I guess I kind of scared The Husband when I told him my mind had wandered to thoughts of Indian boarding schools while I was thinking about the strict systems of merits and demerits and rote learning at Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School and Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academies profiled in this weeks issue of The Village Voice.
Boarding schools were created towards the end of the 1800’s in order to educate the children of Native Americans, Canadian Indians and the Aboriginal Peoples, of Australia (to whom the Australian government recently issued a formal apology). Children were taken away from their families. Their hair was cut, they were forced to wear different clothes, practice a different religion, speak a different language and even change their names all in the interest of assimilating.
The missionaries who founded these schools believed they were helping the children by taking them away from their families in order to teach them how to function in the dominant Eurocentric culture.
One of the comments by a PS 9 parent advocate, at the PEP meeting the other night, focused on the Uncommon Schools (the parent organization of the Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter school) policy of actively discouraging parental involvement to the point of sending a cease and desist letter to a group of parents attempting to start an PTA organization at one of their schools.
I don’t know what would cause me to ponder the culture destroying Indian boarding schools of the last century… unless… It might have something to do with the lack of respect for the values and opinions of public schools parents that I have so recently witnessed.
Hundreds of people spoke passionately for two timed minutes each, one after another. At the end of it all the board went ahead and voted to pass all of the resolutions for closing or relocating schools.
Not even a single motion to simply table just one decision about any individual school –while awaiting clarification of the validity of a particular statistic, number, or fact–if only until the next meeting– was passed.
The meeting ran until one in the morning.
Nothing changed.
The members of the panel didn’t even pretend to listen for insight about the schools from any of the parents, students or teachers who are in those buildings every day.
The lack of respect shown by people of power towards those whose own children’s educational lives are at stake was appalling.