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6 Learning My uncle took me up in the loft of the old log house where my mother grew up. He had used the downstairs as a blacksmith shop since the family moved into their new house in , but he continued to store old stuff in the loft. He opened a dusty wooden chest. It was full of schoolbooks. He put into my hands a green book with a painted cover showing children. “This was your mother’s,”he said. The title read: The Swiss Family Robinson; or, Adventures of a Father and Mother and Four Sons in a Desert Island. I opened the cover and there was her penciled name,“Theresa Schopf.”On the flyleaf were the words, “Given to Theresa Schopf for Good Work in Spelling With Kindest Regards, Your Teacher, Jos. Jantsch, .”I turned to the preface. It was dedicated to the “young inquirer after good,” for whom, the authors hoped, “the accidents of life may be repaired by the efforts of his own thought, and the constancy of his own industry.” It was the story of a Swiss pastor who planned to settle on a farm in the late eighteenth century but was marooned with his family in New Guinea.¹ Sitting in that dusty loft, I remembered what my mother had said about her school days. She was an especially good speller, she told me. At the beginning of her eighth year, a family member was ill, and her mother kept her home from school to nurse the ailing person back to health. She never went back to finish the eighth grade.In fall of ,she would have been thirteen.Her mother, Matilda, had finished school at fourteen and gone to work. Theresa always wanted to finish her interrupted schoolwork. Forty years later she wrote to a friend about that desire. The reality was that at thirteen she was done with formal schooling.Theresa never forgot her joy in learning and the way her teacher had encouraged her that year. In Europe, children’s learning experiences differed from country to country depending on what group or nation controlled national politics. Germans had an excellent system of basic education, and Matilda would have learned to read and write in her village German school. But that same German educational system was oppressive when Germans occupied Poland and forced Poles to attend schools with no regard for local desires or customs. Still, most Europeans and Americans shared what could be called, broadly, a Western European education, and most adult immigrants from Europe were literate in their national languages. Settlers saw the common schools as a continuation of    what they had learned in Europe or the eastern United States, but under local control and supported by local taxes. Protestant native-born settlers may have seen schools as a way of indoctrinating non-Protestant peoples, but they shared a European heritage despite ethnic and linguistic differences. Settler communities built one-room schoolhouses to provide common education and controlled them almost entirely. Catholic settlers and German immigrants supplemented these publicly financed and controlled schools with parochial and German-language schools. Few immigrant girls were able to complete common school; fewer still went on to high school. The Native peoples, however, were in quite a different position in relation to learning. Native people had understood and used European language and customs in the fur trade, but they had adopted them voluntarily based on their own needs. They learned informally in daily interactions with Europeans. The settlers to Native lands, likewise, learned Native languages and customs for practical purposes, for trade and non-economic cultural exchanges.Alongside this language and culture of trade existed hundreds of tribal cultures kept in balance with changing conditions through a selective adaptation of skills, materials, and customs. Native/French, or Métis, existed as multicultural and multilingual people,sometimes choosing to live among settlers,sometimes among Native peoples. They formed bridges among cultures. In Native communities, government day schools were voluntary for most of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century the government was forcing children into boarding schools, where they were taught a foreign culture intended to replace, even eradicate, their home schooling and culture. The government also licensed private religious boarding schools, which provided the only alternative for Native families. Finally, realizing the failure of its schools, the government attempted to integrate Native children into public schools. Who taught in both settler and Native schools was important to parents. The locally controlled system composed...

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