Going to University:
Family Histories & Post-Secondary Credentialing
in a Cape Breton Working Class Town
Paper presented at the Higher Education Close Up Conference 2,
Lancaster University, 16-18 July
Jane McEldowney Jensen
131 Taylor Education Building
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506
jjensen@pop.uky.edu
859-257-1929
“The market based competition that characterizes the acquisition and disposition of educational
credentials gives the process a meritocratic set of possibilities, but the influence of class on this
competition gives it a socially reproductive set of probabilities as well” (Brown, 1995, xvi)
This paper presents, through the histories of two extended families, how experiences of
education and work are intertwined in a community whose public record tells us mainly about
the history of coal mining. Through these family stories, I show how educational aspirations and
attitudes toward the efficacy of education have changed from one generation to the next in Glace
Bay, Nova Scotia--a company town now facing the end of an industrial economy. The stories of
Frank, a retired civil servant; Millie, a retired nurse; and conversations with their friends and
families offer narratives that help build our understanding of education and social mobility in deindustrializing communities. This research paper places the discussion of post-secondary
educational decision-making within the context of a local community.
The community studied is a coal-mining town on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
Although much of the island is rural, the area surrounding Glace Bay was developed in the early
Jensen
Page 1
part of the twentieth century by large coal and steel corporations located off-island, first in
Britain and later in central Canada. Unlike mining in Appalachia and the Alleghenies, local
industry in Cape Breton has never been locally owned (Obermiller, P.J. and Philliber, W. W.,
1994). Glace Bay is a company town populated by workers, dependent upon the vagaries of
global coal and steel markets with a strong history of labor activism and economic upheaval.
Over the last twenty years, the most recent owner of the coal industry in the region, a
government entity called Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO), has closed all of the
remaining coal mines in industrial Cape Breton and the steel mill. Glace Bay is also known for
its fishing industry, primarily in-shore fishermen who harvest lobster and, until recently, cod.
The decline of cod stock in the Atlantic fishery has meant substantial downsizing of fishing in
the area resulting in the loss of jobs for both fishermen and those who work in the fish packing
plants. Economic development in industrial Cape Breton has shifted toward a “cluster” model
concentrating on the potential petroleum industry, information technology, and heritage tourism.
I completed the main body of fieldwork for this study in 1995 with follow-up visits over the
last five years. In 1996, Glace Bay became part of the amalgamated Municipality of Cape
Breton along with a number of neighboring colliery communities. At the time of my fieldwork
DEVCO was going through a process of turning over management of the mines and mill to local
leaders, long after potential buyers had lost interest in Cape Breton coal or steel. While small
groups in Cape Breton still talk about reviving the coal industry, this study is literally about the
end of an era for an industrial region. Public histories of the town concentrate on its industrial
past. Education and other social institutions are rarely mentioned except with regard to mining.
In investigating the decisions individuals have made and the ways that the community talks
Jensen
Page 2
about the possibilities of education, I uncover more of the cultural history of the town that
increases our understanding of how Glace Bay residents see their future.
My research focuses on the ways that the people of Glace Bay have interpreted the modern
ideology of achievement. An achievement ideology rewards individual aspirations for success
and requires public confidence in the meritocratic potential of educational credentials for
economic opportunity. The town of Glace Bay has a strong heritage of solidarity and selfsufficiency that simultaneously accepts the potential of formal education while publicly
eschewing individual ambitions that compete with a perceived ethic of cooperation. How is this
paradox of individual versus community ambition resolved? How is the hegemonic weight of an
ideology of success born by a community that has been and continues to be economically
marginalized? As requirements for educational credentials have changed over the last century,
how has educational decision-making changed from one generation to the next? In what ways
have community members’ understandings of self-improvement, family, community, and
knowledge transformed as the economy has moved from an industrial to a service model and,
more recently, to a knowledge-based global marketplace?
Cultural Production and Credentialing
This study draws upon two conceptual frameworks, cultural reproduction and theories of
credentialism. These theoretical constructions overlap in the study of educational decisionmaking, especially in the ways individuals understand the efficacy of post-compulsory
education. Studies of cultural production, such as Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labor and more
recently MacLeod’s (1994) Ain’t No Makin’ It, demonstrate that public confidence (or a lack
thereof) in education is an important variable to understanding the ways that the processes of
education serve to reproduce social inequality. If individuals or groups of individuals, such as
Jensen
Page 3
the lads in Willis’ study or the hallway hangers in MacLeod’s work, perceive education as
useless or demeaning, then achievement is most likely to be low. After all, why participate in an
endeavor that appears to disdain your cultural identity or the values of your family? The students
and their families in these two studies are generally unsuccessful in school and work
environments and the meritocratic tenets of an achievement ideology place the blame for that
failure squarely on their individual weaknesses rather than other social factors. Proponents of
resistance theory recognize that resistance to the authority of education is a response to an oftenastute grasp of the inequalities inherent in the social system.1 Thus strategies of resistance are
understood as cultural production.
While we can understand how strategies of resistance can result in low academic
achievement leading to the reproduction of social stratification (intergenerational) and how this
kind of social reproduction continues to subjugate marginalized populations, the negative
consequences of under-education are increasing. In a post-industrial economy, post-compulsory
credentials and the hierarchy of post-secondary programs are as important to a discussion of
social reproduction and education as is schooling. It is not enough, in today’s economy, to
successfully finish compulsory schooling. Further or higher education is now required for
almost any kind of work—despite the fact that the nature of that work may not require more
technical skill than before. What happens in this context to those individuals who resist the
dominant culture’s institutional processes and as a result fail to acquire the necessary “tickets”
for success in mainstream society?
1
I wish to note the critique of the works cited as being focused almost completely on the resistive practices of boys
with little attention paid to issues of gender. In an earlier conference paper, I address this issue (Jensen, 1987). See
Goldthorpe, J.H., (1983); Lareau, (1992); Raissiguier, C., (1994); and an edited volume by Mahony, P. and
Zmroczek, C., (1997) for a more complete discussion of gender, class, and educational decision-making.
Jensen
Page 4
Critical theorists studying resistance base their examination of education as a site of conflict
on a Gramscian notion of hegemony where hegemony is both contested and accepted (Apple,
1982). Willis (in Foley, 1989) acknowledges the lived aspect of cultural practice, but does not
offer a liberating solution of empowerment. He states
For me, the crucially interesting thing about cultural reproduction is how (really
and potentially) critical resistant or rebellious forces become contradictorily tied
up in the further development and maintenance of the "teeth-gritting" harmony of
capitalist formations. (p.xi)
From Willis' perspective, our efforts to capture cultural practices as "living critiques and
penetrations of dominant ideology" should be, in effect, efforts to understand how the cultural
system "goes." Is this the only alternative? Is there no possibility for the transformative effects
of education?
Indeed, what happens to those individuals who do go along with society’s rules, those who
assimilate, who finish the programs, who acquire the credentials and who sometimes (and
sometimes not) succeed. What happens to the ear’oles and the brothers, those students in
cultural studies that followed the hegemonic success ideology? Unlike the Native-American
students in Brayboy’s study who are conscious participants in the post-secondary credentialing
game, most individuals who acquiesce to the increasing educational requirements of the new
economy are not necessarily conscious of the structural inequalities inherent in that system.
This is, in fact, what defines hegemonic ideologies as “actively constituted…in a variety of
specific places” (Apple, 1982, p.12). While conscious, in the Marxist sense, of their workingclass identity, individuals seeking to survive in the “new economy” often do not see or are not
conscious of the stratification of outcomes within post-secondary education. Gray (in Hogan,
1982) might refer to this as the way “subordinate classes follow a ‘negotiated version’ of rulingclass values” (p.37). What happens to those who succeed at school and manage to climb the
Jensen
Page 5
ladder, if only a little? What happens to those who experience educational success, but fail to
succeed economically? In places where deindustrialization has resulted in severe economic
stress and education or retraining is offered as the solution, these questions are particularly
important. In Glace Bay, as increasing numbers of each generation have achieved progressively
higher educational credentials, concurrent economic success has failed to occur for all players.
What explains this discrepancy and how is this differential success (or failure) interpreted within
larger tensions between individual and community improvement?
Credentialism, introduced by Randall Collins in 1979 and later revisited by David Brown
(1995) in his work Degrees of Control, provides an intellectual foothold for examining this
problem. As a sociological study of how institutions work within the social system,
credentialism examines the expansion of educational institutions and programs as the
reproduction of social classes across generations. By directly examining the assumptions
underlying a theory of human capital development, these scholars reveal the seductive nature of
political rhetoric that heralds increasing educational achievement as a solution for economic
development. Collins describes the primary driver for public acceptance of the expansion of
post-secondary education and the certification it offers as the myth of technocracy--that increases
in requirements for credentials are driven by the needs of new technology. Collins (1979) states:
…the Technocracy story does have some facts in its favor, and it is important to
see just what they mean. One such fact is that existence of a very considerable
amount of technological change over the last two centuries (indeed, even further
back) with especially visible effects in the twentieth century on economic
productivity and the organization of work. The other fact is the increasing
prominence of education in our lives. p.3
Jensen
Page 6
In reality, he argues, most of the acceleration in requirements for credentials was caused by
conflict among social groups over control of post-secondary educational institutions and
competition for social status. Educational policy based upon the correlation of educational
achievement to technical skill and therefore to economic success masks the ways in which the
educational system continues to sort individuals and create social stratification. Brown critiques
Collins’s emphasis on the conflict between ethnic groups, but agrees that educational expansion
is rooted in a process of social conflict. Yes, government policy makers and stakeholders create
institutions and programs, but it is the product of individual decision making that leads to
attendance (or not) thus making educational decision-making a site of social conflict as well—a
space in which hegemonic ideals are contested and confirmed.
The study of post-secondary education differs from arguments about schooling because, as
stated above, individuals choose to continue to post-compulsory programs as opposed to being
required to attend school. Post-secondary education automatically includes an element of agency
because students of post-compulsory programs decide, for a variety of reasons, to attend. Why
do individuals choose to continue their education? Why do community groups advocate for the
expansion of post-secondary educational offerings? Why does the state invest in the continuing
education of private citizens when the purpose is no longer public education?2 The same
processes of cultural production and reproduction that occur in schooling do occur in postsecondary institutions. The outcomes of educational achievement and economic mobility
continue to provide evidence for the argument that schooling, whatever the level, reproduces the
social structure, but how do the everyday processes of post-secondary educational aspirations
affect that structure and make it dynamic?
Jensen
Page 7
Brown defines his socio-historical theory of educational credentialism as follows:
Whether one admires or despises higher education in the United States, the fact
remains that the life chances of Americans are shaped by the educational system
of the country. This point is reflected by the fact that disadvantaged Americans
seek out educational advancement as a panacea for political and economic
impoverishment and by the fact that privileged citizens seek to send their children
to schools at least one step above the ones to which aspiring, poorer people send
their children. The net result of this culture of educational aspiration has been
expansion of the educational system, particularly in postsecondary education, and
ever-increasing inclusion of otherwise power-bereft groups in stratified sectors of
education. (1)
Brown expands upon Collins’s analysis of educational expansion as competition among ethnic
groups in an important way. He describes the increase in employers’ desire for credentialed
workers as a social process of organizational control. Organizations, especially corporate
organizations, need to “reduce the uncertainty involved with some aspect of organizational
work” in order to remain competitive (72). Post-secondary educational credentials may provide
workers with some technical expertise, but more importantly credentials provide the claim that
their holders will understand and comply with an organizational culture. This includes a
preference for global or bureaucratic knowledge over local ways of knowing. Professional
cultures override the personal and community value systems of their participants—at least they
should, if the participant is to be successful. Brown argues that the potential of educational
credentials to produce professional/bureaucratic workers is the main drive in a post-industrial
2
See Eyerman, Svensson & Soderquist, Intellectuals, Universities and the State in Western Modern Societies. 1987,
University of California Press for a discussion of the public subsidy of private aspirations. See also Carnoy (1993)
Jensen
Page 8
society that needs more service and knowledge workers. This is a crucial point for my
understanding of how educational credentialing can be detrimental to community
development…in effect, professionalization can undermine what makes local culture valuable.
In summary, the achievement ideology emphasizes the meritocratic potential of individual
effort and masks social inequalities that may affect that potential. Furthermore, in the political
economy of the post-industrial era, the individual is called upon to take an entrepreneurial
approach to seeking knowledge that will allow him or her to compete in a global marketplace.
Institutions sell knowledge to the individual and the cost of that education increases as sources of
public funding diminish. As a result, the onus of success falls upon the individual’s ability to
become what Brown calls an “organization man” [sic], separating himself (or herself) from
locally-based loyalties and acquiring the social as well as technical skills to manuever within the
corporate world. The educational process indoctrinates a certain set of values but the credential
is in itself a “claim” against potential economic participation. Post-secondary education
therefore becomes a process and a commodity. In the neo-conservative political climate
described by Lewis (2001), post-secondary educational institutions are being pushed to
commodify education and the credentials they offer are often further stratified by “get educated
and therefore rich” schemes of short-term training programs that boost enrollment. In the long
run, what claims a credential holder might be able to make are subject to their ability to play the
hierarchical system of post-secondary education.
The Increasing “Burden” of Education in Glace Bay
Throughout interviews with residents of Glace Bay regarding the history of education in the
town, the expression "it's no burden to carry" was used often to refer to “getting your papers”
(acquiring educational certification for a particular job or profession). Alternatively, the term
on the relative autonomy of education relative to the state.
Jensen
Page 9
was used to refer to seeking out knowledge for everyday life, such as consulting automotive
manuals, reading novels, or learning the names of a nephew’s playmates. Education, broadly
defined, was and is valued in Glace Bay with its high graduation rates and strong tradition of
self-improvement through reading.
Going to university was never unusual for Glace Bay residents, even for the sons and
daughters of laborers in the mine. Almost every family has a college graduate, in fact, a group of
siblings in a Glace Bay family might include a corporate CEO, a coal miner, a nurse, and diesel
mechanic living across North America. The “burden” of education, however, has become
heavier. Over the past forty years, as coal mining has declined in the area, going to university
has become a necessity rather than an opportunity. Differences between educational certification
and everyday or on-the-job learning have increased, often at the expense of local knowledge
systems.
The liberal politics of equitable access to opportunity of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada
contributed to the rise in public support of post-secondary student grants and loans and the
development of regional institutions. At first quite generous, student grants and loans lifted
restrictions of funding from the public demand for education further increasing the size and
shape of post-secondary programs. A shift in the goals of post-secondary institutions whereby
education became a product to be sold and a business to be run rather than a vehicle for
democratic advancement, however, followed this generosity. For economic survival in Atlantic
Canada, in fact, the commodity of education is a product that everyone must buy or be in the
business of selling or economic survival is uncertain. Government policy in Cape Breton places
ever-increasing emphasis on education as the answer to economic development, but rather than
Jensen
Page 10
investing in general education, provincial and federal dollars go to “economic and technical
innovation” and to 1-2 year certification courses that further generate a hierarchy of outcomes.
The increase in educational credentialing and the commodification of higher education is
true for most of North America (Brown, 1995, Shumar, ). When Frank and Millie finished high
school in the 1930s, there were on-the-job training opportunities for most positions. Working in a
local hospital, Millie eventually finished her nursing degree and became a nursing instructor.
Frank was successful in his government career without further formal education and he actively
pursued an informal education in regional history through reading and attending local heritage
events. Frank and Millie’s grandchildren, however, have no choice but to go to university if they
want to make sustainable wages. The rise of credentialing means more than just the increase in
educational investment required of an individual. For towns like Glace Bay, the changing
economy and changing educational requirements have affected the form and structure of families
and communities—going to university often means going away, regardless of the desire to stay.
The pursuit of educational credentials exacts a toll, not only on the resources of the learner and
his or her family but also on the sustainability of community values and norms as external
knowledge is privileged over local ways of knowing. As requirements of educational credentials
have risen, the burden of education in terms of its costs and affect on the community has shifted.
Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, this research includes participant
observation, focused life history interviews, and historical document reviews. This paper reflects
the intersection of biography and history wherein we learn not only what residents believed to
have happened in their town, but also what they were doing at the time—the decisions they made
and the ways that they interpreted the options and obstacles before them.3 I recruited individuals
for interviews through a variety of methods. These included snowball sampling (following one
Jensen
Page 11
lead to the next, especially from one family member to the next), and convenience sampling
(seizing opportunities to talk to local residents in public venues such as coffee shops, the library,
the bingo halls, my landlady’s kitchen, etc.). I also contacted a random sample of alumni from
one of the two high schools in town (now consolidated into one institution) from a reunion
mailing list. Using these interviews, I created, for this paper, two fictitious families. These are
composite families, made up of pieces of stories of real individuals who are not related. They
are, however, family histories that would be familiar to any Glace Bay resident. They are
representative of the kinds of family stories I heard and recorded. Pseudonyms and slight
changes to the facts are intended to protect the privacy of these citizens.
Visiting Frank
I called Frank to make an appointment after learning from his son that he had lived in the
same mining neighborhood on the east side of town for over 70 years. I wanted to collect oral
histories of the early years of Glace Bay to supplement the recorded history available in books
and at the Glace Bay Miner’s Museum and Frank sounded like a perfect source. When I arrived
at his door, Frank was waiting for me. He was nervous but friendly and he escorted me into his
house.
When going on interview visits, I usually tried to steer my hosts into their kitchens. I found
Cape Bretoners tended to be more relaxed in their kitchens and it was easier to set up the tape
recorder on a table than holding it out over the often-looming divide between davenport and easy
chair in a formal living room. Frank’s house had been renovated, however, from the typical
Glace Bay company house that included a front room, kitchen in the back, two bedrooms and a
bathroom upstairs. Contractors hired by his son had knocked out the walls Frank’s house and
created a floor plan that allowed 75 year-old Frank to live downstairs with his bedroom on the
3
See Watson, L. and Watson-Franke, M.B. (1985) for a discussion of the use of life history interviews.
Jensen
Page 12
first floor. The renovation resulted in a small galley kitchen and pantry along the back of the
house leading to a cozy den. My landlady, a widow who had cared for a husband, three sons,
and countless male boarders in her two bedroom house, would have resented not being able to sit
in her own kitchen, but Frank’s sitting room was pleasant and warm with a view of the ocean and
the bay. Frank gestured proudly at the view and told me we would soon be seeing the ferry
leaving Sydney harbor for Newfoundland.
Frank had lived in this neighborhood all his life with the brief exception of the three years he
spent in the Canadian navy during World War II. He grew up in another company house two
blocks away from where we sat and had gone to school across the street at St. John’s elementary
school once run by the Sisters of Charity. Most of the nuns lived in the convent across the street
and the lay teachers would have also lived in the neighborhood. The elementary school was
closed, but the convent was still there and its residents, those that weren’t retired, taught in the
public schools. Frank went to St. Anne’s High School. To go to school, he would have crossed
the cluster of streets that made up his neighborhood of New Aberdeen, past another cluster of
streets called Tablehead, and finally up Chapell Hill, the closest thing to a middle class
neighborhood in Glace Bay. The town is made up of over fifteen such neighborhoods, most of
which grew up around mines, tunneling deep beneath the town’s streets and out under the
Atlantic ocean into one of three coal seams that wrap the southeastern shore of Cape Breton
Island.
Frank didn’t finish high school. He worked as a miner in a bootleg mine, one of many small
enterprises dug into the cliffs surrounding the town or burrowed down from a mine head hidden
in a backyard shed. I asked why the company allowed them to continue and he laughed. “They
would come and blow up the entrance every once in a while, but it only took a few days to get
Jensen
Page 13
back to where you were before. We’d steal timbers from Dominion and some of the older
miners would check our work and make sure we were keeping our lines straight and safe,” he
explained. When he was seventeen, he went with his father and brothers to work for the
company. “I tried several times to get on at the mine,” Frank said, “but with three brothers and a
father in the mine I think they thought that was enough from one family.” Frank had told this
story many times. For a man of his age, growing up in a company house, in a company town, to
have avoided a life in the mine required explanation. Dispensation. It had not been his choice to
avoid the mine, his story told, but that of the mine managers. Serendipity--if he had not had
three older brothers or, perhaps, if the overmen had been more pressed for labor he might have
become a professional miner. He might have begun a job that would require him to work twelve
hour days (or more), going to and from work in darkness most of the year, with very little pay or
time off, in dangerous working conditions. He would also have joined a fraternity that offered a
common bond with the men in his family and community that cannot be overestimated. Frank
talked about that bond wistfully.
Instead of going into the deeps, Frank went into the Navy in the fall of 1936. Six months
later he was sent to Europe as part of the Canadian fleet sent to protect the English Channel.
Although of the age to enlist, his brothers stayed in the mine. Coal was needed for the war effort
and many Cape Breton miners were asked to stay on their jobs, despite their willingness to serve
overseas. In fact, the need for coal required them to work even harder, despite the low pay and
working conditions. After almost thirty years of largely unsuccessful union activity and strikes
against the absentee coal company management, any movement to strike was squelched by the
weight of patriotism. Union activism in the mines became a more abstract ideal engineered by
organizers outside of the area resulting in a stronger union organization (the UMW), but
Jensen
Page 14
relinquishing the fight for better conditions to the progress of time and technology. Of his three
brothers, two remained underground miners until they retired, and one became a diesel mechanic
at the steel mill in Sydney.
When he returned from the war, Frank took the civil service exam. “I had the second
highest score that year,” he told me proudly. He went to work for the government and stayed in
that job until his retirement ten years prior to my visit. Frank was ahead of his time. In 1950,
when he was 25 years old, the town population was 23,000. 12,000 of those people were miners.
Frank worked above ground in a clean job that paid decently and allowed him to come and go
from work in daylight most of the year. His work experience was categorically different from
that of the other men in his family, his classmates at school, and most of the men in his
neighborhood. 25 years later, however, the town population was still over 20,000 but only 3000
men worked in the mines. Frank was one of many people who worked for the government in
civil and social service jobs; above ground jobs that paid decently, although not extravagantly,
and offered few occupational hazards. By 1995, when Frank and I sat in his renovated company
house, watching the Newfoundland ferry round Phalen Point, the mines were all but closed with
less than 300 miners still employed.
Frank is also typical of many Glace Bay residents in his generation. He is an avid reader.
He pushed his seven children to finish school. He worked hard and saved enough to improve his
home and buy a summer bungalow on the Mira River. He kept his family as close as he could,
but mourned the fact that most of his children live away in Central and Western Canada. He
follows local politics closely and keeps up with local news down at the Tim Horton’s coffee
shop. He complained about the closing of St. Joseph’s hospital and what he called a decline in
medical services, but applauded the building of a new high school that he believed will help
Jensen
Page 15
close the gap between Catholics and Protestants in the town. And he told stories of the old days:
the pit ponies, the strikes, the bootleg mines, and the days when miners filled the sidewalks of
the town shoulder to shoulder with blackened faces on their way home from work.
Frank spoke proudly of his nine children. Two died as young men, one in the Navy and the
other in a fishing accident. Three of his daughters have college degrees and live away. Two
others went to work in the Northwest Territories after high school and still live out west. One
son went to work for the company after dropping out of a training program and one lives nearby
and works as a hospital administrator. I asked Frank what he thought the future held for his
grandchildren who live in Cape Breton. He sighed and said:
When I was growing up, I thought we were worse off as anyone, but the young
people now have it worse. We had anarchy, burning the pluck-me stores, soldiers
in the streets, and the labor wars, but now the prospects for work are so bad. It’s
not just political but economic. It’s even harder for people to deal.
Millie’s Story
A few weeks earlier, I was escorted into another sitting room; this one occupied by Millie, a
78-year-old retired nurse. Millie’s house was new, built for her by her doctor son but still less
than a mile from the company house in which she grew up. Eastern European Jews, her family
lived in a neighborhood that was a mix of European families: Italian, Belarussian, Polish, and
Ukrainian. Glace Bay was not segregated by ethnicity, but the ethnic community clubs in which
the language and culture of the immigrants’ home regions were most persistent were on Millie’s
side of town. Most of the houses in the town were company structures like Frank’s, clustered
together in rows on numbered streets around the mine heads, and sold to their owners by the coal
Jensen
Page 16
company in the 1960’s. In contrast, newer houses like Millie’s popped up along the connecting
roads between the mines and on the roads leading out of town. Further back from the sea than
Frank’s house, the windows in Millie’s sitting room offered a view across the road to the shrub
covered headlands of the coast.
Millie’s father had been a clerk at a store in Caledonia, one of the oldest neighborhoods in
Glace Bay. Millie’s family was luckier than most as her father was less likely to be laid off by
the company. She was visibly upset, however, when she talked about the strikes of her
childhood when families in her neighborhood would be put out in the street and her classmates
were often hungry. Millie finished high school at Morrison Glace Bay High School, the public
school that served most of the non-Catholic students in town. She remembered her Catholic
neighbors walking past Morrison on the way to St. Anne’s. Millie went to nursing school in
Montreal for a year after high school and then returned to train on the job at the public hospital.
Millie was proud of her education and her family. “When you went to college in the
forties,” she began, “it was a big deal! My mother stood on the step of the house and cried!”
She went on to talk about how important it had been to her to “get out” of Glace Bay. “I
couldn’t wait! To get away from this close knit clannishness.” Millie spoke both fondly and
with bitterness about the closeness of her family and those of her neighbors. She explained that
what she called clannishness extended beyond the Scottish families that made up the largest
ethnic group in the town and reduced the antagonism that might have existed between ethnic and
religious groups. “It helped us survive,” she exclaimed. “We knew too much to ignore each
other’s pain.”
Millie and her sisters and brothers all went to college. The two of her sisters became
teachers, one brother moved away to “the Boston States” and went into business and the other
Jensen
Page 17
became a doctor. “My parents lived for three things: food, shelter, and education,” she
exclaimed. She and her husband, a clerk for the coal company, carried on this tradition sending
their son to college in Halifax and later on to medical school in New York. Their daughter also
went to college, but dropped out of school and works in Sydney for a training company.
Millie was active in community outreach, sometimes working with extension workers from
“Little X” the extension campus of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish. The cooperative
movement in Cape Breton was called the Antigonish movement a people’s school that taught
grass-roots development and self-help programs, especially literacy, home economics, and the
benefits of cooperatives. “The principles of self dignity are still important,” Millie sighed, “ just
harder to place in today’s world.” I asked Millie the same questions about the future that I asked
of Frank. She responded that she had recently had the same conversation with her sisters in
Boston:
When my sisters ask me “Mil, what are they doing in Glace Bay?” I say, “It’s a
welfare state.” They can’t believe it.
Frank and Millie lived through the period of the town’s history when immigrants struggled
with the company and children were sent to school with the hopes of getting them out of the
mines and into something better. They both remembered those hard days fondly, with more than
a little nostalgia. This is typical of Glace Bay where any introduction to the town is a history
lesson. Frank and Millie’s stories also reinforce the notion that for this generation, postsecondary education was an opportunity rather than a necessity. While the costs of attending
college were significant, they were not insurmountable. One of Frank and Millie’s peers
explained how booster clubs, local community organizations, and the Catholic church would
Jensen
Page 18
often provide the scholarships young people needed to continue their education.4 A case
example of the educational expansion described by Randall Collins, early opportunities for postsecondary education in Glace Bay was made possible by the desire of different social, ethnic,
and religious groups to increase opportunities for their young people. The clannishness that
Millie spoke of worked to help find the resources needed for the college success of a wide
variety of individuals.
Teachers, Nurses, Miners, and the Pogie
Frank and Millie’s children faced a very different set of educational choices when they came
of age. Graduating from high school in the 1950s and 1960s, they had new schools, a new
extension campus of St. Francis Xavier University nearby in Sydney, opportunities for technical
education at a government technical college, and the choice of a variety of proprietary training
institutions. Government funding for post-secondary education was increasing and with
institutions located nearby costs were less. Credentialing requirements, however, had increased,
especially for professional careers. Teaching, nursing, and mining—the primary occupations in
Glace Bay—now required post-compulsory training (see Table One). Yes, you could still go
into the mines without further education, but the changes to long-wall mining in the early 1960s
meant that the company encouraged apprenticeship programs that provided post-secondary
vocational training and had highly competitive admissions.
4
The differences between American and Canadian higher education have not been stressed in this essay. There are
some similarities, especially with regard to the extent of support by civic organizations for scholarships that offsets
the rigidity of class lines more common in the UK and Europe (Axelrod, 1990; Lipset, 1990).
Jensen
Page 19
Table One
Career Aspirations of Glace Bay High School Seniors
Morrison High School Year Book 1957
social work
teaching
nursing/medicine
secretarial/accounting
engineer/electrician
RCMP (police)/law
university
military
While the traditional occupations in Glace Bay required more education than in Frank and
Millie’s day, there were also fewer jobs to be had. Frank and Millie’s children’s classmates left
Glace Bay in droves—often before finishing high school. There were jobs in the factories in
central Canada and in the fledgling oil industry of western Canada. Opportunities were also
available in the Northwest Territories.
Frank’s son Dave describes his high school years as full of excitement. They were the first
class at the new St. Michael’s High School and there were new institutions and programs
opening in the area. Economic times were touch, however, and he credits the threat of mine
closures as part of the excitement for his peer group:
We were on a wave. Our parents were afraid for us because everything was
changing, but to us it seemed like there was so much possibility. We didn’t have
the choice of the mines or else that our fathers had. Maybe because there was
nothing here we felt like anything could happen!
Dave went on to talk about how his younger siblings, the four youngest who didn’t go to high
school until a decade after he had graduated, did not have the same excitement. “They were
Jensen
Page 20
passive about everything,” he said. In fact, his younger siblings were less successful in the
traditional sense; only one finished college and two of the others barely finished high school.
Dave went away to college and later finished a Masters in Public Administration in Toronto.
He returned to work in Cape Breton when his mother died to be closer to his father, taking a cut
in pay to do so. Visiting with him five years after our first interview, I asked if he still felt that
his generation had been on a wave and if he saw any similarities with the current situation of the
mines closing. He nodded, “Despite the fact that some of my friends are back here living at
home without jobs, I’d still say we were a successful group. We didn’t all make it, but we all
gave it a hell of a try.”
Dave’s sister Karen went to teacher’s college a few years after Dave left home. She also
talked about the excitement she felt has a high school senior. “There was doom and gloom every
day in the papers,” she explained, “but we were as good as anyone!” She talked about the
number of teachers across Canada from Cape Breton. “We went to get out, but we also wanted
to come home again someday. Teaching made leaving possible, but some of us never came
home.”
Karen gave me the name of her friend, Trudy, who still lives in Toronto after going with
Karen to teacher’s college. Trudy talked about living away from the island:
It was pretty lonesome at first. Most of our friends are Maritimers or from Out
West. We talk about moving back, but if we hadn’t left when we did our children
would have left us. We go home every two or three years, usually during lobster
fishing.
Jensen
Page 21
Trudy believes that she and her husband, who works for the RCMP, will eventually retire
to Cape Breton, but not to Glace Bay. “We’ll get a nice country house on the lake,” she
mused.
Millie’s daughter Rachel graduated from Morrison High School in the early 1960’s and went
away to an American college. She dropped out when she couldn’t “find herself”. “I went
because I was expected to, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she explained, “and I missed
being home.” Returning to Nova Scotia Rachel went to work for a proprietary school first in
Halifax and later in Cape Breton conducting life skills training courses. She never married. She
was happy with her position and claimed that the company she worked for was making a
difference. “The universities don’t prepare students for the real world,” she said. Her company
provides upgrading and skills classes for government clients and is known for being “on the
inside” of economic development initiatives.
Rachel talked about her mother’s interest in the cooperative movement and how it affected
her desire to pursue a career that included “helping people”. I asked if she had ever wanted to go
back to school and become an educator and she shook her head and said she that she had
attended workshops on entrepreneurship and marketing. “Training people without teaching them
how to think like business people doesn’t change things,” she said. “As an educator I can do
more to help my students if I have the business know-how than I would if I just taught them
subjects.” Rachel’s job required her to develop partnerships with businesses and she stated she
was interested in building entrepreneurship programs in schools. “They [the children] need to
learn independence. Their parents are too far gone in the dependency mind frame.”
Rachel’s older brother Josh also talked about wanting to work in a field where he could
“help people”. He finished medical school in the United States and then returned to Nova Scotia
Jensen
Page 22
after working in central Canada for ten years. We talked about his decision to go to college and
his decision to go on to medical school. “I always knew I’d go on,” he said. He did not think of
himself as an overly academic student or particularly successful, but he reflected on the
differences between his family and those of his classmates:
In the old days, the people were self-educated. They would discuss politics, listen
to the radio, and follow the union debates. It didn’t matter whether my mother
went to college or not…her friends were just as educated from books and
conversation as she was. But they [his parents] pushed at us, and some of the
people I went to school with didn’t get pushed. That made a difference.
Alistair, a friend of Josh’s, gave another perspective on the influence of family. His father
objected to his academic interests. “University is for doctor and lawyer’s sons,” Alistair’s father
said. “My dad didn’t come to graduation,” Alistair said quietly, “he said that reading and
studying would just make it harder to go enter the mines when the time came.” His mother,
however, would have “done anything” to help him achieve his dreams and she supported his
efforts to go to college and later graduate school. Josh and Alistair were both lucky to have
mothers who pushed them to go on, but they made these choices in a climate that often did not
encourage formal post-secondary educational ambitions.
Josh answered with regret when I asked him if he planned on staying in Cape Breton. “The
Jewish community here is dying,” he said. “Without my mother here, I doubt we’ll stay.” Josh’s
children are about to start college and do not plan on making their lives in Glace Bay or the
surrounding area. “What is there here for them?” Josh asked.
Unlike Alistair, Josh, Dave and Karen, Frank’s nephew John did not go on to college. He
dropped out of high school and went to Ontario to work for Briggs and Stratton with a group of
Jensen
Page 23
his classmates. Later, a friend from home encouraged him to come back and he went to work for
the coal company in 1972. The mine he was working closed, and John went to work for the steel
mill with Frank’s youngest son until they were both laid off in 1989. Unemployed since that
time, he works a variety of odd jobs and occasionally crews on a lobster boat. Trained on-thejob and through upgrading classes at the Adult Vocational Training Center (AVTC), John is a
licensed diesel mechanic and can run a variety of heavy equipment. Divorced, he lives with his
aging father and mother and helps supplement their pension income. John laughed when I asked
him about leaving to find work. “I guess you could say I’m one of them Cape Bretoners who
just likes living on the pogie,” he joked. In all seriousness, he talked about wanting to stay close
to his children and parents and how he did not think that he could do any better living away.
“I’m from the Bay, you see and here that means something. There, I’d just be another John.” I
asked about whether he thought he might return to school. “For what?” he answered, “I’d only
get a degree that I’d have to use away and I’m too old to become something I’m not.”
High School on the Highway
Millie and Frank’s grandchildren and their friends have grown up in an industrial Cape Breton
with little to no industry. While a certain percentage of every generation have always left the
island to find work and seek broader opportunities, the continuing severity of the economic
conditions in Cape Breton mean that a larger and larger portion of young people have been
forced to leave or face unemployment. As the perceived efficacy of post-secondary credentials
for local work declined, cynicism about and, in some cases, resistance to external requirements
for education increased. When referring to the University College of Cape Breton, Millie’s
granddaughter talked unenthusiastically about going to the “high-school on the highway” and
then away to find work. For her, post-secondary education became a necessary next step after
Jensen
Page 24
high school rather than the opportunity it was for her grandmother and father. Frank’s youngest
son told of attending mandatory “life-skills development” sessions after being laid off from the
steel mill. For him, further education became a prescription rather than the personal pursuit of
knowledge his father enjoyed.
In many ways, the career aspirations of young people in industrial Cape Breton have not
changed since their parents graduated from high school. Table Two shows the similarities in
aspirations from one generation to the next.
Table Two
Student Career Aspirations
Glace Bay H.S.
1995 &1996
Student Survey
social work
teaching
nursing/medicine
secretarial
business
trade (electrician, plumber, etc.)
law, criminal justice
university
Morrison H.S.
1957
Year Book
social work
teaching
nursing/medicine
secretarial/accounting
engineer/electrician
RCMP (police)/law
university
military
What has changed, however, are the educational requirements to succeed in these roles and the
potential for employment in these fields. In 1997, St. Francis Xavier University graduated 1500
more teachers than there were teaching positions in the province of Nova Scotia. Successful
college graduates continue to leave Cape Breton to find work, even those who planned on
staying. If post-secondary education no longer provides opportunities to be successful in Cape
Breton, what new roles does post-secondary education play today? Is it still "no burden to
carry"?
Jensen
Page 25
Conclusion
During the first half of the twentieth century education did reproduce social differences in
Glace Bay, but because of the similarities in circumstances from one family to the next, the
playing field was remarkably level. For Glace Bay residents, the economy and the educational
requirements of that economy would play a far greater role than the social capital of families
(indigenous capital) in the ways that economic inequality came to be produced. Millie and
Frank’s families were more successful than many of their neighbors not because of differences in
their positions within the production of capital, but because of their family values for education
that were rewarded in later generations as credentials became valued commodities.
The crucial shift, it seems, for this community, came during the 1960s when the economy
made a dramatic swing away from coal mining (albeit slowly) and the state began to play a
leading role in economic development. It was at this moment that post-secondary education not
only became more accessible but also more important to place-holding within the bureaucratic
cultures of teaching, nursing, and government agencies—the most stable occupations available in
the area. At the time of this shift, however, it was still possible to maintain a sense of value for
community knowledge. Frank and Millie’s children, while pursuing the credentials and
economic mobility of a de-industrializing economy still defined themselves within the local
structures of family, neighborhood, and community—even when living “away”. Frank and
Millie’s grandchildren, however, share little of that loyalty to place. Their success is measured
more and more by their ability to play the global game rather than the local.
Finally, I end with the story of Frank’s grand-daughter Amelia. Amelia, of all the characters
introduced in this story, has reached the most transformational of results from her educational
experiences. Amelia’s father did not go to college, but at her uncle’s prodding she finished high
Jensen
Page 26
school and attended a year of college at the Nova Scotia School of Design. When her Celtic
inspired creations started selling in galleries across North America, she dropped out of college
and moved back to Cape Breton. It seems that for this young woman, the resurgence of heritage,
especially the folk heritage of the Gaelic highlanders of Cape Breton, has produced a market in
which creative ability and craftsmanship are once again rewarded over institutional credentials.
William Morris would be fascinated to hear such a turn of events as Amelia’s cousins struggle to
maintain their position within what Morris (1887) called, “the mass of general education which
earns nothing”.
References
Apple, M.W. Ed. (1982). Cultural and economic reproduction in education: Essays on
class, ideology, and the state. Boston: Routledge.
Axelrod, P. (1990). Making a Middle Class: Student life in English Canada during the
thirties. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. In: Power and
Ideology in Education. J. Karabel and A.H. Halsey. Ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brown, D.K., (1995). Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and
Occupational Credentialism. New York: Teachers College.
Carnoy, M. (1993). The New global economy in the information age: Reflections on our
changing world. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Foley, D. E. (1990). Learning capitalist culture: Deep in the heart of Tejas. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lipset, S.M. (1990). Continental divide: The values and institutions of the United States and
Canada. New York: Routledge.
Jensen
Page 27
MacLeod, J. (1995). Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and attainment in a low-income
neighborhood. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Morris, William (1887) The Commonweal. September 10.
Obermiller, P.J. and Philliber, W. W., 1994. Appalachia in an International Context: Crossnational comparisons of developing regions. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishing.
Raissiguier, C. (1994). Becoming women, becoming workers : Identity formation in a
French vocational school. Albany : State University of New York Press.
Watson, L. and Watson-Franke, M.B. (1985). Interpreting life histories : an anthropological
inquiry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, c1985.
Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to Labor. Aldershot: Gower.
Jensen
Page 28