Alex Lord's British Columbia

Alex Lord, a pioneer inspector of rural British Columbia schools, shares in these recollections his experiences in a province barely out of the stage coach era. Travelling through vast northern territory, utilizing unreliable transportation and enduring climatic extremes, Lord became familiar with the aspirations of remote communities and their faith in the humanizing effects of tiny assisted schools. En route, he performed in resolute yet imaginative fashion the supervisory functions of a top government educator developing an educational philosophy of his own based on an understanding of the provincial geography, a reverence for citizenship, and a work ethic tuned to challenge and accomplishment.

These memoirs invite the reader to experience the British Columbia that Alex Lord knew. Through his words, we endure the difficulties of travel in this mountainous province. We meet many of the unusual characters who inhabited this last frontier and learn of their hopes, fears, joys, sorrows, and eccentricities. More particularly, we are reminded of the historical significance of the one-room rural school and its role as an indispensable instrument of community cohesion. John Calam organizes the memoirs according to the regions through which Lord travelled. Included in the introduction are a biography of Alex Lord, a brief description of the British Columbia he knew, a sketch of the province’s public education system and an assessment of the place Lord’s writing now occupies among other works on education and society.