolhouse any more than they do today.
What it did best was serve as a collection point for news. Every morning started with Jack Dennet and the nine o’clock news on CFRB. This always led to a conversation about our own fresh disasters, the equivalent of show and tell. A lost dog, a sick cattlebeast, a rabid fox, a burnt barn or a death in the community . . . any bad news took precedence over the day's lesson plans. Rosemont was the sort of neighbourhood where you couldn't help but visit and learn from that visit.
SS # 17 served me by carrying out the old duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance of our community to its youngest citizens. Since that time, I have come to believe that all education should be tied to the land under our feet. It should be learned and used in a place where one intends to live and call home.
- Dan Needles