Taking In the past few weeks I've wandered aimlessly around two books I've been reading and various YouTube offerings about aboriginal education. The two books are "Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit" by Marie Battiste and "We Were Not the Savages" by Daniel N. Paul, both Mi'kmaq authors.( I've also been noticing how many times Marie Battiste has been quoted in our Social Studies textbook at the Alberta high school I work at, but that's a side note).
For the last two months, I've gotten quite interested in the ideas that the unschoolers are putting out there; John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, and Ivan Illich are the authors whose works I've been reading and I as I have been wondering if we are even doing the right things in school for any students, I am confronted with the idea that we have definitely not been doing the right things for our students who are at risk of being oppressed both at school and in the wider society. All of these thoughts and ideas have led to some cognitive dissonance for me. I really believed that even though we needed to work on what we were doing, that there was some hope for our education system. After reading all these ideas, I'm wondering if education as we know it should be scrapped entirely and we should start from scratch. The more we move towards standardization, the further we move away from including people, both in our educational models and in our society at large. I find this quite disturbing. Mostly though, I'm frustrated. I do not swallow the ideas of Gatto whole, he seems quite bitter and angry. However, he makes some extremely good points. Holt, on the other hand, is hard to dismiss. Unlike Gatto, who does not seem like a academic with any qualifications other than his 30 embittered years as a teacher, Holt has a well thought out philosophy and it is quite compelling. His basic philosophy is that the whole system of education and schooling, combined with the wider society's interest in keeping people obedient and compliant, is rotten right to the core. The best thing you can do for your kids is to take them out and teach them at home. And for goodness sake, don't take them out and teach them the curriculum, which is the very thing that is perpetuating these problems, let them learn what they want to learn, what's valuable to them. He believed that if you give a child the tools he or she needs, they will need very little 'compulsion' because humans want to learn. So what does this have to do with the books about aboriginal education? Well if I applied those principles to the idea of aboriginal education, I can honestly not see the benefit of compelling any students, but especially aboriginal students, from attending schools where the white myth of superiority is an undercurrent in everything we do. I've read a lot of other works about how to be more inclusive but I always felt that it didn't quite go far enough. That is combined with my opinion that the standard measure of 'success' is flawed as well. What is success in school anyway? Isn't it that people come out of the education system empowered, able to make good decisions, with skills that they need to move into the world of work and life? Well I'm not sure our standardized tests that are implemented by almost every province, are really measuring those things. Success is different for everyone but there are some things that are simply not valued in our school system. We steer kids away from things that they are passionate about. Art, mechanics, etc., are considered inferior to being, say, a university professor. I think that's wrong, it is creating a situation where certain people, no matter what they achieve, can never be considered successful by our society. Why don't we measure happiness after 10 years of leaving school? What if THAT was the measure? What would we change in schools if that was what we considered accomplishment in life? Or what if we measured how many community connection a person had after they had been gone from school for 20 years, what would change if that was the measure? I recently watched a TED talk where the speaker, Robert Waldinger) was arguing that happiness and fulfillment was about the relationships we had in life. http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness If that's happiness and fulfillment, why do we measure success with a dollar value? It makes no sense! I wonder if those are our values in education, if we have any business teaching students at all. I think that students we consider 'at risk' like aboriginal students, their values are being under appreciated. The things that are supposed to make us as humans happy and fulfilled are what the First Nations people are DOING. So why is it undervalued? I have thoughts about each separate item I've read and studied but I will wait for another day to write about them. Those are the most burning thoughts in my heart today. As a result of this study about unschooling and the movement around the world to completely shake up/change education, I've have seriously considered pulling out of education myself. I am simply not sure we are doing the right thing anymore. I have a small burning hope that things can be changed and that I could be part of the change, but I'm just not sure what direction to go in professionally to accomplish that. Until next time, Golda
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AuthorMasters in Education student at the University of New Brunswick, I am avidly interested in the future of education, especially for First Nation, Metis and Inuit students in Canada. I believe change is going to come from these sectors who have the most room for growth and the most interest in seeing the status quo changed. Archives
March 2016
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