Today is "Orange Shirt Day", when whiny far-left Red Indian activists try to make it sound like the Residential School system was a bad thing.
This is, of course, based entirely on a lie. Residential schools, in case you didn't already know, were simply how the British took it upon themsleves to exercise their treaty mandate of providing primitive savages with an advanced technical and cultural education. In fact, it was based on a system of education that, while considered horrible by modern "educators" who can't teach Johnny to read in a mere 12 years, was one of the main drivers of British exceptionalism around the globe: specifically boarding schools.
As this history of boarding schools in Britain and Canada notes:
When Thomas Hughes wrote Tom Brown’s School Days in the 1830s, he used Rugby School as the setting, a school that his readers would have seen as strikingly modern. As he admitted at the time, Hughes created the characters of Tom and Dr. Arnold to illustrate how to live a good life and, by analogy, how to build a great nation. All the classic elements of the boarding school novel were there: students mentoring each other, a strong and empathetic teacher, sports and, inevitably, bullying and corporal punishment. With the help of friends and the advice of Dr. Arnold, Tom defeats the bully and becomes a mentor himself. He doesn’t cheat on homework, he plays cricket, and life goes on. What would have struck early readers aren’t the things that strike us today. Corporal punishment, for example, would have seemed familiar, and not at all specific to boarding school.
Indeed, corporal punishment was still a part of public schools in Alberta into the 1990s. And there's of course nothing really wrong with that...spare the rod and spoil the child etc. etc
Meanwhile boarding schools are away from home.
So already the two big "issues" that Red Indians and their far-left toys in the CBC always drum up ("abuse" and "ripping children from their families") isn't something at all unique to the Residential Schools: they were a common feature in the most advanced education system on the planet at the time. Indeed, this system was mirrored relatively closely in other British colonies: New Zealand, Australia, America, and India.
India provides an interesting case: in that country as well primitive non-whites were put into the British boarding school system...and thrived. Why do you think everything from your computer support line to your Revenue Canada phone scams are originating from over there? Given that IQs follow race more than country of origin, it's impressive that India is doing as strongly with their racial makeup as they are. Who to thank for that? British education.
It didn't "take" with Red Indians for some reason. We leave it up to the reader to figure out why on earth that might be.
