History 3510
Tracy Penny Light
Sept 24,2017
Kaylee Billyboy
T00558089
Week 3 Analysis
Throughout time attending school on a regular basis has just become a normal thing to do as it is required for all children to do so. Why is this? It has been looked at in detail in by authors. In articles like “Motherhood and Public Schooling in Victorian Toronto,” “Who Went to School?” and “The Boys in the Nova Scotian Coal Mines: 1873-1923,” it shows the many reasons why things have changed with education and how it became important for children to attend class.
For instance, in McIntosh’s article “The Boys in the Nova Scotian Coal Mines: 1873-1923,” he explains how long ago children didn’t go to school. In fact, children actually went to work instead, this was because they were helpful in places like coal mines. Their size and flexibility was what was admired about them and they could also be paid less to work. children accepted this so they could help out with their family. Today this seem very wrong as children should not be put in dangerous places like a mine and shouldn’t be working their life away at such a young age. But then they didn’t know any different. But as time went on work began to almost take advantage of the children and they started to act out to hopefully get what they wanted. This didn’t always work. Some of them were thankful when the Free School Act came into place as this allowed them to get away from the working. Some families were dependent on their child’s income so many continued to work, as they felt school wasn’t of any use to them. This affected many companies as they lost many low wage workers and had to hire higher wage people. When schools first became big it had many positives and negatives depending on who you were.
With school not being a priority it made it so school attendance was very irregular and those associated with education want to enforce attendance. In Clubine’s article it shows how the attendance enforcement affected the families. For instance, children were simply not going because they had to help at home or they had to work. when children got caught not at school they go in trouble and the parents did too. Many simply said it was because they family wouldn’t be able to survive with them gone. With going to school it was to maintain social status, so many families tried to make changes in order to send their kids as it made them looks like good parents. With this it made it so more children attended school.
Over the years’ regular attendance numbers have changed drastically. There are many reasons to this as many recorded in history were mentioned in Katz’s article “Who Went to School”. Whether it be class, gender, race or religion everyone had their own reasoning. But they soon had to put those reasons behind them and make attending school a priority. Once this was done almost everyone attended school and shortly every child attended school regularly like it is done today.
With what was said I do understand why school wasn’t a priority then, but I also do see that it is a priory now. I do feel that children should have to attend school as a law, because without education now many people can’t do much and it is good training for the children at young ages. All of these article made good arguments about why school systems have changed and it goes to show that that change is very important. The only thing that I question is why isn’t there more documentation about those who attended school at first and why those others didn’t. Also it doesn’t say if first nations attended any of those schools and why it wasn’t a problem they weren’t going to school until residential schools? These are not answered but should be as the articles seem to lack a bit of precise information that is critical to my thinking. I feel like there could be more in-depth studies on this of a better understanding.
Bibliography
Clubine, Christopher, “Motherhood and Public Schooling in Victorian Toronto,” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 115-126.
Katz, Michael B. “Who Went to School?”.” History of Education Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1972), 432. doi:10.2307/367521.
McIntosh, Robert. “The Boys in the Nova Scotian Coal Mines: 1873-1923,” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 126-139.