Thank you for this Award to the Enoch Turner Foundation; I am deeply honored to receive this Award tonight.

I know that there are many in this room who are equally or more deserving of being singled out for their dedication to causes that are transformative and that shape the way that we live. We are here on this winter night among people who share the belief that culture and memory have meaning and purpose and where volunteerism and education are alive. We are among those who see education as a both a gift and a right that has shaped our lives and allowed us to flourish.

We are not cynical people although most of us are plainly critical at times; and now is a time when we are both critical of the present, as well as sometimes fearful, worrying about a future in which we, and those younger than us, as well of the thousands of others we do not know, face big obstacles because of our changing environment, a change in politics almost everywhere, and a whiff of coming lack of generosity in spirit and entrenchment; we are faced with change in the landscape, the places that we live, and open ideas and values that we cherish.

But here we sit in small handmade building that was made to act on and then to exemplify, in the face of unimaginable adversity, learning for which there was no fee; not no cost, but no fee.

I don’t know that there were not other limitations on attendance in this room in 1848, or limits placed on success here that had to do with gender, or race, or creed or ability, but it was without fee.

This was one of the most democratic institutions that could have been founded in the 1840s. One that aimed to educate the children of the impoverished and the working classes, newly come to Canada, or recently here and making a home in dismal Corktown. And it was not only for philanthropy, it was for freedom, social justice and democracy that this building was built. I know that because I went down a rabbit hole last night about why this building was built.

We do well to remember the generosity and vision of people who made this and other institutions happen in the 1850s, by recalling the battle for education that went on then, and the concern that we carry forward with us as we are forming our own priorities late in life, for a future that is built on the hard won struggles of the past.

In Canada as I understand it, free public education was a very hard won battle; such a free public education was debated in the Legislature, in halls, in churches, on street corners, in private schools and in the press for about 50 years before Enoch Turner opened the doors of this school. It was only in 1850 that legislation was prepared that allowed trustee boards and ratepayers to set up free schools, and only in 1871 that free schooling, compulsory education, curriculum and teaching credentials were codified together. That was over 20 years after this building was built.

There were many reasons that people didn’t want to allow free schools in Upper Canada, and in Toronto in particular. If you read the Globe before 1852, or the early twentieth century accounts of the history of education, you read things that were continually trying to entrench education as the prevue of a privileged few.

In , 1851, a committee of the Toronto Board submitted to the Chairman a special report showing that 3,403 children who should be in the schools of that city were roaming the streets and growing up without educational advantages of any kind. The report ascribed this condition of affairs mainly to two causes, rate-bills and lack of school accommodation, and concluded by making a strong stand for free schools.

However a Reverend Roaf, a Toronto clergyman gave a fair idea of the stand taken by those who favoured ‘rate bills’ or fees upon parents. He wrote in the Globe, January 31st, 1852,:

“May we not hope that the city of Toronto will… spurn the unrighteous counsel which is introducing communism in education to the undermining of property and society? The French people and the Normans ought to serve as warnings of the abyss to which this plausible socialism is enticing us.”

And a letter in the Globe, February 5th, 1852 writing about the potential of free education:

” Gain indeed! why, probably three-fourths of the children now in the Toronto common schools will carry their education away to the West, and here be succeeded by others who will similarly want to use our property for their own benefit. Besides we might give free education to those who otherwise would be destitute of it, but make those purchase it who have the means.

” The free system divests the teacher of all proprietary and personal interest in his school, and will speedily render him sycophantic and servile to his trustees, … haughty and negligent towards his pupils and friends. It will throw education into the hands of an electioneering party, and what kind of party that will be in such places as Toronto, need not be said. It will destroy all the confidence and love felt towards the teacher as the employee and friend of the child’s parents, and substitute for them a cold respect due to the public official. It will render school attendance desultory and variable, because unpaid for, and always to be had for asking. Instead of the soft, familiar, and refined circle in which wise parents like to place their children, it will drive gentle youths and sensitive girls into the large herds of children herds of children with all the regimental strictness and coldness and coarseness by which such bodies must be marked, and thus, while the child asks bread you will give him a stone.”

It was widely held that it was unjust and tyrannical to make people who are childless pay for those who are blessed with a numerous progeny and that parents value the blessing of education more, when they are compelled to pay for it; it is alleged to be a weakening of the parental tie, to take the expense of the education of the child from the shoulders of the parent.

And yet the view that won out ultimately was the opinion that held, ‘we assert without fear of contradiction that all the evils which our warmest opponents anticipate from the introduction of free schools sink into insignificance beside the frightful consequences of our children growing up in the blindness of ignorance, the result which a free system is designed to avert. No reasonable disinterested man would place the one class of evils in comparison with the other. . . .”

From a 1912 account I read last night, about Egerton Ryerson, a giant of the time, and likely known to Enoch Turner in Toronto, “Ryerson was fighting for free schools. He knew that thousands of children were growing up ignorant, especially in the large towns. He was able to show that in the city of Toronto, out of 4,450 children of school age in 1846, only 1,221 were on the common school registers and that the average attendance was scarcely one thousand. Even if it were granted that another thousand were in attendance at private and church schools, the fact remained that not more than half the children in Toronto were being educated.

The Toronto Globe had scoffed at free schools in 1848. …..I shall, therefore, quote from the Globe to show the trend of public opinion on free schools during the early fifties. As early as January 30th, 1851, the Globe said editorially:

“We are glad to observe that the plan of free common schools has been adopted at the recent annual meetings in very many school sections throughout Upper Canada. The best gift the people of Canada can confer on their children is education, sound, practical education available to all. Public money employed in educating the masses is a most profitable investment, and we hope the day will soon be when a good education is open to every child in the country.”

On January 5th, 1852, the Globe expressed itself as follows:

“The most important change proposed in our present system of common schools, is the abolition of all direct charges against the parents of the children attending, and the support of these institutes by direct tax on the whole body of the people. ……the argument against was

As I have already shown, free schools had stronger opposition in Toronto than at any other point, yet at a large public meeting held in January, 1852, in St. Lawrence Hall,[82] there were only twelve people who opposed a motion for free schools. The people of Toronto did so because they were ultimately convinced that free schools were the ‘natural support of a democratic government, and that without their socializing influence a self-governing people would always be more or less at the mercy of demagogues.’

For more information about the award and the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse foundation, please visit: http://www.enochturnerschoolhouse.ca/