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Conclusions Many people felt that the Government was trying to obliterate our culture by making the children attend school . . . the schooling the children have been getting over the past seventy -five or eighty years has educated them to the [outsider’s] ways but made them less knowledgeable about the ways of their own people. A lot of what has been taught is good. It makes them able to understand the way the [outsider] thinks, and to compete in the outside world. But at the same time, they aren’t getting as much of their own traditions as they should. Something important is gained, but something important is being lost. These words could have been uttered by either a Native American or by an Irishman or woman, surveying assimilationist schooling in the period under review. Actually they were spoken by Albert Yava, the Tewa-Hopi quoted in the previous chapter as an advocate of pragmatic compromise; the one who realized that, ultimately, the greatest value is survival.1 The statement reinforces my contention that there has been much to compare between, on the one hand, the bia and cnei assimilationist educational campaigns and, on the other, the responses of Indian and Irish peoples. I A number of major, overlapping themes emerge from this study that extend the work of historians of Indian and Irish education, and of mass elementary education. These themes also lend weight to Peter Kolchin’s three major claims for the importance of comparative history, introduced earlier: it can show how a particular case fits a broader pattern; it can help historians generate new hypotheses; and it can allow us to account for differences within broader patterns.2 The similarity of government assimiliationist educational programs is, of course, a dominant theme. Although the Irish and the many Indian societies were very different, leading to differences in specific educational policies and practices , the campaigns were fundamentally similar. They also shared similarities with other systems of colonial, imperial, or government education. Indeed— Kolchin’s first claim for comparative history—only by making comparisons can we escape parochialism to see beyond the apparently exceptional quality conclusions 264 of a particular case and to establish such broader patterns. Historian J. R. Miller’s characterization of the campaigns to school Canadian First Peoples is also highly applicable to bia and cnei efforts: the educators believed passionately that they “knew better than the native communities and their leaders what was in the best interests of dependent groups” (emphasis in original).3 This cultural hubris is also well expressed by John Willinsky. Turning “the other” into “us” was the goal: “Colonial schooling presumed a right exercised over those to be educated, a right that is present in every educational act yet that represented a special level of presumption in the colonial context.”4 Mass educational campaigns often enshrine privileged views and act against the local culture, be it “savage,” peasant, or proletarian. However, systems such as those presented to the Irish and the Indians sought a near-total obliteration of the “deficient” home culture and the assimilation of its children and, through them, its adults into the dominant culture. Responses to these programs were also strikingly similar, which brings me to my next major theme, convergence. By the early nineteenth century only about two-fifths of all Irish children were enrolled at any kind of school, although far more would have known of the institution. Indians also knew more about schools than might be expected, but far fewer tribal children than Irish children had ever been inside one. The difficulties for educators were greater in the vast areas of the United States, and the “cultural distance” between educator and educated was greater there too. Further, large numbers of Indian families faced the more wrenching decision of whether to release their children for attendance at distant boarding schools and of how to respond if children were removed against kin wishes. By 1930, nevertheless, Indian peoples had generally converged with the Irish in their acceptance of mass education. Explanations for such convergence lead to further themes. The pragmatism of Irish and Indian peoples especially impresses. Individuals in local communities sometimes rejected the new schools as threats to traditional values, but more and more came to see them in terms of personal, kin, and group advantage . Few fully accepted the assimilationist goals of the educators; most responded selectively to the programs offered. Although generally from oral cultures, Irish and Indian adults and children came alive...

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