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Cross-Cultural Issues in
Alaskan Education
Vol. II
Nonformal Educational Strategies
for Rural Development in Native Alaska
Michael J. Gaffney
Alaska Native Studies Program
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
(Ed. note: This paper was originally presented to
the Conference
on Rural Education and Development, Kuusamo, Finland 9-14 September,
1979, sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, Paris, France; and the Ministry of Education, Helsinki,
Finland.)
This paper focuses on the relationship between rural education and
development. It attempts to examine this relationship as it applies
directly to the changing socio-economic conditions of an indigenous
minority group whose cultural organization and traditions are different
from the larger industrial society in which its members live.
I shall first describe the development context of the Alaskan Native
situation with special emphasis on the emergence of new institutions,
both social and economic, resulting from Native self-determination
efforts. Secondly, I shall specify critical aspects of the relationship
between education, and development within the context of Native institution-building.
I shall then describe the salient features of one proposed nonformal
education strategy -- the development of a network of village-based
Native youth organizations. Finally, I shall conclude with a conceptual
statement on the mutually complementing functions of formal and nonformal
education as illustrated by the Native youth organization proposal.
The Alaskan Native Context
The 1970s have seen the Alaskan Native community subjected to extraordinary
pressures to quicken their adaptation to alien social and economic
institutions of the larger American industrial. The ways of thinking
and forms of human relationships implicit in these new institutions
are having far-reaching, change-producing impact on the entire fabric
of Alaskan Native cultural life. This is most particularly the case
in rural Alaska where approximately 77 percent of the State's 60,000
Native citizens live in villages consisting of 25 to 3,000 residents,
the majority of whom support themselves mainly by subsistence hunting
and fishing activities supplemented by seasonal firefighting and construction
work. It is not a melodramatic exaggeration to suggest that what is
at stake is the future survival of a significant culture and its life
style. The issue is succinctly stated in the title of a Native nonprofit
corporation publication: Does One Way of Life Have to Die so That
Another can Live? (Yupiktak Bista, 1976).
These pressures for socio-cultural change arise from a complex of
recent events ranging from the emergence of Alaska as a critical petroleum-producing
region to changes in the "special" relationship between the United
States Government and Native American peoples. As Alaska becomes increasingly
central to the formulation of both government and corporate energy
policies, two resulting mineral resource development activities and
concomitant growth in the State's non-Native population places considerable
stress on the vital culture-sustaining link between Native subsistence
land-use patterns and Native social organization. Moreover, in contrast
to past periods of "termination" and "assimilation," the current era
of U.S. Government relations with Native American peoples can be characterized
as one of "self-determination," with the government, mainly through
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, seeking to convey to local Tribal Councils
and equivalent organizations large measures of policy-making and fiscal
management responsibility in the areas of Native health, education,
and welfare. Within this era of self-determination, the most momentous
event for the Alaskan Native community has been the passage of the
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) on December 18, 1971, as
compensation for aboriginal land rights.
Through ANCSA, Alaskan Natives received 40 million acres of Alaskan
land and 962.5 mil lion dollars. To receive and invest this money and
land in ways that collectively benefit the Native community, twelve
regional Native profit-making corporations were established in different
cultural/linguistic regions of Alaska. These corporations are directly
accountable to their respective Native shareholder constituencies as
they make capital investment, resource development, and land management
decisions affecting the social, economic, and cultural conditions of
these reg ional constituencies. Moreover, within each regional corporation
boundary there exist numerous village-based corporations which receive
and invest ANCSA monies and land under the guidance of the regional
parent corporation.
The drive for self-determination among Alaskan Natives has also brought
about the establishment of Native nonprofit corporations in the twelve
regions to administer wide-ranging social service delivery programs,
many of which were formerly under the control of federal and state
government agencies. These non-profit Native corporations annually
administer over a hundred million dollars in education, health, employment,
and other social programs. Like the profit corporations, they, too,
perform strategic socio-economic planning and development functions
within the Native regions of Alaska.
As with many Third and Fourth World societies, Alaskan Native institution-building
must deal with a colonial legacy and the imposed development imperatives
of the world-wide, political economy. The acceptance of the provisions
of ANCSA by the Alaskan Native community signaled their recognition
that new forms of social and economic life are essential for their
survival as a culturally distinct, indigenous people. Yet at the same
time they do not accept a linear theory of social change; that is,
while there can be no turning back of the historical clock, it does
not necessarily follow that their only development option is an institutional
order imitative of the dominant Euro-American social system. And herein
lies the key Native development issue: Can enduring social forms and
economic-occupational structures be created in Native regions which
are at once consistent with evolving cultural patterns, yet offer adaptive
resilience to the imposed imperatives of the larger political economy?
As, for instance, African societies want their nation-building efforts
to have a distinctly "African" quality, so also do Native Alaskans
want their development efforts to have a distinctly "Native" quality.
The aspiration is clear when a Native spokesman says, " . . . please
try to fathom our great desire to survive in a way different from yours" (Yupiktak
Bista, 1976).
Education and Development In Native Alaska
For the Alaskan Native community, the achievement of genuine self-determination
and self-reliance is doubly difficult. Not only must their institution-building
proceed, within certain legally prescribed parameters and on the basis
of a number of externally determined political and economic realities,
but the Alaskan Native human resources available to lead and manage
this enormous effort at all professional and managerial levels are
appallingly lacking. This high-level manpower bottleneck is amply documented
in Kleinfeld, et al., Land Claims and Native Manpower (ANF/ISER,
1973). They find that the ". . . 1970 census figures indicate that
only 73 Natives in Alaska had any graduate level training and only
235 had college degrees (and) . . . a special survey indicates that
over the last four years, only 19-23 Natives per year have graduated
with four-year degrees." In light of this, it is further confounding
that nowhere in the ANCSA document is there provision for or mention
of the kinds of trained Native manpower required for effective, self-determined
implementation of the Act.
That this human resource bottleneck exists is hardly surprising. Comparable
to the colonial experiences of many Third and Fourth World societies,
the Alaskan Native experience historically included the school systems' "cooling
out" of Native academic and professional aspirations in favor of vocational
educational goals and village artisanship. Consider also that only
150 Natives have been awarded Baccalaureate degrees from the University
of Alaska during its fifty-year history. And like the Third and Fourth
World, the Alaskan Native community is finding the achievement of indigenously
chosen social and economic goals to be very elusive when the colonial
legacy persists through the importation of large numbers of non-Native
professional, technical, and academic personnel. Indeed, the "Nativization" of
its professional work force, through both formal and nonformal educational
processes, is as much a development goal of the Alaskan Native community
as are, say, the "Africanization" programs of post-colonial Africa.
Furthermore, the problems of the uneven quality of public education
and the professional manpower shortage bottleneck are exacerbated by
a general malaise among many village youth as they are consistently
frustrated in their search for socially significant roles and directions
within the normless conditions of rapidly changing cultural patterns.
The extraordinary pressures on Native traditional life, coupled with
the lack of a rural economic-occupational structure capable of absorbing
young people (and many other segments of the population) in productive,
culturally consistent ways, is resulting in classic cases of adolescent
alienation manifested by increased alcohol and drug abuse, generational
conflicts, and violence.
Perhaps the most tragic indicator of Native youth alienation is the
steadily increasing incidence of attempted and accomplished suicides.
During 1965-69 the suicide rate among Alaskan Natives aged 20-24 was
47 per 100,000.1 From 1970-73, this rate climbed
to 170.6 per 100,000. As a point of reference, the suicide rate for
the total U.S. population in 1970 was 11.6 per 100,000. Of course problems
of random statistical variation in small populations must be kept in
mind when interpreting these figures, but, by any reasonable measurement
standard, the seriousness of the problem is evident.
Indeed, village adults are disturbed over the alienated behavior of
many village youth and they, too, are searching for understanding of
the phenomenon and for ways of coping with it as parents. Traditionally,
a subsistence life style within an environment free of pervasive Western
intrusion found Eskimo and Indian parents exercising subtle rather
than overt controls over children, relying heavily on personal example
and culturally institutionalized character ideals which sharply defined
the adult roles of the good and generous hunter and the hardworking,
supportive wife. These traditional socialization processes now appear
to be losing their effectiveness under the stress of changing socio-cultural
conditions.
Youth Organizations as a Third Educational Environment 2
In an attempt to address the problem of Native youth alienation in
a way that fits with evolving Alaskan Native self-determination efforts
and development activities, the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies,
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, proposes consideration of the notion
of "youth organizations as a third educational environment." This strategy
seeks the integrated development of networks of village-based Native
youth organizations and a cohort of formally trained Native professionals
whose university degree program is oriented to facilitating youth organizations
and similar forms of human resource development in rural Alaska. It
is reasoned that within the press of socioeconomic change and development,
such Native youth organizations could play a critical role by offering
an indigenously controlled third educational environment to complement
the formal curriculum of the schools and the socialization processes
of the home. As a third educational environment, these organizations
may be expected to provide opportunities for (a) more active youth
involvement in community affairs, civic service efforts, and cultural
heritage projects; (b) the development of individual occupational and
educational career goals in both the public and private sector as these
relate to regional and community needs; (c) constructive testing grounds
for leadership and organizational skill development; and (d) a comfortably
structured forum for discussion of the wide range of issues surrounding
the impact of change and development on Native adolescents.
The formal training component of this strategy involves the enrollment
of Native university students in a field-based Baccalaureate degree
program. These students would intern under the auspices of Native village
and regional corporations, working as youth organization coordinators
and pursuing a course of study emphasizing adolescent growth and development,
community development, and relations between various forms of education,
both formal and nonformal, and socio-economic change and development.
A distinct advantage of a field-based approach to university instruction
is its inherent capability of capturing true praxis of the learning
situation: a continual interplay of theory and practice and, in P.
Friere's terms, a movement away from the conventional "banking" approach
to education and toward a "problem-solving" approach which offers a
framework for student-instructor collaboration in the learning process.
This proves especially important when dealing in cross-cultural settings
and with the uncertainty and fluidity of the development context.
This dual approach to the development of youth organizations as third
educational environments is further supported by a series of systematic
research activities conducted over the past ten years. This research
has focused on the effects of different formal educational environments,
such as public boarding schools, urban boarding home programs, parochial
boarding schools, and village high schools on the development of village
youth.3 These studies have led to the following
conclusion: Formal instruction in different types of school settings
is highly comparable and makes little difference to the development
of technical skills such as level of English language achievement.
What does make a profound difference to all dimensions of adolescent
development, however, is the degree of nonformal education complementing
the formal educational setting through out-of-classroom activities,
social relationships between adults and youth, and structured opportunities
for formulating socially productive roles.
In the past, many public boarding school programs displaced village
adolescents to regional high schools characterized by sterile dormitory
situations devoid of any culturally consistent social dynamic which
could lead to productive and lasting social accomplishments. The result
was the creation of a marginal adolescent society oriented around passive
consumption of entertainment, e.g., movies, T.V., and dances, punctuated
by sporadic episodes of drinking and dormitory violence. Graduates
from these schools have had low rates of college, success and low rates
of participation in community service roles.
By contrast, many village youth who graduated from one particular
parochial boarding school have done unusually well in higher education,
are active as adults in village leadership roles, and have a striking
quality of personal integration despite the disorganizing effects of
culture change. The school used such educational methods as volunteer
teachers who developed significant informal relationships with students,
the preparation of youth for leadership through practice in organizing
extracurricular activities, and provision of a comfortable framework
for group discussions of values, character ideals, and community needs.
In sum, the school's influence occurred not so much through the formal
educational process as through the creation of a micro-adolescent society
which espoused a clear value system oriented around community service.
This ideological underpinning has helped these adolescents form productive
adult directions, bringing them respect within both the traditional
village context and the larger society. In important ways, these methods
parallel typical educational strategies of youth organizations as they
have developed in Israel and under many other social conditions.
Among Indian and Eskimo adolescents, there have been numerous intriguing,
although undocumented, reports of successful youth group experiences.
In some villages, for example, religious youth groups appear to have
had dramatic effects in reducing adolescents' alcohol and drug abuse
by creating group support for a religiously based value commitment.
These groups discuss such issues as individual responsibility and choosing
between right and wrong. They act out value commitments by organizing
picnics, cleaning up town refuse, and going to people's homes when
someone dies to sing and cheer up the survivors. Nonreligious youth
groups, for example, Boy Scout summer camp or 4-H clubs, also have
been described as quite successful, especially when contrasted with
the level of adolescent interest that usually occurs in schools. Unfortunately,
these youth groups are usually transitory phenomena which fade away
as soon as the instigator leaves the community.
One documented exception to this pattern is a Chevak village youth
organization which was implemented by Native graduates of St. Mary' s,
the parochial boarding school mentioned above as having important,
positive effects on Native adolescent development. Consequently, the
strategy discussed here places great emphasis on training local Native
facilitators, to organize youth groups, in part as a long-range strategy
for maintaining youth organizations within village life, but also in
part as a means for increasing the pool of Native professionals working
throughout the Native community in human resource development.
Nonformal Education Strategies: A Concluding Note of Caution
The proposed notion of Native youth organizations as a third educational
environment gains transcending conceptual significance by proceeding
from the premise that, in relation to formal education ("schooling"),
nonformal education can as well play a complementary counterpoint function.
As presented here, the youth organization concept presumes a broad,
eclectic definition of nonformal education, it holds with Phillip Coombs
that nonformal education:
. . . is not, as some people assume, a separate 'system' of education
in the same sense that formal education is a system, with its own
distinct structure, interlocking parts, and internal coherence. On
the contrary, nonformal education is simply a convenient label covering
a bewildering assortment of organized educational activities outside
the formal system that are intended to serve identifiable learning
needs of particular sub-groups in any given population -- be they
children, youths, or adults; males or females; farmers, merchants
or craftsmen; affluent or poor families. 4
The importance of Coombs' definition arises from what it says nonformal
education is and what it is not: "a separate system of education." It
is the explicit intent of this definition and of the youth organization
concept not to polarize formal and nonformal education; that is, the "deschooling
of society" is neither the basic assumption nor rationale for nonformal
education. The fact of the matter is, for better or for worse, schooling
in a large-scale, bureaucratic society will continue as the predominate
social institution that prepares people for and legitimates their access
to authoritative decision-making positions at all levels of the social
structure. Given that in the foreseeable future there is unlikely to
be any radical shift in the structure of authoritative roles in society,
no amount of polemics or tinkering is going to change this basic "credentialing
function" of the formal school system. Furthermore, it must be equally
recognized that, regardless of nonformal education's capacity for assisting
individuals in areas of skill development, vocational training, and
in certain forms of social/political consciousness-raising, the evidence
surely indicates that it will not displace the school as the essential
institution for preparing and legitimating society's decision-makers. 5
Therefore, in the case of colonized and subordinated minority groups,
it is especially counterproductive to hold out nonformal education
strategies as offering some magical social mobility route around the
formal school system and its credentialing function, Indeed, the real
challenge is to break down the bureaucratic rigidities and insensitivities
of schools so that they may better carry out their basic charter for all segments
of the population: the increased academic achievement of students in
preparation for greater authoritative role participation in society's
decision-making structures.
As a nonforrnal education strategy, the youth organization concept
seeks to complement the academic charter of rural Alaskan secondary
schools, It even goes so far as to make the claim that the more effectively
a village-based youth organization can carry out its nonformal functions,
the more effective will be the small rural secondary school in performing
its formal academic functions.
In 1976, the Alaska State Department of Education signed a Consent
Decree stipulating that the State of Alaska would take immediate responsibility
for the construction, staffing, and maintenance of small high schools
in 126 villages in rural Alaska. This action was forced by legal suit
brought by several Native adolescents in a Lower Kuskokwim Native village
against the State. The essence of the suit was that they and other
Native adolescents were being denied equal educational opportunity
because in order to obtain secondary education they had to relocate
either to the nearest urban center having regional high schools or
to boarding school programs operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In both cases, Native students were separated involuntarily from their
families and communities for considerable periods of time. The documented
evidence strongly suggested that this separation caused extraordinary
hardship for the dislocated student and his family.
With the advent of small high school programs, the Center for Cross-Cultural
Studies, supported by federal grants, moved quickly to establish a
field-based research and development effort. The purposes of this effort
have been to: (a) design alternative secondary curricula and develop
materials more appropriate for these small high school programs and
their cultural/environmental settings, (b) suggest principles upon
which the University might develop a small high school teacher training
program as a degree option, and (c) inquire into the impact small high
schools and the process of their establishment are having on the communities
involved.
During the course of this involvement it became clear that small high
schools cannot be expected to successfully meet the range of social,
physical, emotional, and recreational requirements of village adolescents.
That is, many of the extra-academic functions we ordinarily expect
comprehensive secondary schools in urban/suburban areas to accomplish
simply cannot be done by one-or two-teacher multigraded village high
schools. A primary conclusion of the report issued this year by the
Center on the findings of its small high school project was that, while
appropriate interdisciplinary academic and vocational programs and
methods can be developed to meet any graduation standards set by the
State, this development will suffer substantially if small high schools
and their staffs also are expected to assume major responsibility for
meeting the other dimensions of Native adolescent needs, particularly
those existing from conditions of alienation.6
In summary, the youth organization concept suggests that these needs
can be met best through nonformal, indigenously promoted structures.
To have such expectations small high school programs will eventually
set them up for failure along all dimensions and thus, ironically,
have the effect of perpetuating the historic failure of the formal
school system to accomplish its charter within the Alaskan Native community.
ENDNOTES
- These statistics have been collected by Dr. Robert Krauss, cited
in 2-C Report, Task I, Federal Programs and Alaska Natives,
Part A, Section 2, p. 24.
- Portions of this section of the paper have been taken from the
proposal, "Youth Organizations as a Third Educational Environment," submitted
to the Bernard van Leer Foundation, The Hague, Netherlands, by the
Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
and Tanana Chiefs Conference, Fairbanks; Alaska. I would like to
thank Dr. Ray Barnhardt, Director of the Center, and Dr. Judith Kleinfeld
for their cooperation in this endeavor.
- This research is reported in such sources as J. S. Kleinfeld and
Joseph Bloom, "Boarding Schools: Effects on the Mental Health of
Eskimo Adolescents." The American Journal of Psychiatry, 134(4),
1977; 411-417; Ray Barnhardt, et al., Small High School Programs
for Rural Alaska, Fairbanks: University of Alaska, Center for
Cross-Cultural Studies, 1979; J. S. Kleinfeld, Eskimo School on
the Andreafsky: A Study of Effective Bicultural Education. New
York: Praeger Publisher, 1979.
- Coombs, Phillip. "Nonformal Education: Myths, Realities, and Opportunities," in Comparative
Education Review, Vol. 20, No. 3: October, 1976, p. 282.
- See: Bock, John. "The Institutionalization of Nonformal Education:
A Response to Conflicting Needs," in Comparative Education Review,
Vol. 20, No. 3, October 1976, pp. 346-367.
- See Barnhardt, Op Cit.
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