Challenges of Indigenous People as regards to Education PDF

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Candidate Number: Fts000 Course code and Title: SOA-3010, Indigenous Rights as human Rights, The social organization of Cultural Diversity. Assignment Text: For Indigenous peoples, achieving the right to education is inseparable from other aspects of indigenous rights. In your essay outline the main...

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Candidate Number: Fts000

Course code and Title: SOA-3010, Indigenous Rights as human Rights, The social organization of Cultural Diversity.

Assignment Text: For Indigenous peoples, achieving the right to education is inseparable from other aspects of indigenous rights. In your essay outline the main challenges confronting indigenous peoples with regards to education, and clearly link educational rights with at least two other specific aspects of indigenous rights (for example: land, livelihood, self-determination, intellectual property, language, health, and/or culture). Use examples to illustrate and where relevant refer to specific rights mechanisms.

Table of Content.  Introduction.  Challenges of Indigenous People as regards to Education  Links to Education Rights and Health  Links to Education and Self-determination  Education and Language  Education and Intellectual Property Rights.  Conclusion

Body of essay word count= 3290 Word count including front page and bibliography= 3838

Introduction. Following the International Human Rights Regime, education of Indigenous peoples is identified a priority concern. For the Indigenous peoples to enact their Rights fully, develop their skills, capacities, potentials and to realize other aspects of Indigenous Rights, education is fundamental. According to John Dewey an American Philosopher “Education is not a preparation for life, rather it is the living. Education is the process of living through a continuous reconstruction of experiences. It is the development of all those capacities in the individual which will enable him to control his environment and fulfil his possibilities”. Education of Indigenous Peoples is essential, a fundamental human rights, an empowerment and a precondition for a continuous reconstruction that will ensure their individual and collective development, enabling them to control their environment, realize their aspiration in self-determination of pursuing economic, social and cultural development. Achieving the right to education is often very complex in practice for indigenous people with state control and mainstream educational system. Challenges of Indigenous Peoples as with regards to Education. Schools most often are a venue of discrimination for Indigenous people, until recently that the rights of Indigenous Peoples are gaining recognition and acceptance that, they have a right to be different. Indigenous student had traumatic experiences in learning in the mainstream system of education. Discrimination at school was/is by the school system in itself and the student. Indigenous student are termed to be slow learners in the mainstream educational system, some of these students where from communities where the system of learning was Oral communication and Knowledge generation patterns where oral and not in a formal system. “Orality as a system of communication and thinking has different dynamics from literacy” (Ong 1982). Orality nurtures linguistic intelligence, sharpens memory (voluntary, involuntary, iconic, implicit, semantic, symbolic, and musical) and associative thinking, among others (Revel, 2005), it has been given secondary attention in the contemporary education system (Ong, 1982). Sadly instead of understanding the needs of indigenous students for some degree of transition from one communication and learning pattern to another, they are evaluated in the mainstream educational

system as slow learners. Although indigenous people live in varied circumstances around the world, this pattern of formal education discrimination is an identifiable experience among all indigenous peoples. Forcible Assimilation and integration, this is the deliberate attempts and efforts made by states or colonizers to eradicate the indigenous lifestyle of Indigenous Peoples particularly channeled at stopping the transfer of indigenous knowledge to the next generation and structurally imposing mainstream education and lifestyle on Indigenous Peoples. This experience was very prominent with Australian aboriginal, government adopted policies of assimilation where by indigenous people had to leave their communities and live among white Australians according to values, lifestyles and behaviors. Children were forcibly taken away from their parents at very tender ages of 2-4. It has been estimated that over 60 000 children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island were taken away from their families between 1909 and 1969. During the late 1980s over a hundred thousand people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island descent were afflicted with force assimilation policy of removal of their children from their custody. How could traditional teaching and learning(education) system be carried on with many members of the families and communities taken away and dispersed. The implication of this as regarding education is, the aboriginal lost their form of education, acquired one that gave them no true identity. The alienation of aboriginal children to mainstream from their communities affected the aboriginal population in many ways. Broken intergenerational ties, learning from school building that portrayed indigenous way of life as backward and consequently the children also started viewing their communities as backward or inferior. This resulted to youth been disrespectful to their elders or communities and elders becoming silent because they had lost roles of disciplinary figures in their communities(broken intergenerational ties). Traditional knowledge that took ages to developed and validated have been forgotten to the point that today, meaning of cultural practices, symbols have not been able to recover their validity and popularity among the aboriginals. The “stolen generation” comes up here strongly proving that the value of that generation of children that was forcefully detached from traditional learning system and taken to the Australian mainstream society, cannot be overestimated, the social, cultural and economic knowledge transfer that was halted

and destroyed would have strengthened their ability to exercise civil rights and influence the political policies that will improve protection of their human rights and achieve self-determination for the Aboriginals of Australia. Australia was not a signatory to the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), but it reversed her position and now supports the declaration in attempt to correct this past. Australian Aboriginal history is one of the many cases Indigenous Peoples have faced as regarding education with deliberate government attempts to have only a mainstream educational system. School as an experience of non-being, Indigenous peoples in mainstream schools, see how their subsistence way of life was/is perceived as backward and ancient, and their knowledge and skills discussed as inferior or invalid in comparism with modern knowledge and skills. In the mainstream educational system when indigenous traditional life and being is discussed, there are tendencies of misinterpretation and misrepresentation because of the prevailing prejudice. In instances where the culture of indigenous people where the topic of discussion the concentration was not rooted deep but limited to the surface culture that highlights artifacts and practices (songs, cloths, dances, etc.) giving limited and shallow understanding of Indigenous Peoples as a people, their culture as a process and their identity as one that includes the cultural heritage and history of a community. These points highlight the experiences of indigenous students in mainstream educational systems, and shows that there has to be improvement in mainstream educational system that will address the indigenous community context. Indigenous students will not be able to explore all resources for knowledge acquisition in a discriminatory setting, the mainstream approach to education that uses a single model is not appropriate and not compatible because of diversity in the society. Time and Curriculum are also factors that prove challenging for Indigenous Peoples and education in the mainstream society. Indigenous traditional life style is one that time and seasons are very important in it. Farming and herding for example are subject to seasons pending on favorable environmental and climate conditions, this can often pose a problem for indigenous students in mainstream educational institutions when schools are in session and it is the same period that they need for production in their fishing, herding or farming as the case maybe for a particular

student or people. The Maasai of Ngorongoro, are Nomads with settlements where women, little children, old people live together. The strong and young men of this community take care of the livestock, they move from place to place as the seasons change. The young boys between ages of seven to fourteen years are been brought up to be herders and therefore are taken along with the livestock during the dry seasons. Their movement away from their settlements could be only a few kilometers away, pending of the severity of the dryness and drought they could move a lot more kilometers and might as well move with the whole settlement. Merging this lifestyle with mainstream education is now problematic because of priority in time of the herders. Time will not pose a problem if States in corporation with indigenous Peoples established control over their educational institutions as stipulated by the first part Article 14 of the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples(UNDRIP). In Tanzania the educational system, curriculum and language is control by the central government. According to the set system by the authorities, teachers are supposed to capture the diversity in different regions in their teaching but this is not happening because they lack the capacity(training) to do that because the curriculum is not flexible enough. Despite the introduction of universal free primary education in 2002 in this area, literacy rates where around 25% in Ngorongoro making the district one of the lowest in the country. In 2005 four secondary schools and fifty two primary schools where added in the area but enrollment remained extremely low, an estimated 50% of children of school age did not attend school. The parents preferred to have their own controlled traditionally learning that reflected the reality of the life they live bearing in mind that a child that spends so much time in formal education grows up unequipped and unskilled for life of herding. Education Rights and Health. High-income, low or middle income countries Indigenous Peoples have most challenges in ill health. Using Africa as a focal point in this example, Indigenous Peoples in Africa have higher vulnerability to contracting diseases due to, no or lowest quality of awareness or education that get to these areas, disempowerment (poverty), poorer health facilities(if any), difficulties in accessing health care which are distantly located from their settlements, fear of understanding and

communication (language barrier), geographical isolated communities and general discrimination on Indigenous Peoples. Many indigenous communities are in isolated remote rural areas, this isolation to some extent offered moderate protection for them in the spread of HIV. For example the San people in Ghanzi area of Botswana according to the informal data of 2002, was lower at 21.4% than the national rate of 35.4% of HIV infected persons, this implied that geographical isolation provided protection for them. With the changing pattern of rural/urban migration and integration increasing, individuals from indigenous communities lack knowledge about HIV or other health challenges they face in big cities. Relocation from tradition lands makes the indigenous populations more vulnerable to racism, discrimination and abuse. Women particularly face sexual violence or could engaged in sex work, all which are social risk factors for their health, being that they lack the health education and human rights knowledge both of which will keep them safe, and away from abuse. As these populations migrate and mix with non-indigenous populations, additional culturally appropriate HIV sensitization will be needed. HIV/AIDS education is seen as a social vaccine, UNESCO Director-General speaking on world AIDS Day in 2011, identified education as the primary instruments to combat HIV/AIDS, stressing that every individual in and out of formal education should have access to comprehensive HIV education. Inclusively, many health care clinics or health care practitioner do not have enough understanding of indigenous health practices, moreover the reliance on western medicine and intervention alone may lead to healthcare services which are unsuitable or even offensive to the indigenous patients. Access to health care by the Indigenous Peoples is often problematic because of a number of factors. Many Indigenous Peoples live in remote or rural areas, geographically distant from the majority population limiting their ability to reach health care services, in many of these distant indigenous communities, there are no own health care systems, indigenous peoples in some communities lack precautionary knowledge measures, lack training to successfully manage health challenges as they come to prevent escalation and sometimes they are seasonally isolated by the mainstream authorities. Canada has the second largest proportion of indigenous peoples in the world, with over 1 million people, representing almost 4% of the Canadian population. There are

over 600 distinctive First Nations communities, each with their own culture, language, arts and music. In Canada, within the flying or isolated communities, women had to sometimes fly over a thousand kilometers to access a maternal hospital to give birth, get a tooth extracted or treat an illness. Many of the people in this indigenous communities never left their homes before and there was an insecure feeling accompanied by reluctance to do so for the first time. Addressing situations like this in communities affected require targeted

and effective educational

institutions in these areas, health training, and effective programming as well as a consideration of the underlying health determinants to ensure long lasting and meaningful interventions. In Canada, health care priorities set by the government do not always match the needs and the priorities that would be otherwise set by the aboriginal communities, however progress has been made on this as many communities have been incorporated into the training, educating, managing and administering of the health care systems for the greater achievement of the aboriginals and the government. This is an attempt by this system to balance aboriginal access and compatibility with mainstream health care bridging the intercultural challenges.

Education and Self-determination. The right to self-determination and education of indigenous peoples is closely linked and sometimes inseparable, they are the most important to realizing, development of legal and political arrangements of the indigenous peoples and the state. A relational perspective on implementing self-determination “encourages the view that indigenous peoples must seek influence in a variety of different political forums to manage the complex web of relationships in which they have become entangled with non-indigenous communities and governments” (Murphy 2008). A regional approach will help capture core importance of education to seeking influence in the complex web of indigenous peoples self-determination with non-indigenous communities and governments. The Saami in the Nordic countries, focused on the ways in which they can extend political influence beyond the traditional domain of Sami politics, beyond self-government in autonomous indigenous institutions by

incorporating their perspectives(education) into mainstream decision-making bodies at local, regional, and national levels. They have well established educational institutions i.e. (university, secondary and primary) that train experts that use professionalism in development processes of realizing self-determination. Educational institutions are important to both the Sami and the general or mainstream population, there is need to understand and have knowledge about the indigenous Sami, this will make it easier to communicate problems and find relevant solutions without conflicts. The culture/traditional lifestyle of indigenous Sami also be included in education curriculum of the mainstream population to expose them as an integral part of the Nordic Cultures and to bridge the knowledge gap and vise visa the indigenous peoples to their curriculum. The government has the responsibility of providing all resources that will give indigenous peoples the learning environment they aspire. There are several international declarations and conventions that deal with the rights of Indigenous Peoples education. Most important to the topic of discuss is the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples(2007) and the International Labour Organization(ILO) Convention (1989). ILO convention 169 which is binding to all signatories states, in Article 26,27 and 29 makes it clear that Indigenous Peoples should be able to acquire education at all levels as the rest of the population, co-operation of concerned people to address their special need in policies of education and quality training of members of these peoples. Article 29 states the importance of education, knowledge and skills of the concerned peoples to the full participation in their community and the national community on equal grounds. United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples(UNDRIP) states even more direct emphasis on educational rights as regarding self-determination. Article 14 of the declaration express strongly the right of indigenous peoples access to mainstream education, have control over their established educational institutions, education in

indigenous languages and states compliance and corporation to

realization of these educational rights to maximal attainment. The Sami are not used to the political arena, the where humble reindeer herders, and in this new phase of activities they need all the knowledge, education and understanding of all the international mechanisms and state politicians been that there had not functioned in politics, lobbying, law before. Things could be probably

be easier for Indigenous Peoples if there is a better knowledge, information, and education, and therefore a better understanding. Education and Language. Linguistic diversity is been threatened around the world, over 600 languages have disappeared in the past century and more are losing popularity in communication according to UNESCO. Indigenous Peoples are struggling not to losing their language, making language one of the defining criteria of indigeneity. Loss of language is more so the effect of colonizers and state on indigenous people. In the current International Human Right Regime, the indigenous peoples have the right to be educated in their mother tongue, the right for indigenous languages to be recognized in constitutions and laws, the right to live and be free from discrimination based on language and the right to establish and have access to media in indigenous languages. These language rights are recognized in many countries and also neglected by many national legislations and policies. The recognition of these rights and implementation of supportive policies in educational institutions will promote and develop them as they are of high importance to the Indigenous Peoples. The first education directed at Sami Language alone was in 1717, the so-called seminarum scholasticum established in Trondeim. The goal of this institution was to train educators, clergymen, and missionaries the Sami language in preparation for missionary work. This highlighted the importance of mother tongue for understanding. However during the 19th century after Norway gained independence from Denmark, the quest for nationalism arose and education and language were central means of assimilation policy...