Aboriginal Education: Current Crisis and Future Alternatives

Abstract

Every Aboriginal language in Canada has words for learning. In the Cree language Kiskinohamâw means being taught, learning, or going to school. There are words for study, words for student, and many words for needing to learn. Aboriginal cultures across this country hold the educational processes very dear, yet the First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples all face serious problems of underachievement. We find that Aboriginal educational attainment lags significantly behind the Canadian population. While we can see overall improvement for Registered Indians between 1981 and 2006, improvement in educational attainment has not been continuous. In the 1981 to 1991 period there was a narrowing of the gap with the Canadian population in terms of the proportion with high school or higher, whereas in the 1991 to 2006 period the gap actually increased. As we have noted before (White, Beavon, et al. 2007) younger cohorts of Aboriginal peoples have greater educational levels then older age groups. However, the gap between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal education is even greater at the younger age levels. In other words, the gains Aboriginal youth are making vis-a-vis their elders is being eclipsed by the rising education levels of Canadians in general. Canadians generally agree that the development of human capital is very important in the self-actualization of a person. It allows one to choose when and how to integrate into the economic enterprise of the country, region or community in which one lives, and it also contributes to the production of citizenship. There is a long scientific tradition in sociology and economics that has established that educational attainment, that is, the acquisition of human capital, is highly correlated with income, wealth, occupational diversity and a host of other positive outcomes (see Becker 1964, Coleman 1988). This relationship has been demonstrated to hold for Aboriginal people as well (Richards 2008, Spence et al. 2007, Spence 2007, White, et al. 2004, White, et al. 2005). Given that Aboriginal peoples culturally prize education and there are these very positive associations with education concerning self-growth and prosperity, we might hope that Aboriginal attainment would be close to the national average. If we look closely at the situation for education we see a different trend. We can see in Figure 1.1 that the Registered Indian population on reserve (measured in

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.