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

4. Regimentation

4. Regimentation My folks tole me I must go to school but I don’t like to go. . . . So my father took me to the school. When my father went away I was not feeling good. I didn’t talk to anyone because I don’t know these children. . . . Some of them is mean to me sometime, too, and make me cry. By and by I got a friend, and now I’m happy with him. The teacher was trying to talk to me. I didn’t say a thing because I don’t understand them what they mean. In the school was very hard lesson for me. When my teacher try to make me read, I won’t do it, and so she sometime whip me . . . I was scared, and when we have vacation, I went home and tell my folks all about how I was doin in school. Charlie Tallbear, essay to bia teacher, early twentieth century The first reminiscences of school, writes Susan Douglas Franzosa, “are retold as a terrifying entry into an alien culture presided over by towering adults who . . . expect their charges to act in incomprehensible ways.” The place is often evoked “through meticulously sensuous detail, now familiar but distant , then strange but clear.”1 If the experience can shock twentieth-century Western children, how much more challenging must have been the first day for nineteenth-century Indian and Irish children, many of whom spoke no English and began early in the age of mass elementary education, when the very idea of schooling was new to them and their peoples. Although educated to participate in their own communities, children living in remote parts of western or southern Ireland were almost as unused to the school as Indian children. Irish autobiographical narrators recalled, for example, that their families did not possess clocks, and they had never even seen spectacles, let alone experienced a systematically organized curriculum that segmented approved knowledge into half-hour periods, regularly dispensed in custom-built establishments.2 Supportive kin could prepare the child; older siblings or mates could help adjustment. But, whether in Dunquin, County Kerry, or at the Presbyterian boarding school in Nebraska, regimentation 90 the young boy and girl encountered the school—with its new physical environment , often incomprehensible language, regimentation, and its severe punishments—in some sense alone. I “All the children trooped in and each class sat on its own bench,” wrote Peig Sayers of her first day at school on the Great Blasket Island off southwestern Ireland in the late 1870s. When the master finally arrived the “clatter or noise” made by the pupils ceased abruptly, and Peig held onto an older friend’s hand “with the grip of a drowning man.” Then, in a passage that powerfully conveys the awed ambivalence of many of these accounts, she remembered: “my two eyes were as big as bowls with fear and wonder . . . [and they] darted here and there taking in every single detail.” Although she was a monoglot Irish speaker, and the class activity was in English, Sayer’s first day went well. More experienced pupils looked out for her. The teacher, a near-relative, presented her with a book because in those decades of “payment by results” he wanted pupils to attend regularly and learn well. The girl’s initial ambivalence dissolved as she came to thoroughly enjoy her schooling.3 Micheál O’Guiheen, Sayer’s son, also remembered a gift: “My heart was pounding in my breast with delight when the master gave me a new book,” he wrote. “I didn’t let go of the book but was looking at the nice pictures until midday”—a child’s thrill of ownership and fear of loss. “I loved being at school,” he recalled. “All the small children were there and we had great company ,” and the teacher too had been pleasant and gentle with him. Maurice O’Sullivan, another Blasket Islander, similarly recalled his sense of fear being immediately transformed into joy by the gift of sweets and—of course—a book. After that “I saw a sight which put gladness into my heart,” he recalled, “sweets in the shape of a man, a pig, a boat, a horse, and many another. . . . So there I sat contentedly looking at the book, while not forgetting to fill my mouth.” That O’Sullivan later grew to dislike school lends credence to his retrospective account in that he admitted some positive aspects among the negative.4 Not all...