Taught to the Tune of the Hickory Stick

“There was certainly more structure to the day,” Marie-France Giasson, principal of Winnipeg’s Ecole LaVérendrye, observes, leafing through an eighty-five-year-old teacher’s guide that has children disciplined down to the nubs of their clean little fingernails. More structure to the day, more structure to the room: In a novel experiment in education, Ecole LaVérendrye, built in 1909 in the then-burgeoning Fort Rouge district, has reconstructed a turn-of-the-(last)-century classroom, furnishing it – like a period movie set – with all the trappings of a time when nurturing self-esteem was not a formal part of the curriculum. The desks (with inkwells) are bolted to the plank floor, the blackboards are slate, the lighting is antique, the walls are chalk white, and all things bow to the front of the room where the teacher’s desk rises like a bench of judgement under a portrait of His Majesty King Edward VII . The only bits missing are a rectitudinal schoolmarm and a passel of restless ten, eleven, and twelve-year olds. These will soon arrive, however. No mere exercise in extreme retro design, this period classroom has a pedagogical point: This winter, grades four to six girls will put on pinafores and the ribbons in their hair, boys will wear knickers and suspenders, and they will spend the morning readin’, writin’, and doing ‘rithmetic in the style of their great-or great-great-grandparents while absorbing the social history of their school and community in the early twentieth century.

The brainchild of Ecole LaVérendrye teacher Jerry Lemay, who leapt on the chance to acquire period school furniture from a defunct Manitoba museum, the classroom has attracted the attention of heritage societies and local businesses who have donated labour and artefacts to the project. Notable are the shelves full of schoolbooks of yore, some of which reveal period attitudes as well as period detail. (Careful vetting will screen them from impressionable minds.) On the other hand, as Giasson points out, while teaching strategies may have changed over the many decades, subject matter is often unchanged. What advances have there been, for example, in 2 + 2 = 4?

            The strategy is eventually to make the heritage classroom available to other schools that seek to give their students an old-new twist on learning. If so, they might consider arriving in the preferred pre-World War 1 mode –horse-and-buggy. The teacher’s guide of the day advised not to penalize students if they arrived late in such a conveyance – a nod perhaps to the potential for disorder in an orderly time.

Reprinted with permission. The Beaver. December 2004/January 2005