Schools of Thought

Egerton Ryerson’s role in the creation of residential schools, however debatable, has prompted his erasure from Canadian public memory. Most dramatically, in June 2021, his statue was toppled and beheaded on the campus that then bore his name; the following year, the institution rebranded itself Toronto Metropolitan University. Yet, as Robert Crocker notes in Religion and Schooling in Canada, the energetic Methodist minister and bureaucrat’s fingerprints remain on much of this country’s educational system.

As superintendent of education in the mid-1840s, Ryerson tackled disputes between Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Protestant dissenters in Canada West, as Ontario was then known, by creating public or “common” schools, where there would be no distinctive religious instruction. Those who could not abide such arrangements — above all Roman Catholics — could run “separate schools,” which were nonetheless funded by taxation. Two decades later, the architects of...