The readings this week Claudette Knight’s “Black Parents Speak: Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada West.” and Timothy J. Stanley’s “White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the Chinese Students’ Strike, 1922-1923.” both highlight segregation and discrimination regarding race. I answered the question this week as to how separate schooling today is similar in some ways but mostly dissimilar. Separate schooling today is for private schools that are generally Christian or Catholic. There are also private elite schools which are separate from the public schooling system.

Ways in which they are similar:

  • Separate schooling and segregated schooling are both set apart from the public school system and generally only allow certain individuals to be accepted. For example, it is recommended that people attending a Catholic or Christian school follow the religion and its values. The same goes for segregated school It was intended for only African American/Canadians and Asians. More specifically it was British/Canadians.
  • They both hold specific intentions on what schooling is offer and for who
  • There can be private elite schools where children must hold a certain GPA, allow this didn’t mean the same for segregated schools it still meant that the children attending the segregated schools had to be of a different race.
  • Each contributes to isolation in some form or another.
  • All schools are exposed to racism or differences. Not everyone gets along.

Ways in which they are different:

  • Separate schooling today is generally expected to benefit the child and can be an effort to help the child succeed in the future. Ex. Private elite schooling. Segregated schooling was not intended to benefit children but set them up for failure. They didn’t want children of a different race excelling more than white children and didn’t want them within their schools. It was a way to divide them and separate them from white children.
  • Schools today are usually funded and don’t risk shutting down. Segregated schools often failed in staying open because there weren’t enough funds available to keep it afloat.
  • Parents today want their children to go to separate schools, whereas parents during the time of segregation of schooling didn’t want their kinds segregated and wanted their children attending public schools with other children.

 

Bibliography

Knight, Claudette. “Black Parents Speak: Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada West.” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 225-237.

 

Stanley, Timothy J. “White Supremacy, Chinese Schooling, and School Segregation in Victoria: The Case of the Chinese Students’ Strike, 1922-1923.” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 237-252.

 

These articles were important to include in my article as they demonstrate the racial segregation and discrimination seen between the two groups of Blacks and Chinese. They allow insight into the operations of isolation of two different races apart from Indigenous People. Indigenous people were not the only ones expected to conform to the ways of Euro-Canadian society.