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Education during the First World War | Wartime Canada:
Stories of young heroes and brave soldiers clearly appealed to young Canadians, but some adults struggled to find a balance between protecting children and promoting war. In 1916, for instance, a Hamilton teacher named Helena Booker raised this question in a letter to The School, a magazine for teachers published by the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto. What should teachers, Booker wondered, “say about the present war to our primary classes? We feel a great reluctance to bring so unhappy a subject before such young minds. But what do they hear at home? Many times only words of hatred, ignorant tirades, useless bragging, equally vain of purpose and harmful in their imprint on young minds. So if we speak of war let it be with the sole purpose of teaching patriotism, a love of our own country, not a hatred of our enemies – a positive, not a negative, thing.”
The minority of citizens who opposed the war also expressed concern about the effects of war pedagogy on young Canadians. Pacifist and suffragist Gertrude Richardson used her writing in the socialist periodical Canadian Forward, for example, to warn readers about the dangers of a militarized curriculum. She urged Canadian mothers to monitor what their children were learning at school in order to keep “the bayonet and the rifle … [from] the hands of children to whom we try to teach the ideals of humanity and brotherhood.” Richardson was not alone in her concern, and after the war several pacifist groups including the Quaker Society of Friends and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom campaigned for the revision of all textbooks that depicted or glorified the war.12
