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A Country Schoolmaster of Nova Scotia in 1850
The following editorial appeared in a Nova Scotia weekly newspaper, “The Sun” in 1850, the same year the great fire destroyed the small rural school located about ¼ mile north of the intersection where the Kennetcook Dyke school subsequently operated from then to 1963. One wonders how closely this editorial applies to the teachers of that earlier school. It was written five years before the founding in 1855 of the Normal School in Truro, after which the majority of teachers in Nova Scotia were young women.
“A Country Schoolmaster of Nova Scotia!! Poor wretch!"
Look at him with his pale face, wrinkled forehead, bald almost to the crown, --his weak eyes glimmering feebly through his rusty spectacles, -- his nether lip continually hanging down, as if in sympathy with his own misery, -- his bloodless complexion…Poor devil!
Most generous public!...To see the poor debilitated, half starved, over-worked creatures, labouring for eight or nine hours of a sweltering summer’s day within the cooped walls of a log cabin twenty feet square, essaying to penetrate skulls obdurately sealed against instruction, is surely a sight calculated to make every man of feeling and reflection bless his stars that he is not reduced to the necessity of teaching the young idea how to shoot…And then to have an income made up of weekly two pences – to which may be added, if it please the Trustees, some 5 pounds per annum from the Provincial Chest, to be ill-clothed, ill-lodged, and, in the end, die of dyspepsy, be buried and forgotten…
Who that can pack mackerel at two shillings a day…would be a Nova Scotia Schoolmaster?”
The Normal School’s opening did not immediately bring uniform improvement as this quote from the “Morning Journal” of Sept 3, 1856 attests.
“In too many places the rising youth of our country are entrusted to the care of broken down, worthless drunkards, whose sole recommendation is that they are cheap, and seldom get drunk in school hours.”