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from the well-intentioned-but-oh-so-wrong dept.
In 1951, Denmark had resolved to improve living conditions in Greenland, its Arctic colony. Many people still made a living by hunting seal, only a small percentage spoke Danish, and tuberculosis was widespread.
The best way to modernise the island was to create a new type of Greenlander, the Danish authorities decided, so they sent out telegrams to priests and headteachers asking them to identify intelligent children between the ages of six and 10. The plan - formed with the help of the charity Save the Children Denmark - was to send them to foster families in Denmark so they could be re-educated as "little Danes".
Denmark, the colonial master over Greenland, decided to remove a group of 22 intelligent Inuit children from their families and relocate them to Denmark for re-education. The children were first quarantined and then placed in foster families. The next year part of them were returned to Greenland but they were placed instead of their homes to an orphanage where they were not allowed to use their mother tongue. Instead of becoming some new wonderful breed of citizens many of the subjects became alcoholics and died young.
[A female reporter looking at this event] received a letter from the Danish Red Cross in 1998 in which it said it "regretted" its role in the episode.
Finally, in 2009, Save the Children Denmark apologised too. But an internal investigation showed that some of the documents detailing the organisation's involvement have disappeared - Save the Children admits they could have been deliberately destroyed.
"When we look at what happened, it was a clear violation of children's fundamental rights. There's hardly a rule that hasn't been broken here," says Mimi Jacobsen, secretary general of Save the Children Denmark. "Their well-being was set aside in favour of a project. They meant well, but it all went terribly wrong. I suppose the thinking at the time was that they wanted to educate and improve Greenlanders to give them a better future."
The Danish Government has not yet apologized for this experiment. Greenland now has it's own parliament which decides upon and administers internal matters, but Denmark retains control over constitutional affairs, foreign relations and defence.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by jdccdevel on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:09PM
You forgot to mention the death rate. Over the course of the program in Canada, the odds of the students dying was 1 in 25. (For reference, the odds dying for a Canadian serving in WWII was 1 in 26)
The last "residential school" in Canada didn't close until 1996, a number operated through the 1980s.
Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission [www.trc.ca] on the history of these schools uncovered some staggering facts [www.cbc.ca]:
As bad as they were, the "early years" of the program were even worse! Also from the article:
As a Canadian, I can only imagine that how I feel about our history of residential schools must be similar to how Germans feel about the Holocaust.
I am ashamed to know that my country, which prides itself on its multiculturalism, had a "conscious policy of cultural genocide". To know that my country waged a hidden war (with a death rate worse than one of the deadliest in history) against aboriginal youth and culture for 113 years sickens me.