The one-room schoolhouse is a historical fixture of the Canadian identity. If anything, the legacy of these little rural centres of childhood literacy may not loom largely enough. According to new research by Devin Bissky Dziadyk, a PhD candidate with the Department of Economics, the expansion of one-room schoolhouses during the 1900s shaped economic history, and regional development and ultimately sparked the reallocation of labor out of Canadian agriculture.
Bissky Dziadyk wanted to understand if and how having access to a nearby school changed the paths that early 20th century rural children followed as they grew up.
“What I find is that children who had access to this very early form of education made dramatically different life choices compared to those who didn’t,” said Bissky Dziadyk. “They were more likely to move out of agricultural occupations, earn higher incomes as adults, and shift into a specific set of higher-skilled jobs, particularly becoming teachers or managers.”
To conduct his study, Bissky Dziadyk accessed newly available Canadian census records that allowed him to identify individuals and their precise locations, starting around 1906. With the data, he could pinpoint where people lived and determine which children gained access to a nearby schoolhouse and which did not. Then, Bissky Dziadyk could track these children forward in time to observe their adult outcomes in the 1931 census. He then combines this with a model of education-driven structural transformation.
“Because I could look at where the kids were and where the schools were, I could actually look at the distance decay that you get from being further versus closer to the school,” he explained. “There was a very, very consistent pattern where the kids who are living right by the school are going to be way more likely to go there than the kids that are further away. The pattern exactly fits with our intuition, but we just haven’t been able to estimate it before, except with this data.”
Bissky Dziadyk’s approach to this new data combined with other sources is also unique.
“Devin’s research integrates methods from applied microeconomics and spatial economics with newly linked historical data,” said Professor Stephan Hieblich, Bissky Dziadyk’s dissertation supervisor. “His job-market paper constructs the first individual linkages across waves from the 1900-1930 Canadian micro-censuses and fine-grained geolocations, testing how proximity to newly opened schools affected education and later occupational choice.”
Bissky Dziadyk then used model-based counterfactuals built on the linked data. This revealed that much of the movement out of Canada’s least productive farming regions would not have happened without improved access to school. Expanding access to nearby schools not only changed children’s job choices but also accelerated the depopulation of less-productive farmland. Educated young adults relocated toward better-paying opportunities elsewhere.
The role of the teachers, who covered every subject for children between ages as young as six and as old as fourteen, continues to be a source of inspiration. As a seasoned teaching assistant, Bissky Dziadyk has learned that while students of all ages may have changed, the demands of teaching at all levels haven’t changed as much in the century since the rapid expansion of one-room schoolhouses.
“When you’re teaching, especially in economics, you have to make it interesting and fun,” said Bissky Dziadyk. “You’re competing with everything else going on in your students’ lives. If you want to reach them, you must be engaging enough to hold their attention. The U of T student body is insanely diverse from so many different dimensions. You see that in where students come from, their strengths and weaknesses, and how much they care about the material. As a teacher, you have to be flexible and willing to speak to different audiences in different ways.”
Return to the Department of Economics website.
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