Re: Mrs. Conning's et al's thoughts on Ontario's education (systems)

Mrs. Conning has written well, thoughtfully, and sincerely regarding the state(s) of education in Ontario. However, there are errors in fact in her writing:

Firstly, " . . . back then if you weren't Catholic or Protestant you didn't count."

This is untrue (and uncharitable). "The rising generation" - as children were then called (never "kids" which we know in Dufferin County still means young goats - have always been the paramount concern in Ontario (Canada West; Upper Canada).

During the period say 1800-40 any concerned family grouping or religious grouping could (and did_ begin schools for children: the Pennsylvania "Deutsch" around Berlin; the Gaels between St. Raphael's (near Cornwall and Kingston); the French-speaking Canadiens near Sandwich (Windsor); escaped and fugitive slaves in southwestern Ontario; First Nations in missionary settings (supervised by the likes of Methodist missionary Egerton Ryerson).

However, funding for them was nearly totally unavailable as in each year up to 1840 80% of educational monies were absconded with by the political "Pope," Rt. Rev. John Strachan (Anglican) for his York (Toronto) educational projects to reproduce a "Little England" with the scions of the Family Compact - one year during the 1820s as much as 70% of the Province's entire educational fund (from the sale of lands) went to fund what would become Upper Canada College (my alma mater) within the elite and hegemonic Church of England (Anglican) "pale" or fold.

Bishop Strachan oversaw and abetted an out-and-out educational funding swindle for which he offered up not a few sacrificial lambs, mainly half-pay army officers/factotums.

To understand Ontario's education in 2007 you have to understand one thing alone: education in this Province grew up to what it is today in reaction (largely Methodist and rural) to Church of England elitism, exclusivism, skullduggery, misappropriations, and hegemony in (early) Upper Canada.

As a result, bare crumbs were left from the Anglican "table" for the hinterland; so the pioneers our forebears, just made do. As a result "separate schooling" was the 'norm' rather than the exception by the time Dr. Ryerson came fully into command of Canada West's education system during the 1940s and 1850s.

Primary research shows that "separate" schools began to peter out during this period ('though there were still black "separate" schools into the 1960s) at the parents' and their communities' behest. For example, Frenchspeakers - the easy majority then around Detroit and Windsor - petitioned constantly for both funding for and an Englishspeaking teacher seeing that their children's futures were being ghettoized by being monolingually French. Thus, without exception "separate" schools in Ontario have been shut and shuttered only by their concerned parents, their stakeholders, their communities for normative reasons and parental concerns.

Secondly, " . . . Quebec and Newfoundland faced these issues in the 1990's (sic) and they eliminated their separate systems."

We are here comparing maple syrup, cod, and cars - the situations amongst Quebec, Newfoundland and Ontario are so markedly different.

First, without the provisions enshrined in B.N.A. Act (1867) viz. the education separately of Catholic Christians in Ontario, there is not a nation called "Canada" today. The deal-making was (and remains until Ontario Catholics tire of their "separate" schools as tens of other groups have in our provincial history) necessary to found and to begin the present nation of Canada.

In the modern era the Canadian Supreme Court has upheld this founding "minority right" 9-0: they have recognized this as a nation-making concession.

Second, Newfoundland's separate (Catholic) schools foundered psychologically, politically, educationally, publicly, on the revealed and sickening abuses by Catholic operators of Mount Cashel. Newfoundlanders - like the rest of us - were rightly disgusted and utterly appalled by what had been allowed to occur and to be covered up and the irreparable damage to trusting youth.

Newfoundland's separate (Catholic) schools were swept away by an appropriate tsunami of revulsion that swept (and continues to sweep) the globe about the sexual perversions and flagrant abuses of positions of trust by some Catholic priests, "brothers" and laity. With superb and legally-brilliant politicians like Clyde Wells opening discussions to fold up the "separate" Confessional schools in our youngest Province, the writing was writ large on the wall. our youngest Province.

Third, Quebec's clerical domination - near absolute during most of its 400 year history - also had dark and lengthy shadows: clericaldomination/" glaciation" for too long has led to an equal and opposite "isostatic rebound" (if one can borrow from geomorphology).

For example, talking to spry WWII veteran two summers ago at a Toronto-area grocery store, the former R. T. O. rating from the Royal Canadian Navy told me that when undergoing further wireless-training around the Port of Quebec in 1943, cassocked and soutained clerics would routinely 'shoo' inside their homes any women "showing" in their pregnancies. Such blind doctrinaire paternalism and parochialism and clerical-patriarch was always going to gets its comeuppance: Quebec has gone from a birth-rate near 7.5 in the early 1950s to 1.5 in the early 2000s.

By the 1990s, astute political operatives, leaders and commentators within Quebec could clearly see that (Shakespeare has it: "There is tide in the affairs of men . . .")

Quebec's Catholics would no longer en masse stand up for or behind their Confessional and Catholic schools - this time, however, the Protestant (minority). Denominational schools were the ones who had to be swept away with Constitutional re-jigging and the "flood" of indifference of and generalized "falling away of" (read: ageing of) Quebec's Catholics.

None of these conditions pertain _ in the main or "globally" - in Ontario except that general lassitude and complacency of Ontario Catholics toward regular church attendance. None of the "Big Three" Ontario political leaders will touch the 1867 constitutional bargain of separate Catholic schools with a bargepole for Catholics, 'though not largely attending Mass(es), comprise and vote as the single-largest voting bloc in Ontario.

Only the not-to-be-electeds/ electables (Sorry, Rob!) like the green Party can fly trial balloons like creating the one, united school system for primary and secondary schools in the Province of Ontario.

As long as Catholic Christians turn out and vote - which they do conscientiously - and as long as they remain interested in their children's Catholic and Christian schooling, these "Separate" schools are to remain part of the constitutional, jurisprudential, and socio-educational firmament in the Province of Ontario.

Rob Bredin Orangeville