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In 1919, the Reading Camp Association applied to the Government of Canada for a name change. After 1920 the organization would be called The Frontier College and in 1922, reflecting its national scope, Frontier College was granted a Dominion Charter. This gave it the authority to grant university degrees and seemed the fulfillment of Fitzpatrick's fondest dream: The recognition of the academic validity of extra mural study. A worker studying by lamplight in a bush camp bunkhouse could receive a university degree just as someone could in the ivy-covered halls of McGill or the University of Toronto. Fitzpatrick got busy putting together course calendars and curricula, engaging luminaries like Charles G.D. Roberts and C.D. Howe to write the syllabuses and act as examiners.
The dream, however, was short-lived. A mere three degrees were granted before all came crashing down. To make a long story short, Frontier College might have wanted to see itself on a par with the University of Toronto, but the inverse was not so. Canada's universities, led by the U of T, lobbied strenuously and Ontario, in 1932, succeeded in having Frontier College's degree granting powers rescinded. The philosophical argument was that the federal government, by chartering this unique institution, had stepped on constitutional powers held by the provinces.
The naked power play, however, had Ontario refuse its substantial financial grant to Frontier College unless the College would cease handing out degrees. These were the early years of the Depression; the College's board, strapped as always for cash, voted to comply.
Fitzpatrick was devastated and resigned as principal. The end of the dream, some said, led to his early death in 1936. Frontier College went back to its stock-in-trade: informal education offered to those the rest of society had missed. The simple and straight-forward mission suited the man who took over from Fitzpatrick, Edmund Bradwin, just fine. He preached a return to basics, disavowed all competition with existing educational institutions, and as the relief camps of the 1930s Great Depression filled up with unemployed men, he was able to send out 200 labourer-teachers a year.
Bradwin's standard communication with the volunteers were brief, one-page missives called "Help." Over his decades as principal he sent out dozens of these, part instructor manual, part philosophy. The following is the first, sent out probably in about 1930.
Selected Frontier College Letters
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