2017
Rozon, Gina. (2001). Education for self-determination. American Review of Canadian Studies, 31(1-2), 61-70. (Presents that state/public education is not promoting self-determination for Aboriginal people, and probably for no one. “Control over education is seen as an element of Aboriginal self-government. In the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba [Canada], it states, “When 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 [like homeschooling?]. ….. This school system [set up in the mid-nineteenth century in Canada], 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. “For 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 State 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) (retrieved 7/11/13 from http://www.questia.com/library/1G1-79408132/education-for-self-determination). (Keywords: Aboriginal education, Aboriginal, self-determination, hidden curriculum, home education, home-based education, homeschooling)
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