What Is Education For?
Last week, one of Rē’s staff, Krissy, and I had the pleasure of attending the Haudenosaunee Storytelling Conference in Niagara, NY, hosted by the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Buffalo. It’s been an annual conference since 2005, when several Indigenous students at the University of Buffalo instigated a conference to bring together Indigenous community members with Indigenous academics. It has served an important knowledge-sharing role in the region.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, education, especially language reclamation and cultural revitalization, was a steady theme at the gathering. Reclaiming and revitalizing Indigenous languages is a primary way of revitalizing culture, identity, land connection, traditional ecological knowledge, and better futures.
It’s been very encouraging to hear how many different approaches to language revitalization are happening, from early child education to adult community-based education to academic spaces to digital spaces to finding different ways of conceptualizing the languages. One of the keynote speakers, Tom Porter, talked a bit about the Akwesasne Freedom School that was started in 1979 - which was the first time since the horrific onslaught of the horrific Indian boarding schools that Indigenous people in New York were able to start their own school to teach their own children. Without permission from the State of New York, in 1985, the parents decided to adopt a total Mohawk immersion curriculum approach.
They also have developed their own approach to education that is distinct from the surrounding areas. As stated on their website:
“The Akwesasne Freedom School is not like other schools in the community, whereas subjects are taught set to a specific time frame. Here the subjects are taught in a holistic manner with no time frame restrictions. The Akwesasne Freedom School strives to keep our traditions and culture alive by bringing them into the classroom as everyday activities. We are hoping that this will in turn be welcomed into the family and the home. Encouragement for the children to speak at home is a must in order to have the language gain a foothold. Reinforcement of the language is the most important part of the survival of the language.”
Too often, revitalization of Indigenous cultures and languages are not part of how we think about ‘education’. Nor is storytelling, which in many traditional academic spaces is discounted and diminished in comparison to theory. Culture in general is often discounted. Which is an idea that creates its own culture.
Education, in a dominant culture perspective, is often seen to help young people get jobs and thus take care of themselves and their families.
These are jobs that, too often, take people away from their families and the homelands they grew up in to do work that too often perpetuates the structures and institutions of a wider dominant culture society that enables an economic and political system that harms the land and the waters.
All of which is part of a wider neoliberal set of values that emphasizes individualism over collectivity and profit above all else. That harms all of us, no matter our cultural or ethnic backgrounds.
Is it possible to build a regenerative society in a cultural context that primacies individualism, especially over cultures of care and mutual responsibility?
It’s a question that we at Rē take seriously. Building regenerative culture requires us to ask hard questions about the systems we’ve inherited — including the ones that shape educational systems, which influence how young people understand their place in the world and what they owe to it.
Which is not to say that educational programs for jobs is unimportant!
In some of the research Rē has done for the Future of Rural, it is clear that young people want higher education that will help prepare them to get good jobs. Of course young people and their communities want ways to support themselves and their families!
How do we engage with the need for a both-and approach: good jobs and a healthy society and revitalizing culture?
Well, part of it might entail taking a systemic perspective and finding ways to engage with both job-creation/livelihood opportunities and education programs that revitalize culture and language at the same time. We need livelihoods that support our ecologies and societies… and education systems that support both.
What if more Indigenous language holders and teachers - and learners - were paid for both teaching and learning (especially adult learners who too often have to choose between working for cash or learning their language)?
The goal of regenerative education isn’t to opt out of economic life — it’s to help shape livelihoods that are genuinely rooted in care for land, community, and the living systems we depend on. Education that helps people grow skills and philosophies that is capable of tending those relationships is practical preparation.
What if we (collectively) focused on building local economies and education systems and spaces for all ages that could feed into those local economies, thus help people of all ages (especially young people) stay in their communities?
This is still very much a question we are sitting with….
We’d love to know what you think!
What do you believe education is fundamentally for? And what would it look like if our schools and universities took that answer seriously?