The founders of Frontier College believed in the power of education to improve the lives of all people, including the loggers, miners, and railway workers whose work produced the wealth that made it possible for Dalhousie, Laval, Queen’s, the University of Toronto, and the University of Alberta to construct the massive neo-Victorian halls where a tiny number of privileged students were able to study and learn.

"Open up these halls!" cried Fitzpatrick, echoing Walt Whitman.

He went further, insisting that the rough cabins and bunkhouses of the Canadian north could also be adapted and refitted into classrooms where workers could meet and study at the end of their twelve- to fourteen- hour workdays. The teachers would be volunteer students and faculty members from the universities. And they would be labourer-teachers working in the bush and on the rails all day alongside their coworkers and then voluntarily teaching evenings and weekends. The workers would teach the students by day; the students would teach the workers by night.

Fitzpatrick knew from his years of preaching in these isolated camps that working people possessed intelligence, curiosity, and a desire to learn. But they lacked the opportunity to pursue these things, burdened by their work, by the strict class codes of the time and by the ignorance of most educators who felt education was exclusively for the professional class and that wider accessibility would dilute the value of education.

Frontier College proved these views were wrong. The bunkhouse classes filled rapidly, tents and reading camps were set up across the country, and, by the 1920s, Frontier College had been granted a charter, the right to grant university degrees to working people. Fitzpatrick and his determined teams of student volunteers had successfully connected the work camps to the academy.

One hundred and five years later, the frontiers still exist. They look different. The rail gangs and the logging camps have been replaced by the inner-city high-rise, the prison, and the homeless shelter; the loggers and miners have been replaced by cashiers and waitresses, burger flippers and migrant workers.

Canada has obviously come a long way since Fitzpatrick and his volunteers boarded the train for Nairn Centre: we have achieved a great deal in the pursuit of education for all. But there are still isolated people and places. There are still frontiers – frontiers of poverty, of despair, and of dispossession. And those are the places where Frontier College teaches today.