Excerpt from Onlooker, Vol. 1: A Monthly Review of Current Event Canadian and General, Toronto, July, 1920

The burden Of this score Of articles is not so much how we shall improve our schools as how we shall keep people on the farms. And one may ask himself whether any changes made in the schools will touch the root Of the trouble. A very reasonable letter appeared in The F armers' Sun on May 19, 1920, which discusses the point as follows: What a silly supposition it is to suppose that rural de population has been due to defective rural school training, or to farm boys and girls being drawn away from the farm to the city by attendance at High School or Collegiate in towns and cities! It isn't at all true. More people have left the farms and gone to the cities and towns who never attended High School or Collegiate than there has been Of farm boys and girls who attended High School and Collegiate. The lure Of higher wages and shorter numbers Of hours per day and a soft job for big pay has drawn more farm laborers and farmers' sons and daughters to the city than higher education has.

NO doubt this correspondent is right. It is not the schools that have driven people into the towns, and no changes made in education will keep people in the country unless economic and social conditions therein are made more attractive. Moreover, this state ment would be re-enforced if one took the trouble to enquire what has gone on, and what is still going on, in other parts Of the world in the matter Of the growth Of cities. It is a well-known fact that the same shifting Of population has characterized the United States as Ontario. The same thing is going on, but to a less degree, in the sister Province Of Quebec, where the schools differ from those in Ontario. England, Scotland and Ireland complain Of the same phenomena, although their schools are probably better than ours. A group Of French writers, Of whom René Bazin is one, have for years been preaching the doctrine Of back to the land, and the same situation is present in all western Europe. Evidently we are face to face with a world-wide series Of facts for which perhaps there is no cure, - certainly no pedagogical one will suffice. And when we look farther back we are still more convinced Of this. Through out the whole Of the nineteenth century we see the subject cropping up in literature, as for instance in Hugo's Misérables. And still farther back in the works of Cowper and Burns, as well as in the works Of Rousseau and Of Bernardin de saint-pierre. It is certain, too, that in ancient Rome similar topics preoccupied serious people. And it may well be that in the cities Of Mesopotamia and Egypt the same subjects worried the thinkers.

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