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

1. Education in Native America and Ireland to the 1820's

1. Education in Native America and Ireland to the 1820s In 1812 the Commissioners for Inquiring into the State of all Schools, on Charitable or Public Foundations, in Ireland admitted that while “the present establishments for the instruction of the lower orders [are] extremely numerous,” they were “inadequate as a system of general education.”1 More commissions reported, and by 1824, according to the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry, there were 11,823 schools of all kinds, enrolling over half a million pupils out of a total population of about seven million.2 Over 9,000 of these Irish “schools,” however, were extralegal and impermanent “hedge schools.” The far fewer and far more dispersed Indian mission schools in the United States—perhaps 32, enrolling less than a thousand pupils the same year—“served” one-third of a million tribal peoples.3 Thus a far higher percentage of Irish children than Indian children had some experience with the school by the early nineteenth century. However, combining figures from many different Irish educational organizations, churches, and societies, Graham Balfour estimated that by 1824 only about two-fifths of Irish children were enrolled in some school. He further convincingly claimed that “the extent of their attendance and the quality of their instruction may have amounted to anything or nothing.” Indeed, as Peter N. Stearns writes about western Europe up to about 1800, “most children, after a few years of infancy, defined their lives in terms of work.” Because of costs, parental goals, and widespread social inequality, the majority of children in pre-industrial Western societies did not attend formal schools at any point in their lives.4 By the 1820s, then, Indian and Irish experiences of the school were not as incommensurably different as we might expect. A major theme of the present book is that both groups were to converge in their experiences of this educational institution during the century under review. The present chapter sketches the educational experiences, traditional and school based, of Indian and Irish children into the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the U.S. and British governments began to systematically enter the field. I ask the following three questions: How similar or different were traditional—nonschool —methods of education, for Indian and Irish peoples? To what extent had children in the two areas experienced the kinds of education we in the West designate as schooling? How did these earlier experiences of education, non-school and school, influence Irish and Indian responses to bia and cnei campaigns in the century under review? I “The school is the only place for the Indian child to learn,” wrote H. B. Peairs, superintendent of the bia’s Haskell Boarding School in 1896. “He learns nothing of value at home; nobody there is competent to teach. He learns nothing from his neighbors; nobody with whom he associates does anything better than he finds in his own home.” Similarly reflecting the common EuroAmerican belief that “primitive” peoples lack education because they apparently lack the institution of the school, another educator generalized that the Indian girl’s “mental attitude [was] a blank, her moral consciousness worse than a blank.” And in a classic statement of prejudice, Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, the famous founder and first superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, informed a group of Lakota adults in 1879: “You have no education.”5 This ethnocentric assumption was also a product of another characteristic Euro-American perception, one that flourished from first contacts in the fifteenth century until—and beyond—the period under review: that Indian peoples failed to control their children. “No feature of native American child rearing evoked more criticism than an apparent lack of child discipline,” writes historian Margaret Connell Szasz.”6 Like peoples everywhere, however, Indians did indeed discipline and restrain their children, if in ways different from those prevalent in EuroAmerican societies at the time and since. F. Niyi Akinasso has contested the assumption that for schooling to exist, so must literacy. He has pointed to examples of formal learning among non-Western and non-literate peoples that together suggests the existence of kinds of schooling. Formal, institutionalized education implies that learning is organized to fulfill the specific purpose of transmitting certain values, attitudes, skills, and other kinds of knowledge (specialized, rather than practical); that such learning is separated from normal, daily routines and usually takes place outside...