Week Eight Blog Post

Following reading the Historical Dimensions of Canadian Education article, I was surprised that only a century ago, “most people had little if any formal schooling” (53) because today it is assumed that without schooling beyond grade school there are few occupations with livable wages available. Also, that at the beginning of public education, school boards “sought to [hire] male teachers,” (64) I found this interesting as the majority of teachers I had in my education were female, which is an interesting cultural shift over a period of a hundred years towards gender roles and gendered perceived occupations. Initially, schools were wrought with “rituals of repetition to memorize information,” whereas now, education is focussed on learning, not memorization as memorization is not indicative of learning. The two connections I made were first, to the meals described by Alphonse Little Poplar, as it reminded me of the food given to people in concentration camps during the Holocaust, where “dinner was usually soup and one piece of bread with no grease. Sometimes the soup had a sliver of meat and a potato in it,” making the connection that in some ways the horrors of the Holocaust and Residential Schools were similar (59). Secondly, they mentioned the “revamping [of] curricula” during the 1960-1970’s, was “giving emphasis to programs in mathematics and the natural sciences” (69) in hopes of gaining interest in students towards career paths in these fields but by 1980, the majority of Canadian women were still receiving degrees in fields seen as feminine, such as education, nursing, and social work. While today there are more women entering the sciences, those fields are still seen as typically masculine in nature and those same feminine degrees and occupations in the 1980’s are typically seen as feminine and more often are occupied by women in the workforce over men. Today, the society we live in emphasizes the need for higher education, where it be a degree or certificate program yet we undervalue the institutions where we build up student’s education based, from elementary to high schools and post-secondary institutions. This undervaluing is apparent through the lack of funding, at least in Saskatchewan, towards public education, so my question is: Will there ever be a point at which we fully understand the value of education enough to for governments to put considerable resources into maintaining and developing our educational systems?