Explaining educational achievement among Indigenous individuals: how important are culture and language?

Melanie O'Gorman

Education Economics, 2025, vol. 33, issue 4, 479-514

Abstract: A mismatch between one's culture and that of the school they attended – cultural discontinuity – has been put forward as a reason for low educational attainment globally. This paper evaluates the cultural discontinuity hypothesis for Indigenous youth in Canada using the 2012 Aboriginal Peoples Survey. I find that Indigenous language instruction and cultural programming are generally associated with negative educational outcomes for the full APS sample. However, in communities with the highest proportion of Indigenous language speakers, and among a sub-sample who speaks an Indigenous language, such programming is more likely to be associated with educational success.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2024.2387586

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