Imagining institutions of man: Constructions of the human in the foundations of Ontario public schooling curriculum

Abstract

In this essay, I analyse Egerton Ryerson’s proposed curriculum for the first state-led mass public educational system in Ontario. Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Schools in Upper Canada during the wide-scale proliferation of state schooling across Turtle Island, produced proposals for “universal” common schools, as well as proposals for residential schools for Indigenous students, segregated schooling for Black students and institutionalized schooling for disabled students and lower-class students. Following the work of Sylvia Wynter, I argue that these proposals within a supposedly universal system were not contradictory, but an organic production of Ryerson’s educational philosophy. Ryerson’s vision is organized by what Wynter terms Man, a representation for a story of the human that is overrepresented as the human itself. Through this story, claims of universal humanity are produced through the manifestation of categories of difference. In exploring how Ryerson’s universalism is structured by this understanding of what it means to be human, we see how his writings on curriculum for his common schools presage his future proposals for the violent exclusion of those who are excluded from the category of Man. Ryerson’s writings suggest that Ontario curriculum is historically founded in colonialism and imperialism (which construct the category of Man and its overrepresentation), with further implications for curricula throughout Turtle Island. This analysis points to how efforts to reform curriculum of its racist, ableist and classist roots need to rethink the very story of what it means to be human, which is wrapped up in the foundations of public education.

Keywords:

• Sylvia Wynter
• Egerton Ryerson
• curriculum development
• curriculum studies
• critical theory

Notes

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Katherine McKittrick for her valuable feedback on an earlier version of this article. Thank you to Tanya Titchkosky and Diane Farmer for their support and guidance of the larger project that produced this research. Thank you to Lynn Ly, Elliott Jun and Adwoa-Atta Afful for their insights and excitement. Thank you as well to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful recommendations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For clarity, I collapse here Wynter’s differentiation between Man1 and Man2 into Man. For more on these two figures, see Wynter (2003), as well as my overview later in this essay.

2 For this understanding of Upper Canada’s population, I work from statistics from Houston and Prentice (1992), who write that in 1841 just over 50% of the Upper Canadian population had been born in Canada. These statistics are based on the work of Akenson (1984) who works from an 1842 census that includes a category of “Canadian Born” (p. 16). Neither Houston and Prentice nor Akenson interrogate whether this category includes Indigenous people, an interrogation that is especially important given the fact that demographic methods like census-taking have historically been used as tools of colonization by actively erasing evidence of Indigenous peoples (O’Brien, 2010, p. xvi) – an erasure that is evident in the broad category of “Canadian Born.” Given the fact that it was unlikely that nineteenth century settler colonial statements about “Canadians” included Indigenous people, and the fact that their inclusion would have likely produced very different numbers than those mentioned above, it is probable that these statistics about immigration were produced from a settler-only or settler-majority census. My statement that less than 50% of the population was composed of Canadian-born settlers works from this modified understanding of Houston and Prentice’s statistics.

3 Those nations included, for Ryerson’s work doing this Report, France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden.

4 Here and elsewhere, I place the terms that Ryerson used for the constructed categories of people who were intended for these schools in quotation marks in order to clarify and emphasize that I am discussing these categories and their construction as fictions themselves, rather than any people who may have been constructed into them.

5 In highlighting this distinction, I work from Lisa Lowe, who writes that liberal philosophers conflate these dimensions to naturalize colonial hierarchies and dependencies (Lowe, 2015, p. 16).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hunter Knight

Hunter Knight is a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She researches the ways in which understandings of what it means to be a child are entangled with imperialism and colonialism.