{"id":17153,"date":"2016-02-12T00:22:05","date_gmt":"2016-02-12T08:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=17153"},"modified":"2016-02-11T17:02:50","modified_gmt":"2016-02-12T01:02:50","slug":"applying-korczaks-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2016\/02\/12\/applying-korczaks-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Applying Korczak\u2019s lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond speaks at the fourth session of \u201cHow to Love a Child,\u201d the Janusz Korczak Lecture Series. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cRights are paper tigers, just pieces of paper, unless there are people courageous enough to defend them, and unless there are mechanisms to enforce them and compel them. The child who has a right to be heard but no one listens to, and disappears without ever being heard, never really had a right to be heard,\u201d warned B.C. representative for children and youth Dr. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond at the fourth session of \u201cHow to Love a Child,\u201d the Janusz Korczak Lecture Series.<\/p>\n

The Jan. 21 lecture at the University of British Columbia, which is part of a six-part series co-organized by the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada and UBC\u2019s faculty of education, focused on The Human Rights of Aboriginal Children. Also speaking was Dr. Mike DeGagn\u00e9, president and vice-chancellor of Nipissing University, who was the executive director of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF), which was established in 1998 with a grant from the federal government and wound down its work in 2014. Its mandate was \u201cto encourage and support, through research and funding contributions, community-based aboriginal-directed healing initiatives which address the legacy of physical and sexual abuse suffered in Canada\u2019s Indian residential school system, including inter-generational impacts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Grant Charles, associate professor at UBC School of Social Work, acted as moderator, and Janusz Korczak Association president Jerry Nussbaum also spoke, explaining briefly who was Janusz Korczak. The educator, writer and orphanage director \u2013 after whose book How to Love a Child<\/em> the lecture series is named \u2013 not only wrote about his theories, but lived and died by them. When the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Korczak\u2019s orphanage was forced to move there, and Korczak went with the children. In 1942, he and the almost 200 children in his care were taken to Treblinka, where they were murdered.<\/p>\n

Nussbaum reminded the audience of Korzak\u2019s philosophies on the rights of children and their direct influence on the content of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Korczak believed that every child has a right to love, said Nussbaum, and that \u201cchildren offered love and care will reciprocate with love and care.\u201d Children have a right to be taken seriously, to education, to protest an injustice, among other rights. Nussbaum explained that Korczak believed that the health of a society could be gauged by the health of its children.<\/p>\n

Despite protection under the UN convention, there are many children and youth who are marginalized and, in Canada, First Nations children are among those who are the most at risk. Dr. Jo-Ann Archibald, associate dean for indigenous education at UBC, gave an example of one of the research programs at the university\u2019s faculty of education that is trying to ameliorate this situation. Called Awakening the Spirit, \u201cit\u2019s about revitalizing canoeing at Musqueam,\u201d she explained. There is cooperation among different faculties and some students are involved, \u201cbut the most important part is the Musqueam communities that partner in this research. They are the ones who determined this particular project because they felt that they wanted to have something positive in their community for the young people, for the youth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Canoeing, she said, was a very important part of the community lifestyle, \u201cit was a way to build family and community cohesiveness and also have fun and learn about the environment at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The benefits of the research project, she said, \u201cwill be realized in educational materials, in the way of revitalizing important values, the Musqueam language, ensuring we have intergenerational learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo
Mike DeGagn\u00e9 (photo from nipissingu.ca)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

DeGagn\u00e9 has had 20 years of experience working with the repercussions of residential schools. He said his views about rights, \u201cespecially indigenous children\u2019s rights, I color it with the history of residential schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

Often when there is a conversation within the community about indigenous issues, he said, it begins with the high rates of suicide, poverty, over-representation in the justice and child welfare systems, \u201cthe rosary of our grievances.\u201d Given that indigenous children have rights, yet the grievances continue, he asked, \u201cHow can we be sure those rights are being supported and upheld?\u201d<\/p>\n

When AHF began, he said, grant applicants would ask, for example, whether the foundation had an approved list of elders that they could use. \u201cWe were astonished. Can you imagine in your own community \u2026 in your own spiritual context, asking if your priest was OK, if your rabbi was OK? This is the making of the colonial mind. After years of being subjected to doing it someone else\u2019s way, even when we came along, we could not engender people doing it their way.\u201d He described this as \u201ca learned helplessness,\u201d and a lack of trust in their own culture.<\/p>\n

To move forward, it is important to talk of the past, he said. He used the metaphor of a pebble being dropped into a pond to describe the effects of the residential school system. The child\u2019s abuse at the hands of an adult is at the centre, it is the pebble being dropped; the next ripple out is one child at a residential school abusing another child (\u201clearned behavior\u201d); the next is when that person leaves the school and returns to their community and starts a family in which violence takes place; then the violence between that family and another in the community. As we look at the outcome, standing on the outside, we see the high rates of suicide, family violence, neglected children, but we, as observers, \u201ccan\u2019t see anything but the dysfunction and so infrequently do we get to examine what happened in the middle, what happened in that first instance of violence, what happened when that child\u2019s human rights\u201d were disregarded. \u201cThis is why we talk about history,\u201d this is why 100 years of residential schools is important, he said.<\/p>\n

To change the situation, he pointed to two necessities: the establishment of fairness, \u201cthe money that we spend on First Nations child welfare should be equal to the money that we spend in the rest of the population\u2019s child welfare systems\u201d; and transference of control to First Nations peoples of their lives, agendas and resources.<\/p>\n

DeGagn\u00e9 commended the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on capturing the hearts and minds of Canadians and drawing them to indigenous issues, and for talking about system reform as opposed to tweaking or just adding money to a dysfunctional system. But, among his criticisms of the commission\u2019s recommendations is that they do not make him uncomfortable. \u201cIt turns out that, in the reconciliation between you and me, indigenous people and non-indigenous people, that 93 of the 94 recommendations require that you do something\u2026. I\u2019d like to feel a lot more uncomfortable reading these recommendations because reconciliation is going to require that I work and that you work, and not that you come to stand by me, but that somehow I come to stand in the middle with you. And so, I think, too often with these recommendations, and this could be a reflection of the colonized mind, we are calling upon someone else to fix the problems with our community. That\u2019s a concern of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

The TRC, he added, also describes issues as if there has been no progress in the last 20 years \u2013 by the churches, universities, governments and others \u2013 towards reconciliation. \u201cWe have much to do, but we have to start by acknowledging the good work of all us and how much progress we\u2019ve made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turpel-Lafond spoke about how long it takes to change systems. \u201cYou have to really make that investment [in change], and it takes time,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

AHF \u201claid the groundwork for thinking about healing\u201d and the view of storytelling and its importance in healing, she said. \u201cStories, particularly the stories of grievances that aboriginal adults have \u2013 and many of our parents and grandparents have \u2013 are stories that needed to be told, that needed to be heard, that needed to be listened to.\u201d AHF \u201cgave resources for people to validate that process of allowing individuals who had been through residential school, their personal experience and their collective experience, to be told and listened to in a very sincere way in which they were supported, but also could create that medicine toward healing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Turpel-Lafond\u2019s great-great-grandparents were the first two students at St. Michael\u2019s Indian Residential School in Duck Lake, Sask. She spoke of the difficulties in sharing some of the stories with her own children. \u201cChildren are not always ready to hear those stories. I\u2019m not trying to be over-protective, but we need to think about children\u2019s well-being \u2026 how we tell the stories to children, when we tell stories to children, and how we can put those stories in a context.\u201d<\/p>\n

She then went on to speak about Korczak and the lecture theme, \u201cHow to love a child.\u201d For her, Korczak represents what it means to love children, even \u201cwhere it was extremely unpopular to love and support some children, who were considered to be less worthy, who were considered to be disposable\u2026. And also to bring forward the idea that love is a kind of medicine with respect to our society\u2026. We express our love for our own society and its furtherance by how we love our children because we create a vision of something we may not even be here to enjoy, that we create through that very values-based process.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not talking about creating the perfect system or bureaucracy, she said, noting that Treblinka was an attempt at a perfect system, \u201cwe\u2019re talking about values.\u201d<\/p>\n

The love that Korczak represents for her in the context of indigenous children is an approach that does not come from a perspective of shaming, blaming, contempt or judgment. This is \u201ca really serious problem that we continue to have for the current generation of indigenous children, which is, we want to save them but we still want to blame their parents, and that\u2019s a very unhealthy attitude.\u201d We need to come \u201cfrom a perspective of love and understanding and context, and seeing \u2026 [how] multiple shocks \u2026 can just devastate families, not every family, but some families.\u201d<\/p>\n

A second lesson she takes from Korzcak\u2019s views is \u201cthe idea that nobody owns your story, that you have to have the courage to say it.\u201d People may relate to your story in various ways, \u201cbut the story, and telling it, the courage to do that, to talk about the difficult things, is a very important instinct related to love and, if you can\u2019t bring that out and you don\u2019t have enough people in your society who are courageous, then your society is doomed. And how do you build courageous people? \u2026 [I]t\u2019s about love and acceptance and space, but it\u2019s also about having very strong adults to allow people like kids to tell stories.\u201d Korczak \u201crepresented that right to be heard,\u201d she said, and he went even further, going against the mores of the day in that he wanted \u201cno corporal punishment of children.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said that many indigenous children have been \u201craised in an environment deprived of the type of unconditional love, culture, language and the right to know who they were and where they were\u2026. If you love people and you\u2019re prepared to understand that grievance and suffering is not permanent, it can be redressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, adults who love children must see something in the children that the children may not see themselves because they\u2019re mired in rejection. \u201cThere have to be positive, healthy adults who see their potential and support them to get to their potential. That\u2019s a very important concept because, not surprisingly, guess what, some of the children who have been most abused and ill-treated can be the most challenging to engage with in terms of their emotional regulation, in terms of their contact with adults, in terms of their anger.\u201d<\/p>\n

The government label is that these children are \u201cservice resistant,\u201d she said, which means, \u201cwe will leave you alone because you\u2019re too angry for me even to listen to your story. But, if you take a page from Andrew Solomon [author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity<\/em>] and Janusz Korczak, what would you say? I am able to rise above it and listen to this story and, if I\u2019m a good, healthy adult that\u2019s coming from a place of love, I can probably see what\u2019s in the story and see how it can be a medicine for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

The third lesson she takes from Korczak, her experience as an indigenous person and as an advocate for children is that \u201crights are an important medicine.\u201d Rights are so important because \u201crights are a way to reframe incredible vulnerability and systematic disempowering \u2026 into a different context that overnight takes, for instance, that residential school experience and now makes it appalling, completely unacceptable, who would ever do that to children? Because they have a right to learn, they have a right to be safe, they have a right to be heard, they have a right to their language, [to their] culture transmitted from their parents to them, and there\u2019s nothing threatening or harmful about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In British Columbia, we have a long way to go. Of the children in care, more than 60% are indigenous children. While Turpel-Lafond said we are in a better place as a society than when she left home and went out in the world, \u201cwe are not in a place where indigenous children can in any way be guaranteed equal opportunities with other children in British Columbia. By accident of birth, they\u2019re going to be born with significant disadvantages that will only be overcome based on what we decide to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the half-hour question and answer period that followed, one of the listeners shared her story of how her child had been abused by foster parents and, when she tried to remedy the situation, she could not find help, no matter to whom or to which government office she turned. Turpel-Lafond was at a loss to respond, other than to empathize and say we don\u2019t have the answers, \u201cbut we\u2019ve got to find a way to get them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fifth lecture in the Korczak series takes place on Feb. 18, 7 p.m., and focuses on the topic Social Pediatrics in Canada and Vancouver. The final lecture on April 6 provides a summary of the series. To register and for more information, visit jklectures.educ.ubc.ca<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond speaks at the fourth session of \u201cHow to Love a Child,\u201d the Janusz Korczak Lecture Series. (photo by Cynthia Ramsay) \u201cRights are paper tigers, just pieces of paper, unless there are people courageous enough to defend them, and unless there are mechanisms to enforce them and compel them. The child who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4663,3956,5313,4661,5312],"class_list":["post-17153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-childrens-rights","tag-first-nations","tag-grant-charles","tag-janusz-korczak","tag-mary-ellen-turpel-lafond"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}