“Learning to leave” or learning to live? Preparing teachers for rural life in Canada, 1900–1955

This study explores the rationales, organisations, and approaches employed to prepare teachers for careers in rural communities in early twentieth-century Canada. Rather than finding great diversity among teacher education institutions across the widespread regions of the country, what was discovered was a general consistency in the ideologies that shaped the preparation of teachers for life in rural areas. With a desire to train “agents of the state”, Normal schools display great concern with the training of teachers to bring “civilisation” and modern scientific understanding to the seemingly wild, remote inhabitants of rural areas. In doing this, teaching training during this time period showed little interest in learning about the culture, socio-economic systems, and ways of thinking embedded in rural places.