Is it alright to debase and deface a statue? Are we all given the right to do thousands of dollars in damage to statues of people who are long dead? Does the original mould for Egerton Ryerson’s statue still exist? And surely there is a law against defacing public property in such a manner?
Those callow creeps who tear down statues had better not go up to Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto to disinter the original Egerton Ryerson. There are definitely laws against that.
Frankly, there is little reason to give a damn about the original Egerton Ryerson, neither the man nor as architect of the Ontario school system or the residential school system for aboriginal children. From what there is to be learned growing up in Ontario, about the school system, is that when you start with bad design, band-aid solutions are not the answer. What we have to-day is a mishmash—from pre-school to post-graduate—of a badly planned system. And, in my opinion, religion has no role to play in publicly funded schools. Nor, in a truly egalitarian society, should wealthy parents be allowed to discriminate in their children’s schooling.
My early recollections as a child where in the area of downtown Toronto in what is now called the Garden District. I remember standing at the fence on Victoria Street during the Second World War, watching Royal Air Force specialists, who were trained there, playing cricket. It changed after the war, as the property morphed through being a retraining school,to being a trades school, into a degree-granting adjunct to the University of Toronto and finally a free-standing university.
I always regretted not taking the radio-television arts program at Ryerson but coincidently married a lady who did. She loves to tell of the time her instructor in television equipment only agreed to give her a passing grade if she never, ever got behind the cameras or touched any of the broadcasting equipment.
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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry
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