Ideas - School Cars: How Trains Brought Classrooms to Children in Remote Communities

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

They were known as school cars and schools on wheels. Trains that brought the classroom to children in the most isolated communities of Northern Ontario. It was a novel six-month experiment that lasted 40 years, from 1926 to 1967. IDEAS producer Alisa Siegel explores remote education, homeschooling and nation-building. *This episode originally aired on January 9, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. It began with two chugging steam locomotives,

school car number one and school car number two. They were also known as school trains and schools on wheels. If a coach could be fitted out as a classroom on wheels, instead of the children going to the school, the school would come to the children. It was an unprecedented collaboration between Ontario's then Ministry of Education and the railways, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, that lasted four decades from 1926 to 1967. And if it could do one community, well, it could travel on 10, 20, 50 or 100 miles and serve other communities. At the height of the program, seven school cars traveled up and down the tracks of northern Ontario

to the isolated children of railway workers, trappers, loggers, and hunters. We didn't have no fridge or television or nothing like that. Groceries, they'd come in every two weeks with the train when I came in. The steam trains delivered food, medicine, and occasional news from the outside world to Northern Ontario. Now they'd be bringing teachers, lessons, and books. Some students just had to walk out of the house and cross the tracks to get to the

school car. Others had to use skis, snowshoes, and dog sleds. We had a dog team of about five sleigh dogs, and we had an eight-foot toboggan, and we'd just get on, and they'd go, and they knew the trail. And then on the lakes, we'd put branches up and mark the trail across the lake, because very often the wind would blow your trail over with snow. The school car was the brainchild of school inspector J.B. McDougall. One day he happened to see a switching train push some railway service cars into a spur. The idea suddenly struck him.

That's the voice of the late William Wright, who served as a school car teacher for 39 years. Recorded for the CBC in 1978. This railway that sort of shackles these families to the rails can be used as a means of bringing education to the children. The first two trains departed on a September night in 1926 from the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. One train carried teacher Walter McNally and headed for North Bay. The other carried Fred Sloman and his young family to Sudbury

and then further north to Folliette and Capriel. to Sudbury, and then further north to Folliette and Capriel. This documentary by Aliza Siegel explores an early experiment in remote education, homeschooling, and nation-building. Les school trains. N'y voici enfin. J'ai été happée, littéralement, par les school trains. The school train. We have finally arrived. I was struck utterly by the school trains. Mon nom est Justine Saucier. Je suis romancière et je suis l'auteur du roman Atremp perdu.

du roman Atremp perdu. My name is Jocelyne Saussier. I'm a novelist, and I'm the author of In Miles to Go Before I Sleep, a novel in which the school brains take a big part. Collision frontale avec des garnageurs,

une fascination qui m'a tenue dans un état d'alerte pour tout ce qui les concernait. A head-on collision with major damage. A fascination that kept me in a state of alertness around anything to do with them. My name is Iona Peterson. I live in Sudbury, Ontario. I'm 93 years old.

I was born in Rule, Ontario. I'm 93 years old. I was born in Rule, Ontario. It's R-U-E-L, which is a little town between Folliette and Capriol. And this is where the school car was running at the time that I was born. There was a post office and a little store and a railway station. It was a stop for lumber workers working in the bush. My mother, she worked at home while my father worked in the lumber company in the north between Folliet and Rule. And he would be gone for three weeks at a time or longer in the camps, then come out for a week to us, and then go back in the logging camps again. There was nothing there, no school. It's just people that worked on the railroad.

So you'd go to school on the school car. At that time, it was the only option that we had to learn. My name is Marcel Constantine. I'm 74 years old, and I was on the school car. In 1956, 1957, I was living in rural Ontario with my family, my mother, my father, and six siblings beside myself. I belonged to the Cheching Nation on Manitoulin Island. My father was from Quebec, Québécois, and my mother was Indigenous and came from Gogama, Ontario. My father worked for Canadian National Railroad.

We're in the bush. There's trees, there's railroad tracks, and there's a short railroad track just for the school car. The school car came to Palomar just to teach my brother and myself, and in the later years, my sister. Fred Sloman was the teacher, and he was the same teacher that taught my father in Groundhog many years prior. My name is Raymond Bromley. I attended the school car in 1952 in Palomar, Ontario,

which was approximately 12 miles east of Folliet, Ontario, approximately 136 miles west of Capriel, which is 20 miles from Sudbury. We lived in the bush in Palomar. Well, there was nothing but bush. My mother and father and my brother and one trapper and two section men that worked for my father on the railroad. That was it. I mean, it was nothing but trees, you know, all around. And we would cut our wood in the summer and we would prepare it for winter.

That was the extent of it. We had a rabbit line in the wintertime, and we'd snare rabbits. And we had a little lake not far from us where we used to shovel it off and make a rink, and then we would play hockey, the two of us. My mom was from Folliet, and my father was from Groundhog, which was another four miles east of Palomar. They were both born in Canada and they ended up there because my father was the section foreman on the railroad for the Cheyenne. He had to maintain a smooth surface for the trains to go on.

Dad worked on the railroad for 42 years. My name is Bob Bell, and my father was one of the teachers on the school car that ran between Chapleau and Carchy. I lived for five years on school car number one. As a youngster, on my seventh birthday, I became a student on this school car where we moved from Cartier to Chapleau in a series of stops, seven to be exact. At the end of the seven weeks, we would pick up groceries in Chapleau and a freight train would haul us back to the original spot where my father would teach for one week.

Each week, my father would tell the way freight to pick us up and take us to another stop. Some of these stops had as many as 12 students. Others would only have three to five students. A minimum was to have three students to facilitate the stop for that particular place. The school car would be on the siding. They have two double tracks, so they can put the school car on a siding track. We'd cross the road, and then we had to cross three or four double tracks, double railroad tracks, and then down the path to the school car.

It was hard getting up there. You kind of crawled up. In you go. You're late. Fred Sloman was the teacher. Fred Sloman, the first school car teacher on the Canadian National Line, speaking to his students in school car No. 1 in 1931. Where's Jimmy? It was recorded by the Fox Movietone Corporation for release at the time in theaters across Canada and the United States.

Over the hill? Where's Jimmy? And his wife, Celia. A thousand miles of bush country was our schoolyard. We had lots of playgrounds, trees and shade and rocks and streams. They were such nice people, and they had little girls, and we would get to play with them. The teacher had his quarters on the train.

Three tiny rooms with the modern comforts of the times. A kitchen, a bathroom, and a central space that, depending on the hour, served as a sitting room, dining room, or bedroom. Was it a sitting room, dining room, or bedroom? We walked in up the stairs, and Mr. Sloman had his desk at the front. They had desks on both sides, like you would in a regular coach. It was a made-over passenger train, so it was about 10 or 12 feet wide, and I believe about 62 feet long. There was a classroom, which would be about a third of the size of the passenger car. My parents had a living room,

bedroom, and then at the very end, there was a small kitchen. There were a total of 12 desks. My sister and myself had roll-away beds, where they were kept at the back of the classroom. And after everyone had gone in the evening, we would bring these roll-away beds and set them down beside the students' desks. And the beds would be made up, and that's where we slept. We had to carry water. The water sometimes had to be carried a great distance, and it would be kept in large pails, which we used for drinking and for cooking, and the bathing where we had to heat it on a wood stove or a coal stove. On a Saturday, we would have a bath.

Every morning, the day would start with the singing of God Save the King. That's another thing he taught us, how to sing God Save the King or Queen. And then there would be the Lord's Prayer, and then we would sit down and get started with our regular lessons. The first day I went to school, my parents told me to listen to my brother. So my brother says, ring the bell. So I got up and I rang the bell. The teacher escorted me by my ear right back to my desk and told me to sit there. And then he gave me a note to bring to my parents, but I stuck the note underneath rocks.

I didn't give it to them. So around Christmas time, the teacher was out there with us making an archway over the walkway, and he come across this piece of paper, and he said to me, it looks like you forgot to give this to your father, Raymond. So I had no choice but give it to him then. It wasn't a laugh at the time. The creation of the school cars was prompted by this general notion that schools needed to reach the population of Ontario or Canada, no matter where these students were. My name is Theodore Christou. I am a professor of history of education at Queen's University in the Faculty of Education.

The school cars were part of a broader effort that included, for instance, correspondence schooling, reaching students in the North who either, due to physical or other reasons, could not attend some of the other school buildings. And this was a period that I've referred to as a progressivist period, and many of our scholars have called it progressivist because it represented a kind of an unfettering from the Victorian model of schooling that had preexisted, a kind of a model of education that was considered to be passive because it focused on sitting and passively learning materials only to be regurgitated or to be remembered for examinations. A criticism of Victorian schools was also that they lacked any kind of connection to the world

as it is today. In other words, that they were preparing students for a world that had already passed. And the third element of progressivism was focusing on the individual, as opposed to this curriculum or these texts that had been passed on. And the themes of progressive education are very alive today. We see them in curriculum documents focusing on inquiry. We see them in the reports of government officials and in school journals. So in the rhetoric of education, we've been fascinated with this idea of progress. So in the rhetoric of education, we've been fascinated with this idea of progress. And in post-World War I Ontario, the idea of expanding what schools could do and the reach of schools, I think, crystallized in this idea of the school trains, which were almost like a very image itself of technology, of progress, of industry, of connecting this country from coast to coast. And so outfitting trains as classrooms was seen as this really novel experiment. There wasn't any roads in those days.

Lil' Dingy in 1978. And they had to paddle down if they wanted to go the school car like in open water four miles to the railroad. And then you either go through the bush and take a porridge leg or you can go right to the railroad track and then walk down the railroad track to Cucutash. and then walk down the railroad track to Cucutash. And then in the winter, of course, they either tobogganed or snowshoed or skied down. We'd have to tie up our dog team to the trees outside the school car there and leave them there for the day. We often heard and saw wolves on the lake when we were going,

and we'd try to get back before it got dark. Well, I can tell you one thing. You didn't have no slack time. There was more hands-on because it was just, at one point, there was just my brother and I, so Fred Sloman, he would go and spend, you know, 15, 20 minutes with one and then 15, 20 minutes with the other one, and then recess time. And lunch was 12 to 1, and not one minute after either.

It was 1 o'clock. You'd be there. On the school car, most of it was arithmetic, geography, spelling. We'd have spelling bees. Spelling was very important. Arithmetic. I can remember doing science. I do remember geography a lot. And we did learn a lot about Canadian history more than any other history. He would teach us stuff that we should know about living in the wild. He'd teach us about the environment. A lot about nature and how things grow and animals, different kinds of animals that we had in rural trees. And that was all our life, of course.

Mr. Schloman taught us about life in the bush. Because we were in the bush. He used to bring us outside, and we'd spend our time outside doing things. To be around a fire. How to make fire. He'd teach us about the snow. He'd teach us about the weather. Anything to do with Northern Ontario.

About the railroad. He used to tell stories at night. It was fantastic. All different type of stories about different people along the line and, you know, the trapping experiences. It really got our attention. I saw a moistern up the wall, I saw his tail and that was all. Who knows their funny recitation? Well, give us yours, please. The moistern on the railroad track, the train is coming fast. The train got on the railroad track. The train was coming fast.

The train got off the railroad track and left the motorway fast. Good. Yours. He was good at building confidence. He would give you something to talk about, and you didn't have the answer. Well, you had to find the answer. Well, you had to do some reading, and he would give you some books, and you had to come out with an essay saying what you've learned

and what you've picked up out of that book. The thing about the school car, it was parked quite close to the main line of the CN. And you'd be sitting there, and it used to get him a little bit mad. He'd be nicely into a lecture or telling you something, and a big freight train would come by. Well, you couldn't hear a thing. And they used to, it was steam engines then, and they'd be blowing at him. steam engines then, and they'd be blowing at him. It's a chugging sound, eh?

Like, I can still hear it in my mind. And it's the steam coming out of the engine. So he would stop and stop teaching until the train went by. He would carry on from there. God, you know, this was over 70 years ago. To me, it was normal. I knew nothing else. That was the way life was then. We went out on a train. Every week we moved, the train would come and pull us to another stop.

And my father would teach, and I would go to school on the school car. I had both my parents, and it was a reasonably happy life. I had no sports. I used to ski a great deal, but that was about it. I missed out because there was no radio, nothing like that. We were too far away for radio. We did not get a paper even. I knew very little about the outside world. The National Geographic was a godsend because we were able to see pictures of the outside world then.

because you were able to see pictures of the outside world then. A freight train would pull the car over a distance. Leave it on a siding in the middle of the forest, from which emerged a group of children, who, for a few days, would learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. Until another train came to take it to where other children awaited it. And they would stay one week. And then they'd give us homework for the next three weeks. All right, now the freight engine will be coming in a few minutes to take the car up to mile 92.

I'll be back in one month, or maybe two or three days more than one month, but I want your homework done, please. And do it a little bit neater. Will you, Charles? A little bit better than before. The local train would pick the school car up and take them on to the next little town on the railroad. And they would stay a week there and then move on to the next one.

When we passed to the next mileage point, everybody stood with tears in their eyes, and we were sad, too, to leave them. But we always knew we were coming back again. Mr. Sloman would give us homework. If he was gone for three weeks, so we'd do homework for three weeks. My mother would help us.

It was almost like homeschooling because you had your work given to you before they left. And when you come back, that work should have been done. But you had to do that at home. He had his ways of getting everybody to produce. My brother and I, we always had our work done. It was always done. There was never a question about whether it was left out.

Homework was finished. And then some. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder.

Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. From 1926 to 1967, the school cars, passenger trains converted into schools on wheels, chugged along the railway tracks of northern Ontario, where children living in the province's isolated bush couldn't get to school, so school was brought to the children.

The school train was much more than a school. It was where they offered evening classes for adults, reading, writing, and on Canadian democratic institutions for immigrants. A doctor came twice a year.

They had bingo nights, radio evenings, particularly during the war. No one had light. When the sun went down, the little shacks, just one kerosene lamp on a table, and that was all. And we had lots of light when we came. And so everybody loved to see the school car with its lights coming. Everybody was happy.

That was very exciting for everybody. That was a big deal. We waited for that train to roll into town. We did. It was a big excitement. My father had to make a place on the track, on the siding, for the school car to park. And it was a piece of track that was just specifically for the school car.

The school car would be welcomed by the kids running up alongside and ready to greet us as we came into that particular stop. Oh, they came racing up as soon as they saw the school car come in. They'd come racing over. Sometimes he'd arrive on a Sunday. We used to run down, go see Mr. Sloman. Then he'd tell us, us Monday morning school starts. I knew when the school car would arrive, I knew we're going to learn something that week, which I loved. We always loved going to the school car. We loved it. All I remember is Mr. Sloman being a good teacher,

All I remember is Mr. Sloman being a good teacher, his wife. Mr. Sloman was the teacher. Mrs. Sloman was the keeper of the car. It was a gala week, the week that we were at each little siding. She was always cooking. You could smell it in the car. I've made millions of cookies, I think, to serve and coffee. It was like Christmas. Christmas

every three to me, without the gifts. But the gift was to have these lovely people to be with us. They had a pet skunk that they used to carry with them on the train for a pet. The skunk was there when my father was going to school and he was still there when I was going to school. When I think of the school car, I think happiness right away. I think, oh, the school car is coming. happiness right away. I think, oh, the school car is coming. And when I walked in there, I felt secure. I felt special. And I felt that this was a very special occasion this one week of having these lovely people with the kids. It was like a visitor more than a teaching. At the end of the day, we had to clean up the boards, make sure the books

were all packed in our desks, and made sure the place was left tidy before we left the school. and made sure the place was left tidy before we left the school because the evening time they would have bingo games and they would have silent movies and little gatherings for the people in the town. We've had perhaps 60 people in the school car in one evening for a picture show running on our old car battery. We had no electricity. We didn't know there were so many people in the bush. They seemed to

come from nowhere. I think the big thing was the excitement of having something different and having somebody else come into town and something to do. The children would flood a river for skating, and we'd take the gramophone out to the river, and once or twice they had a dance out on the river, on the ice, with wolves howling in the background. They would explain to us things that happened in the big city that we never knew anything about.

I didn't really come to a city until I was 12 years old, actually. So everything was all so new to me. We lived a very, I guess you'd call it sheltered life, but happy life. So this is also a period of generally mass immigration to Canada. Three million had come into the country between 1894 and the start of the 20th century, largely moving to remote regions. Education as a portfolio was so important that the Premier of Ontario was, up until 1934, also the Minister of Education. So this is some of the importance of education for building, I think, this idea of an educational state or building the idea of what Ontario could be,

was reaching out to these new Ontarians and Ontarians who were not living primarily in that golden horseshoe from Hamilton to Oshawa that had been developed largely with the automobile industry. This is also a period where it's just noting automobiles, where in 1916, we know that half of the vehicles on the road were horse and buggy, right alongside automobiles. So the marks of technology and the marks of progress were all over society. And yet schools seem to remain remarkably unchanged from the traditional Victorian model that had been inherited. A kind of a learning that was focused on textbooks, a kind of learning that was focused on the past, and a kind of learning that was focused on bringing together Canadians with a shared knowledge and shared history.

bringing together Canadians with a shared knowledge and shared history. So reaching students in the North was absolutely imperative, I believe, to premiers of this province and also, I believe, the government, not only to be able to stand firmly and say that education was able to reach more Ontarians than it had in the past, but also because school served a fundamental socializing purpose, helping to realize some of the aims of Anglo conformity. 90% of the learners enrolled in the classes were children who were new to Canada, but of course their parents and their families. We even have a reference to older family members who might have been uncles or aunts or grandparents engaging in some of the learning that came when the trains would come into a community and the teacher would then have the opportunity to engage with that community.

The section men who couldn't read or write, they came nights and they in one week could write their name on the board and they'd grip the pen until the blood would be running from their hands. They gripped the pen so hard. Everybody wanted to do something, so there was no effort to teach anybody. So the learner, the student engaged in the learning, I believe, was seen to be, to some extent, a sort of a light for the rest of their family and others who could play an educational role in supporting others' learning. So absolutely, the justification in

many cases for the schools was that not only were the students engaged in the learning served, but also their families and other members of the community. This remains an important part of how we do education today is by bringing children together, we're bringing together families. Decorum, order, discipline, and fervor. Every morning, he would raise the Union Jack at the back of the car to greet the children of the woods. Washed, hair brushed and braided, and in their best clothes, they were also dressed up in honour

of the day of school. They numbered seven. Certains were at the beginning of the alphabet. Others could decline the names of all the prime ministers since the Constitution Act. They numbered seven, eight, twelve, sometimes only three or four. Some of them were just learning the alphabet. Others could list all the prime ministers since Confederation. Certains arrived from Ukraine or Yugoslavia.

Some had just arrived from Ukraine or Yugoslavia. Others had never seen anything but the forest where they were born. It was a mixed-grade, multi-ethnic class with a teacher mindful of each. It was a mixed grade, multi-ethnic class, with a teacher mindful of each one of them. We had in that little town many Polish people and Italians, Italian immigrants and immigrants working on the train tracks, the section gang, they called them.

And a lot of them couldn't speak English, and they had their wives with them, and they couldn't speak English well. This Fred Sloman would have classes at night sometimes to teach them English. So they learned to speak fairly well, and it made for a better understanding of everybody in the town.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has charge of espionage investigation and checks on evidence following revelations by a Soviet embassy cipher clerk. This is Drew Pearson with a flash from Washington. Canada's Prime Minister Mackenzie King has informed President Truman of a very serious situation affecting our relations with Russia. A Soviet agent surrendered some time ago to Canadian authorities and confessed a gigantic Russian... We know that many of the students who were engaged in the railway school car project were recent immigrants from Europe, and that the focus of instruction was primarily on literacy, but not exclusively. That included elements of what we might call today citizenship education. So the idea of schooling as civic formation is essential, and particularly for immigrant populations at a time between the two

wars. So Bolshevism, the ideas of communism and socialism were, to some extent, as frightening in Canada as they were in the United States, particularly around popular rhetoric. So long as communism threatens the very existence of democracy, the United States must remain strong enough to support those countries of Europe which are threatened with communist control. Prime Minister Mackenzie King disclosing a sensational spy plot hurls an international bombshell. That plant did work on the atomic bomb at Deep River, Ontario. And in the story, that radio experimental station figures. Wartime precautions for secrecy were taken. We have a wonderful quote from a minister, from the Minister of Education, George S. Henry, that Bolshevik

propaganda finds no place or acceptance wherever the school car operates. There's no doubt that the next generation will fall naturally into their place as loyal citizens. We also see that these schools are referred to as wholesome Canadianizing influences or means of establishing history values and enforcing a kind of civic life that conforms to this notion of British Anglo conformity within the Canadian context. And so combating Bolshevism, infusing the spirit of democratic learning or democratic ways of governance, but particularly also the sense of what it means to be a Canadian within the sense of the Commonwealth, was embedded in the curriculum of schools, whether they were railway school cars or they were schools that we could find in Toronto. So the school car was, according to Premier Howard Ferguson, adding its quota to the loyal and intelligent citizenship of Ontario. We know

of one student, for instance, named Joseph Ruffo, who was referred to as, quote, a little Italian, who came to this country in the spring after only 12 weeks of learning, he learned English, and thus was able to be kind of woven into the fabric of what it meant to be a Canadian. So yes, schools helped to educate children who were not in urban centers, who may have had physical or other obstacles that prohibited them from attending school, that we would bring the schools to them.

But they also served an assimilationist end, which we know is derived from a sense of angle conformity within a sense of being British in Canada and being part of the British Commonwealth. And schools, to some extent, continue to be criticized for the same reason. We had Indigenous people living in our town, and they mostly all spoke English. They did speak their language also,

and they did have some of their ways that they lived also that was a little different. But we all got along well together and enjoyed each other and played together. Many of these young people during the last few years of the operation of the school car were from Indian families. Former school car teacher Philip Fraser on CBC Radio in 1978. By agreement, the Indian sold his treaty rights

for a certain cash payment. This payment in a lump sum, enabled the family to buy certain things, perhaps an outward motor and boat or things like that. And then, once they had spent their money, all their privileges enjoyed under the treaty were gone. They could not send their children to Indian school, and almost a generation grew up in certain areas

without being able to go to school. When we found this out, we made application with the department to make other stops. We have a record of two children who camped out waiting for the school to come. It was right, where Indigenous children had come out of the woods in order to go to school and had set up a tent, including the fall and winter. They put up a tent and they lived there so they could come to school that week.

And the Minister of Education, who was also the Premier of Ontario, Howard Ferguson, notes this quote, two boys living far from the railway line journeyed 40 miles to the car, set up an old tent in midwinter, thatched it with balsam boughs, and lived in it while the car was near. Then after the week was over, they went back to their homes, which would be farther away in the bush, and impossible to get to the tracks, you know, every day. I promised to show you the goldfish. Who was it that had never seen the goldfish?

Well, take a look. Here's the mystery. You have to go past because the engine's coming. I'll leave it here. Now, if the train doesn't come, you can see it again. Mr. Sloman, to me, was like a father. He was somebody very special. I think he was very honest, he was very fair, and he was firm. Very kind, very soft-spoken, and he seemed to know so much.

No matter what you asked him, he always answered you with such a wonderful explanation. Mr. Sloman treated you like you were somebody. Everybody was important to him. Mr. Sloman was a good teacher, and we loved him dearly. I still do. They taught us about life. They taught us how to live. Mr. Sloman has given me the idea that if you want to do something in this world,

you can. And he's made me a more understanding person of the language barrier and how to treat people so that they feel they're part of Canada. He treated immigrants just as he would treat us. Always a smile, always happy to see you. I don't ever remember him giving a crossword. We're always just so very happy to see him in that. And I feel so grateful to him and his family for doing this. It must have been awfully inconvenient teaching and bringing up a family on a train and moving from place to place. And him and her to do it with such grace and happiness, I think he's left a real spot in the life of history of people.

Him and all the others that have done the same thing as he has. You know, I've been living a long time. I mean, that's history gone by. And it's possible it could be now, because with the way people are teaching from home and teaching with all the stuff they have to teach, it just kind of boggles your mind. It's going back, going back to old times. It's almost like, to me, it's like homeschooling now. Well, it was almost like

homeschooling. For three weeks, you were homeschooled. And now a lot of people are doing homeschooling. They now call it remote learning. But it's the same, almost the same thing. You have to govern yourself to do your work and get it done. The school cars are indicative of kind of a universal trend that as we are finding ways to educate, as we're finding ways to improve schooling in diverse and multiple avenues, that the solutions are almost always unique and local, that the railway school cars are a uniquely Ontarian solution to the challenges of educating a broader population.

This is a story that is embedded in the very life and history of this province and the people who lived in it. I think I was very lucky. I learned a lot of things. How to get along with other people, what to appreciate in life, little things that we take for granted that we should be so thankful for. Without the school car being there, we would not have had any schooling. We did move from rural to Tainega because that way we could go to school every day. And we had a one-room school in Tynaga, so we finished our schooling there.

Why did the program come to an end? was not the same population. It was not located in the same places. More and more, we were seeing that the population of Ontario was moving into urban centers and into towns and cities where educational opportunities and schools were already established. And so the urbanization of Ontario continued unabated. And so the school population that would have been served by these school cars had dwindled to next to nothing. The end could be seen approaching because the railway was making changes. Conditions were changing. Roads were being built, in some cases beginning as logging roads but being continually improved. And in that way, it was possible to bus children out to bigger schools,

particularly when it became necessary to go to high school. These railway sections that had been six miles long had become 20 miles long, where they had used a pump-type motor car, now they were using gasoline-powered cars, pump-type motor car. Now they're using gasoline-powered cars, and telegraphers were being replaced by the central traffic control system. So those families were being moved out. By 1967, once novel, the school on wheels, these remarkable technological innovations, seemed like relics from the past. The railway school cars were no longer considered an aspect of modernity. Modernity had moved on to using new technologies such as the telephone and the television to reach students. The trains were now seen as costly, I think

inefficient, and most certainly outdated. They were running short on teachers. Fred stayed three years after his retirement date. Just because we didn't want to leave the children, there was no one anxious to go and stay in the isolated north. Maybe the most important legacy of the school cars, it's how it transformed families and individuals' lives. And I think we are bound by these stories. These stories are what make us, not only the kind of curriculum of the schools, but the kinds of stories that we share when we're engaged in learning. The vision of reaching all people

and offering them an opportunity to become literate, to become fluent with numbers, to be able to apply their learning and to be able to build their learning and to be able to build community as they do it. These are things that we all yearn for. And we know the power of education to change lives, broadening opportunities, allowing students and families to see more than what they might have otherwise seen. A truly democratic education can do is to reach all

people, no matter where they are an ordinary looking freight train pulls up against an ordinary looking backdrop and follows the ordinary procedure of uncoupling one car an ordinary looking school children from grade one to second year high head for an unusual railway car which acts as an itinerant school in the north. Symbolic of Canada itself, education in Ontario is literally rolling the frontier ever northward. Educational research often proceeds in two ways. One is experimenting, figuring out what works. Will this float?

Will it work or not? Let's see. They didn't know whether these railway school cars would work or not. And so I think today we ought to continue to experiment with new modes and means of learning, as we have sometimes done in the virtual world and throughout the pandemic, but continuously to experiment and never to presume that we know the best way in which we ought to school or we ought to educate all people. To me, when you say the school car,

I have a good feeling inside that I was able to experience the school car and that I was part of that. I was part of those people's lives. I'm happy for that. The nostalgia of the train. The nostalgia of the whistle of those powerful beasts. I'm very happy to have been part of it. I feel very honored that I was around at that time. It's nice thinking of all those things.

It brings you back. It's been such a long time ago that it was a good start for my life. I have good memories. I have good memories. When I see a picture of it, I just feel home. Just a homey feeling like, oh yeah, that's home. That's my life. That's where I started. Nine o'clock sharp. Don't be late. Goodbye. Thank you, Peter. You were listening to a documentary about Canada's school trains, produced by Aliza Siegel. Special thanks to Bonnie Sitter. Thanks also to Palmiro Campagna, Zoëlle Deschâtelet, Fred Tiolis, and Dale Wilson. To Benjamin Singleton and the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collection,

to the late Carl Schuessler, and to Kate Zeman and Bob Rempel of CBC Library and Archives. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.