Education

Thus, even as Fitzpatrick identified some of the harsher aspects of the treatment of campmen by employers, he did not recognize these practices as forming part of a systematic pattern of class exploitation, and felt that they could be remedied through legislative means. Moreover, he saw these practices as distinctly secondary in importance to what he considered to be the main (environmental) cause of the poverty, crime, alcoholism, etc. among campmen: the lack of opportunity for education, and in particular, for literacy training in the camps:

The problem of improving the condition of the semi-nomadic labourers who live in more or less temporary lumbering, mining, and railway construction camps is mainly educational. The majority of these men are comparatively illiterate, while thirty-five per cent are unable to recognize their own name....23 (emphasis added)

Fitzpatrick and his colleagues believed that deprived of "mental and social uplift" that reading provides (reading of 'decent' and intellectually stimulating materials, that is), illiterate campmen were prone to various "moral diseases":

Men whose spare time is occupied in gambling, drinking, listening to or taking part in the low jest, song and story, soon become depraved. Sundays and rainy days in camp, when men are off work, are the longest in the year. Men suffer more from ennui, from mental and spiritual languor, than from overwork on other days. They are then ready to jump at any suggestion, no matter how vulgar, that promises even temporary relief from such bondage. Their moral diseases, that are the result of this lack of social and religious restraint, are of a much more serious character.24

One of the "moral diseases" was crime. Fitzpatrick writes that, "Workers commit crimes they would never have perpetrated had they had anything ennobling to occupy their minds."25 The answer to the problem of "mental and spiritual languor" is education:

The only means...that men have of building up their characters is by thinking right thoughts. If we expect workers to come up to the same standards as others we should supply them with the means of education.26

The place to start was with literacy instruction conducted in the camps:

The average boy leaves the public school from the third reader. These boys, as well as those who escape the school walls without any education, should be followed to the woods and mines .... Correspondence schools reach a small percentage of men in the mining camps, and railway employees, and in some cases are doing good work. They, however, cover only a small fraction of the available ground. Owing to the illiteracy of a large percentage of men in the lumbering, mining, and railway construction camps, there is a work here these schools cannot overtake. Men who can neither read nor write can only be benefitted by a resident instructor. Men who have an elementary education will be more likely to add to their knowledge under the direct inspiration and incentive of a teacher.27