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So said an elderly refugee, recalling the community's first heady years of freedom. Education was surely next to religion in the 19th-century scale of social values. In this improving age, education was seen by many as essential to civilizing the vastly different peoples of the European colonial empires; of assimilating the Aboriginal cultures of the new world; and of ameliorating the lives of former slaves who, in the language of white missionaries, had lived their lives in degraded circumstances. For refugees from slavery, the Southern planters' ban on the education of slaves had only served to underscore the connection between learning and power. Having freed their own bodies, education was seen by fugitives as the path to freeing the mind.
In a practical sense, training and education rendered a black refugee as qualified as any white person, eradicating any legitimate barriers to advancement. Where adequate educational facilities existed, African Canadian graduates often went on to train as teachers or to further their studies at colleges and universities. Many subsequently returned to their communities to pass the knowledge they had gained on to the next generation or to serve in a professional capacity.
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Nevertheless, acquiring such education was often far from easy. The provision of public education expanded slowly in Upper Canada, along with the growth of settlement. In some cases, black children attended school along with white children; in others, white resistance to integration made this impossible. As with settlement in general, there were two approaches: one was to insist on the legal right to integrated schools (the approach much favoured by equal rights advocates such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary); the other was to accept de facto segregation at schools provided either by the government or by various missions.
Public Schools
The establishment of segregated schools was spurred by the reluctance of many white parents to sanction integrated education, and was bolstered by the legal basis on which education was made available to settlers in Upper Canada. During the period of the greatest influx of Underground Railroad refugees, formal schooling was not always readily available to the general public. The Common Schools Act of 1816 provided funding for common or public schools in places where there were 20 or more children.
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