Deculturalization & the Failure of the Common School Ideal

What is “Race”?

  • Combining cultural discrimination and religious intolerance with democratic beliefs.
  • Historically, an educational process used in schooling in the United States to destroy a people’s culture and replace it with the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.
  • Systematically used to destroy the cultural heritage of :
    • Native Americans,
    • African Americans,
    • Mexican Americans,
    • Puerto Ricans, and
    • Immigrants from Asia, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
  • Native American Boarding Schools
  • Puerto Ricans — 1898, the Spanish -American War

How The US Suppressed Native American Identity

Native American Boarding Schools: A Lost History

US Legal Decisions, Congressional Acts, & Student Diversity

  1. The Naturalization Act of 1790
  2. Civilization Fund Act of 1819
  3. Indian Removal Act (1830)
  4. Civil Rights Act (1866)
  5. The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1868)
  6. Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
  7. Texas Court Ruling on Mexican Americans (1897)
  8. Immigration Act of 1924
  9. Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County (1946)
  10. Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District (1948)
  11. McCarran-Walter Act of 1952
  12. Immigration Act of 1965
  13. Bilingual Education Act of 1968
  14. Cisernos v. Corpus Christi Independent School District (1970)
  15. Indian Education Act of 1972
  16. Lau v. Nichols (1974)
  17. Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975

A Look At The State Of School Integration 64 Years After Brown v. Board Of Education | NPR

Linda Brown Thompson of Brown v. Board of Education recently passed away. In 1954, the decision was supposed to desegregate schools. Now, more than sixty years later, NPR’s Audie Cornish speaks with Georgetown University law professor Sheryll Cashin about the effects.