Residential Education In The 1920's

639 Words2 Pages

Many historians regard the 1920’s as one of the most important decades in Canadian history, this is true. The landscape of Canada changed during this time, many argue for the better and some may argue for the worse. Well today i’m here to inform and educate you on major topics during the 1920’s that may help you make a decision on where you want to end up. P.S - You may not like what you are going to learn. Today many of us view Canada as a forward thinking nation that is all about equality, no matter what skin colour you are, gender you identify as, religion you follow, etc. This wasn’t always the case. The 1920’s kind of blew if you weren’t a male in most countries and Canada was not exception to this. In the 20’s the average wage was …show more content…

Well today I will be revealing this history to you and trust me, it isn’t pretty. Residential schools were first created in the 1890’s but started to gain popularity in the 1920’s. The point of these schools were to teach Aboriginal children the way of christianity and also teach them valuable life lessons and skills, however it failed miserably to achieve this. Aboriginal children would be forcibly taken to these “schools” that were more often than not 50+km away from their homes, so the opportunity to see their families was limited. That isn’t close to the worst part about these residential school, the worst part was how the children who attended them were treated. You weren’t able to speak any language other than english, which was a huge takeaway because most of the kids there weren’t fluent in the language, you weren’t allowed to speak to family members that were at the same school, you weren’t allowed to partake in your own cultural activities, and worst of all, you would be physically punished for doing any of these things. Residential schools are one the only concepts that sound horrible to begin with, and then end up being even worse than advertised. The people who would come out of these schools usually suffered mental damage, as well as being more susceptible to taking drugs to then cope with the

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