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.

John Calam's profile page

John Calam (editor) is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Social and Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia.

Lord's strength is that he delightfully conveys a sense of rural life in B.C. and explains the problems associated with establishing an effective educational system in a sparsely settled resource-based frontier. Alex Lord's British Columbia should be of interest to educators and local history buffs; the extensive notes provide a rich source of primary and secondary references for the academic historian.

Historical Studies in Education

This book succeeds both as a slice of rural conditions in the past and as a solid contribution to the history of education in British Columbia, and as a result bears the unique attribute of appealing to the casual reader and serious scholar alike.

BC Studies