B. Allan Quigley

This is one of literacy’s most remarkable stories—a Canadian literacy success story that begins with Reverend Alfred Fitzpatrick.

Alfred Fitzpatrick was born in the farming community of Millsville, Pictou County, Nova Scotia. He was the second youngest of 12 children (Morrison, 1989) and grew up knowing that one brother, Lee, had worked and died in the Redwood lumber camps of California. Another of his older brothers, Isaac, had left for the same Redwood forests to work but they had not heard from him since. After graduating with a degree in theology to become a Presbyterian minister, Fitzpatrick decided to visit and serve in the same Redwood forest lumber camps. He wanted to search for one lost brother and find the gravesite of the other, but it was “in the towering forests of California that Fitzpatrick was to define his life work” (Morrison, p. 5; Quigley, 2007).

According to oral history, Fitzpatrick was working as a minister in a lumber camp when he accidentally met his long-lost brother, Isaac. True or not, the story goes that Alfred offered Isaac a ride in his wagon. Alfred immediately recognized his older brother and it was during this drive Isaac learned he was reunited with the little brother whom he thought was some 4,000 miles away (Morrison, p. 6). As they talked, Alfred learned about the brutal work men were required to do in the lumber camps. As Morrison states, “Their working conditions were appalling, their living conditions primitive” (p. 7). With no unions, no charitable church support, no governmental agencies to turn to and few medical facilities, workers were beasts of burden who often died through accidents on the job. Alfred decided “to devote his life to those who laboured on the frontier” (Morrison, p. 6).

Many of the forgotten thousands were immigrants. They laboured in mines and lumber camps, and worked on the railways across the nation. And, like so many of our literacy founders, Fitzpatrick was driven by a spiritual desire to help. For him it was the prevailing Social Gospel reform movement that moved him to believe knowledge was “the God-given right of every person, not the exclusive privilege of the favoured few” (Morrison, p. 8).

Fitzpatrick’s Model Takes Literacy to Learners

He headed to a lumber camp near Nairn Centre in Northern Ontario in 1899 and set up his first Reading Camp in October 1900 (Quigley, 2006). Other young university graduates followed and started 24 reading rooms in log structures or canvas tents in various locations throughout that northern region. These graduates were supported by church donations, as well as private, commercial, and some governmental finances but they were then—as they are now—volunteer workers.

At first, the volunteers stayed in the camp until the men came back after work, but soon this model changed and the “labourer-teachers” worked shoulder-to-shoulder with miners, railway workers, or those working in the lumber mills. Then, in the evening, completely exhausted and hurting from hard labour, avoiding the hordes of mosquitoes, the volunteers set up a reading tent or pulled open the door of an empty boxcar. With portable or improvised blackboards and the few books they had, they taught basic literacy skills to their fellow workers.

This model has changed little since 1899. Labourer-teachers still work for the same wages as their co-workers and they still teach literacy in the evenings, or whenever and wherever there is space and time for learning.

With thousands of immigrants entering Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, Fitzpatrick’s approach caught the eye of the Canadian government. Impressed with his efforts, the Canadian government supported them through citizenship education sponsorship. By 1920, the labourer-teacher ranks had grown to 46 men and 3 women. Fitzpatrick personally wrote the Handbook for New Canadians in 1919 so “Each instructor [could be] sent to the frontier grasping a volume to promote Canadianism” (Morrison, p. 13). Translations of 700 words of Italian, French, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish into English were added to “materials on Canada’s history and government, naturalization, and basic English language structure” (Morrison, p. 13).

By 1920, some 100,000 workmen had been taught by over 500 labourer-teachers. However success sometimes leads to conflict in literacy.

Success as Threat

Like all of our heroes and heroines, Fitzpatrick met with great success and, also, great disappointment. In his case, it was a clash with the school educational systems. Fitzpatrick had received degree-granting authority for Frontier College from the federal government in 1919 but that charter would never be fulfilled. Many of the universities, colleges, and provincial government departments of education across Canada would not accept the idea of a “national college.” In Canada, education is a provincial responsibility. A “national college” with a national jurisdiction would interfere with provincial post-secondary control. All kinds of questions and objections were raised. Despite every effort, despite his 1919 charter, despite the support of scholars across the nation, “little or no financial support was forthcoming from government” (Morrison, p. 15). Alfred Fitzpatrick died along with his dream of a degree-granting institution in 1925.

Cultural Imperialism and Literacy for What Purpose?

Edwin Bradwin took on the role as the second president of Frontier College. He encouraged Frontier College to do what it had always done best--place labourer-teachers throughout the frontiers of Canada as volunteers in a non-credit undertaking. Today, labourer-teachers work alongside migrant workers on farms and in market gardens. Frontier College is now also reaching new frontiers among the physically and mentally challenged in literacy, building learning partnerships with Canada’s First Nations Peoples, teaching prison literacy, and promoting reading with young people.

Fitzpatrick has stated, “Wherever and whenever [people] have occasion to gather, then and there shall be the time, place and means of their education” (cited in O’Leary, 1999, p. v). However, recent researchers have questioned how truly inclusive Frontier College was in its earliest days. The absence of work with, for instance, First Nations and women in the early years has been noted. Moreover, researchers such as Pierre Walter (2003) have questioned the extent to which Frontier College was “educating for Canadian conformity.” He argues this was the grand project of Anglo-Canadian nation building in the Victorian tradition of nineteenth century imperialism. Frontier College’s strong focus on Canadian conduct and values in the citizenship teaching materials parallels much of the Americanization movement seen south of the border at that time (Quigley, 1997), which has been criticized on the same grounds (Quigley, 2006).

Interestingly, according to Walter (personal communication, 2006), there has been a shift from social gospel purpose to a social justice orientation in Frontier College’s work. The turn has been from an individualistic, citizenship education approach to working with learners, hearing their voice, and, at times, advocating for learners in the face of injustice.

The lesson here echoes back to the very term “literacy” coming from the Latin word, litteratus. Under the Roman Empire in the first century AD, to be a litteratus meant you could read and write in Latin. No other language mattered. Latin was the “vehicle of Christendom and all learning” (Fischer, 2003, p. 149).

Literacy has never been “value neutral.” Throughout our history, religious, social and, today, economic purposes have formed the basis of much of the literacy content and sponsorship purpose. Learner voice in literacy is a recent chapter in the long history of our field.

If we can learn one thing from our history, it is to begin to ask: “Literacy for what purpose, as decided by whom, and for whose benefit?” One can also ask: “What is the purpose of my program now?” “What was it when it first began?” “What model would be best if we are to be truly authentic, effective, literacy educators into the 21st century?”

Note: Permission to use portions of "Building Professional Pride in Literacy" (2006) by A. Quigley has been granted by Krieger Publishing; an earlier version of these vignettes appeared in the Literacies journal in 2007.

Sources

Fischer, S. R. (2003). A history of reading. London: Reaktion Books.

O’Leary, J. D. (1999). “Creating a Love of Reading.” Retrieved July 30,
2008, from
http://literacy.sa.utoronto.ca/resources/CreateLoveReading.html.

Morrison, J. H. (1989). Camps & classrooms: A pictorial history of Frontier College. Toronto: The Frontier College Press.

Walter, P. (2003). Literacy, Imagined Nations, and Imperialism: Frontier College and the Construction of British Canada, 1899-1933. Adult Education Quarterly (54), 42-58.

Quigley, B. A. (1997). Rethinking adult education: The critical need for practice-based change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Quigley, A. (2007). Literacy’s Heroes and Heroines: Reclaiming our forgotten past. Literacies, 7, 4-11.