Saskatchewan - Education

Education

The first education on the prairies took place within the family groups of the First Nation and early fur trading settlers. There were only a few missionary or trading post schools established in Rupert's Land – later known as the North West Territories.

The first 76 North-West Territories school districts and the first Board of Education meeting formed in 1886. The pioneering boom formed ethnic bloc settlements. Communities were seeking education for their children similar to the schools of their home land. Log cabins, and dwellings were constructed for the assembly of the community, school, church, dances and meetings.

The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties and the success of farmers in proving up on their homesteads helped provide funding to standardize education. Text books, normal schools for educating teachers, formal school curricula and state of the art school house architectural plans provided continuity throughout the province. English as the school language helped to provide economic stability, because one community could communicate with another and goods could be traded and sold in a common language. The number of one-room school house districts across Saskatchewan totalled approximately 5,000 at the height of this system of education in the late 1940s.

Following World War II, the transition from many one-room school houses to fewer and larger consolidated modern technological town and city schools occurred as a means of ensuring technical education. School buses, highways, and family vehicles create ease and accessibility of a population shift to larger towns and cities. Combines and tractors mean that the farmer could successfully manage more than a quarter section of land, so there was a shift from family farms and subsistence crops to cash crops grown on many sections of land.

School vouchers have been newly proposed as a means of allowing competition between rural schools and making the operation of co-operative schools practicable in rural areas.