When speaking about Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mazina Giizhik — also known as Justice Murray Sinclair — often declared: “Education has gotten us into this mess, and education will get us out.”
Sinclair captured an essence of formal schooling that is frequently ignored.
Contemporary discourse often draws on older philosophic traditions to discuss education as a force for democracy, liberation and self-expression. But formal schooling is also a structuring force — an instrument of the state.
