Research reveals what generations of tribes know firsthand: that forced assimilation and unhealthy conditions at compulsory boarding schools takes a permanent toll.
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Native Americans sent to government-funded schools now experience significantly higher rates of mental and physical health problems than those who did not.
Gilda Soosay, president of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Parish Council in Maskwacis, Canada, where Pope Francis visited the site of a state school for Indigenous children.
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A historian of the residential schools explains how religion played a key role in assimilationist systems for Indigenous children in Canada and the United States.
A young boy walks by a burnt-out dormitory building set on fire by students after a night of school unrest in western Kenya.
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Student violence is a response to the devaluing and oppressive environment in boarding schools.
A makeshift memorial for the Indigenous children who died more than a century ago while attending a boarding school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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For Indigenous Peoples Day, a scholar of Native American studies explains why understanding the tragic history of Indian boarding schools is important for healing to take place.
Native American students at the Carlisle Indian School, circa 1899.
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Ernest Knocks Off was 18 when he arrived at the Carlisle boarding school in 1879. He was one of many young Native people who fought – in his case, to the death – to retain their language and culture.
International school enrolments have flatlined over the period 2016-2019, even as tertiary enrolments increased by more than 30% across the same period.
Seeking out a good education can sometimes take you away from what’s familiar.
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If the government is to continue to spend millions toward sending Indigenous children away to boarding school, we need research into how effective this model is, and its impact on communities.
Dormitories are commonly targeted in school burnings.
Elizabeth Cooper
Acts of arson by Kenyan high school students have been characterised as ‘mindless hooliganism’. But research shows that students are actually engaging in purposeful, reasoned political action.
A French boarding school aimed at disadvantaged pupils.
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Send a child to a boarding school and they’ll thrive. That’s what many richer families believe when they send their children away to board, and it’s the belief behind a series of programmes set up around…