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5. Curriculum The Navajos believe all kinds of things, but we schoolchildren don’t believe. Cecelia Bryan, Navajo pupil, early twentieth century “Missionary education was doing more than to purvey knowledge or teach skills,” writes A. J. Ashley. “It was an important part of the missionary effort to effect a transfer of pupils from one universe to the other.”1 Whereas in a “normal” school the teachers attempt to indoctrinate pupils more deeply into their own cultural universe (or an approved version of it), in an assimilative situation the goal is radically different. Missionaries—and the teachers of the bia and the cnei were cultural missionaries, whatever their attitudes toward religion—often accept a far more ambitious task: to discredit or simply ignore the universe in which the child has been reared and to transport him or her into a new universe of meaning and value. The regimented school environment forcefully and sometimes brutally transported the child to the different universe. In the mass school systems throughout the Western world, writes Vincent, “a new sense of clock time was dramatized by the official curriculum.” Earlier educational practices had often produced “shapeless lessons in which the children spent a few minutes at the teacher’s desk and the rest of their day working at their own speed.” This was “replaced by blocks of time, beginning and ending at a specific moment, within which pupils collectively undertook a specific task without pause or interruption.” This segmentation of time ignored “the existing rhythms of the household and the local economy.” Pupils were punished not only for failing to learn the content of the new curriculum, but for failing to do so on time.2 And what of curricular content itself? Broadly generalizing across “the Imperial curriculum” of many colonial regimes, J. A. Mangan validly claims that “school knowledge is a political assertion. It attempts to establish the parameters of acceptable knowledge, impose ideological boundaries, determine the range of permissible interpretations, point the way to action, and, both overtly and covertly, create images of self-belief and self-doubt” (empha- curriculum 119 sis in original).3 All forms of education establish regimes of knowledge. The imperial curriculum established new forms of knowledge that legitimized not the child’s home culture but an (initially) alien culture. Although every subject taught in Indian and national schools aimed to transform cultures, not all subjects were taught in every school; nor were all subjects taught in the same school throughout the period under review. Indeed, there was far greater variety from school to school within the bia and cnei systems than between those systems. Circumstances, teacher availability , and money decreed the mix of subjects. Neither in Ireland, however, nor in Native America did authorities make many concessions to local cultural circumstances. The assimilationist bia curriculum in some form was presented to Lakotas and Navajos and Hopis, the cnei curriculum to urban English-speakers and rural Irish-speakers. Fashions did change. Child- and community-centered progressive educational ideas began to influence educational authorities later in the period under review, for example. Yet the assimilatory drive was powerfully maintained throughout, both in what was presented and in what was erased by the curriculum. I The bia and cnei espoused variants of the “half and half” curriculum: a mix of literary or academic subjects with vocational and manual labor subjects and practices. As general moral uplift and Christian religious instruction were central to both systems, we might more accurately refer to the “three thirds” curriculum. On both continents the ideal persisted of training both mind and body and of preparing the vast majority of children for modest roles in society, supposedly appropriate to their gender. The literary or academic element was central. Indeed, it is highly likely that on both continents most parents enrolled their children so they might learn the English language and reading and writing, along with academic subjects of supposedly higher status than those relating to mere manual labor or vocation . What immediately becomes apparent is the similarity between the academic curriculum in America and Ireland, indeed across the Western world. “Performance in reading and writing, and also arithmetic,” writes Vincent, “became the basic unit of exchange between the school and the state, the teacher and the family, and the education system and the labour market.” The length of sentences a child could read and spell accurately “became the means by which governments could measure the efficiency of their expenditure of tax-payers...

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