Fighting A "weird Pessimism"
After his ordination in Rome in 1910, Coady began teaching at St. FX. He put on special classes for students at risk of failing, and prided himself on being able to teach maths to anyone. He honed his considerable oratorical skills and developed a talent for making complex concepts easily understood.
Emigration from Nova Scotia continued, and Coady fought against a kind of “weird pessimism (that) so benumbed everybody that nothing has been attempted to break the spell.” In 1921 he helped organize the province’s school teachers. Typically earning about $35 a month, four out of five were young women who lost their jobs as soon as they married. At a meeting of the teachers’ fragile union in Truro that year he urged action and was elected secretary-treasurer. He spent much of the next 3 years expanding support for the union and founding/editing the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Bulletin.
The defining moment in Coady’s career came when he testified before a Canadian government commission in 1927. Drawing on his own experience and that of other Movement leaders like Jimmy Tompkins and Hugh MacPherson (an early co-operative pioneer) he maintained that the local economy could be revitalized if the right type of learning was cultivated in ordinary people: especially critical thinking, scientific methods of planning and production, and co-operative entrepreneurship.
Read more about this topic: Moses Coady
Famous quotes containing the words fighting a, fighting, weird and/or pessimism:
“The only kind of love worth having is the kind that goes on living and laughing and fighting and loving.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“Adolescent girls were fighting a mother’s interference because they wanted her to acknowledge their independence. Whatever resentment they had was not towards a mother’s excessive concern, or even excessive control, but towards her inability to see, and appreciate, their maturing identity.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or religion? But why not study this Sanskrit? What if one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions,—so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her? One moon gone by unnoticed?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... pessimism is a product of inactivity.”
—Stella Nowicki (c. 1905–?)