American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling: A Comparative Study

6. School Staff

6. School Staff “It may be set down as an aphorism generally true,” declared cnei head inspector W. H. Newell in 1857, “that the teacher is the life or death of a school.” Recent improvements in one Dublin model school, he believed, were in part the result of his board appointing “zealous and effective teachers in the room of careless and inefficient ones.”1 Those at the top of the cnei and bia bureaucracies certainly believed that their own roles as commissioners, inspectors , or other officials were central to the smooth running of the educational machines. However, all accepted the “aphorism” that for a school to live or die, local staff, especially teachers, were crucial. Over half a century later another cnei inspector waxed even more eloquent on the potential influence of a good teacher. Among the lessons to be learned from biographies of the world’s celebrities, wrote J. P. Dalton in 1913, there was “none more striking than the frequency with which associations with a man of scholarly tastes and cultivated ideals has acted on the young as a summons to a career.” The well-educated teacher was “diffusing round himself an invisible force that will insensibly, and without conscious cooperation on his part, lift the best of his scholars from time to time to higher levels of purpose and endeavor.”2 While examining school regimentation and curriculum we have already met individual teachers and seen something of their methods of discipline and pedagogy. The goal of the present chapter is to comparatively analyze the crucial role of school staff in the cnei and bia/missionary assimilationist crusades. The work of commissioners, inspectors, or U.S. agents as links between school and educational authority is touched upon. The major focus, however, is on those staff running the schools. In Ireland this meant principals , teachers, and trainee teachers, along with monitors and other pupils placed in control of classes. In America it meant superintendents, teachers, trainees, and “officers” chosen from among the pupils themselves; at boarding schools it also meant matrons, school blacksmiths, cooks, farmers, and othersemployedaroundtheschool.Allsuchemployees,permanentortemporary , bore responsibility for advancing the cultural missions of Anglicization and Americanization.3 I If both the disciplinary and curricular requirements bore heavily upon pupils , the demands on staff were also onerous. The position of national school teacher in Ireland, as John Coolahan has noted, was peculiar. On the one hand he—especially the male—benefited from the older hedge school tradition . There is thus some truth to Oliver Goldsmith’s famous lines about the villagers’ awe of the local master: “They gazed and gazed and still the wonder grew / That one small head could carry all he knew.” Illiterate local people might therefore respect him as a man of learning and indeed power. To the cnei authorities, however, the teacher was a very lowly and carefully supervised cog in the great machine. His (or her) main function, writes Coolahan, “was seen as cultivating approved moral qualities . . . and inculcating necessary levels of literacy and numeracy.”4 The situation was similar for teachers of white Americans in “the little red school” on the home front, although such men and women were answerable to local and state, rather than federal or national authorities. To an extent teachers at Indian schools carried the prestige of learning, especially to peoples for whom reading and writing initially appeared as strange and magical skills. In addition, once the awesome political and military power of the United States became obvious to tribespeople, white teachers were seen as possessors of some of this power. Yet they too were lowly cogs in a huge machine. “The compensation is so small,” wrote U.S. agent George W. Frost in 1877—acting as an inspector of schools in his jurisdiction—“that but few teachers of ability and who are adapted to the work can be secured.” The job, he noted, “requires peculiar tact, patience, and energy of character to be successful ; and when it is known that the cost of living [on the Montana frontier] is double what it is in the States, the pay is small indeed.”5 Whatever the reward, the challenge was great. “The class-room work of an Indian school requires and demands teachers of ability,” wrote George W. Scott, superintendent of the Fort Stevenson School in South Dakota in 1888. “The idea that any one who has the necessary patience can teach Indians is a fallacy” (emphasis added). The tribal child possessed...