Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic

Valid points:

…On the latter point, especially with a world of information a mouse click away, I am very sympathetic. You can know history’s names and dates and understand nothing about it, for example, or you can draw a blank on the names and dates but have a very firm grasp of history’s overall arc and its relevance for today.

And on that point, this week, Ontario offered up a case study to show where crappy education, especially in history, can lead us. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s executive committee, the last step before city council, approved plans to rename the city’s Yonge-Dundas Square — think Times Square but even more antiseptic and soulless — as Sankofa Square.

Sankofa is a Ghanaian term referring “to the act of reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past, enabling us to move forward together,” CBC reports. The rebranding is framed as a sort of recompense for the city having named it previously after Henry Dundas, an 18th-century abolitionist politician who, among other feats, managed to invalidate all slave contracts on Scottish soil.

But Dundas disagreed with other abolitionists on whether it was best as a practical, political matter to try to abolish slavery immediately or incrementally. And that was enough to get him cancelled in Toronto, just as Egerton Ryerson was cancelled before him on the spurious charge that he helped design an abusive residential-school system for Indigenous children.

Councillors exhibited sub-zero levels of Sankofa in debating the matter, it must be said. Coun. Chris Moisie accused one anti-renaming deputant of being a racist. Non-Black councillor Gord Perks complained that the opponents just don’t understand anti-Black racism.

Well nor does Toronto City Council, if it’s stripping an abolitionist’s name from a public square as an apology for slavery.

Education matters. It separates us from the apes and grounds us in a basic shared understanding of how the world works, and worked in the past, and it informs debate on how it should work in the future. By rights, the COVID nightmare should have produced a call to arms: Let’s get serious about education again. Some, however, seem prepared to use it to speed up a race to the bottom.

Source: Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic