Education - Decolonilizing the Larger Narrative

In our current culture education is seen as an unmitigated good and education here really means university.  Education is sold as a route out of poverty and a ticket to the middle class/good life.  A path to knowledge and acceptance.

I can be that, but it can also be a path into debt for some, or marginal employment for others.  I was lucky and economists have a magic allure around them, but for other disciplines this economy is not very good and the promises were lies.

So I really appreciated these pieces by Adrianne K at nativeappropriations.com  and NPR where she explains some of the the feelings indians might have upon entering higher education. She raises a number of really good points that i had never thought about as being impediments in the acheivement of higher education for native peoples.

I had primarially thought that the barrier to education for indians would be socio-economic status, theirability to access funds or ability to get through high school to be in a position to  think about higher education.   Further barriers coming from the remoteness of a lot of the Candian indigenous communities, making going away to school an even larger burden and then all magnified by the cultural changes that many of us face when going to university anyway. 

But Adrianne raises some really important points around of feelings of entitelement or disentitlement regarding education as well as the relationship to the broader context of school.  School may be a loaded concept for some, especially where your histories around school involved being taken away from home and community, where it meant losing you language and your culture, and where the learning is steeped in the history of the male colonializer and a canon that is very dismissive of the experiences of the "other" women, aboriginals, gays excetera. 

I really appreciate those people who are sharing their perspectives.  It helps to open my eyes and re-interpret my world in new ways.