Read This Before It is Made Illegal

 

Rugby School--frontispiece to Tom Brown's Schooldays

Some choice quotes from this recent Conrad Black National Post column:

“The Trudeau government has deliberately proclaimed and incited the world to believe that this country has been guilty of attempted genocide. That is a monstrous blood libel on English and French Canadians and as I have written and said many times, it is a betrayal of Canada that should morally disqualify the government from re-election.”

“[I]t is a heinous falsehood to impute to any official policy of any jurisdiction of this country a desire to conduct any kind of genocide against anyone.”

To call feeding, housing, and educating poor Indian children “genocide” is slander, and racism of the worst kind.

A recent piece at True North agrees that sexual and physical abuse were “often rampant,” but primarily at the hands of older students. This is in line with the experience in upper-class British boarding schools, and is actually part of their educational design. The idea was to teach leadership by having the students self-police. One does not learn leadership by being told what to do. And so the school authorities imposed only a light hand.

Inevitably, as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, this led to some bullying, and some sexual exploitation. “Fagging” developed certain connotations. 

However, here the intention was that the lowerclassmen would band together to defend one another, and learn from this how to organize for the common good.

This is what was supposed to happen. Thomas Hughes, who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays, lauded the result in his own case. No doubt it did not always happen; others, like George Orwell, report terrible experiences at boarding school. But it is what the upper classes have long believed was best for their own children.

There was also some abuse by staff, the True North article admits. But, per the True North article, “hardly any was at the hands of clergy.” Many staff members were themselves indigenous. The best protection against abuse, imperfect as it is, is to have such schools run by clergy. And at worst, the average Indian child attending a residential school was safer from abuse, starvation, and disease at school than at home on reserve. Statistics prove this.