University and another way of teaching

After Edgely, Bethune enrolled in the University of Toronto to study Physiology and Biochemistry. He passed his courses, but his marks were not good, and he was bored. He missed his beloved wilderness. After two years he found an answer.

In 1911, Bethune joined the Reading Camp Association. The arrangement was that Bethune and other students would work at remote logging camps during the day. In exchange for free accommodation, they would spend their evenings teaching the loggers, many of whom were recent immigrants without good English skills. It suited Bethune perfectly. He was in the wilderness, working hard and doing something worthwhile. He even had to be self-sufficient, on occasion fixing a broken phonograph or setting a man’s broken leg.

Norman (centre with legs apart) with loggers during his Reading Camp Association days, 1911

Alfred Fitzpatrick believed that education should be available everywhere, “on the farm, in the bush, on the railway, and in the mine.” In 1899 he founded the Reading Camp Association to try and teach people who could not get into school. The students were mostly adults and they were mostly taught English. In 1919, the name was changed to Frontier College. Frontier College still exists today, and now works with children and teens, people in prison, living on the streets or with special needs—in fact, anyone who cannot, for one reason or another, get to school.

Norman Bethune must have liked the idea that the teachers should go to the pupils rather than the other way around. All through his life, he practised the idea that doctors should go where they were needed rather than wait for the sick and wounded to come to them.