Growing up British in British Columbia: Boys in Private School

P.F. McKenna was librarian at the Police Academy, Brampton, Ontario.

Jean Barman’s work, which began life as a doctoral thesis at the University of British Columbia, is a very thorough and engaging survey of the growth and development of private schools for boys in British Columbia. She begins her story near the turn of the present century and brings her readers up to the very recent present. Ms. Barman looks carefully at the deep roots cultivated by wealthier British immigrants to the most westerly province of Canada. She analyzes their steadfast determination to transplant a vigorous system of private education for their offspring. These more substantial British immigrants wished to preserve and perpetuate a form of education that had developed in England and that was pledged to the task of creating “gentlemen.” The thrust of this education was perceived by British-Canadian parents as being something wholly distinct from the public education provided by the provincial government. There was a strong disinclination on the part of well-endowed British immigrants to blend with their fellow British Columbians, and the private school system was a mechanism for enhancing their distinctiveness. Ms. Barman takes a close look at the growth of private schools and discusses some of the difficulties these schools experienced in gaining a secure foothold. Understandably, the focus is on the most successful of the private schools and their founding fathers; Lonsdale’s Shawnigan, Mackie’s Vernon Preparatory, Symon’s St. Michael’s, and Hacker’s St. George’s. We learn of the strenuous efforts made to preserve a form of education that cherished and nurtured qualities which were in large measure absent from the public school system in British Columbia or, for that matter, in the rest of Canada. Ms. Barman has added two appendices that present statistics relevant to the matters at hand as well as an alphabetical listing of all non-Catholic private schools in British Columbia from 1860 to 1984. The book is carefully indexed and boasts a generous bibliography.