So they’ve torn down Egerton Ryerson’s statue and they’re going to rename Ryerson University, alias Ry High. The Star is even doing one of its Saturday debates on the subject. As usual, both sides are off base.
Here is the link for this “debate”.
I do not like putting up statues of people. I do not generally like naming things after people. Usually, it a ruling class creating monuments to its own heroes. Since ruling classes always fall in the end, their statues usually come down with them.
Lenin in his will asked that no statues be erected to him. His followers did not listen to him. The urge to put up statues and monuments to legitimate a particular social order is more grandiose the more fundamentally illegitimate the order is.
A lot of statues are coming down these days. Clearly, some section of the ruling elite is losing its hold. It seems to be that section which is identified with old style capitalism and imperialism.
Ryerson is generally identified with the more liberal face of old Canadian imperialism. He was not part of the rabidly anti-catholic Orange Anglican Church elite of the time. He does not even seem to have had any particular responsibility for the residential schools set up at the time, which seems to be the statue pullers chief beef with him.
However, I do not see this as being about whether Ryerson was a good guy or a bad guy. What statues represent often has little to do with the person in whose image they are made. This one symbolizes a system which was never good.
Exactly why history from Ryerson up to now should not be looked at sentimentally is not what I want to get into here. Simply put, education in Canada has been about training a working class, “farmers and mechanics”, to serve a ruling elite. The worst thing about it is that generations of people were taught how to not think and how to not work collaboratively.
Those were the products of this education system out there yanking down old Eggie. The rulers of the new order always tear down the idols of the old one. I wonder what kind of idols this new order is going to try to put up.
On the other hand, maybe we can finally get a real discontinuance from the past. Maybe we can begin a time when the perpetrators of atrocities like residential schools have their systems torn down before they get going. Tearing their symbols down two centuries later is pitiful, especially when done by people who have clearly learned the wrong lessons from them.