How Schools Can Preserve a Culture or Help Destroy It

Schools do more than teach reading, mathematics and science. They also decide, explicitly or implicitly, which languages children use, whose history is considered important, which traditions are treated as legitimate and whose knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. That makes education a powerful mechanism of cultural transmission. A school can strengthen a community’s language and identity, or it can weaken them when children are separated from their communities and taught that their own culture is backward, irrelevant or incompatible with participation in wider society.

The difference is not education itself but how education is designed and controlled. Indigenous communities have historically experienced both sides of this divide. In the United States, federal boarding schools used education as part of an explicit assimilation policy, suppressing Indigenous languages and cultural practices. Today, international frameworks and Indigenous-led education initiatives increasingly emphasize community control, Indigenous-language education and the integration of Indigenous knowledge into schools. UNESCO describes education as a key mechanism for preserving, revitalizing and promoting Indigenous languages, while the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to establish and control their own educational systems.

Why schools have such influence over culture

Culture is transmitted through ordinary repetition.

Children learn language by hearing adults speak. They learn history through stories. They learn social expectations by observing teachers, parents and other members of their community. They learn which places matter, which ceremonies are important and which forms of knowledge are valued.

Schools bring these processes into an institution.

That gives them unusual influence over what a society considers legitimate knowledge.

A curriculum that teaches Indigenous history, uses Indigenous languages and invites elders to contribute knowledge sends a different message from one that presents only the dominant society’s history and treats Indigenous traditions as obstacles to modernization.

Neither curriculum is culturally neutral.

Even decisions that appear technical—what language mathematics is taught in, which historical events receive attention, whose literature children read—can influence whether a culture is reproduced or gradually displaced.

Education can transmit culture across generations

At its most constructive, schooling can reinforce the transmission that already takes place within families.

An Indigenous-language school, for example, can provide children with vocabulary that their community needs for contemporary subjects while also giving them sustained opportunities to use their ancestral language.

This matters because languages need domains of use.

A language taught only during a weekly cultural lesson occupies a different position from one used to teach science, conduct assemblies, tell stories, write assignments and communicate with classmates.

UNESCO’s current work on Indigenous languages emphasizes education alongside media, digital spaces and other areas where languages can be used and transmitted to new generations. Its International Decade of Indigenous Languages runs from 2022 to 2032.

Schools can therefore help make an Indigenous language a language of the future rather than treating it solely as an inheritance from the past.

The curriculum determines whose knowledge counts

Cultural preservation does not require schools to teach only traditional knowledge.

Children need access to mathematics, sciences, technology, literature and other fields of contemporary education. The more important question is whether these subjects are taught in a way that makes Indigenous identity compatible with academic achievement.

A curriculum can teach both Indigenous history and national history.

It can teach traditional ecological knowledge alongside contemporary environmental science.

It can teach an Indigenous language alongside a national or international language.

It can prepare students for university and employment without suggesting that success requires cultural abandonment.

The UN framework recognizes this principle. Article 14 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states that Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions and to receive education in their own culture and language.

That is different from isolating students from wider society. It is about giving communities greater authority over how education connects their children to both their own culture and the wider world.

When schooling becomes a mechanism of suppression

The same institutional power can work in the opposite direction.

A school can suppress culture when it systematically removes the language, history and relationships through which children learn who they are.

This can happen through explicit rules. A school may prohibit an Indigenous language, punish traditional practices or require children to adopt unfamiliar names and customs.

It can also happen through curriculum.

If Indigenous history is absent, Indigenous people are presented only as figures from the distant past, or Indigenous knowledge is consistently treated as inferior to external knowledge, children receive a powerful lesson about which identities society considers valuable.

And suppression can occur through separation.

When children are removed from families and communities and placed in residential institutions, the school becomes more than an educational environment. It can become the primary authority over language, behavior, identity and social relationships.

The U.S. boarding-school system shows how education could be weaponized

The history of federal Indian boarding schools in the United States provides one of the clearest examples.

The U.S. Department of the Interior states that when federally operated off-reservation boarding schools were established in the nineteenth century, their primary educational goal was assimilation. Students were prohibited from speaking their languages and were prevented from engaging in traditional cultural practices.

The Department’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative later documented a system operating from 1819 to 1969, with 408 federal schools identified across 37 states or then-territories. The investigation found systematic efforts to assimilate Indigenous children through education, including changing names, cutting hair and discouraging or preventing the use of Indigenous languages, religions and cultural practices.

This history demonstrates why the phrase “education policy” can sometimes conceal a much broader political project.

The schools were not merely deciding how to teach arithmetic.

They were participating in an effort to change children’s identities and sever connections to their families and communities.

Separation changed what children could learn

Culture is not contained entirely in books.

A child can learn a traditional story from a textbook, but that is different from hearing it from a grandparent who understands its place within family history.

A dictionary can preserve a language, but it cannot by itself recreate the everyday conversation between generations.

A school can teach the name of a ceremony, but participation in community life may be necessary to understand what the ceremony means.

This is why residential schooling could have consequences beyond the classroom.

When children were separated from their families, they lost opportunities for ordinary cultural transmission. The U.S. Department of the Interior describes forced removal and family separation as central features of the federal boarding-school system and identifies lasting intergenerational consequences.

The harm was therefore not simply that certain lessons were omitted.

The social environment in which cultural knowledge normally moved from one generation to another was disrupted.

Language is often the first place the impact becomes visible

Language makes the relationship between schooling and culture particularly clear.

If children spend most of their educational lives using a dominant language and rarely encounter their Indigenous language in formal settings, the dominant language gains prestige and practical usefulness.

That can influence family choices.

Parents may decide that the dominant language is more important for education and employment. Children may become more comfortable using it with friends. Teachers may lack resources to teach in the Indigenous language.

Within several generations, a language that was once used throughout community life may become concentrated among older speakers.

This is one reason UNESCO emphasizes Indigenous-language education as part of cultural preservation and revitalization.

The issue is not whether children should learn the national or international language.

Multilingualism can expand opportunity.

The question is whether learning an additional language requires losing the first one.

Schools can also help repair what earlier education damaged

The history of assimilation does not mean schools are inherently destructive to Indigenous cultures.

The same institution can be redesigned around cultural continuity.

In the United States, federal policy eventually shifted away from the earlier assimilation model. The Department of the Interior notes that the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 supported the teaching of Indian history and culture in Bureau-funded schools, while later legislation, particularly the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, expanded tribal authority to operate federally funded schools.

That change illustrates an important principle:

Who controls education can matter almost as much as what education provides.

A school administered from outside a community may have different priorities from one governed by the people whose children attend it.

Local control does not automatically guarantee educational quality, but it can give communities greater authority over language, curriculum, cultural content, staffing and institutional priorities.

What culturally sustaining education looks like

There is no single model that works for every Indigenous community.

But several features can make education more compatible with cultural continuity.

These categories can overlap. A community-controlled school might use bilingual education, immersion and mainstream academic curricula simultaneously.

The key is that cultural preservation does not require sacrificing educational ambition.

The revival model is different from the preservation model

There is an important difference between preserving a culture and revitalizing one.

Preservation can mean documenting a language, recording elders’ knowledge, archiving traditional stories or maintaining historical records.

Those activities are essential.

But revitalization requires people to use the culture in the present.

For education, that means an Indigenous language should not exist only in an archive or a special cultural class. Students need opportunities to speak it, write it, create in it and use it to understand contemporary subjects.

UNESCO’s approach increasingly connects language education with broader cultural and digital participation, reflecting the idea that a language remains stronger when it has contemporary domains of use.

A living culture needs children who can carry it forward—not simply institutions that remember what previous generations knew.

Teachers are part of the cultural infrastructure

A culturally relevant curriculum is difficult to sustain without teachers who understand the language and community.

This creates a problem for many revitalization efforts.

Where earlier education policies suppressed Indigenous languages, there may be too few fluent speakers who are also trained educators. Communities may therefore need to develop teachers while simultaneously rebuilding the language environment in which those teachers work.

The challenge extends beyond language teachers.

A school seeking to teach through an Indigenous language may need people capable of teaching mathematics, science, history and technology in that language. It may also need curriculum writers, translators, school leaders and educational researchers.

Cultural revitalization consequently becomes an investment in educational infrastructure, not simply a decision to add one more subject.

Modern technology can extend what schools can do

Digital technology creates new possibilities for culturally relevant education.

Schools and communities can use digital archives, recorded oral histories, language-learning tools, online dictionaries, multimedia lessons and locally produced video to make Indigenous knowledge more accessible.

UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages specifically identifies digital spaces as an area in which Indigenous languages need greater presence.

But digitization raises questions of ownership and consent.

Not every cultural story, ceremony or item of knowledge should automatically become public online. Indigenous communities may have their own rules concerning who can access particular knowledge, how it is shared and whether it can be reproduced.

Technology can strengthen cultural education when communities retain meaningful control over what is recorded and how it is used.

The goal is not to isolate children from the wider world

Culturally sustaining education is sometimes misunderstood as an attempt to keep children separate from national society.

That is not necessary.

A child can become fluent in an Indigenous language while also becoming fluent in the national language. They can learn Indigenous history alongside global history. They can study traditional ecological knowledge alongside modern science. They can understand their community’s institutions while preparing for university or a career elsewhere.

The objective is to expand the child’s capabilities rather than force a choice between identities.

This is consistent with the broader principle in the UN Declaration that Indigenous peoples have rights to their own educational systems and culture while also participating fully in the wider society.

What makes cultural education sustainable

A school can introduce a language or cultural curriculum, but long-term transmission depends on what happens beyond the classroom.

The strongest systems connect several environments:

• Home, where children can use the language with family.
• School, where the language and culture have academic legitimacy.
• Community, where children see adults using the culture in real life.
• Media, where the language appears in contemporary entertainment and information.
• Public institutions, where Indigenous languages and knowledge have practical functions.
• Digital spaces, where younger speakers can communicate in ways that reflect modern life.

If these environments reinforce one another, school becomes part of a wider cultural ecosystem.

If they contradict one another, the classroom may struggle to compensate for everything outside it.

A child may learn an Indigenous language at school, for example, but abandon it if there is no one to speak with at home and no opportunity to use it elsewhere.

The most important question is who gets to define success

For generations, Indigenous education was often evaluated according to how successfully Indigenous children adopted the dominant society’s language, religion, customs and economic expectations.

That definition of success has changed.

Contemporary Indigenous education increasingly asks different questions: Are children academically successful? Are they confident in their identity? Can they speak their language? Do they understand their history? Can they participate in their communities and the wider society? Does the education system respect Indigenous authority and knowledge?

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s current Bureau of Indian Education strategy reflects this broader direction, identifying both student outcomes and expanded access to Native language and cultural instruction while emphasizing tribal sovereignty and community-driven approaches.

That shift matters because academic achievement and cultural continuity do not have to compete.

A school can pursue both.

Education can become a site of cultural recovery

The history of Indigenous schooling demonstrates that education is never simply about transferring neutral information from teacher to student.

It is also about deciding which knowledge is valued, which languages are legitimate, who has authority to teach, and what children are encouraged to believe about themselves.

When schools separate children from their communities, suppress their languages and replace their histories with those of a dominant society, education can become an instrument of cultural destruction. The documented history of U.S. federal Indian boarding schools provides a clear example of that process.

When schools instead give Indigenous communities meaningful authority, support Indigenous-language learning, include community knowledge and connect academic achievement with cultural identity, the same institutional power can work in the opposite direction.

That is why the central question is not whether schools should transmit culture. They inevitably do.

The more important question is whose culture is transmitted, who controls the process, and whether children are given the freedom to inherit their culture without being denied access to the wider world.

A school preserves a culture not by turning the past into a museum exhibit, but by giving the next generation enough language, knowledge, confidence and opportunity to make that culture part of their future.