Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission
to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
In my reply I mentioned that, although they have changed since their introduction, almost all institutions that we have are the products of colonization, the name we give to the use of state power to take control of a geographic region and the people who inhabit that region.
Prior to colonization, the Indigenous people who lived on the land we now occupy had their own languages, culture, and institutions. Those institutions were forcibly replaced by institutions that Europeans brought with them when they established dominion over the land they had forcibly occupied. The European settlers assumed the right of ownership, absolute use of the land and control of its inhabitants.
By imposing their language, culture, and institutions upon Indigenous inhabitants, settler societies impose ways of knowing and thinking on them. The effect of such actions is a reshaping of thinking of the original inhabitants and their successors. If the process of replacing Indigenous ways of knowing and thinking with those of the settler societies occurs, it is no longer necessary to forcibly impose control; people will do that on their own.
This is exactly what forcible removal of the original inhabitants from their land, removal of children from their parents, and institutionalizing the children and imposing settler languages and cultures sought to do. I would, were I Indigenous, think twice about sending my children or grandchildren to schools established by settlers. I would also want control of the education of my children or grandchildren to be vested in a government for and operated by my people. I would want schools in which my language and culture were taught and where my ways of knowing and thinking were the foundation of the curriculum.
To many people public schooling appears to be a generous gift. It is not. I am not referring here to the fact that public schools are paid from tax dollars. I say that public schooling is not an open-handed gift because there is more than an exchange of tax dollars. Whether they are conscious of it or not, when someone sends their offspring to school, they are allowing the school to transform how those offspring will think and what they will know.
Our settler society is coming to terms with the damage inflicted upon Indigenous people in the past and the present. Gradual changes are occurring to make settler institutions less hostile and more welcoming environments for Indigenous children and youth. Provision is being made for the teaching of some Indigenous languages and incorporating ways of knowing and thinking that are more common among Indigenous people.
Those changes will gradually alter colonial institutions, making them less colonial. But they will not eliminate the fact that schools are colonial institutions. They have been created and are operated by the dominant society.
While the colonial nature of schools in Canada is being softened, Canada continues to practice a form of colonialism elsewhere in the world. Canada is not forcibly imposing a way of life on those in other countries. The process is more subtle. Many jurisdictions in Canada operate or license the operation of schools in other countries. Those schools often adhere to Canadian curricula and employ Canadian teachers.
Students who attend those schools do so at the behest of
their parents. But make no mistake, whether they or their parents are conscious
of it, the minds of those students are being colonized.