Children, Work and Compulsory Schooling

The Boys in the Nova Scotian Coal Mines: 1873-1923

• Boys had a different definition of the age, in the mills it was anyone under 18 years of age. Yet boy was defined as anyone from age eight to age 21.
• Horses and motor runner vehicles replaced women in the mills.
• The cheap labor of the boys then fully replaced the women in the work force of the mills.
• Where the seams of the passage were too narrow for adults and/or the horses they used the boys to go in pulling a sled.
• “Trappers” were less than 10 years old.
• The establishment of mining schools in the coal towns, long a goal of the Provincial Workmen’s Association (PWA), the first miner’s union in Nova Scotia, aided the ambitious miner.
• A boy’s experience in the mine may end a different way as either a death or disability.
• In 1880, the average pay of the boys was 65 cents a day.
• The provincial Mines Act changed the minimum age from 10 in 1873 to 12 in 1891 and then 16 in 1923.
• Nova Scotia was behind the British in their mines so they never had to employ the women.
• An 1881 amendment to the Miners act required the certification of colliery officials by a provincially constituted board of examiners and by the end of the decade cutters themselves needed provincial accreditation.
• Boys caused may strikes i.e. recreational strikes.
• There were also boys who came to work on the mines drunk at times as they took on that ‘adult’ role of being the breadwinner in the family.
• One consequence of the mines was the low level of formal education among the miners.
• Over the winter months, when the mine was closed, and when the mines were idle, the schools had a high attendance of the boys.
• In 1883, the law said that children between the ages of 7-12 needed to complete 80 days of school throughout the year or else the families of these children would be fined.
• Concerns for the children’s education was reflected not only in school legislation but also in mines legislations.
• A general concern for the child’s welfare and concern specifically for his education began to push the boys from the workplace.
• PWA efforts focused on protecting the miners trade.

The Rhythm of Work and the Rhythm of School

• The school act of 1850 gave legislative recognition, making it possible for schools to enforce free education
• A huge increase in the number of children attending public school, yet the increase for those attending private school only increased slightly.
• The yearly enrolment was misleading because it didn’t account for children that left during the school year, just those registered at the beginning
• The number of five- to sixteen-year-old children reported by the local superintendent as enrolled in the common schools rose from 158,159 in 1851 to 423,033 in 1871, an increase in the proportion of the growing school-age population attending school from 61.2 per cent in 1851 to 86.4 percent in 1871
• Within two decades’ free schools had become an accepted thing that was just part of the experience of growing up