History

• • Public schooling in Ontario spent $25.78 billion on 2,020,301 students
  • Reasons for the start of public schooling: Industrialization, urbanization, immigration
• Industrialization:

  • A literate population is a prerequisite to industry
  • Industry required employable skills such as punctuality, discipline, literacy, and tolerance for hours of work
  • Urban parents needed affordable childcare and education to meet the labor-intensive demands of industrialized work
• Opposition to Industrialization:

  • Some business owners were concerned that workers would leave menial jobs
  • Rural parents worried that public schooling would restrict them from using children for free labor
• Urbanization:

  • Urbanization increased the need to ensure social order, lower crime rates, and improve health
  • Religious leaders provided young people with religious and moral character
  • Reformers offered wayward children care, guidance, and protection
  • Community leaders aimed to instill common values across different backgrounds and classes
• Opposition to Urbanization:

  • Progressives believed it would endanger freedom of thought and reduce personal initiative
  • French Catholics thought it would cause children to lose people's values
• Political Intersection:

  • Aims to create a national identity and patriotism
  • State wanted to instill allegiance to the nation and state
  • Democrats encouraged participation in the political process
  • Military aimed to promote discipline, willingness to serve the country, and recruitment
• Opposition to Political Intersection:

  • Taxpayers were concerned about additional taxes required for educating the entire population
  • Elite individuals feared that education would cause the population not to obey the current elites
• • Egerton Ryerson:

  1. Established public compulsory education

  2. Formalized and standardized public education

  3. Put libraries in schools to help teach literacy

  • Founder of the first teacher college
  • Founded provincial normal school, later became OISE
  • Used taxation to shift costs from parents to property
  • Supported residential schools
• • Sir John A. Macdonald asked Nicholas Flood Davin to learn about "aggressive civilization" of First Nations in the USA
  • Justification for residential schools included turning kids into farmers, wanting children to abandon their Aboriginal identity, fearing they were not educated enough and would become a menace to social order, and finding ways out of long-term commitments to Aboriginal people
  • Christian churches sought support for their missionary efforts
• • Odds of dying in Indian schools: 1 in 25, compared to 1 in 26 in WW2
  • From 1883 to 1996, parents wanted their children to succeed in a white person's world
  • Residential schools became places of violence, death, and worse
  • Approximately 3,200 out of 150,000 students in 135 schools
  • Revisionist approaches to history focus on the interests served by the school system, entrenched power structures, marginalized and discriminated people
• • 12 people could set up a school for Protestants, Roman Catholics, or colored people under the Common Schools Act of 1850
  • The last segregated school closed in 1983
  • The last segregated school in Ontario shut down in 1965
  • Queen's Medical School had an anti-Black policy until 2018
  • Suggestions for improvement included using precedents like outdoor schools and open-air schools
• • Studying history is crucial to address past problems and bring about change
  • The Davin Report