Graff observes:

Labour. ..deviated from the major premises of leading schoolmen who sought more education of the working class for greater productivity. Ambivalent about the proper role, form and content of education, recognizing some contradictions, and often placing its benefits and applications quite aside from their jobs, they sought to be free and independent, powerful in ways that would not have pleased the men who desired to have the masses educated .... Their notions of education and the uses of literacy were hardly the same as those of the schoolmen.44

The Workman suggested that the sole aim of education should not be to increase the value of capital. 45 One immediate need was education which could help the workers serve the cause of labour.46 Workers must "educate themselves to think; they must also think for themselves". 47

Factory Labour

The working class was suffering under the onslaught of capitalist industrial development, which demanded rigour, punctuality disciplined labour. 48 Particularly onerous was the length of the work day, which stood at an average of ten hours, and the working class movement was engaged in a vigourous and militant struggle for a shorter work day. 49 An iron molder wrote in 1875:

So let us organize, concentrate--our forces, irrespective of trade or profession, and demand eight hours per day,....Let the capitalist call us communists or what they will, I would rather be called a communist and have my right, then be called a 'scab' and have no rights at all.50"

Without measures to improve the condition of the working class such as a shortened work day, education could only be of limited value and effect. An anonymous worker, "Vincent", wrote in the Labour Union, an organ of the Hamilton Knights of Labour.