School & Society: Ch. 7 Study Questions

1. The history of the American "melting pot" idea suggests that all minority cultures share basically the same problem: how to fit into the larger dominant culture of the United States. Yet each minority group is different, with a different history and different needs. What particular issues associated with the development of a system of public education for Native Americans are different from those experienced by other American minorities? Rely on your own experience as well as the material from this chapter in developing your response.

The American Indians, as a society, were agrarian. In a raw, primitive sense, they were even beyond agrarian, surviving and thriving in the wild land. The strong European drive for "progress" was simply not a prominent part of the Indian psyche, nor did it need to be. However, because of this fundamental difference, there were significant cultural adjustments to be made: from non-materialist to materialistic, from an honor system to a contract system, from ceremony to seminary.

Adaptation and assimilation was an inevitable result of white settlement, a process that was at various times handled clumsily by both Indians and whites. Indians, as native inhabitants, deserved more respect than they received. Whites, as (mostly) peaceable newcomers, deserved less hostility. Coterminous social progress was laid on a foundation of mistrust.

2. In Chapter 4, various objectives and practices of progressive education were presented in the context of an urbanizing, industrializing, and heavily immigrant society. To what degree are progressive education aims and practices relevant to the changes in schooling developed for Native Americans in the 20th century? Explain.

Progressive education sought to understand education from the perspective of the student and also to integrate the education machine to the social one. These perspectives become even more potent when dealing with cultural minorities and racial idiosyncrasies. As Collier believed, it was crucial for educators to work hard to understand and appropriately engage Indian culture - to walk a mile in their moccasins, as it were.

Progressive education, therefore, was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it made important strides toward properly understanding the Indian; on the other, it fueled the unrelenting drive for assimilation.

3. American Indian educational reform during the first half of the 20th century might be characterized as partly pluralist and partly assimilationist in nature. How would you describe and assess the character of the pluralism embodied in Indian schooling reform? In explaining your position, explain also the degree to which those reforms appear to you to be consistent with democratic ideals - and why.

As Indians began to assume responsibility for managing and advancing their own education, they made important changes to reverse some of the initial damage caused by the impositions of the system. What they don't appear to have questioned was whether the system was valid and useful in the first place, being an entirely European invention. By this time, (1970's) the demands of society may have made an institutional-style educational system non-negotiable, or perhaps enough time had passed to where the Indians took it for granted.

Whatever the case may be, the Indian's affirmation of their identity was entirely healthy. They stepped back from the problems and challenges, took a deep breath, and engaged the larger society as they saw fit, which is the epitome of the democratic ideal.

4. The point of view informing this chapter suggests a strong connection between U.S. reform of American Indian education and the elimination of native culture and values. If Indians could have controlled their own educational destinies on a continent won in battle by Europeans, how could they have pursued an educational policy any different from that imposed by the United States? In developing your response, consider differences in ideology between the dominant European-American culture and the various Indian cultures; political-economic constraints; and the Primary Source Readings as well as the chapter material itself.

The Indians were at a distinct disadvantage as European settlement expanded across the continent. They were not free to simply continue their way of life, seeing as the continental infrastructure had radically changed. They could not adapt their play and try out a different strategy - it was a whole new game. The development of an Indian educational system was inevitable, but were it given a bit more care and thought it might have been pursued in a more specifically Indian style.