EXTERIOR READING TENT, A. R. MACDONELL'S CAMP, TEMISKAMING AND N. O. R'Y.

HE problem of improving

the condition of the semi-nomadic laborers who live in more or less temporary lumbering, mining and railway construction camps is mainly educational. The majority of these men are comparatively illiterate, while thirty-five per cent. are unable to recognize their own name in any language.

The causes of this illiteracy are, first, the foreign element, and secondly, the fact that this class of laborers is recruited chiefly from the newer settlements. The public school is usually late in reaching these communities, and when it does the average young man is often unable to avail himself of it. The combined efforts of the family are usually needed to make ends meet in a new country.

Education should not and need not be confined within the school walls. The average boy leaves the public school from the third reader. There is no reason why his education should end there; nor is there any reason why those who are wholly illiterate should not receive an education in the woods and mines in even the farthest confines of the earth. Literature will stand transportation as well as pork and beans, an instructor is as available and portable a person as a cook, and a reading shanty or tent is as easily run up as a cook-camp or bunk-house.

The practicability of manual laborers in the older settlements and towns acquiring an education or improving what they have in spare moments has often been demonstrated, Hugh Miller, in the quarries of Scotland, and Alexander McKenzie, on the Martello towers near Kingston,

In the last four years the Canadian Reading Camp Association has shown it to be possible to acquire even the rudiments of an education in these camps, and also in lumbering and railway construction camps, a field which correspondence schools have not en

tered.

The Ontario Department of Education has assisted the work of the Association by initiating a system of camp libraries and giving a small grant for the maintenance of reading camp instructors. It has also, for several years, sent representatives from the School of Mines, Kingston, and the School of Practical Science, Toronto-usually Professors Goodwin and Bain-to visit the mining camps during the summer months, and give a series of lectures and practical demonstrations in mineralogy, geology and metallurgy to the men actively engaged in the mining industry.

These gentlemen, as well as the

reading camp instructors, do not confine their efforts to technical instruction, and are an untold influence for good in the camps they visit. This year Dr. Goodwin has taken his magic lantern with him, and additional interest is being awakened. The lantern has also been used successfully by the Association in a number of reading-rooms in the lumbering camps.

It is hoped the various provincial departments of education will in the immediate future undertake and assume full responsibility for the education of all beyond as well as within the school walls.

Hitherto, because of the failure of our Canadian departments of education and educational institutions to provide for the needs of the miner and railway employee, American correspondence schools have occupied the field. Although some of these schools are doing good work, and although