Where our story began

The founders of Rosseau Lake College didn’t just want to create a school. They wanted to change the world.

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1967 was a big year. It was Canada’s Centennial, the whole country was thinking big, and Rosseau Lake School, now Rosseau Lake College, opened its doors. The school's founding board was no exception. In a letter announcing R. H. Perry as Headmaster, they wrote that "As Canada prepares to enter its second century, there is a pressing need to equip its future citizens socially, morally, and intellectually so that they may meet the challenges of ensuing decades with courage, intelligence and understanding." The school would "do its modest share to help young Canadians face the post-centennial years," and it counted "itself fortunate in having Mr. Perry as founding Headmaster."

It was fortunate. Perry was an amateur naturalist, an expert canoeist, and a highly regarded educator who had just spent 16 years as headmaster of Ashbury College in Ottawa. He held degrees from the University of Toronto and Columbia University. He had worked at the Taylor Statten Camps and founded a camp of his own, Camp Kawabi. He wrote books on canoeing and set national canoeing standards. He served as a squadron leader with the RCAF during the Second World War, hosted a cross-country travel show on CBC Radio for two seasons, and worked at the University of Toronto, including as Director of Educational Programs at Hart House.

Perry had retired from Ashbury, but the idea of a school on Lake Rosseau brought him back. It was a chance to bring together the two things he cared about most, the outdoors and education, in a school of his own. By all accounts, he saw it as a calling, not a job.

“…an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit…”

The idea for the school began with Roger Morris and Maurice East. Neither was a professional educator, but both believed in the power of education to change a young person's life. They also felt the world was changing, and that it would ask more of young people than schools had traditionally prepared them to give.

They weren't alone. One of the leading voices of the time was Kurt Hahn, a German educator who established schools and programs in Germany and the UK, including the Salem School, Gordonstoun, the United World Colleges, and Outward Bound. "I regard it as the foremost task of education," Hahn said, "to ensure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and above all, compassion."

It's hard to imagine now how new that idea was. Instead of learning only "at the foot of the master," students would learn first-hand, immersed in what they were studying. Instead of memorizing facts and figures, they would discover something about themselves. Learning would reach beyond the classroom, because it happens between people, not between desks and blackboards. "There is more to us than we know," Hahn said, "if we can be made to see it."

Perry, Morris, and East wanted their students to see it too, and in Rosseau they found the place to make it happen. The school would be challenging and rewarding, built on the shared experience of a close-knit community. Subjects would connect rather than stand alone. Students' talents, interests, and curiosities would be encouraged, not flattened for the sake of uniformity. They would leave with a strong education and a sense of who they were and their place in the world. The woods, the lake, and the land would be part of the curriculum, from canoeing to calculus.

“ … and living becomes exhilarating.”

They wouldn't have called it experiential education, still a fairly radical idea at the time, but that's what it was. In his manual on canoeing, Perry wrote that "a reliance on one's skill and judgement seems to sharpen the appreciation for all the little, but important things of life: food tastes better, clothes are more comfortable, nature takes on a new meaning and living becomes exhilarating." It's hard to find a better description of experiential learning.

That's what the founders built, and it still shapes RLC today. In 1983, the school became co-educational and took the name Rosseau Lake College. Our students still learn in the woods and on the lake, and they still grow as citizens and stewards of the land. The founders wanted learning to be exhilarating. At this small, independent school on Lake Rosseau, it still is.

End of an Era (2016), a student film by Chris Blair '16, made in his final months at RLC.