School names face examination. That's a headline in the Toronto Star yesterday that public schools in Manitoba are examining their names. My high school was named Laura Secord Secondary School, and speaks for itself as having a good provenance.
The names of other schools have come under a lot of scrutiny. A headline for quite a few years has been the name of Ryerson University. Professors there have been signing the University name as "X" in protest for quite a while. Both Gerry and I taught at Ryerson - a great institution for continuing education on timely and current topics.
The protest is all about one of the main architects of the education system - Egerton Ryerson. He was a Canadian educator and Methodist minister who was a prominent contributor to the design of the Canadian Public school system. It turns out that he was a great influencer of the segregation of education of people of non-white status. He created reforms in the mid-1800s that included creating school boards, making textbooks more uniform, and education free. But Ryerson's views on the education of non-white males was extremely troublesome. For example, he opposed the participation of girls at grammar schools in the province, and ended co-educational instruction at the Upper Canada Academy. Women were to be wives and mothers.
He recommended in 1847 that indigenous peoples should be educated in separate boarding schools that were denominational, English-only and agriculturally/industrially oriented. Ryerson had ideas for segregating everyone who wasn't a colonial white male.
In 1847, he made recommendations to control Indigenous children's future to become agricultural and industrial workers.
In 1850, under the same act that established separate schools for Catholics and Protestants, he forced Black children into segregated schools.
In 1862, he defined vagrant and neglected children of the poor as candidates for industrials schools so to avoid their inevitable future of becoming criminals.
In 1868, he took aim at the deaf and blind needing to be segregated.
The Toronto Star article details the above HERE. Ryerson University will be changing its name - it took a few years - a strong campaign and violently toppling the Ryerson statue. It is going to take a lot of activity to dismantle a systemic naming bias, and this is a great first step.
And our picture? a beautiful lighting project on the Image Arts Building at Ryerson about 5 years ago. This was created by some of Gerry's graduates in the lighting program there.
