Religion and religious practices interfere with education to a large extent. Remuneration and other support is poor in state-sponsored schools. The boarding school system is a major problem in senior high schools. No education system in an advanced country centres its secondary education on boarding. They brought it from England, the colonial masters. Those public boarding schools are all completely private in England today. The state schools are day schools. How can you have the teenage children of an entire country housed in boarding schools? Unless we do something about that, there will be no significant improvement in the country’s education system.

As we pulled up at the big school gates, I saw tears rolling down my dad’s face. I felt confused as to what part of nature or love thought this was a good idea. My instinct certainly didn’t; but what did I know? I was only eight.
So I embarked on this mission called boarding school. And how do you prepare for that one?
In truth, I found it really hard; there were some great moments like building dens in the snow in winter, or getting chosen for the tennis team, or earning a naval button, but on the whole it was a survival exercise in learning to cope.
Coping with fear was the big one. The fear of being left and the fear of being bullied — both of which were very real.
What I learned was that I couldn’t manage either of those things very well on my own.
It wasn’t anything to do with the school itself, in fact the headmaster and teachers were almost invariably kind, well-meaning and good people, but that sadly didn’t make surviving it much easier.
I was learning very young that if I were to survive this place then I had to find some coping mechanisms.
My way was to behave badly, and learn to scrap, as a way to avoid bullies wanting to target me. It was also a way to avoid thinking about home. But not thinking about home is hard when all you want is to be at home.
I missed my mum and dad terribly, and on the occasional night where I felt this worst, I remember trying to muffle my tears in my pillow while the rest of the dormitory slept.
In fact I was not alone in doing this. Almost everyone cried, but we all learned to hide it, and those who didn’t were the ones who got bullied.
As a kid, you can only cry so much before you run out of tears and learn to get tough.
I meet lots of folks nowadays who say how great boarding school is as a way of toughening kids up. That feels a bit back-to-front to me. I was much tougher before school. I had learned to love the outdoors and to understand the wild, and how to push myself.
When I hit school, suddenly all I felt was fear.

The reasoning behind the best schools being far away was to assimilate native children, to train them to live in a culture that was very different from their parents. So that when they came home, often children couldn't speak the language that their parents were speaking. I have to say right here that boarding schools are often characterized in sort of a lump definition, but they were all very different. And the government had secular boarding schools which underwent a real sea change in the 1930s and became much more supportive of native culture, while many of the boarding schools which were run by religious groups did not and remained hostile to native religion and native culture.

I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own beds, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student, I was a brat — if I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself — but this hammering kids to fit into this system is horrific. It leads to a lot of kids being either medicalized or criminalized, and I think the message I would have to kids is just like, survive it. And then, once you're out of childhood, I mean, you're just so much freer.

My parents tried to provide me and my siblings with a normal childhood, but we had to study in a school for orphans because other schools discriminated against us.

A father is rarely a good teacher; either he thinks he knows things and finds his knowledge to be very slight, or he knows but explains badly, or he is too severe and impatient because teaching bores him, or he is dangerously indulgent because he loves his children too much. It is from professional teachers who have made a success of the art that we must learn its rules. There can be no teaching without discipline. A pupil must first learn to work. Training of the will must precede that of the mind, and this is why home teaching is never very successful. Excuses are too easily accepted: the child has a headache; he has slept badly; there is a party somewhere. A school makes no compromise and that is its virtue. I am inclined to prefer the boarding-school system. It has some serious drawbacks; it sometimes produces immorality and it is always rather severe, but it makes men. The system forces boys to find their own places in a group; in a family they find these places ready-made and it is too easy for them. If absolutely necessary, and if the parents are judicious, day schools are satisfactory up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. For boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty, freedom in a large city is fatal.

Growing up with chaos can make it harder to know how to create order as an adult.

As a child at a mission boarding school in the 1960s, I was forced to learn English. Nowhere in our lessons was there any mention of Native history. But at night, after lights out, we girls gathered in the dark to tell stories and sing Navajo songs, quietly, so as to not wake the housemother. We were taught that if we broke the rules, we would go to hell, a place we could not conceive of—there is no Navajo analogy. As I learned to read, I discovered in books a way to assuage my longing for my parents, my siblings, my home. So in this way my schooling was a mixed experience, a fact that was true for many Native children.

People with happy childhoods never overdo; they don't strive or exert themselves. They're moderate, pleasant, well liked, and good citizens. Society needs them. But the tremendous drive and dedication necessary to succeed in any field- not only show business- often seems to be rooted in a disturbed childhood. I wasn't an unloved or an unwanted child, but I was moved around a lot, and then death and cruel circumstances brought many painful separations.

So, first, I will tell you, as -- you know, as a parent, the one thing you want is for your child to have a better life than you did. And we can talk about all of these things, and there's a lot of crazy, woke things happening in schools, but we have got to get these kids reading. If a child can't read by third grade, they're four times less likely to graduate high school. So we need to make sure we bring in reading remediation all over this country. We need transparency in the classroom, because parents should never have to wonder what's being said or taught to their children in the classroom. Parents need to be deciding which schools their kids go to, because they know best. And let's put vocational classes back into the high schools. Let's teach our kids to build things again.

The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history… Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.

For more than a century, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities and forced into boarding schools run by the U.S. government, specifically the Department of the Interior, and religious institutions. … When my maternal grandparents were only 8 years old, they were stolen from their parents’ culture and communities and forced to live in boarding schools until the age of 13. Many children like them never made it back to their homes. … The federal policies that attempted to wipe out Native identity, language and culture continue to manifest in the pain tribal communities face today, including cycles of violence and abuse, disappearance of Indigenous people, premature deaths, poverty and loss of wealth, mental health disorders and substance abuse. Recognizing the impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system cannot just be a historical reckoning. We must also chart a path forward to deal with these legacy issues. …The fact that I am standing here today as the first Indigenous cabinet secretary is testament to the strength and determination of Native people. I am here because my ancestors persevered. I stand on the shoulders of my grandmother and my mother. And the work we will do with the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative will have a transformational impact on the generations who follow.

My name is Percy Jackson.
I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.
Am I a troubled kid?
Yeah. You could say that.

Although my parents did the best that they could, like most families, they were not perfect. There were many years when life at home was not good. So I stayed away from that home for as much as possible. I hung out, out of the house, after dark, maybe far longer than I should have. I snuck out at night. I skipped classes. I was aggressive. I was argumentative. I was combative. My grades dropped significantly. It was a public school teacher that turned it all around for me — a public school teacher that noticed that something wasn’t quite right and that I was squandering my potential. I remember her coming up to me in the halls of my high school one afternoon after school. She grabbed me by the shoulders, turned me around and said: “Bowinn” — pardon me — “what are you doing? You’re ruining your life. You need to snap out of this. You need to do this better.” I turned my life around. Instead of hanging out after dark, I spent a lot of time at my school, in after-school programs. I put a lot more effort into my classes. I eventually graduated and went to UBC. I became an engineer, and now I’m an MLA. But what would have happened to me if my teachers had been too stressed out, too overworked, too under-resourced to be able to notice that I was struggling? What would have happened? What happens to the people who attend schools when schools are no longer able to function as the critical component of the social safety net that they are? What happens when children are not caught before they fall? I wonder, often, what would have happened to me if I had grown up not in the ’90s but under back-to-back B.C. Liberal governments.