Education for Self-Determination

Abstract

Control over education is seen as an element of Aboriginal self-government. In the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba, it states, Aboriginal people seek the right to self-government, they mean the right to determine how matters such as health care, education, and child welfare are provided to their people, in their own communities (Manitoba Public Inquiry 1991, 258). However, if Aboriginal people, in gaining control over education, replicate the schooling system, they will be perpetuating a system that robs people of self-determination. That is, whether it is band-controlled or state controlled, no school system can meet the goals of self-determination in education for Aboriginal people. As a system specifically designed by the dominant society to inhibit such self-determination, it should be scrapped and replaced with a model favoring a home-based education approach. When Egerton Ryerson set up a school system in Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century he began to change the focus of schooling. Under Ryerson, went from focusing on the teaching of basic literacy skills to molding social identities. Ryerson established what is now known as the curriculum--a system that, through the structure and pedagogy of school, tries to shape the behaviour of students. aim was to develop people who willingly accepted the status quo, and this was to be done by establishing school rituals that implicitly taught passivity and submission (Contenta 1993, 11). This school system, geared to teach passivity and submission, was aimed not at Aboriginal people, but at the general public. Aboriginal control of education, if it continues to be delivered in a schooled environment, will not eliminate the lessons of this hidden curriculum. We fail to question school as the only means of delivering education because it is all we have ever known. most of us who experienced state schooling, the contours of the educational map were drawn when we arrived. School practices preceded us and neither we, nor those we knew, had experienced an alternative reality (Curtis 1988, 16). Schooling and education are not synonymous. The construction of this Educational was accomplished only through the destruction of a prior organization and the marginalization of the structure of educational possibilities it presented. Education was certainly not synonymous with state schooling in the 1830s and 1840s. That we often equate the two today is another accomplishment of the Educational State (Curtis 1988, 15). That these words were synonymous in the eyes of the government in relation to education for Aboriginal people is apparent in the wording of treaties. For example, Treaties number Three, Five, and Six contain the promise that Her Majesty agrees to maintain schools (Charleston 1988, 1). Treaties number Two, Four, Eight, and Nine all contain similar wording regarding either the maintenance of or the provision of teachers. While Aboriginal people have interpreted these treaties to mean that they will be provided with education, the government has interpreted them to mean Aboriginal people will be provided with schooling. Post-contact First Nations schooling was based on religious and public schooling ideas that were imported from Anglo and French traditions--everything from the design of the school day, to the Eurocentric emphasis on the content of the curriculum, to the theories and practice of learning, curriculum development, and assessment (Calliou 1999, 175). Although Aboriginal people, and Canad ians in general, have now recognized the fact that schooling has had devastating effects on Aboriginal people, the design of the school day, a flaw Calliou has pointed Out, receives little attention. Instead the focus of those interested in self-determination in education is focused on First Nations' control over those school days, Aboriginal curriculum, and Aboriginal institutions. …