Bush Teachers

The oddest gandy-dancer on the railroads in Manitoba during the summer of 1926 was a 6-ft. 4-in. American medical student named Ben Spock, who owned a resplendent red handlebar mustache and an oilcloth blackboard. After a ten-hour day of shoveling gravel and sand to keep the railroad track from sinking into the muskeg, Spock would wipe the sweat from his mustache, wolf a huge supper, and unroll his blackboard. His afterhours task: teaching basic English to 40 sunburned Galician laborers. "I didn't get very far," recalls Dr. Spock, who has since lost the mustache, become a pediatrician and won wide fame as an expert on the horticulture of babies. "They thought I was a spy for the Canadian Pacific."

Medical Student Spock was one of thousands of young men who have invaded Canada's bush country in the last 60 years as faculty members of a unique institution called Frontier College. Its campus stretches 3,000 miles from the Yukon to Labrador; its most avid students are immigrant laborers who hunger to learn English in order to become Canadian citizens. Last week the Toronto-based school dispatched the first of this summer's 75 instructors--most of them greenhorn college students--to take grueling jobs in remote mines, lumber camps, construction and railroad gangs. "They arrive at the camps as soft as colleges can make them," says Frontier's muscular principal, Eric Robinson, 33. a onetime McGill University football player. "Most of them are filled with ivory-tower idealism. It's apt to be a traumatic experience."

"We Wid You." At first the laborer-teachers do little except work, sleep and eat, while suety muscles harden. Management does them no favors; they do the same work as ordinary laborers and get the same wages. When classes begin, the props are Spartan: a few books, a folding blackboard. Recalls Welfare Worker Dean Bowman, who arrived at the Geco uranium mines in northwestern Ontario four years ago fresh from Ohio's Antioch College: "I was a complete stranger, carrying expensive luggage, who bore all too much resemblance to a run-of-the-mill college boy." Bowman soon developed "calluses over blisters," managed not to look "too slack alongside experienced and hardened pick-and-shovel men."

Most of the men were newly arrived Italians. When Bowman started classes, "they sat before me like children and listened intently while I began the English language with the ridiculously simple statement, 'This is I, that is you.' " Suspicion quickly vanished; said one hard-muscled student as Bowman struggled to look professorial: "We wid you, teacher."

Stick to It. Bush teaching is not always that simple; Frontier College instructors have had squabbles with union leaders and with management, sometimes have to roar out lessons above the din of a bunkhouse card game. One teacher told Principal Robinson last year: "Many times this summer I've hated your guts." But the school has few resignations. Most teachers, says Robinson, "stick to it no matter what. The result is respect."

Frontier College operates on a tiny budget: $70,000 this year, most from private gifts, part from the Canadian government. But since 1899 it has taught more than 250,000 men--some of whom have taught a thing or two to the teachers. The Rt. Rev. Anson Phelps Stokes Jr., Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, who learned about Frontier College from Fellow Yaleman Ben Spock, was a teacher in an Ontario construction camp in 1928. Recalls Bishop Stokes (who answered to the camp tag, "Slim"): "I asked the carpenter boss, 'Can I have some 18-inch spreaders?' He answered: 'Young man, I think you mean, "May I have some 18-inch spreaders."'"

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