ROBERT NICHOLAS BÉRARD Moral Education in Nova Scotia, 1880-1920 THE PROMOTION OF MORALITY has always been regarded as a function of the school throughout the history of education in Nova Scotia. As had been the case in Europe earlier, the school shared with the family and the churches respon- sibility for moral formation. The majority of early school foundations owed their establishment to religious organizations whose interest in moral education was paramount. Even with the rise of the common school movement, against a backdrop of deep religious division in the province, pioneers like Alexander For- rester, first principal of Nova Scotia's Normal College, argued in 1867 for moral instruction on broadly but specifically Christian lines as the central aim of public education. 1 By the end of the 19th century, however, concern for the promotion of moral and ethical instruction began to intensify. As society became industrialized and urbanized, traditional guarantors of morality and social stability — family, church, and small community — saw their effectiveness in that role steadily eroded. The churches found it difficult to adjust to political and economic changes of the age. The Roman Catholic Church, stubbornly resisting com- promise with modernism, formulated the clearest response to liberal democracy, industrial capitalism, and Darwinian science, a response which was largely negative; Most Protestant denominations were divided during this period between those who sought to reinterpret the Christian message in changed sur- roundings and those of a more fundamentalist stripe. 2 Throughout the Western world, men found themselves, in the words of Dutch historian Jan Romein, "before the dark gate of utter uncertainty" 3 in a world in which scientific dis- covery and social change had put traditional verities under attack. It is not sur- prising, then, that conventionally religious persons should seek to reinforce the moral order through the schools. At the same time, even those who professed adherence to no creed were no less concerned about what appeared to be a decline in personal and public morality and were equally vocal in demanding that schools place renewed emphasis oh the teaching of ethics and morality. 4 There were no clear battle-lines between "secular" and "Christian" morality, 1 Alexander Forrester, The Teacher's Textbook (Halifax, 1867), pp. 585-90. 2 These divisions are discussed in Henry F. May, Protestant Churches in Industrial America (New York, 1949), pp. 163-203. 3 Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900 (Middletown, Connecticut, 1980), p. 586. 4 See, for example, the history of Britain's Moral Instructional League, a largely secular body, in Gustav Spiller, The Ethical Movement in Great Britain (London, 1934), pp. 124-55.