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, weird and/or pessimism:
“It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one, a savage city, yet it had such tenderness, a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone and steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.”
—Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938)
“That weird shall never daunten me.”
Syne he has kissed her rosy lips,
All underneath the Eildon Tree.”
—Unknown. Thomas the Rhymer (l. 22–24)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)