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One means of teaching dominant white culture was through the school system. Whereas reading, writing and arithmetic had potential down the road, home economics offered an immediate opening to homes and families. The school was a prime location for teaching white cultural values, and home economics one of its more effective agents. Almost all Canadian home economics teachers between 1903 and 1920 received their training at Macdonald Institute, Guelph, under the leadership of Mary Urie Watson . Two Mac grads, Fannie Twiss (class of 1907) and Mary Hiltz (class of 1914) used the hot school lunch program in Saskatchewan to transmit their values about etiquette and social cooperation to their Russian Doukhobor and Ruthenian students who were almost, but not quite white.
Access to Daily Living
Fannie Twiss, first Director of Home Economics in Saskatchewan (and Canada) emphasized the need to have teachers at centres in the province where they could work among the people:
By means of co-operating with the Inspectors of Schools visits may be made to rural schools where assistance may be given the teacher in the teaching of needlework and garment-making, in establishing noon lunch and in improving school conditions generally. Demonstration methods of teaching may be used wherever possible. Visits may be made to the homes for the purpose of drawing the school and home closer together. Such visits will lead to the formation of better ideals of home-making and of healthful living (Twiss, 1917, p. 77).
Once teachers had access to their students' daily lives, they could expand upon the ideals of homemaking and healthful living, according to home economics standards of the day. On the farm, the noon meal was "dinner", the main meal of the day. Children at school all day missed out on this important transmittive cultural occasion. A school lunch program offered a way to teach cultural values which may or may not have coincided with family values. In an article written for the Agricultural Gazette, a publication out of Ontario, Fannie Twiss lauded the explicit aims of school lunches. She commented how one teacher began the process by "simply spreading a white table cloth, brought from her own home, on her desk" and how the children soon showed marked improvement in the quality of food they brought for lunch and in the way in which it was prepared and packed (Twiss, 1917, p. 612). Twiss also referred to the special value of such work in non-English speaking communities:
The teacher finds that a [non-English speaking] community of this kind needs to be shown that it is worth while. In a school of twenty-eight, of whom twenty-seven were Russian Doukhobors, the teacher went during one term with her pupils one afternoon each month to the homes of the pupils in turn. Here she taught them to make a few simple dishes not found in their dietary. The mothers gathered also and were very interested observers and were quite anxious to earn new ways. When the food was cooked the teacher instructed the pupils in table-setting; then all sat down to enjoy the cookery. Table manners were incidentally taught. During the following week the afternoon's work was the subject of oral and written composition. The next term, the parents were ready to put in the necessary equipment and to help to carry on the noon lunch (Twiss, 1917, p. 613).
Twiss listed the multiple benefits of having a school lunch program. The hot dish would increase the appetite for the cold lunch. The child would eat quietly and take time to "masticate his food properly". All the lunch would be eaten; no crusts would be thrown away. The child would develop a rational appetite for wholesome food, thus forming the habit of proper food selection. The child would also become trained in social etiquette and learn consideration for others. Finally the community would benefit also because the school and home had to co-operate for the work to be a success and for the school to become the "community centre" (Twiss, 1917, p. 612-613).
From the perspective of 2001, a school lunch program in 1917 seems very ambitious until we look at its components - usually a cup of cocoa, prepared with much labour and use of dishes. It was not by any means an extensive cooking operation. The school lunch was, however, a means of training students in specific behaviours that had an underlying tone of dominant culture. Even though the Russian Doukhobors were white, they were not white enough. They had to be taught white ways.
School Lunches in Ruthenian Schools
J.T. Anderson, Inspector of Schools for Yorkton School District, reported his district's school lunch program as run by Mary Hiltz, like Fannie Twiss, a graduate of the Macdonald Institute home economics training program.
Much of Miss Hiltz' work lies in the non-English districts. One example will suffice to show the response she met within the Ruthenian settlements; Mostetz school had been asked to purchase a noon lunch outfit suitable for catering to the needs of the fifty children enrolled. Word was set that Miss Hiltz would be at the school on a certain Monday to remain two days. The parents were asked to provide a supply of milk, eggs. etc. When she reached the school she found a full supply of cups, saucers, cooking utensils, spoons, etc. Almost everything necessary had been purchased except an oil stove and that had been ordered. As for milk, eggs, etc., there was enough of these to start a modern cafe. The first day hot cocoa was made by certain pupils and served to the fifty scholars at noon. One boy who helped "keep house" at home remarked that he would add this dish to their daily menu. The next day another dish was served. The pupils in the senior classes wrote out the recipe and were advised to provide siilar dishes at their homes.
Many other Ruthenian schools are engaging in this work and others will follow as soon as Miss Hiltz has visited them. Wonderful possibilities lie before those engaged in this work. These children must be taught how to sew and cook as well as how to read and cipher. They must be taught concerning our home life - our modes of housekeeping. Politeness, table etiquette, cleanliness, hygiene, et., must be inculcated in these schools. The work being done by Miss Hiltz will assist materially in accomplishing this desired end (Anderson, 1918, 1002-1003).
If Fannie Twiss couched her words more generally, J.T. Anderson made it perfectly clear. In addition to reading and ciphering, the purpose of the school system was to teach "our" home life. Ruthenians and Doukhobors might be white, but they fit into the category "not quite". To be white, one had to be Northern European, preferably British. One had to have particular standards of politeness, table etiquette, cleanliness and hygiene to fit in. The parents, according to Twiss, were anxious to learn new ways. The dominant white culture was settling over them. It would not be very long before they would learn to make white sauce in a home economics laboratory.
School Lunches in Ontario
A few years later, Isabelle Abbott, an Ontario teacher described her plans for the school lunch program:
If the teacher chooses, and it is very desirable that she should, she may in connection with the teaching of Household Science, serve a hot dish at luncheon to the pupils remaining through noon hour at school, during the months from November 1st till April 1st. The hot dish should be something simple as a cup of cocoa, different kinds of soups, eggs creamed, baked or soft cooked, custard, or boiled rice and milk....We found that it was a good plan to decide on Friday what hot dish should be served on each day of the following week, as: - Monday, potato soup; Tuesday, custard; Wednesday, creamed potatoes; Thursday, tomato soup; Friday, cocoa. (Abbott, 1922, p. 497).
Abbott found a variety of opinions about the hot lunch program in her rural, white Ontario community:
You must not think the ratepayers are accepting this new thing without some objections: one of my trustees withheld his consent altogether. The other two trustees were in favour. One of these was a lady (my first experience with a lady trustee): would that there were more like her in every school in our country. One ratepayer said he thought Household Science a good thing but he had no children in school so would not approve of it. Another said he thought when his children smelled the hot dinner in preparation they would be thinking of a nice dinner and not of their lessons so he objected. Another said he could feed his own children and objected to a teacher interfering. Another said he got his schooling and ate a cold lunch and he would see to it that his children did likewise. The children from some homes were forbidden to partake of the hot dish. We noticed that the mothers were much pleased with whole thing. So the objections all came from the fathers. (Abbott, 1922, p. 498).
Almost White
The rhetoric in Saskatchewan, where the underlying message of the school lunch program was to teach manners and etiquette to foreigners, contrasts sharply with Ontario where it was merely considered an addendum to the curriculum and where parents could object. One reason was simply numbers; Saskatchewan had undergone a phenomenal growth in population, increasing over 250 per cent between 1905 - 1920. In 1916, the people of British extraction comprised 54.4 per cent of the population; the remaining 45.5 per cent included both those who were foreign-born and who were first generation Canadians born of parents who had recently made Saskatchewan their home (Toombs, 1964, p. 1). According to prevailing thought, the "immigrants" had to be taught the British or "white" ways very quickly. Foreign-born was equated with not-quite white. Bhabha uses the term "mimicry" to show the colonial desire for a reformed recognizable Other as a subject of difference, that is almost the same, but not quite. Immigrants could become Anglicized, but not English, or in this case, British.
References:
Abbott, Isabella. (1922). Household science in a rural school. The School. 10 (8). Pp. 496-498).
Anderson, J.T. M. (1918). Saskatchewan - Household Science Progress. Agricultural Gazette, 5 (10), 1002-1003. [Inspector of Schools, Yorkton].
Bhabha, H. (1994). Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. The location of culture. London: Routledge. 85-92.
DeZwart, M.L. (1999). Past Roots: Fannie Twiss. Canadian Home Economics Journal. 49 (1). 34.
Saskatchewan Department of Education Annual Report (1917). pp. 74-79 [Fannie Twiss, Director of Household Science]
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