'Memorial (Smallwood) added, should become "an Extension Department with a university tacked on to it, not the other way round."
He was thinking of the co-operative and community work of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish.


(Richard Gwyn, Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary, p 309)

Moses Coady

In his revolutionary book - Masters of Their Own Destiny (The Story of the Antigonish Movement of Adult Education Through Economic Cooperation), Moses Coady describes the movement's work in NL during the 1930s.

"This book tells about an effort to educate the people by assisting them to become masters of their own economic destiny." (p. ix)

"Perhaps the most signal tribute that has been paid the Adult Education Movement sponsored by St. F.X. was that of the Newfoundland Commission of Government after it had investigated the program. The Extension Department was asked, in 1933, to send a man to the Old Colony to start similar work there. Gerald Richardson, who had been editor of the Extension Bulletin for one year, was selected. He took with him four young men who had been thrown up in the movement. During the last four years the people of Newfoundland are organizing for study and economic action according to the Antigonish technique. Their success in the face of many obstacles is encouraging. In 1938 there were six hundred study clubs, twenty six credit unions, twenty five buying clubs, and ten other cooperatives. A program of producer and consumer coopertion is gradually being established in Newfoundland." (page 67)

Fast forward to 1991 and the elimination of Newfoundland and Labrador's Extension Service (just before the closure of the cod fishery) - click here for more information.