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This work has been one of historic retrospect and theoretical application. The authors have established that the philosophy underlying education, in general, and educational policy as it relates to Native Americans, more specifically, has been that of the Functionalist perspective. At earliest contact, education, or rather training, was used as a tool of oppression and exploitation. The Spanish and English explorers and colonists, when faced with the lack of facility, in hopes of utter genocide, happened on a subtler means of control. The Native American would be molded into usefulness as laborer in the European economic structure. The undereducation, education, training, and deculturation of the Native American is not an isolated instance. Indeed, the same method has been successfully used globally against disenfranchised peoples with whom the European model of conquest has come into contact. African Americans, Caribbean peoples, South Americans, Central Americans, Australian aboriginal people, and even women have been victimized by the Functionalist mode. In reality, even those males of European origin who have not had the benefit of being born into the upper classes have suffered. The Functionalist mode of education, in essence, trains people to fit a niche in the economic structure of the dominant society. The niche is defined by the student's class, gender, and ethnicity among other designators. Except for isolated pockets of resistance, the ideology that propagated these societal biases is still existent today.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137557452_11

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