Deculturalization & the Failure of the Common School Ideal

What is “Race”?


  • Combining cultural discrimination and religious intolerance with democratic beliefs.
  • Historically, an educational process used in schooling in the United States to destroy a people’s culture and replace it with the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.
  • Systematically used to destroy the cultural heritage of :
    • Native Americans,
    • African Americans,
    • Mexican Americans,
    • Puerto Ricans, and
    • Immigrants from Asia, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
  • Native American Boarding Schools
  • Puerto Ricans — 1898, the Spanish -American War

How The US Suppressed Native American Identity


US Legal Decisions, Congressional Acts, & Student Diversity

The Naturalization Act of 1790

Civilization Fund Act of 1819

Indian Removal Act (1830)

Civil Rights Act (1866)

The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1868)

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

Texas Court Ruling on Mexican Americans (1897)

Immigration Act of 1924

Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District of Orange County (1946)

Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District (1948)

McCarran-Walter Act of 1952

Immigration Act of 1965

Bilingual Education Act of 1968

Cisernos v. Corpus Christi Independent School District (1970)

Indian Education Act of 1972

Lau v. Nichols (1974)

Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975