Renaming Ryerson Public School

 

Photo taken June 6, 2021

The Thames Valley District School Board intends to rename Ryerson Public School on Waterloo Street. Then they’re going to review all school and facility names to determine if any others should be changed. The next may be Sir John A. Macdonald Public School near Highbury and Cheapside.  

This, of course, follows the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. Today we’re being told there may be three times as many burials at Marieval School in Saskatchewan. The deaths were apparently undocumented by the school administration, their families never told the children died. 

Egerton Ryerson argued way back in 1847 that Indigenous children should be educated in boarding schools and his ideas were later applied to the residential school system. In 1883, when Macdonald was Prime Minister, Canada’s Parliament approved the funding for the first three residential schools. Ryerson died in 1882, Macdonald in 1891.

Here’s what else they did:

Egerton Ryerson

•          A founder of Victoria College, its first principal, and benefactor.
•          An advocate for secularization, to keep power and influence away from any particular church.
•          Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada after 1844. His major innovations included school libraries, professional development conventions for teachers, and a central textbook press using Canadian authors.
•          Lobbyist for free universal education to provide schooling for those less privileged.
•          Creator of a system of school inspection to ensure provincial polices were enforced.
•          A founder of the Toronto Normal School in 1847. Canada’s first publicly funded museum was established in this building in 1857, using a collection based largely on artwork and scientific apparatus Ryerson himself acquired in Europe.

Sir John A. Macdonald

•          A leading figure in the discussions and conferences which resulted in the BNA Act of 1867 and the birth of Canada as a nation.
•          As Prime Minister, the builder of a successful national government for the new country.
•          The builder of a railway across the continent, a project many believed to be impossible. It was the largest engineering project of its kind in the world.
•          Creator of the NWMP in 1873 to patrol the North-West Territories.
•          Creator of Canada’s first national park, Banff Hot Springs Reserve, in 1885.
•          Proponent of Indigenous people gaining the franchise without losing any of their rights under either the Indian Act or any of their treaties. (They did not gain the vote until 1960 under Diefenbaker.)
•          Proponent of votes for women, the first world leader to do so, in 1885.

While Macdonald and Ryerson were involved in the creation of the residential school system and no doubt intended Indigenous children to be culturally assimilated, it is doubtful whether either man intended the children to be abused or neglected. Their goals were likely to ensure the children graduated as English-speaking Christians who could farm or practice a trade, a not unreasonable goal given the time period. While the system appears outrageous to modern sensibilities, the instances of abuse and neglect at the schools were the responsibility of individual teachers, principals, and workers, not Ryerson and Macdonald. 

What names will go next?

There are other “problematic” school names in London. No doubt many of these will have to go too: 

Emily Carr: Her depictions of coastal Indigenous culture have been called cultural appropriation. One writer has called her a “narcissistic white colonizer.”

F. D. Roosevelt: He sanctioned the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Lord Elgin: During the Second Opium War in China, he ordered the destruction of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, along with its collections of artworks and antiques, inflicting invaluable loss of cultural heritage.

Lord Nelson: Some aspects of his life and career are controversial, including his affair with Emma Hamilton. He may have opposed William Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Prince Charles/Princess Anne/Princess Elizabeth/Victoria: Clearly these names are offensive to anyone wishing to sever Canada’s connection with Britain and be a republic instead of a "colonial settler state."

Sir Arthur Currie: He embezzled ten thousand dollars meant for regimental uniforms into his personal accounts to pay off debts. Arguably, he wasted the lives of the soldiers under his command by taking Mons, Belgium on the final day of WWI.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier: He raised the Chinese head tax to $100 in 1900. In 1903 he raised it to $500. And in 1898, he removed the right to vote from the few Indigenous men given the franchise under Macdonald’s 1885 reform bill.

Sir Frederick Banting: It’s said he had a prickly personality and was subject to fits of rage. He even punched one of his colleagues in his laboratory. Some think he took much of the credit for the discovery of insulin, without giving much to fellow researchers Best, Collip and Macleod.

How shall we rename the schools? Number them like in New York City? Bland. Rename them after the streets they’re on? That won’t do. Our street names aren’t always PC either, often being named after colonial officials, streets in the other London, or battles the British won. Example: We could rename Lord Roberts School ... Princess Avenue School. But Princesses are elitist.  

Let's face it. Most people before the 1960s were racist, sexist or otherwise bigoted by today’s standards. The concept of empathy for others is quite modern. Abuse and neglect were rampant everywhere before our own enlightened age, and not just at residential schools. Is it reasonable to remove all personal names? Cancel all our historical figures? Create a decolonized country with no history? 

Senator Mary Jane McCallum has referred to the residential school system as the “genocide of children.” Let's consider the term genocide. Traditionally, genocide is the intentional murder of a group of people. It’s been practiced worldwide in such hideous examples as the Nazi Holocaust, Bosnia, and Rwanda. The term "cultural genocide," however, is new, an example of concept creep in which a term broadens to take on meanings outside its original context. So while forced assimilation may be a disgrace, doesn't calling it genocide trivialize this worst of crimes?

I believe extremists are damaging the Indigenous cause by alienating moderates such as myself,  cancelling our historical figures, denigrating our patriotism, and insulting our ancestors. I simply can’t support those tell me my country committed genocide. Or those who rename schools to signal their virtue. 

Update February 2022: The school has been renamed Old North Public School. Completely generic and inoffensive. And boring.