Much of the heat in the great debate that raged for months over the so-called University Question was generated by ecclesiastical exasperation at the exclusive hold the secular university maintained on the provincial endowment, but one major target was the misuse of that endowment “to deal out snatches of
knowledge on various subjects,” rather than “to develop and discipline the powers of the mind by a common course of application and exercises, sanctioned by the experience of ages” (124). The speaker is now the most prestigious spokesman for the prosecution, the Rev. Egerton Ryerson, first principal of Victoria College in the 1840s and long-established chief superintendent of education for Upper Canada.
Cook had already declared that he found “the study of Modern Languages, to any great extent, at a University, injurious to the acquirement of Classical and Mathematical Learning, which it is the main purpose of a University education to communicate” (106). Ryerson, although approving the study of French in the schools, was even more sweeping in his condemnation of the modern language
options in University College as an extravagant waste. “I think that the period of attendance at a University is not the time for studying Modern Languages, but that the Student’s attention should be exclusively devoted to the recognized subjects of a University Education, – that the study of the elements of the Modern Languages should be an extra study, and that the Tutors employed should be chie_y paid by Fees from Students” (117-8).
No action resulted from these prolonged hearings. As the select committee was unable to come to any conclusion and failed, therefore, to make any report to the Assembly on the subject, we may assume that it was at least equally impressed by the strong defence of modern languages presented by John Langton, vice-chancellor of the university, and by Daniel Wilson, professor of History and English Literature, who twenty years later was to become president of University College. Langton admitted that “a Chair of Modern Languages, in the sense of teaching the Languages themselves, and not the principles of Comparative Philology,” seemed
to him “very inadvisable” in a Canadian university (a position that we shall see John Squair and his colleagues having to battle in 1890), but he insisted that separate lectureships in the modern languages should be maintained and that, “[since] three quarters of the learning and science of the world is published in French, or German, no man should pass through a University who has not acquired at least one of them” (170). Wilson went further, and his defence of the Toronto system of options includes examples of the values, both practical and cultural, of French for Canadians.
If you intended to be a Medical man drop your Greek and Latin and go on with the Natural Sciences and Modern Languages, for every educated man in this Country, and especially every Medical man ought to know at least French, – which here is a spoken Language, – and German also ... If a Farmer, ... for I trust we are to educate not merely professional men, but the youth of Canada generally; and men will make all the better Farmers and Merchants and Tradesmen for having highly cultivated minds, – if a Farmer, we