The Book of the West: The story of western Canada, its birth and early adventures, its youthful combats, its peaceful settlement, its great transformation, and its present waysKennedy, Howard Angus
History
The Book of the West: The story of western Canada, its birth and early adventures, its youthful combats, its peaceful settlement, its great transformation, and its present ways
Kennedy, Howard Angus
Northwest, Canadian
Look at this little schoolhouse, where a young teacher is playing with
the boys and girls. It is in their free hours out of school, quite as
much as in their “lessons,” that they learn our spirit and our ways as
well as our speech. This young woman has such tact and sympathy and
sense that the parents love her, as the children do, and come to her for
information and advice on all sorts of subjects quite apart from school
work. But she is absolutely alone; to every one else in this district
English is a foreign tongue; our Canadian spirit and ideals are
unfamiliar.
Lectures are valuable, when they are listened to and understood; books
and papers, if they are read, and read with ease. But living interest,
personal friendship and sympathetic insight, have ten times the
attracting and stimulating force of all other influences put together.
Without the power of winning affection by giving it, the strongest
intellect is feeble at a task like this—to make the “New Canadian” not
only at home in our country but at home with ourselves; to make him one
of us. It is not paternalism that will do this, but fraternalism.
We must back up those solitary teachers, and, doing that, we shall back
up those New Canadians themselves who are already keen to see their
whole people on the highest level the best of us have reached. We cannot
wish them to adopt our faults when they adopt our language. We have
something to learn from them, as well as they from us.
It is not unnatural uniformity we want. If we got it we should not like
it; and we are better without it. The highest music is not unison, but
harmony, in which our varied voices play their natural parts. Unity is
our aim, not monotony.
We must penetrate the remotest settlement, the densest mass, with the
national spirit of Canada—the spirit and sentiment that knit us
together, the ideals that shame us instinctively when we are unworthy of
them. But only when inspired ourselves by such ideals can we inspire
others with them.
Whether by casual neighborly intercourse, by travelling among them as an
unassuming friend, by large and carefully thought-out systems of
intensive education, or by establishing among them little community
settlement houses in which the teachers of several districts and others
who see the need and the opportunity would live together—or by all
these means and any others which good-will and good sense united can
devise—this aim can and must be achieved.
Achieving this, we shall have laid the sure foundation of a splendid
future for our country, every diverse element joining, in mutual
appreciation and respect, to form one great harmonious community.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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