Accueil Paysage Social Ways of Working: Labour and Manual Training at Canadian University College

Ways of Working: Labour and Manual Training at Canadian University College

par David Ridley

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However, the divestment did not occur without some tension at the College itself and among its supporters. In a denomination noted for its pragmatism, the solution to the economic and administrative problem of the industries was interpreted by some as modifying the church's historical position on the benefits of manual labour.⁷ CUC's academic programs had also come under some scrutiny from its supporting congregations, over perceptions of the liberalizing and relativizing of Church teaching under the guise of "higher education." This larger tension was a backdrop to the selling of the industries.

It has been the case in many of Alberta's rural communities that rapid and significant change, such as that at CUC, gives rise to particular memories around the experience of earlier generations.⁸ The work and vision of the first generations stands as a symbol of moral fortitude and hardiness, something found wanting in the younger generations. Appropriately, the earlier generations look to the past as a way of assessing and understanding recent developments. This, after all, is how tradition works in religious communities: it provides a check on what G.K. Chesterton called "the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around," although the decision to divest at CUC was in no way cavalier or intentionally pushing the margins of Seventh-day Adventist self-understanding.

It would be simplistic to explain the dilemma at CUC with that worn-out catch all, "the generation gap" for these concerns for the integrity of education and manual labour are deeply rooted in the memory and experience of the denomination. The Seventh-day Adventist co-founder Ellen Harmon Gould White (1826-1915) devoted a substantial portion of her more than 100 published books and pamphlets to manual training and the health-benefits of physical labour. In her 1903 treatise entitled Education, Ellen White writes:

At the creation, labor was appointed as a blessing... the curse of sin has brought a change in the conditions of labor; yet though now attended with anxiety, weariness, and pain, it is still a source of happiness and development. And it is a safeguard against temptation. Its discipline places a check on self indulgence, and promotes industry, purity and firmness. Thus it becomes a part of God's great plan for our recovery from the Fall.

Labour, in this respect, is redemptive, the restorer of humankind to the desired image of the maker. Given the enormous influence of Ellen White's writing on Seventh-day Adventism, this concern is foundational for Adventist teaching. Understanding "God's great plan for our recovery from the Fall," is a source and means to attaining moral perfection and the paradise lost.

IIn order to give full expression to this redemptive work, Ellen White's ideal instructional setting was in the country, away from the city, that students might better see the created order in learning to tend it. Given the early development of Seventh-day Adventism in the rural communities of the American mid-west, the rural setting and the accompanying work ethic is part of the denomination's cultural memory. These communities were shaped by the "self-evident truths" and agrarian thinking articulated by Thomas Jefferson, namely that a society of industrious and self-supporting landowners were critical for social stability and moral development.⁹ Such an ideal would have travelled with the Adventist settlers arriving in Wilfrid Laurier's "Last Best West," easily taking root with the agrarian sentiments prevalent in Alberta's early years. Consequently, CUC's rural setting is by design, its landholdings creating a pastoral belt around the College. Ellen White's observation that "agriculture is the ABC of education" has been sublimated through CUC's --and indeed the entire Seventh-day Adventist movement's- relationship to agriculture.¹⁰

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