First Nation Education

I taught for a year in a first nation community inside a bubble where my main interaction was with students and colleagues,  and where the community did not have enough high school and college graduates to staff high school teaching posts.   I faced a high school generation who did not share my view of education and the need to sit down and study, nor need to attend school.  Many of their parents had primary school level instruction. So there was no tradition that favored continued high school instruction.  In the community, I was a foreigner hired by the community   to provide a service, an educational service which had been in the past a means of assimilation. 

And in Quebec, there is also an absurd scenario (1997-2008) of first nation school boards trying to follow the irrational, ill-put, Quebec primary and secondary mathematics curricula, curricula ill-suited for the needs of Quebec student general, and hence more than likely ill-suited to the needs of Quebec first nation students. First nation and aboriginal societies should not assume the education systems of nearby or overrunning societies are rational, and suited to the needs of the latter societies. 

A Few Thoughts, Not all is certain

Contact and interaction with industrial or pollution age societies and their educational and quantitative ways and traditions may come as shock, more negative than positive. That contact or shock may lead to a indifference, deliberate rejection or a deliberate adaptation by individuals, subgroups or the society as a whole.  The experience of first nations elsewhere  should be studied and discussed, and then some goals adopted.  

Embracing education is a two-edge sword. It may improve the self-reliance of individual and communities, aid in health and economic matters, but it will also introduce the younger generation to different ways, ways of thinking and logic, that may foreign to elders.  Where the parental languages lack terms for skills, concepts and objects, the returning generation will have to invent terms or adopt them, so that the parental tongue remains not in pristine form, but in adapted form, a consequent of interaction between more and more cultures.  

Loss of culture and language  may be lessened by a first generation going out with the deliberate aim of getting an education in the wider world in a second language, and then deliberately  returning to provide education and services in the parental language.  In that, many that leave will not return. 

Adults or elders who want to preserve old ways, will need to return to school to see what the younger generation sees offline and on, and then develop a hybrid culture that embraces old and new. The cultural change will be present in terms of goods and services that do not reflect old times, that reflect world-wide trade and commerce. 

Opinion:  Communities, families and individuals with goals  will have greater well-being than others who adopt none.  Good luck. 

LAMP (first draft, June 2008) a program for adult  and teen mathematics education

Mathematics education standards implied by calculus should be a factor, not the only one, yet not a forgotten nor hidden one in course design 

Area Intro
Introduction
Arithmetic
Geometry
Algebra
Logic
Calculus

Musings - More Ideas

More About LAMP
Evaluation
Maths Cultural Origins
First Nation Education
Modern Mathematics
Before LAMP
Problem Solving Skills Routine to Non
Instructional Concepts
Student Cooperation
Maths Extrinsic Origins
Science Education

For further musings or thoughts see site books.

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