Publicly funded education has probably been the greatest accelerant of human progress, providing access for the impoverished, underprivileged, and child labouring masses to the accumulation of human ingenuity and knowledge. The masses became literate and never looked back, gaining access to and expanding higher learning in medical science, engineering, and history (including knowledge of the greatest technological inventions, civilizations and freedoms).
The Canadian government in the MacDonald years had overseen the greatest expansion of publicly funded education. The first university educators going back to the founding of Oxford and prior, were religious clerics. The first public school teachers, mostly women, entered the profession as a vocation. Many were discouraged from marrying and were fired if they had children. Many teachers were nuns or might as well have been because they gave their lives to teaching. These early educators made sacrifices to build the society we take for granted today, with all of its freedoms, enfranchisement, upward mobility, increased lifespan, low infant mortality, and progress across countless metrics.
The 19th and early 20th century world was a harsher one. It was the end of a world where Indigenous, in the south at least, could realistically live a traditional lifestyle because the modern world was expanding and offering new opportunities to all To pretend that all of this new opportunity was rejected or resisted by most Indigenous isn’t really the case. It was a compromise, but electricity, film, radio, and the inventions of Edison were and still are hard to resist, like so many other technologies for farming, travelling, etc.
Terrible as the idea of residential schools sounds today in our more gentle world, they were seen as the way to raise living standards and provide the linguistic and cultural literacy needed for Indigenous to participate in this advancing, convenient, multifaceted wider world. An illiterate Indigenous man would be a fish out of water in this new age. Do you really think it was possible or advisable to try to stay closed off in the wilderness? The government tried to protect at least some of that with reserves, but of course they’re artificially propped up with federal money and benefits In the end the two-tier society is an unrealistic and I think unhealthy choice. However, that’s for Indigenous to decide now. It has to be for political reasons, because we can’t open ourselves up to more colonialism. Indigenous have upheld the Indian Act despite its problems, because they’re afraid of losing its protections.
Our society is essentially still dealing with the fallout of a centuries old clash of civilizations, but if we’re honest, most Indigenous would far prefer to use grocery stores and computers and modern medicine to the traditional means of survival. The old ways are mostly maintained to preserve the memory and cultural traditions, except in the far north, on the most part. It’s not a bad deal actually today: protected free land, few taxes, publicly funded health and education, free university...
When we’re honest about history, it’s easier to see that many of the things we don’t like about our past were hard choices that seemed like progress to most but not all people at the time. Families suffered even as many made gains at the same time. Suffering is baked into life, but those who had less power suffered more, as is also the case today. Yet even today it’s hard to know what helping the disenfranchised means. Is it about leaving people to fend for themselves or giving them everything or somewhere in between? We will be judged as retrograde soon for the “progressive” choices we make today.
Tearing down the Roman triumphal arches, including the one celebrating the conquest of Jerusalem, is not what most people today would want, including most Jewish people. MacDonald and Ryerson achieved some good things but also hurt people. Sometimes those who were hurt also achieved great victories, not so different from our world today.