RYERSON UNIVERSITY IS NAMED PERFECTLY

EGERTON'S STATUE MAY BE TORONTO'S OLDEST

This silly argument that Ryerson University needs another name because Egerton Ryerson's has been ruined by his harm to indigenous Canadians demonstrates how activists can ignore history when they contrive indignation about flawed leaders.
The taint comes from those residential schools for what were then called Indians. (And that name still exists in our legislation governing indigenous peoples.) The schools were awful in every possible way.
Canada's federal bureaucrats who acted in such a cruel paternalistic fashion in operating the schools displayed stunning ignorance and callous contempt for decades as they ruined lives and ripped apart families.
But to blame Egerton Ryerson after whom the university is named, saying he was the creator and significant operator of these residential schools, is to flaunt an amazing illiteracy about the man and his writings and his morality and how governments work.
Then to have this slop over like pigs' feed to urgings that his statue be removed from where it has stood since 1889 - the oldest major public statue in the city built from pupils' pennies and even foreign donations - shows that the bellowing activists behind these demands deserve an F for their malicious lack of research.
The idea behind residential schools started in New France with various religions long before Egerton was even born in 1803.  Egerton did recommend them many years later in an important report and also in a supporting letter in 1847 as he became the top education official in what was then Upper Canada. Two such schools did start a year later but were not run by him, were judged failures and  closed quickly.
It was only as Egerton retired as the top provincial education official in 1876 that supporting legislation was passed federally. He died in 1882 as the residential system was getting underway in a major way, run by an Indian Affairs bureaucracy in Ottawa which brooked no interference from 1867 on from provincial officials like Egerton and his successors.
So student politicians at the university where I am a graduate and was once the student president are blaming the indignities of residential schools on a man admired throughout North America for his pioneering work to make education available to all, not just the rich.
Yet this leader didn't originate the idea or implement the concept but is guilty mainly for being a minister who as a young man had worked as a missionary among tribes in southern Ontario and believed with all his might that children and his many friends among the natives - who included a man who lived with him in the family home in the vicinity of Dundas Square - would benefit from a general practical education with a generous helping of Christianity.
Now I may be the son of a woman who graduated from Toronto Bible College on her way to the mission field, and my aunt was a prominent missionary in Nigeria long ago when it was still all mud huts and not filled with oil millionaires and con men, but I don't much like education laced with religion.
Egerton was very much the Methodist minister in his debates and sermons and voluminous writings in wanting to mix the two as the basic recipe to prepare everyone for a good life. Yet if he is to be trashed for that, then the same activists must denigrate a host of  Roman Catholic and Anglican priests, indeed all religious figures in the new country. They all believed that everyone, certainly the natives too, would benefit from education with regular religious instruction along with a good dose of cod liver oil every Friday night.
(Since U of T is infested with activists fighting free speech under the politically correct banner, I expect to hear about Victoria University also mounting an apologetic plaque, just like the one to be placed beside Egerton's statue, to explain Egerton's beliefs since he founded Vic before building his marvellous nursery for education at St. James Square where his statue stands.)
As I detail in my book Ryerson University - A Unicorn Among Horses, Egerton's name was considered apt as the name in 1948 for the old complex about to house a new form of education which featured hands-on training as well as liberal arts and coaching in whatever innovations technology developed. After all, Egerton in his personal life demonstrated that he could do everything from farming to panelling the living room to building a stout skiff  to sail Lake Ontario.
I went into this in detail with experts on Egerton, and they never mentioned, along with the Canadian Encyclopedia listing, anything to do with residential schools. It just wasn't a major part of his important career. I have read hundreds of pages of his writings, and he seemed to produce a thousand words before lunch every day, and maybe a sermon, and found lots of praise for the natives with whom he was working, but nothing much on residential schools.
I have talked to educators about my book as it was published in the spring. In it, Egerton's work with natives and tenuous involvement with residential schools was mentioned briefly because, after all, it was a footnote in his stunning list of accomplishments.
David Crombie, an important Ryerson administrator before he became Toronto's most popular mayor and finally Ryerson's first chancellor, loved how my "outstanding" book brought back "warm memories" in an "exciting, sometimes rollicking saga about how ordinary people were given the freedom and opportunity to invent a new education as a unique Ryerson played an extraordinary role in Ontario."
Sylvia Sutherland, a Ryersonian through and through before she married David, an important Ryerson official before they went off to Peterborough (he founded Sir Sandford Fleming and she became mayor) called my book a "must read" on Facebook.
They are veteran politicians. I am a veteran at covering politicians. And we know what verbal stunts politicians will pull, even student politicians, to get noticed. But it would be appropriate,  occasionally, if they actually did study all the information and just not try to create phoney outrage over what one of the giant figures in Canadian history did briefly in a long career.
Residential schools have a deserved odious reputation because of how they were inflicted on natives as if their family structure and tribal relationship didn't matter. Ironically, according to the elite of the world and even in literature, the concept can be wonderful if the pupils are not mistreated and ripped from their parents. Just look at all the books, all the lore, about Eton and Harrow and UCC and all the "public" schools in real life, and the Hogwarts of literature. Many of us in unhappy childhood, and I certainly include myself, dreamed about being a boarder in a residential school instead. Except the native version in Canada did everything wrong and was a perversion of education.
When Egerton died in 1882, the newspapers were filled with editorials lamenting the loss of such a great man because the baby country had so few of them. I still think he's great even if we are into an era when disembowelling the reputation of our historic greats is routine procedure for any publicity-hunting jerk who wants to claim Egerton was a racist and Sir John A. was a drunk and look at what what Pierre Trudeau did with that guitar player.
None of us, including the Biblical Jesus, are safe from ridicule and condemnation when the activist use fake facts to exaggerate faults.
It is fitting that Egerton Ryerson's statue faces away from the quadrangle heart of the university where dwell craven administrators and petty student pols. As a noted champion in education and religion who never shied from a fight, he would be embarrassed by what is happening there under his honourable name.