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Widening the Story – Artifact 1

Eugenics in the Classroom

Context

Just as survivors’ knowledge is often marginalized, finding documentation of eugenics in institutional archives is also a challenge. Archives themselves are often inaccessible to many people. Once inside, traces of eugenics can be hard to locate through keyword searches. In some cases, institutional histories are obscured through naming changes. The frequency of such restricted access to institutional histories of eugenics indirectly exemplifies the complexity of institutional involvement in this violent history. At University of Guelph, the full support of the archivists was key to locating eugenics in its archives. Their support has created an opportunity to shed light on why and how eugenics was taught so that we can enact a different, possible future.

The following historical materials tell the story of why and how eugenics has been taught in educational institutions across southern Ontario through time. They expose the broad range of ways eugenics tried to shape society and control life through education.

  • A white male eugenics teacher at a podium, facing a group of white female students in a room at Macdonald Institute circa 1930s to 40s.

A white male eugenics teacher at a podium, facing a group of white female students in a room at Macdonald Institute circa 1930s to 40s. McConkey’s Eugenics slides courtesy of University of Guelph McLaughlin Library Archival & Special Collections, Ontario Agricultural College, Dept. of Field Husbandry Oswald Murray McConkey Papers, RE1OACA0066 Regional History Collection, Box 15B, Genetic Slides.

In their Eugenics course, students at Macdonald Institute, one of the founding colleges that became the University of Guelph, were taught about the elimination and segregation of those with “bad germ plasm”, who were called “unfit”, “defective”, “backward”, “inferior”, and “subnormal.” Eugenics was taught as a stand-alone course and interwoven into other courses at Macdonald Institute for over three decades (from at least 1914 to 1948). Eugenics students were taught to lump together a wide range of people who did not fit white settler colonial aspirations under the banner of “unfit.”

Teachers of eugenics were strong proponents of restricted immigration, restricted marriage, forced institutionalization, sterilization, and educational segregation of the “unfit” in Ontario. They viewed the “unfit” as a threat to the immediate and future strength of a Canadian Nation, which aspired towards a white middle class status quo.

Eugenics teachers expected learners to absorb and memorize narrow ideas of what it means to be human. Teachers presented themselves as “experts” and in control of knowledge. The people they talked about were not given a history or any context and, instead, reduced to numbers, charts, and symbols. These accounts objectified life and lives. And they presented constructions of human differences that marked those who were deemed “unfit” as less-than-human.

This slide belonged to Dr. O. M. McConkey (1917-1974). It is one slide from his large collection of eugenics lecture slides.1(footnote) McConkey was Professor of Genetics and Field Husbandry at Ontario Agricultural College (OAC). He lectured on eugenics to Macdonald Institute students as part of their curriculum from 1920 to 1938.

Artifact 1b

A Tradition of Eugenics in Education

Context

A series of Eugenics course timetable cards exemplifies how educational institutions normalized eugenics and how it was embedded within institutional traditions.2(footnote) It is also a visual representation of the way institutions perform a systemic role in reproducing and disseminating oppressive ideas and practices. In this case Professor Dr. McConkey’s role was to integrate learners into a structure of oppression.3(footnote)

Footnotes

  1. McConkey’s Eugenics slides courtesy of University of Guelph McLaughlin Library Archival & Special Collections, Ontario Agricultural College, Dept. of Field Husbandry Oswald Murray McConkey Papers, RE1OACA0066 Regional History Collection, Box 15B, Genetic Slides. ↩

  2. Courtesy of University of Guelph McLaughlin Library Archival & Special Collections. RE1MACA0007, Box 3, Card File of Faculty Timetables, 1934-40 Eugenics. ↩

  3. Paulo Freire, Donaldo P. Macedo, and Ira Shor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). ↩