With the introduction of free schools into Canada West in 1850, school attendance became, as it had for American educators, both the greatest obstacle to the successful implementation of the new system and the greatest justification for its future growth. Once the education of all school-age children became the primary goal of educational reform, the days of the district common school in the city were numbered. The district system had encouraged patterns of attendance attuned to the interests of the family and not those of the state. Schoolmen accused this more informal education of inefficiency and discrimination against the poorer classes and also objected to the large numbers of parents who kept their children out of school. To its proponents, the extension of free schooling would not only ensure a higher rate of attendance, but would also serve to assimilate the “famine Irish” who had flocked to the cities of Canada West in the late 1840s, and whose mere physical presence mid-nineteenth-century educators perceived as a direct threat to social order. To men like Dr. Egerton Ryerson, the Chief Superintendent of Education in Canada West, it was therefore doubly important to make operative as soon as possible the forces of social levelling, acculturation to work values, and diminution of crime inherent in universal primary education.