Rosthern Junior College

Rosthern Junior College, an independent high school, has been a landmark institution in the town of Rosthern, Saskatchewan, Canada since 1905. Opening in that year as the German-English Academy, it was founded by Mennonite settlers in response to a need for trained teachers to work in the schools being established in homestead communities in Saskatchewan. Implicit in this perceived need were concerns among Mennonite settlers for the preservation of culture, religious values and the German language, concerns that arose directly from the pressure in the province (Northwest Territory at the time) to make education English and assimilative.

Particularly in the 1870s, Mennonites of Dutch-German origins residing in colonies in the Black Sea region of present-day Ukraine became alarmed at the rising nationalism in the Russian Empire. Along with land shortages in these growing colonies, pressure toward Russification of minorities was threatening Mennonite values in education. Similarly, the promise made by Catherine the Great to exempt them from military service was quite clearly being challenged and rewritten by the then current Russian government. Canada was seeking farming immigrants, and about 7,000 Mennonites chose to immigrate to Manitoba where the government of Canada set aside two reserves for their resettlement. In the early 1890s, some of these families decided to move on to Saskatchewan, thereby establishing a trend that would see considerable Mennonite immigration to the Saskatchewan Valley area before the turn of the century. Many came from Manitoba, but others arrived directly from colonies in Russia, from the Danzig region of Prussia and from Kansas, Nebraska and Minnesota where they had settled in the 1870s.

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