https://theconversation.com/egerton-ryerson-racist-philosophy-of-residential-schools-also-shaped-public-education-143039

Ryerson was one — but perhaps the most influential — of the multiple Canadians who recommended, designed and built the Residential School system. He also established segregation of Black children into different schools, along with Catholics, Protestants, the blind, deaf, mentally and physicially disabled, the poor and the orphaned. Only white students were given the advantage a farsighted education designed to encourage lifelong learning and personal advancement, because only they, in Ryerson’s view, had potential to be anything other than labourers.

Ryerson wanted indigenous students to work 8 to 12 hours a day, from age 4, ‘with little time for academics’. Their only hope of salvation in his view was to be forcibly ripped from their culture, their language, their religion, their family and their traditional ways of life. That is cultural genocide, but the intent was to extinguish Canada’s ‘inferior’ peoples as recognizable entities.

That is called genocide.

I am the first to say the focusing on Ryerson and Macdonald alone is very much missing the point. The point is the totality of colonial culture as inherited by Canada from Britain was based on a view the racial superiority of white people, and their right to do with the world as they saw fit. The full fallout from that period of history is very much not over, either in Canada, or Africa, or Asia. But that does not get Macdonald and Ryerson remotely off the hook.

That seems to be the problem, it is not an either or question. Residential Schools and Edgerton Ryerson are two different stories linked more by time than events.

The history of residential schools and atrocities that took place was and is clear by most accounts and needs to be addressed. The history of Edgerton Ryerson by most accounts, including those referenced in Lynn McDonalds article do not link him to those schools or atrocities.

In your article, some how, you have inexplicably linked one to the other.

Thanks for the comment.

Well, I’m also a former history professor (kind of, and albeit they’re not called that in the UK) at the University of St Andrews, so I guess we’re quits on that one. It’s disappointing that a former NDP MP would even consider writing for the National Post in its current climate of hysterical defence of statues and school names against the ‘woke’ attack of dead children. Do you think McDonald would be as vocal defending Ryerson if she was still an NDP MP?

It annoys me that I’m adding more words to a debate that is simply not the part of this story that matters. Put dead children on one side of the scale, and put Edgerton Ryerson’s name on the other side. Which deserves the greater attention?

If Ryerson’s reputation as an educationalist deserves to survive, believe me it will do in the hands of future historians writing revisionist PhD theses and monographs that will kick back against the current orthodoxy, as every generation does. Ryerson does not need school names and statues to defend him.