Education in the Niagara Peninsula

Dennis Blake is a high-school history teacher with the Halton Board of
Education.

All too often, local or regional history is ignored or dismissed as
merely the purview of the amateur historian. Some historians hold as a
truism that what is parochial in interest is necessarily parochial in
importance. Education in the Niagara Peninsula stands in refreshing
rebuttal to this understanding and provides a welcome example of some
fine local history based on an educational theme. Within its paper
covers is a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of five articles
selected from works presented at the Tenth Annual Niagara Peninsula
History Conference (held at Brock University in 1988).

If the articles are read in order of presentation, this collection is
accessible to both the specialist and the lay reader alike. Goldwin S.
French’s introductory article on Ryerson provides the reader with the
broad nineteenth-century context of education in Ontario and outlines
the general educational fundamentals on which free public education in
the province was organized and constructed.

James H. Love uses his research on the Niagara district to illuminate
the procedural and philosophical tensions that existed between local and
provincial school authorities during a mid-nineteenth-century period of
educational reform.

Using “broad brush strokes,” Paul Crunican briskly paints a picture
of the development of Catholic schools in the Niagara Peninsula. And on
a related religious theme, Gerald S. Shantz examines the mid- to
late-19th-century theological controversies over what constitutes a
Christian education and the sociopolitical relationship between
organized religion and public education, with Ridley College as his
focus.

This recommended short collection of works concludes with a fascinating
look at early architectural school design in the region. Dana Johnson
rebuilds with the reader the interrelationships between school design
and education.