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Revision as of 06:37, 7 July 2005
The term residential school generally refers to any school at which students live in addition to attending classes.
Kinds of residential schools
There are various kinds of residential schools. They are distinct in nature depending upon the scope or functional aspects of its organization. The most common type of residential school are boarding schools. Other forms of residential schools include resident schools for disabled pupils (e.g. for students who are blind), special needs residential schools (e.g. for mentally challenged students), and the Israeli kibbutzim, where children stay and get educated in a commune, but also have everyday contact with their parents at specified hours.
Mandatory residential schools for aboriginal children
In Canada, the term usually refers to a number of schools for Aboriginal children, operated during the 20th century by churches of various denominations (about sixty per cent by Roman Catholics, and thirty per cent by the Protestants) and funded under the Indian Act by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, a branch of the federal government. Implemented under the Gradual Civilization Act, the schools' purpose was "to take the indian out of the Queen's Red Children" according to the Gradual Civilization Act.
The first residential schools were set up during the French colonial rule in the 1600s by Roman Catholic missionaries. Their primary role was to convert First Nations chlidren to Christianity. However, the First Nations people did not wish to be converted and were applied little pressure from the European communities to attend the residential schools. Consequently, only few Aboriginals ever attended them. Most schools did not last over a decade.
In the early 1800s, Protestant missionaries opened residential schools in the current Ontario region. The Protestants not only spread Christianity, but also tried to help the indigenous people adopt agriculture. The federal government noticed that the Protestant efforts complemented their aim for assimilation, and began to fund the schools.
Students were required to stay in residences on school premises, which were often walled or fortifed in some manner, and were often forcibly removed from their homes, parents, and communities. Most students had no contact with their families for up to 10 months at a time due to the distance between their home communities and schools. Often, they did not have contact with their families for years at a time. The locations of the schools were planned deliberately to ensure a "proper distance" from the reserves. They were prohibited from speaking Aboriginal languages, even amongst themselves and outside the classroom, so that English or French would be successfully learned and their own languages forgotten. Students were subject to often unreasonably severe corporal punishment for speaking Aboriginal languages or practising non-Christian faiths. It is because of this that the residential school system (and indeed the entire Gradual Civilization Act) have been severly criticized as culturally insensitive or even inhuman. It has also been proven to be a government and church sponsored attempt to assimilate the Aboriginals into the European-Canada culture, and it was at least partially successful in many cases.
Until the late 1950s, residential schools were highly underfunded, and relied on the forced labour of their students to maintain their facilities. The work was arduous, and often compromised the academic learnings of the students.
In the 1990s, it was revealed that many students at residential schools were subjected to severe physical, psychological, and sexual abuse by teachers and school officials. Several prominent court cases led to large monetary payments from the federal government and churches to former students of residential schools.
The last residential school closed in 1996. The federal government has since apologized for the trauma the students experienced. Because morals have changed with the times, the policies of the residential schools are now often seen as racist and similar to Apartheid.
Similar schools were operated in the United States (under the name Indian Boarding Schools) and in Australia (the Stolen Generation).
Traditional natives and tribal communities around societies have been subjected by governments to similar forced residential boarding schools.
See also
External links
- A Lost Heritage: Canada's Residential Schools
- Office of Indian Residential Schools Resolution, Government of Canada