The Education Of Native And Minority Groups

Examines the history of the education of five minority groups in British Columbia, including native Indians, Doukhobors, Chinese, Japanese, and East Indians.

Indigenous people have often been confronted with education systems that ignore their cultural and historical perspectives. Largely unsuccessful projects of assimilation have been the predominant outcome of indigenous communities' encounters with state schools, as many indigenous students fail to conform to mainstream cultural norms. This insightful volume is an important contribution to our understanding of indigenous empowerment through education. The contributors to this volume work in the fields of education, social development and community empowerment among indigenous communities around the world. Their essays create a new foundation for implementing specialized indigenous/minority education worldwide, and engage the simultaneous projects of cultural preservation and social integration. This work will be vital for scholars in Native American studies, ethnic studies, and education.

This volume brings the perspectives of educational anthropology to the consideration of the education of ethnic and linguistic minority students and to the challenges often associated with that enterprise. Built around a core of chapters originally published in the Anthropology and Education Quarterly, which presented two major anthropological perspectives on school success and failure for minority students, focuses on the cultural difference approach and the discontinuity approach. Each is represented by a theoretical chapter and two case studies. Chapters contrast anthropological and nonanthropological perspectives on minority education, outlining key concepts and methods in educational anthropology for readers who may be unfamiliar with the field. A later section offers recent modifications or additions to the two major perspectives. These chapters examine the role of parents and community in minority education, call attention to the cultural groupings that an form in response to the school context itself, focus attention on children as active decision-makers in school, and question the validity of the whole conceptualization of school success and failure. Concluding chapters on applying anthropological perspectives to policy and practice.