Jump to content

Leaderboard

Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/06/2021 in all areas

  1. Because the records will show the Canadian government's own complicity.
    3 points
  2. Unrealistic, why?? There were and supposedly still are tribes living in isolation in PNG, South America and other places, preserving their culture and gene pool. The idea is not to "educate". The idea was to assimilate.
    1 point
  3. Quote from Sir John A McDonsld, 1879: When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men."
    1 point
  4. Maybe what would help is citizens investigation panels, for essential matters. Something along the lines of juries. Not parliamentary commissions useless as much as over expensive and too late for anything in a partisan political system. The same old principle if the citizens could not do, who could? And if they wouldn't care who should?
    1 point
  5. meh, Canadian beer, overpriced the value pick is Dortmunder Actien Brauerei Scots German Orangemen of British North America, last of the Hanoverians
    1 point
  6. Publicly funded education has probably been the greatest accelerant of human progress, providing access for the impoverished, underprivileged, and child labouring masses to the accumulation of human ingenuity and knowledge. The masses became literate and never looked back, gaining access to and expanding higher learning in medical science, engineering, and history (including knowledge of the greatest technological inventions, civilizations and freedoms). The Canadian government in the MacDonald years had overseen the greatest expansion of publicly funded education. The first university educators going back to the founding of Oxford and prior, were religious clerics. The first public school teachers, mostly women, entered the profession as a vocation. Many were discouraged from marrying and were fired if they had children. Many teachers were nuns or might as well have been because they gave their lives to teaching. These early educators made sacrifices to build the society we take for granted today, with all of its freedoms, enfranchisement, upward mobility, increased lifespan, low infant mortality, and progress across countless metrics. The 19th and early 20th century world was a harsher one. It was the end of a world where Indigenous, in the south at least, could realistically live a traditional lifestyle because the modern world was expanding and offering new opportunities to all To pretend that all of this new opportunity was rejected or resisted by most Indigenous isn’t really the case. It was a compromise, but electricity, film, radio, and the inventions of Edison were and still are hard to resist, like so many other technologies for farming, travelling, etc. Terrible as the idea of residential schools sounds today in our more gentle world, they were seen as the way to raise living standards and provide the linguistic and cultural literacy needed for Indigenous to participate in this advancing, convenient, multifaceted wider world. An illiterate Indigenous man would be a fish out of water in this new age. Do you really think it was possible or advisable to try to stay closed off in the wilderness? The government tried to protect at least some of that with reserves, but of course they’re artificially propped up with federal money and benefits In the end the two-tier society is an unrealistic and I think unhealthy choice. However, that’s for Indigenous to decide now. It has to be for political reasons, because we can’t open ourselves up to more colonialism. Indigenous have upheld the Indian Act despite its problems, because they’re afraid of losing its protections. Our society is essentially still dealing with the fallout of a centuries old clash of civilizations, but if we’re honest, most Indigenous would far prefer to use grocery stores and computers and modern medicine to the traditional means of survival. The old ways are mostly maintained to preserve the memory and cultural traditions, except in the far north, on the most part. It’s not a bad deal actually today: protected free land, few taxes, publicly funded health and education, free university... When we’re honest about history, it’s easier to see that many of the things we don’t like about our past were hard choices that seemed like progress to most but not all people at the time. Families suffered even as many made gains at the same time. Suffering is baked into life, but those who had less power suffered more, as is also the case today. Yet even today it’s hard to know what helping the disenfranchised means. Is it about leaving people to fend for themselves or giving them everything or somewhere in between? We will be judged as retrograde soon for the “progressive” choices we make today. Tearing down the Roman triumphal arches, including the one celebrating the conquest of Jerusalem, is not what most people today would want, including most Jewish people. MacDonald and Ryerson achieved some good things but also hurt people. Sometimes those who were hurt also achieved great victories, not so different from our world today.
    1 point
  7. Not a problem; governments routinely blame things on previous governments. It's more likely, imo, that Trudeau, being a Catholic, doesn't want his Church to look bad.
    1 point
  8. The true leader of what's left of the free world will be speaking any minute now from the NC state GOP convention. They say this is going to be a good one:
    1 point
  9. There's tons of evidence but how would you suggest it be given to you without the use of words? Would you prefer memes?
    1 point
  10. All major Christian religious denominations ran the first public schools. Prayers were said in all these schools for over a century. Education reflects the values of the majority of the public’s values, which were primarily English and French. Abuse took place in many schools, residential or not. The attitude towards Indigenous, misguided as it was, was that they were educating and civilizing people, very racist by our standards but considered progressive at the time. The separation of children from their parents was wrong but hard to avoid if there were no local schools. The suppression of Indigenous language and culture is of course terrible. None of that should’ve taken place, like many things a century or even 30 years ago. The government has paid settlements but the healing of emotional wounds is going to take generations. Does that mean all or most things that governments did were bad when public education was founded? As always, context is hugely important. It is ignored and babies are thrown out with the bath water, including public education and the country of Canada. What happened to those children is so wrong.
    1 point
×
×
  • Create New...