Native Americans

African American demographic and Social Change While Washington and Du

Bois engaged in debates over social and educational policy, important changes were taking place in the African American population. No longer concentrated in the rural South, African Americans were moving to the large northern cities. World War I (1917–19) and World War II (1941–45) generated manpower needs in the war industries. An estimated 1.6 million African Americans migrated from the rural South to large northern cities to take jobs and improve their economic condition. The African American population in the North increased by an estimated 40 percent as large black communities developed in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. Blacks joined labor unions, and a new spirit of activism was born. The African American situation was much more complex than it was in the post-Reconstruction era when Booker T. Washington constructed his philosophy of industrial education. An urban black community now existed along with the Southern rural and agricultural community. (Racial integration and social change is discussed in Chapter 11, Social Class, Race, and School Achievement, and elsewhere in this book.)

5-6c native americans

Education among pre-Columbian Native Americans was largely informal. Children learned skills, social roles, and cultural patterns from their group’s oral tradition, from parents and elders, and from direct experience with tribal life. The role of tribal elders in helping children understand and use the possibilities and limitations of the place— the landscape’s resources—in which the tribe lived was an especially valuable lesson. (See Chapter 3, The World Origins of American Education, for information about education in preliterate societies.)

Marked by suspicion and violence, encounters among Native Americans and European colonists affected both cultures. As colonists attempted to re-create European culture in North America, and Native Americans sought to preserve their culture, both groups changed. Europeans did not believe that they had anything to learn from Native people; rather, the Native people had much to learn from the Europeans, and if they failed to learn, then they were doomed for extinction.56 European colonists’ efforts to “civilize” North American indigenous peoples rested on the Europeans’ belief

56Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 42; also, see Milton Gaither, “The History of North American Education, 15,000 BCE to 1491,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1 (August 2014), pp. 323–348, for the importance of landscape in American Indian education.

timeline

w.e.B. du BoiS

a n d Pho tog raphs Division [LC-USZ62-16767] s t n P r i Lib rar y of C on gress

1850 1865

1884 graduates from great Barrington high School

1885–1888 Attends Fisk university

1868 Birth

1880

1895 Awarded PhD by harvard university

1903 Publishes The Souls of Black Folks

1909 helps organize NAACP

1910 Editor of NAACP’s The Crisis

1895 1910

boarding schools Residential

institutions where students live and attend school. in their own cultural superiority. In the Mississippi Valley, French missionaries, especially the Jesuits, sought to convert Native Americans to Catholicism and to educate French colonists’ children in the language and culture of France.

In the Spanish-controlled Southwest, Jesuit and Franciscan priests sought to alleviate exploitation of Native Americans by Spanish landlords by establishing missions to protect, control, and convert the tribes to Catholicism. Mission schools taught religion, reading, writing, and craft skills.57 The Moravians—religious followers of John Amos Comenius, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina—taught the Native American tribes and translated the Bible and religious tracts into Indian languages.

Among the early Native American educators, Sequoyah (1770–183l), a Cherokee, devised an alphabet in his native language that developed into Cherokee as a written language.

In the nineteenth century, the US government forcibly relocated the majority of Native Americans to reservations west of the Mississippi River in remote areas of the Great Plains and the Southwest. After 1870, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), encouraged by well-intentioned but misguided reformers, again attempted to “civilize” Native Americans by assimilating them into white society. These so-called reformers sought to eradicate tribal cultures and instill what they saw as white values through agricultural and industrial training.58

From 1890 to the 1930s, the BIA used boarding schools to implement the assimilationist educational policy. Boarding schools emphasized a basic curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, and vocational training. Ruled by military discipline, Native American youngsters in these schools were forbidden to speak their own native languages and were forced to use English.

Native American youngsters variously resisted, passively accepted, or accommodated to the boarding schools’ regimens. Active resisters repeatedly ran away from the boarding schools.59 Others passively accepted the boarding schools’ programs as a way to learn a trade useful for earning a living.60 Many students suffered a loss of cultural identity, feeling trapped in a never-never land between two different cultures.

After the boarding-school policy was discontinued in the 1930s, Native American education experienced significant changes. Many Native Americans left reservations to live in large cities where their children generally attended public schools. Children on tribal reservations attended BIA schools, public schools, or nonpublic schools.

Ending the assimilationist policies, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 encouraged Native Americans “to control their own education activities.”61

57Christopher Vecsey, On the Padres’ Trail (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 58David W. Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), pp. 12–24. Also, see Ruth Spack, America’s Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), p. 75. 59Spack, America’s Second Tongue, p. 131. 60David W. Adams, “From Bullets to Boarding Schools: The Educational Assault on Native American Identity, 1878–1928,” in Philip Weeks, ed., The American Indian Experience (Arlington Heights, IL: Forum Press, 1988), pp. 218–239. For a history of a boarding school based on reflections of its students, see K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 61For Native-American self-determination and education, see Julie L. Davis, Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

1935 Publishes Black Reconstruction 1963 Death