Different ways of knowing the world

As I started working my way through the course work for my masters degree, I began to develop an understanding that there are many different ways of knowing the world. The way we roll in the western world is quite normalized for us, so it's difficult for us to understand that it is, in fact, Eurocentric. 

A good example of this is our school system in Canada, which includes bells and schedules and cohorting by age. Ringing bells and following schedules in schools was incorporated into the school system by Europeans in order to train children to be able to punch a clock when they became adults and joined the workforce in the newly industrialized world. It hasn't changed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, regardless of the fact that the world is quite different now and many adults don't punch clocks. (The late Sir Ken Robinson explains this well in his Ted Talk.) 

And this isn't the way the entire world works, as much as we would like to think that it is. Indigenous peoples don't have the same view of the world. Their traditional ways of educating their young,for example, have more to do with elders engaging with the kids to teach them. No schedules. No bells. No age-appropriate cohorts. This is a topic that certainly goes beyond the length of any standard blog post, but I'm touching on it because it 100% applies to the topics of white privilege and how people in non-dominant cultures are treated (i.e., their cultural practices are made to be wrong because they are different from those of the Europeans).  

Residental schools were essentially created as a way to assimilate Indigenous kids into the European way of life. Indigenous people were just far too different for their own good and the all-knowing white men needed to help them to be less indigenous and more like them. So they created schools, ripped children away from the structure their family (that Europeans couldn't have fully understood at the time), and disrupted the lives of everyone for generations to come. There are examples of this all over the world in any country that experienced colonization.  

I love this topic more than I can say because it was one thing to realize that most of the systems running in North America are Eurocentric and it was another thing altogether to start learning about how other people know the world and exist in the world. I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I'm learning. This is a topic I want to know deeply--mainly because it's fascinating for me to go beyond what I know and learn about what works for others. I have so much to learn. But that's why I'm here.