Read CHAPTER XV - PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION of A Labrador Doctor, free online book, by Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, on ReadCentral.com.

Every child should be washed. Every child should be educated. The only question is how to get there. The “why’s” of life interest chiefly the academic mind. The “how’s” interest every one. It is a pleasure sometimes to be out in dirty weather on a lee shore; it permits you to devote all your energies to accomplishing something. When secretary for our hospital rowing club on the Thames, a fine cup was given for competition by Sir Frederick Treves on terms symbolic of his attitude to life. The race was to be in ordinary punts with a coxswain “in order that every ounce of energy should be devoted to the progress of the boat.”

That is the whole trouble with the Newfoundland Labrador. All moneys granted for education are handed to the churches for sectarian schools. It is almost writing ourselves down as still living in the Middle Ages, when the Clergy had a monopoly of polite learning. In more densely populated countries this division of grants need not be so disastrous. Here it means that one often finds a Roman Catholic, a Church of England, a Methodist, and a Salvation Army school, all in one little village and no school whatever in the adjoining place.

The denominational spirit, fostered by these sectarian schools and societies, is so emphasized that Catholic and Protestant have little in common. Some preferred to let their children or themselves suffer pain and inefficiency, rather than come for relief to a hospital where the doctors were Protestant. This has in some measure passed away, but it was painfully real at first so much so that once a rickety, crippled child, easily cured, though he actually came to the harbour, was forbidden to land and returned home to be a cripple for life.

The salaries available offer no attraction to enter the teaching profession in this island; and there is no compulsory education law to assist those who with lofty motives remain loyal to the profession when “better chances” come along. Gauged rightly, there is no such thing as a better chance for fulfilling life’s purposes than an education; and modern conditions concede the right of a decent living wage to all who render service to the world in whatever line.

In the little village where are our headquarters there was already a Church of England and a Methodist school when we came there, and a Salvation Army one has since been added. Threats of still another “institution of learning” menaced us at one time almost like a new Egyptian plague, with more permanency of results thrown in.

If the motor power of the school boat is dissipated in sectarian religious education, not to say focussed on it, the arrival of the cargo must be seriously handicapped. The statistical returns may show a majority of our fishermen as “able to read and write”; but as a matter of fact the illiteracy and ignorance of North Newfoundland and Labrador is the greatest handicap in the lives of the people.

My first scholar came from North Labrador, long before we aspired to a school of our own. He was a lad of Scotch extraction and name, and came aboard the hospital ship one night, as she lay at anchor among some northern islands, with the request that we would take him up with us to some place where he could get an hour’s schooling a day. He offered to work all the rest of the time in return for his food and clothing. To-day he holds a Pratt certificate, is head of our machine shop, has a sheet-metal working factory of his own which fills a most valuable purpose on the shore, is general consultant for the coast in matters of engineering, as well as being the Government surveyor for his district. He is also chief musician for the church, having fitted himself for both those latter posts in his “spare time.” The inspiration which his life has been is in itself an education to many of us a reflex result which is the really highest value of all life.

As each transferred individual has come back North for service, desire has at once manifested itself for similar privileges in young people who had not previously shown even interest enough to attend our winter night schools. This is the best evidence that inroads are being made into that natural apathy which is content with mediocrity or even inferiority. This is everywhere the world’s most subtle enemy. Even if selfishness or envy has been the motive, the fact remains that they have often kindled that discontent with the past which Charles Kingsley preached as necessary to all progress. Nowhere could the pathology of the matter be more easily traced than in these concrete examples carrying the infection which could come from no other quarter into our isolation. It has been in very humble life an example of the return of the “Yankee to the Court of King Arthur.”

There was a time when Lord Haldane proposed that every English child, who in the Board schools had proved his ability to profit by it, should be given a college or university education at the expense of the State as a remunerative outlay for the nation. This proposal was turned down as being too costly, though the expenditure for a single day’s running of this war would have gone a long way to provide such a fund. We now know that it can be done and must be done as a sign manual of real freedom, which is not the leaving of parents or forbears, incompetent for any reason, free to damn their country with a stream of stunted intellects.

America has already honoured herself forever by being a pioneer in this movement for the higher education of the people. Religion surely need not fear mental enlightenment. The dangers of life lie in ignorance, and after all is not true religion a thing of the intellect as well as of the heart? Can that really be inculcated in “two periods of forty minutes each week devoted to sectarian teaching,” which was one of the concessions demanded of us in our fight for a free public or common school at St. Anthony? My own mental picture of myself at the age of seven sitting on a bench for forty minutes twice every week learning to be “religious” made me sympathize with Scrooge when the Ghost of the Past was paying him a visit.

One thing was certain. The young lives entrusted to us were having as good medical care for their bodies as we could provide; and if we could compass it, we were going to have that paralleled for their minds. The parents of the village children could do as they liked with those committed to them and they did it. There is nothing so thoroughly reactionary that I know of as religious prejudice well ground in. As regards the treatment of physical ailments the prejudices of what Dr. Holmes called “Homoeopathy and Kindred Delusions” always are strong in proportion as they are impregnated with some religious bias.

Our efforts to combine the local schools having failed, we had to provide a building of our own. This we felt must be planned for the future. For some day the halcyon days of peace on earth shall be permitted in our community, and the true loyalty of efficient service to our brothers will, it is to be hoped, become actually the paramount object of our Christian religion. Perhaps this terrible war will have convinced the world that the loftiest aspirations of mankind are no more to save yourself hereafter than here. Is it not as true as ever that if we are not ourselves possessors of Christ’s spirit, ourselves we cannot save?

The only schoolhouse available, anyhow, was not nearly so good a building as that which we have since provided for the accommodation of our pigs! Fat pork is considered an absolute essential “down North”; and it was cheaper and safer, according to Upton Sinclair, to raise pigs than buy the salted or tinned article. So we had instituted what we deemed a missionary enterprise in that line. (Pace our vegetarian friends.)

As soon as a sum of three thousand dollars had been raised, architect friends at the Pratt Institute sent down to us competitive designs, and one of our Labrador boys, who had studied there, erected the building. Having at the beginning no funds whatever for current expenses, we had to look for volunteer teachers. One denomination helped with part of its harbour grant, but the Government would not make any special donation toward the union school project. Even the caput grant, to which we had hoped that we were entitled for our own orphanage children, had by law to go to the denomination to which their parents had belonged. This was not always easy to decide correctly. On the occasion of taking the last census in Labrador, a well-dressed stranger suddenly visited one of our settlements on the east coast. It so happened that a very poor man with a large and growing family of eight children under ten years, who resided there, was not so loyal to his church as we are taught we ought to be. When the stranger entered his tilt a vision of material favours to be obtained was the dominant idea in the fisherman’s mind. He was therefore on tenterhooks all the while that the questioning was going on lest some blunder of his might alienate the sympathy on which he was banking for “getting his share.” At length it came to the momentous point of “What denomination do you belong to?” a very vital matter when it comes to sympathy and sharing up. In some hesitation he gazed at the row of his eight unwashed and but half-clad offspring, whose treacly faces gaped open-mouthed at the visitor. Then with sudden inspiration he decided to play for safety, and replied, “Half of them is Church of England, and half is Methodist!”

Being an unrecognized school, and so far off, some years went by before the innovation of bringing up scholars from our northern district entered our heads. We realized at length, however, that we should close one channel of criticism to the enemy if we proved that we could justify our school by their standard of annual examinations. Our teachers, being mostly volunteers, had to come from outside the Colony. Having no funds to purchase books and other supplies, we made use of books also sent us from outside. The real value of the local examination becomes questionable as a standard of success when far more highly educated teachers, and at least as cleverly laid-out study books, prevented the children in our school from passing them.

Moreover, further to waken their faculties, we had included in our facilities a large upper hall of the school building and a library of some thousands of books collected from all quarters. The former afforded the stimulus which entertainments given by the children could carry, and also space for physical drill; the latter, that greatest incentive of all, access to books which lure people to wish to read them. In summer the parents and older children are busy with the fisheries day and night, and the little children run more or less wild, so this form of occupation was doubly desirable.

The generous help of summer volunteers, especially a trained kindergartner, Miss Olive Lesley, gave us a regular summer school. All the expensive outfit needed was also donated. Eye and hand were enlisted in the service of brain evolution; while a piano, which it is true had seen better days, pressed the ear and the imagination into the service as well.

One of the great gaps in child development in Labrador had been the almost entire lack of games. The very first year of our coming the absence of dolls had so impressed itself upon us that the second season we had brought out a trunkful. Even then we found later that the dolls were perched high up on the walls as ornaments, just out of reach of the children. In one little house I found a lad playing with some marbles. For lack of better these were three-quarter-inch bullets which “Dad had given him,” while the alley was a full-inch round ball, which belonged to what my host was pleased to call “the little darlint” a hoary blunderbuss over six feet in length. The skipper informed me that he had plenty of “fresh” for the winter, largely as a result of the successful efforts of the “darlint”; though it appeared to have exploded with the same fatal effect this year as the season previous. “I hear that you made a good shot, the other day, Uncle Joe,” I remarked. “Nothing to speak on,” he answered. “I only got forty-three, though I think there was a few more if I could have found them on the ice.”

The pathos of the lack of toys and games appealed especially to the Anglo-Saxon, who believes that if he has any advantage over competitors, it is not merely in racial attributes, but in the reaction of those attributes which develop in him the ineradicable love of athletics and sport. The fact that he dubs the classmate whom he admires most “a good sport,” shows that he thinks so, anyway.

So organized play was carefully introduced on the coast. It caught like wildfire among the children, and it was delightful to see groups of them naively memorizing by the roadside school lessons in the form of “Ring-of-Roses,” “Looby-Loo,” “All on the Train for Boston.” To our dismay in the minds of the local people the very success of this effort gave further evidence of our incompetence.

Our people have well-defined, though often singular, ideas as to what Almighty God does and does not allow; and among the pursuits which are irrevocably condemned by local oracles is dancing. The laxity of “foreigners” on this article of the Creed is proverbial. At the time there were two ministers in the place, and realizing that the people considered that our kindergarten was introducing the thin edge of the wedge, and that our whole effort might meet with disaster unless the rumours were checked, I went in search of them without delay. Three o’clock found us knocking at the kindergarten door. The teacher and source of the reputed scandal seemed in no way disconcerted by the visitation. The first game was irreproachable every child was sitting on the floor. But next the children, were choosing partners, and though the boys had chosen boys, and the girls girls, the suspicions of the vigilance committee were aroused. No danger, however, to the three R’s transpired, and we were next successfully piloted clear of condemnation through a game entitled “Piggie-wig and Piggie-wee.” Our circulation was just beginning to operate once more in its normal fashion when we were told that the whole company would now “join hands and move around in a circle” to music. The entire jury sensed that the crucial moment had come. We saw boys and girls alternating, hand held in hand and all to the undeniably secular libretto of “Looby-Loo.” It was, moreover, noted with inward pain that many of the little feet actually left the ground. We adjourned to an adjacent fish stage to discuss the matter. I need not dilate on the vicissitudes of the session. It was clear that all but “Looby-Loo” could obviously be excluded from the group of “questionables” but the last game was of a different calibre and must be put to vote. My readers will be relieved to learn that the resultant ballot was unanimously in favour of non-interference, and that from the pulpit the following Sunday the clergy gave to the kindergarten the official sanction of the Church.

Other outsiders now began telling the people that we could not pass the Colony’s examinations because we wasted our efforts on teaching “foolishness”; and the denomination which had hitherto lent us aid withdrew it, and tried again to run a midget sectarian school right alongside. The first occasion, however, on which this institution came seriously to my attention was when the minister and another young man came to call during the early weeks of our winter school session. The stranger was their special teacher. He was undoubtedly a smart lad; he had passed the preliminary examination. But he was only sixteen, and in temperament a very young sixteen at that. He was engaged at a more generous salary than usual, and was perfectly prepared to revolutionize our records. But, alas, not only was their little building practically unfit for habitation, but after a week’s waiting not one single scholar had come to his school. The contrast between the two opportunities was too great except for frothing criticism. Gladly, to help our neighbours out of a difficulty, we divided a big classroom into two parts, added a third teacher to our school, and were thus able to make an intermediate grade.

The great majority of the whole reconstruction and work of the school was made possible by the generous and loving interest of a lady in Chicago. Added to the other anxieties of meeting our annual budget, we did not feel able to bear the additional burden for which this venture called. One cannot work at one’s best at any time with an anxious mind. The lady, however, was generous enough to give sufficient endowment to secure two teachers among other things, though she absolutely refused to let even her name be known in connection with the school. Our consolation is that we know that she has vision enough to realize the value of her gift and to accept that as a more than sufficient return.

Seeing that some of our older scholars were able to find really useful and remunerative employment in teaching, and as only for those who held certificates of having passed the local examinations were augmentation grants available, we decided to make special efforts to have our scholars pass by the local standards. We, therefore, thanks to the endowment, engaged teachers trained in the country, and instituted the curriculum of the Colony. These teachers told us that our school was better than almost any outside St. John’s. Four scholars have passed this year; and now we have as head mistress a delightful lady who holds the best percentage record for passing children through the requirements of the local examinations of any in the country.

So much more deeply, however, do idle words sink into some natures than even deeds, that one family preferred to keep their children at home to risk sending them to our undenominational school; and there is no law to compel better wisdom with us here in the North.

On the other hand, we had already obtained a scale of our own for grading success. For a number of our most promising boys and girls we had raised the money for them to get outside the country what they could never get in it, namely, the technical training which is so much needed on a coast where we have to do everything for ourselves, and the breadth of view which contact with a more progressive civilization alone can give them. The faculty of Pratt Institute gave us a scholarship, and later two of them; and with no little fear as to their ability to keep up, we sent two young men there. The newness of our school forced us to select at the beginning boys who had only received teaching after their working hours. Both boys and girls have always had to earn something to help them on their way through. But they have stood the test of efficiency so well that we look forward with confidence to the future. A girl who took the Domestic Economy course at the Nasson Institute told me only to-day, “It gave me a new life altogether, Doctor”; and she is making a splendid return in service to her own people here.

The real test of education is its communal effect; and no education is complete which leaves the individual ignorant of the things that concern his larger relationship to his country, any more than he is anything beyond a learned animal if he knows nothing of his opportunities and responsibilities as a son of God. But though example is a more impelling factor than precept, undoubtedly the most permanent contributions conferred on the coast by the many college students, who come as volunteers every summer to help us in the various branches of our work, is just this gift of their own personalities. Strangely enough, quite a number of these helpers who have to spend considerable money coming and returning, just to give us what they can for the sole return of what that means to their own lives, have not been the sons of the wealthy, but those working their way through the colleges. These men are just splendid to hold up as inspirational to our own.

The access to books, as well as to sermons, may not be neglected. Our faculties, like our jaws, atrophy if we do not use them to bite with. The Carnegie libraries have emphasized a fact that is to education and the colleges what social work is to medicine and the hospitals. We were running south some years ago on our long northern trip before a fine leading wind, when suddenly we noticed a small boat with an improvised flag hoisted, standing right out across our bows. Thinking that it was at least some serious surgical case, we at once ordered “Down sail and heave her to,” annoying though it was to have the trouble and delay. When at last she was alongside, a solitary, white-haired old man climbed with much difficulty over our rail. “Good-day. What’s the trouble? We are in a hurry.” The old man most courteously doffed his cap, and stood holding it in his hand. “I wanted to ask you, Doctor,” he said slowly, “if you had any books which you could lend me. We can’t get anything to read here.” An angry reply almost escaped my lips for delaying a steamer for such a purpose. But a strange feeling of humiliation replaced it almost immediately. Which is really charity skilfully to remove his injured leg, if he had one, or to afford him the pleasure and profit of a good book? Both services were just as far from his reach without our help.

“Haven’t you got any books?”

“Yes, Doctor, I’ve got two, but I’ve read them through and through long ago.”

“What kind are they?”

“One is the ‘Works of Josephus,’” he answered, “and the other is ‘Plutarch’s Lives.’”

I thought that I had discovered the first man who could honestly and truthfully say that he would prefer for his own library the “best hundred books,” selected by Mr. Ruskin and Dr. Eliot, without even so much as a sigh for the “ten best sellers.”

He was soon bounding away over the seas in his little craft, the happy possessor of one of our moving libraries, containing some fifty books, ranging from Henty’s stories to discarded tomes from theological libraries.

Each year the hospital ship moves these library boxes one more stage along the coast. As there are some seventy-five of them, they thus last the natural life of books, since we have only rarely enjoyed the help of a trained librarian enabling us to make the most use of these always welcome assets for our work. Later, some librarian friends from Brooklyn, chief among whom was Miss Marion Cutter, came down to help us; but our inability to have continuity when the ladies cannot afford to give their valuable services, has seriously handicapped the efficiency of this branch of the work. This, however, only spells opportunity, and when this war releases the new appreciation of service, we feel confident that somehow we shall be able to fill the gap, and some one will be found to come and help us again to meet this great need.

The cooperation of teachers and librarians more than doubles the capacity of each alone, and we believe sincerely that they do that of doctors, as they unquestionably do that of the clergy. All the world’s workers have infinitely more to gain by cooperation than they often suspect. And indeed we who are apostles of cooperation, as essential for economy in distribution and efficiency in production, realize that groups of workers pulling together always increase by geometrical progression the result obtained.

None of our methods, however, tackled the smallest settlements, hidden away here and there in these fjords, especially those unreached by the mail steamers and devoid of means of transportation. Mahomet just could not come to the mountain, so it had to go to him. A lady and a Doctor of Philosophy, Miss Ethel Gordon Muir, whose life had been spent in teaching, and who would have been excused for discontinuing that function during her long vacations, came down at her own cost and charges to carry the light to one of these lonely settlements. She has with loyal devotion continued to carry on and enlarge that work ever since, till finally she has built up a work that the clergyman of the main section of coast affected, and also the Superintendent of Education, have declared is the most effective branch of our Mission. Her band of teachers are volunteers. They come down to these little hamlets for the duration of their summer vacations. They live with the fishermen in their cottages and gather their pupils daily wherever seems best. Lack of proper accommodation and pioneer conditions throughout in no way deter them. We expected that their criticism would be, “It is not worth while.” That has never been the case. Before the war they came again and again, as a testimony to their belief in the value of the effort. Some have given promising children a chance for a complete education in the States. Indeed, one such lad, taken down some years ago by one of the students, entered Amherst College last year; while several were fighting with the American boys “Over There.”

The only real joy of possession is the power which it confers for a larger life of service. Has it been the reader’s good fortune ever to save a human life? A cousin of mine, an officer in the submarine service of the Royal Engineers, told me a year or two before the war that he was never quite happy because he had spent all his life acquiring special capacities which he never in the least expected to be able to put to practical use. This war has given to him, at least, what possessions could never have offered.

It almost requires the fabulous Jack to overcome the hoary giants of prejudice and custom, or the irrepressible energy of the Gorgon. It has been helpful to remember away “down North” the stand which Archbishop Ireland took for public schools. When the Episcopal clergyman for Labrador, whom we had been influential in bringing out from England, decided to start an undenominational boarding-school on his section of the coast, we began to hope that we might yet live to see our sporadic effort become a policy. Laymen in St. John’s, led by the Rev. Dr. Edgar Jones, a most progressive clergyman, sympathized in dollars, and we were able to back the effort. A splendid volunteer head teacher will arrive in the spring to begin work. The effort still needs much help; but I am persuaded that a chain of undenominational schools can be started that will react on the whole country. Already a scheme for a similar uplift for the west coast is being promulgated.

In a letter written to my wife some years ago I find that my convictions on the subject of education were no less firm than they are to-day. One came to the conclusion that “ignorance is the worst cause of suffering on our coast, and our ‘religion’ is fostering it. True, it has denominational schools, but these are to bolster up special ecclesiastical bodies, and are not half so good as Government schools would be. The ‘goods delivered’ in the schools are not educational in the best sense, and are all too often inefficiently offered. Instead of making the children ambitious to go on learning through life, they make them tired. There is no effort to stimulate the play side; and in our north end of the Colony’s territory there are no trades taught, no new ideas, no manual training it is all so-called ‘arts’ and Creeds.”