Reading Rebecca Dobkins’ storied research about Native
American women and girls interactions in early twentieth century federally
mandated boarding schools has me thinking of all things about the open house at
a local public Montessori school that I could apply (through a lottery system)
to be my son’s kindergarten school for next year. These two schooling situations in most ways
couldn’t be more dissimilar. The
boarding schools described by Dobkins worked actively and without remorse to assimilate
Native American children away from their home cultures, languages and lives. The forces used were long distance separation
from family, difficulty in returning home for any reason and use of legal
language and even force to maintain the authority to separate families. Our local Montessori school is the most
progressive public opportunity available in my county, I, especially as a
white, middle class, academic have a great deal of power/knowledge available to
negotiate my and my child’s position in the school and his entrance to the
school at all. I don’t have any power
over whether he gets in, but I can choose some other kind of schooling option
altogether. I don’t have to send him at
all.
It would seem that the differences
between me and the Native American mothers who I have been reading in Dobkins’
essay are gulfs, but I’m interested in thinking also about the
interconnectedness we share. I was also
reading today Dias Soto and Blue Swadners’ The
Politics of Early Childhood Education.
The first chapter unravels the ways that schooling (again), particularly
college education of some early childhood teachers and mothers worked to
professionalize and make scientific some mothers and some teachers. These professional mothers and teachers, I
can count as both of these, are still under the reign of patriarch through
discourses of white, male generated child development theories or the more
modern neoliberal models of education and child rearing based on new business (still
white and male) dispositions approaches to foster problem solving and
flexibility, for instance. Progressive
schools that take up, for instance, 21st
Century Learner frameworks, seem to work to the success of individual students,
who can be self starters and business-ready but the benefits are not to all
students, but to a few who are already benefiting from the corporate model of
exchange in late capitalism. I am left
feeling cornered. I can option to send
my child to our neighborhood school, where worksheets abound, possibly to the
Montessori alternative (although unlikely since I declined to enter him in the
lottery at age 4, where most slots are taken) or I can homeschool him in a local
community of thoughtful people, but with political consequences of separatism. If I’m not interested in testing, structured
curriculum, focus on “the basics,” then I am not at all compelled to be part of
this public system, and though politically a powerful choice, it is a very
difficult family one to make.
The public schools push me (and family) out in some ways as zealously
as they pulled in the children of the Native American children Dobkins writes
of. This power to separate groups of
people, like women, mothers, who could be united is a major component in the
colonialist efforts of schooling Dobkins illustrates. So while I am faced with resisting guised
power that works through me as a professional and as a mother. My resistance seems separate and different
and scaleless compared to the need for resistance of Native American mothers,
who are marginalized and erased from history even. But as Diaz Soto and Blue Swadner point out my
schooling, my professionalization, has been another tool to create a hierarchy of
differences, separating me from the other women in the world and in history
with whom my resistance could be aligned.
References
Diaz Soto, L. & Blue Swadner, B.
(2006). The politics of early childhood
education. NY: Peter Lang.
Dobkins, R. (1999). Strong language, strong actions:
Native American women writing against federal authority, In M.Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, & L. Sutton (Eds.) Reinventing identities:
The gendered self in discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.
