After reading Crafting and Uncrafting Relationships in Child and Youth Care, I believe that the quote by Battiste and Youngblood's (2006) about Eurocentric education capture the main idea of the book. According to the indigenous authors, Eurocentric curricula "teach that knowers are manipulators who have no reciprocal responsibilities to the things they manipulate." In this quote, the authors criticize the curricula of western education because it teaches ways of relating that are based on manipulation, possession, and dispossession. Working at the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and interning at the Intensive Learning and Social Growth center at Kennesaw University have shown me that the authors' evaluation of western education is true. The quote describes our relationship to knowledge in child and youth care because we expect our subjects to follow everything that we tell them. The belief that we can determine the knowledge to privilege, silence, or generate without the input of the learner is equivalent to conquest and do not foster constructive relationships.
Dealing with children and the youth is challenging regarding relationship development because it is easy to assume that they know very little; therefore, we can manipulate them as we feel. It is easy to fall into this trap, but the danger of pursuing such a manipulative strategy is that it does not foster a nourishing relationship with children and the youth. It is true that our current education system is founded on the accumulation of knowledge and material wealth at the expenses of nurturing meaningful relationships with knowledge. As a person working with children the youth, creating and maintaining a relationship is difficult because of the notion that children and youth have limited knowledge. However, treating children and the youth as more than objects to be taught fosters positive relationships with knowledge, which the opposite of our modern perspectives on knowledge.
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