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Dependency and Adolescence on the Canadian Frontier: Orillia, Ontario in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Extract
Educational historians have come to accept fully the importance of relating changes in formal schooling to changes in aspects of social structure. Perhaps the most successful recent studies have been those which have analysed the growth of elementary education in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States in terms of the total experience of growing up. Employing developmental theory and concepts of life-cycle, their work suggests that formal education was only one aspect of a series of psychological and behavioural stages through which children and youths passed on their way to adulthood. The nature and pattern of these stages are said to have been determined by family and household characteristics as well as demographic, economic and cultural factors.
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- Copyright © 1977 by New York University
References
Notes
1. Demos, John, Hareven, Tamara and Katz, Michael are prominent among those who emphasize the importance of change over time to the study of children and youth. See Demos', “Developmental Perspectives on the History of Children”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Autumn, 1971); Hareven's, “The Family as Process: The Historical Study of the Family Cycle”, Journal of Social History (Spring, 1974); and Katz', The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), esp. ch. 5.Google Scholar
2. The Canadian Social History Project is funded by and located at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The Orillia data were prepared by Tiller, John.Google Scholar
3. Hunter, A.F., A History of Simcoe County (Toronto, 1909), Vol. 1, pp. 80–111.Google Scholar
4. MacLeod, Douglas, Orilla: A Geographic Study of a Southern Ontario Town. (University of Toronto, unpublished B.A. thesis, 1953), pp. 26–27.Google Scholar
5. MacLeod, , Ibid., p. 4.Google Scholar
6. The occupational categories were devised by Michael Katz for the study of urban Hamilton. The applicability of this format to small town is now being studied by John Tiller and Ian Winchester at the C.S.H.P. Google Scholar
7. Ann Kussmaul of York University in Toronto is studying the role of servants in husbandry during the 18th century in England. She has found that, in a relatively stagnant pre-industrial economy, individuals often found it necessary to spend several years in a subservient position in order to acquire the capital necessary to stock an independent peasant farm. An analogous and perhaps comparable dynamic may have existed in mid-nineteenth-century Ontario despite the impact of economic expansion.Google Scholar
8. An obvious Canadian example of a “provident” individual who made good is Timothy E. Eaton. Starting as a semi-independent cog in Isaac Buchanan's commerical wheel, Eaton survived crises and depressions to become the founder of his own family dynasty. Whether his success on a smaller level was a common experience in nineteenth-century Canada has not yet been established. While Herbert Gutman finds some evidence of group upward mobility in his study of early industrial Paterson, New Jersey, most historians stress that social improvement was not a widespread phenomenon in nineteenth-century North America. In addition to Katz', work on Hamilton, Ontario, other studies – including the work of Stephan Thernstrom – suggest that occupational betterment was an infrequent occurrence; see Gutman, Herbert, “The Reality of the Rags to Riches ‘Myth’: The Case of the Paterson, New Jersey, Locomotive, Iron and Machinery Manufacturers, 1830–1880”, in Thernstrom, Stephan and Sennett, Richard, eds., Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven, 1971); and Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, 1964).Google Scholar
9. See Katz, , “Growing Up in the Nineteenth Century: Relations between Home, Work, School and Marriage, Hamilton, Ontario 1851 and 1861”, in the Canadian Social History Project, Interim Report No. 4.Google Scholar
10. For example, see the April 14, 1871 issue of The Northern Light, one of Orillia's weekly newspapers.Google Scholar
11. In 1873 there was a shoemakers' strike in Orillia but this seems to be connected with the decline in artisanal control of production rather than being a result of an upsurge of working-class consciousness. For a discussion of labour relations during the transition from craft to factory methods of production in this industry, see Kealy, Greg, “Artisans Respond to Industrialism: Shoemakers, Shoe Factories and the Knights of St. Crispin in Toronto”, Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (Toronto, 1973).Google Scholar