Editing Harold Innis (section)

===Early life===
<!--Optional image:[[File:Stamp_Canada_1899_2c.jpg|thumb|right|An 1899 postage stamp. Harold Innis was born near the end of the Victorian era when the "Dominion of Canada" was still a self-governing British colony.]]-->
[[File:Harold-Innis-school.gif|thumb|right|The one-room schoolhouse in Otterville, officially known as S.S.#1 South Norwich. The photo was taken around 1906. Innis is the boy with the cap, fifth from the right, back row. Innis would later teach for a few months at the school.]]

Innis was born on November 5, 1894, on a small livestock and dairy farm near the community of [[Otterville, Ontario|Otterville]] in [[southwestern Ontario]]'s [[Oxford County, Ontario|Oxford County]]. As a boy he loved the rhythms and routines of farm life and he never forgot his rural origins.<ref>Creighton, Donald. ''Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar''. [[University of Toronto Press]], pp. 8–9.</ref> His mother, Mary Adams Innis, had named him ''Herald'', hoping he would become a minister in the strict [[evangelical]] [[Baptist]] faith that she and her husband William shared. At the time, the Baptist church was an important part of life in rural areas. It gave isolated families a sense of community and embodied the values of individualism and independence. Its far-flung congregations were not ruled by a centralized, bureaucratic authority.<ref>Watson, pp. 50–51.</ref> Innis became an [[Agnosticism|agnostic]] in later life, but never lost his interest in religion.<ref>Babe, Robert. ''Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers'', [[University of Toronto Press]], p. 51.</ref> According to his friend and biographer [[Donald Creighton]], Innis's character was moulded by the church:
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The strict sense of values and the feeling of devotion to a cause, which became so characteristic of him in later life, were derived, in part at least, from the instruction imparted so zealously and unquestioningly inside the severely unadorned walls of the Baptist Church at Otterville.<ref>Creighton, p. 19.</ref>
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Innis attended the one-room schoolhouse in Otterville and the community's high school. He travelled {{convert|20|mi|km|0}} by train to [[Woodstock, Ontario|Woodstock]], [[Ontario]], to complete his secondary education at a Baptist-run college. He intended to become a public-school teacher and passed the entrance examinations for teacher training, but decided to take a year off to earn the money he would need to support himself at an Ontario teachers' college. At age 18, therefore, he returned to the one-room schoolhouse at Otterville to teach for one term until the local school board could recruit a fully qualified teacher. The experience made him realize that the life of a teacher in a small, rural school was not for him.<ref>Creighton, pp. 18–19.</ref>