Education
Historically the Navajo Nation resisted compulsory education, including boarding schools, as imposed by General Richard Henry Pratt.
Nowadays, education, and the retention of students in all school systems, is a significant priority. A major problem faced by the nation is a very high drop-out rate among high school students. Over 150 public, private and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools serve students from kindergarten through high school. Most schools receive funding from the Navajo Nation under the Johnson O’Malley program.
The Nation also runs a local Head Start, the only educational program operated by the Navajo Nation government. Post-secondary education and vocational training are available on and off the reservation. Kurt Caswell, a well-known writer and professor at Texas Tech University, taught at the Borrego Pass School on the Navajo Reservation. He wrote a memoir, In the Sun's House: My Year on the Navajo Reservation (2009) about his life-changing experiences during that time.
Because drop-out rates are high on the Navajo Nation, the people have adopted programs such as the Literacy is Empowering Project to help combat academic problems. The non-profit project promotes literacy and pre-reading skills for Native children to increase their understanding of standard academic language.
Read more about this topic: Navajo Nation
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I think the most important education that we have is the education which now I am glad to say is being accepted as the proper one, and one which ought to be widely diffused, that industrial, vocational education which puts young men and women in a position from which they can by their own efforts work themselves to independence.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)