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In a devastating summary report released Tuesday, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) calls for an ambitious overhaul of the entire relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians – with recommendations touching on everything from education to health care, law, the corrections and welfare systems, and even how the history of the schools should be commemorated.

In all, it makes 94 recommendations.

Among the proposals is that children in Canada’s public schools – from kindergarten to Grade 12 – be give mandatory lessons on the residential schools and aboriginal history.

It also recommends the creation of an Aboriginal Languages Act to preserve indigenous languages; changes to the oath of citizenship to ensure Canadians respect treaties; and government-to-government co-operation to find and identify the remains of children who died at the schools and were buried in unmarked graves.

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Was this an ethnocentric goal? Absolutely. So was the goal of educating the children of the millions of disadvantaged immigrants who came from all over the world during the same period, resulting in the same acculturation ­spuriously called “cultural genocide” — that has occurred around the world since the origin of human beings.

Regardless of what some besotted prime minister may have said 150 years ago about “taking the Indian out of the child,” the primary function of formal education, especially in complex multi-ethnic societies like Canada, has always been to teach mainstream norms and practices. State education has been compulsory for decades and the children of non-British residents, native and non-native alike, have always undergone considerable cultural loss, “taking the Swede/Ukrainian/Jew out of the child,”­ by attending government-mandated schools while still managing to retain many old country beliefs, customs, and languages.