Review of With Unshakeable Persistence: Rural Teachers of the Depression Era By Elizabeth McLachlan

• Main Author: Carney, Robert J.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 2001
• Subjects: Other International and Area Studies; Northwest Territories
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2267; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsquarterly/article/3267/viewcontent/BR_Carney.pdf

In 1905 the Canadian government separated several districts from the Northwest Territories to establish the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Both provinces continued the centralized education system of the Territories. The newly-formed Departments of Education were expected to provide schooling in the recently settled agricultural areas, but were often unable to persuade parents to erect school districts. In 1910 the situation was bleak; Alberta and Saskatchewan had the lowest school age enrollment figures in the country. Over the next twenty years, both departments accelerated the establishment of school districts administered by locally elected trustees and funded by local property taxes and small government grants. In rural locations this usually meant a one-room school of six to eight grades serving a four-square-mile area. In 1935 Alberta had 3,800 such districts; while not all were active, most operated single-room, multi-grade, one-teacher schools. Elizabeth McLachlan's With Unshakeable Persistence contains the recollections of two men and five women who taught in one-room schools in Alberta and Saskatchewan during the Great Depression. The recollections of another forty teachers are drawn upon in discussions of the teachers' role, their accommodation, social life, and the schools themselves. The reader is also reminded of the devastating effects the 1930s Depression and natural disasters had on prairie life which led to many farm abandonments and a dwindling number of schools. One result of these conditions was a surplus of teachers, including many recent normal school graduates with first-class teaching certificates. One-room school job notices prompted hundreds of applications. As a McLachlan interviewee put it, "My teaching career began in 1931. That was the year when teachers were a dime a dozen." School trustees negotiated salaries well below the average annual wage of $1,076 in Saskatchewan and $1,055 in Alberta at the beginning of the Depression. For example, a teacher's salary was $90 a ...