The “Separate schools” in Saskatchewan and Alberta stand on the solid granite of our Constitution.  The highest tribunals of the land and the Empire have implicitly recognized the principle of the minority-schools in many of their decisions.  Moreover, let us not forget it! the separate school system in Canada is “protestant” in its origin.  It was to protect the protestant minority of Lower Canada that this system, Catholic in Ontario, Protestant in Quebec, was adopted on September 18th, 1841.  In the West the minority school-law was also enacted to protect the protestant minority of the Territories.  Our Non-Catholic opponents should not forget this origin of our separate schools.  What their fathers appreciated then for their children, we appreciate now for ours.  The principle remains unchanged.

Some may be surprised at our contention to make an argument in favour of separate schools out of the very point on which rests the scaffolding of those who oppose them.  They claim that the minority school principle is the greatest enemy of Canadian Unity.  What we need, they say, is to standardize our schools, and bring all Canadian children under one system.  No genuine “Canadianization” is possible without this unity of education.  The advocates of these ideas are now at work promoting through the country the “nationalization of schools.”  The Conference of Winnipeg, 1919, was the first tangible result of this movement.  A National Bureau of Education—­a non-government institution, at least for the time being; a survey of school text-books throughout the Provinces, a study of matters affecting the status of the teaching profession—­such are the duties that this National Council of Education has assumed at its first gathering.

This movement towards Federal control of schools involves the denial and the eventual suppression of the minority-principle in our system of Education.  This nationalization of Education, we claim, is erroneous in its principle, anti-constitutional in its operation, and dangerous in its consequences.  Uniformity in education, as a source of efficiency, is one of the fallacies of our materialistic age.  Schools to be successful have not to be submitted to the same laws of a commercial or industrial combine.  Ethnical and moral values do not follow the laws of the mart and the stock exchange.  If in our extensive Dominion even a unity of tariff, readily acceptable to the East and to the West, is Utopian, how much more so would be the unity of the school system?  Education, to be effective, must take the colour of the environments to meet the needs of the community.  The levelling process would be most detrimental, for uniformity in education is the seed of decay.