Summary By Decade
| 1900-1909 | 1930-1939 | 1940-1949 |
1900 - 1909
Education was not yet a major force for change. University was for the rich and many opposed public education. Higher education was impractical.
School rooms consisted of desks, sitting two students per desk and children wrote on slate tablets. A typical school room housed grades 1-12 and housed a pot belly stove for heating. Textbooks were imported from England.
McGill University in Toronto was the mainstay University to attend.
Most other universities and colleges were run by church affiliations. i.e. Columbian in New Westminster - Methodist Church. Jealousy between Victoria and Vancouver squashed an early attempt to develop a University in western Canada. A University Teacher was paid $460 per year salary.
1930 - 1939
In the 30's children all over the country were kept home from school because they had no money for clothes, let alone money for books.
1940 - 1949
The most valuable opportunity offered to the vets was in education. By 1945 Vocational schools were set up across the country, often in wartime service camps, to train 85,000 vets as machinists, carpenters, electricians or masons. Canada's universities were open to a flood of vets who could not have afforded to go in peacetime. Tuition was free and each was given a living allowance of $60 a month. About 50,000 vets swamped campuses across the country. Enrollment at UBC jumped from 2,900 undergraduates in 1944 to 7,300 in 1946. In time the universities graduated 35,000 highly motivated vets, many of them in 2 years. Among them were 8,000 engineers, 5,000 teachers and 3,000 doctors.
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