“Racialized Childhoods and Segregated Schooling”

 

In the article “Black Parents Speak: Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada West”, Claudette Knight focuses on the history of black access to education in mid-nineteenth –century Canada West. Picking up the various references from different authors, he developed a convincing argument about American blacks under slavery, black fugitives, and other black struggles. He throws light on many issues, drawbacks, and failure of the education system. He believes that the history of black education in mid-nineteenth century Canada west establishes the presence of racism in the formation of Ontario’s public education system. He believes that even today black parents struggle against the more subtle racism in academic curricula and the assessment of student ability which I don’t agree. I must conclude that by using references from different authors’ works Claudette Knight made his argument very convincing.

 

In the article “White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the Chinese Students’ Strike, 1922-1923”, Timothy J. Stanley focuses on the Chinese community in BC and the challenges faced by them in an educational context. He mainly focuses on discussions of school segregation and different effects of the gender imbalance. He tells us about an anti-racist institution as Chinese-language schools. He says, “For Chinese, this school was a ‘public’ school in a true sense. This was reflected not only in its name but also in its practices. It charged no tuition and was open to all Chinese children, and its activities were regularly followed in the Chinese language press.”  He draws the argument that not all white British Columbians accepted that the Chinese constituted a real physical and moral threat. He draws references from various primary sources like works of different authors to present his argument.

 

In the article “Black Nova Scotian Women’s Experience of Educational Violence in the Early 1900s: A Case of Colour Contusion”, Bernice Moreau focuses on testimonies of black women schooled in the early 1900s in Nova Scotia conducting in-depth interviews to know about the shocking reality of the educational oppression they experienced. He explains about the extreme racism due to which the results were widespread illiteracy, underemployment, unemployment, economic deprivation, political powerlessness, social rejection, spiritual exclusion and other negative elements imposed on the black community by white Nova Scotian society. He uses a reference from a book ‘ Feminist Theory from Margin to Center(l984)’ to tell us about marginality of black women and the centrality of the oppressor class by showing how the physical, economic, political, social and intellectual location of groups reveals their positions of power and powerlessness. He picks reference from ‘Mc Kerrow, A Brief History of the Coloured Baptists of Nom Scotia’ and says “the literature mentioned throughout the study reveals that Nova Scotia’s history of consistent hostility towards black children of school age is paralleled by much lobbying of government. Generation after generation of blacks resisted the decision of the government to exclude them from adequate formal education”, to conclude.