Schooled for Inequality: The Education of British Columbia Aboriginal Children
- First Nation adults have the highest rates of alcoholism, abuse, suicide, poverty and incarceration in Canada; This can be related back to the abuse they have suffered from the residential schools they were once a part of
- The event that has effected First Nation’s for years and years after was the residential school systems
- It was a control mechanism for the “Indians”
- It was an implemented system to try and abolish the culture of the First Nations and try to simulate them to be like the White’s in Canada
- There were boarding schools for the younger children and there was industrial school’s for the older children
- The schools were mandatory, and if the parents didn’t agree to send their children to these school’s people came to their houses and took the children regardless
- The children weren’t in the classroom for very long at a time; an average of 3 hours at a time
- They tried to “civilize” the children by making them speak the language of English
- Schooling was based heavily on the church system
- There is evidence of sexual abuse in the schools
- There was major underfunding for the schools in which these children were living in and attending
- For many individuals today the thought of these schools is unbearable, it has left a negative impact on their lives and has been passed down through the generations to affect their relatives that weren’t directly connected to these horrendous crimes
Implementing Integrated Education Policy for On-Reserve Aboriginal Children in British Columbia, 1951–1981
- Although the act to have children removed from residential schools was put in place in 1951, it wasn’t until 1981 that most of the schools were finally empty
- Until 1951 most Aboriginal children were educated separated from their non-Aboriginal peers
- Implementing Integrated Education Policy for On-Reserve Aboriginal Children in British Columbia, 1951–1981
- Economic factors played an important role in the integration matter
- “By the end of World War II, politicians and the public alike had begun to support the idea of integrated education for Aboriginal children, due in large part to the “equality revolution” that was taking root throughout the western world to afford previously marginalized peoples equality of treatment, opportunity, and access” (Raptis, 2008)
- “In 1950, under the Indian Inquiry Act, the province set up an Indian Inquiry Committee to investigate and make recommendations to improve the overall welfare of BC’s Indians” (Rapis, 2008)
- “By 1958, 2,516 (or 29%) of the province’s 8,622 school-aged Aboriginal children were attending provincial or private schools with the remainder enrolled in residential or on-reserve day schools” (Rapis, 2008)
- Concern for the welfare of Aboriginal peoples had grown appreciably across the country
- The grades of these children wasn’t the best because for many of them, English was a second language for them
- “In 1981, the province had yet to understand what the federal government had learned long ago: that without a significant presence in the schools themselves, neither federal legislation, nor money, nor educational curricula or resources administered from a distance were sufficient for central authorities to leverage province-wide changes in the lives of individual Aboriginal learners. Another twenty-five years would pass before the province agreed to enable Aboriginal people to establish their own school districts and fully begin to implement “Indian control of Indian education”” (Rapis, 2008)