In this short account of the work of education in the Province of Canterbury, before the provincial governments were abolished, I have collected most of my material from the original reports and records of the schools. I have endeavoured to avoid statistics as much as possible and so make the work more interesting. Many of the records were destroyed when the Canterbury Education Board moved into its new building about five years ago, so that in the majority of cases there is only a passing reference to the schools, perhaps just saying that the school had been established, that it has required repairing, or that it has been marked "satisfactory" or "not satisfactory" by the school inspector. Owing to the migratory nature of the country population, and to the lapse of time since these schools were built, there is excepting in the cases of the larger schools, no first-hand evidence available.