Programming and Professors

Khaki University’s educational centres were in camps and hospitals in England. At the core of its programming were the fundamentals of the Canadian charitable organisation, Young Men’s Christian Association, and services by army chaplains in several subjects. However, once it received formal recognition abroad, universities across Canada began sending professors and notable scholarly figures to deliver lectures and more specialised courses: “Besides the university-educated padres and officers giving lectures, various intellectual leaders, such as George Parkin, the famous Canadian Imperialist, historian and then Organizing Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, and Bernard Shaw, English essayist, public figure and playwright, came to lecture at the camp educational classes” (112).

By 1917, around 50,000 men were in part-time courses across varied subjects, from medical instruction and undergraduate university courses to literacy, singing, and practical trades like carpentry. The emphasis was on inclusivity and accommodation for the breadth of diversity of experience and circumstance in the corps. The Khaki University catered to all levels of education and all methods of learning, such as lectures, directed readings, small reading groups, and hands-on training offered. There were also a uniform set of textbooks approved by all Canadian provinces. Teacher training, legal instruction, mechanics, singing, elocution, cooking – practical hands-on training, small group learning – meant to be inclusive and accommodate the diversity of the corps. As Tim Cook observes, “The war had a brutal and dehumanizing effect on soldiers. Education was one means of ameliorating the afflictions of modern battle” (119).

Sources: Tim Cook, “From Destruction to Construction: The Khaki University of Canada, 1917-1919,” Journal of Canadian Studies 37, no 1 (2002): 109-143.