OTTAWA, ON (March 11, 2025):
Canada is losing yet another founding figure to the fires of historical revisionism. The mob is after Egerton Ryerson, a great Canadian and the chief architect of Canada’s public education system. In Historic Injustice: Canada’s Misguided Betrayal of School System Founder Egerton Ryerson, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow Paul W. Bennett argues that Ryerson’s contributions to Canada have been distorted and forgotten. The man who gave Canada public education is being cast as a villain by dishonest brokers who readily violate the principles of sound historical thinking.
Far from a villain, Reverend Egerton Ryerson was a Methodist social reformer who challenged the elitism baked into the society of his day and fought for a system that reflected the equality of all people. “The toppling and erasure of Ryerson… is a glaring injustice that leaves a gaping hole in the narrative arc of Ontario’s, and Canada’s, educational foundations,” warns Bennett.
Ryerson has been falsely cast as the architect of Indigenous residential schools. The report sets the record straight: “Ryerson’s involvement with what came to be federal Indian residential schools was limited to providing the Indian Department of the United Canadas with a 3,000-word 1847 letter containing recommendations… While [Ryerson’s] framework may have carried some influence, Ryerson was not involved in the formulation of the [Residential Schools] policy.” Despite this, his name has been stripped from public institutions, his statue destroyed, and his legacy removed from the national conversation. Meanwhile, his American counterpart, Horace Mann, remains celebrated in the United States as the father of public education.
Canada must correct this wrong in order to restore intellectual honesty, protect the integrity of historical scholarship, and ensure future generations understand the foundations of our public education system. The trend of historical presentism—the distortion of history by judging the past by today’s standards and imposing modern perspectives on historical figures—must be challenged. “It’s up to historians to call out glaring examples of presentism that fail the test of historical accuracy and violate the fundamental principles of sound historical thinking,” Bennett warns.
Policy-makers must take immediate action to ensure that figures like Egerton Ryerson are recognized for their full legacy without rewriting history to serve ideological agendas.
To learn more, read the full paper here:
For further information, media are invited to contact:
Dagny Pawlak-Loerchner
Senior Communications Officer
613-482-8327 x113
dagny.pawlak-loerchner@macdonaldlaurier.ca
