3.6) Boarding Schools for Native Americans

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American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

From the lesson

Postbellum Period

This module considers the post-Civil War expansion of the common school and the reality behind the myth of the “Little Red Schoolhouse”; the educational gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction period and the limits white supremacists put on blacks’ educational progress after Reconstruction; the Hampton/Tuskegee model of industrial education for blacks and the role of northern industrial philanthropists; Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow schooling in the South; the Carlisle Indian School; and the early progress of the American high school.

3.1) Introduction 1:54

3.2) Expansion of the Common School 6:29

3.3) After Emancipation: Education of African Americans in the Reconstruction South7:58

3.4) Industrial Education in the South's Organic Society 7:47

3.5) Jim Crow and the Radical Segregation of African Americans6:38

3.6) Boarding Schools for Native Americans 3:16

3.7) The Rise of the American High School 5:52

Meet the Instructors

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

After the Civil War, the federal government, to make way for

the railroads and the closing of the American frontier by white settlers,

confined American Indians on reservations in the West.

The bison, or buffalo, an animal that once had swarmed the great plains in

the tens of millions and fed and clothed generations of Plains Indians was all but

extinguished by white settlers and buffalo hunters.

Indians now have no choice but

to live off the paltry largesse of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Traditional tribal cultures were endangered.

>> Richard Henry Pratt, a former colonel in the Union Army,

believed that Native Americans could survive only if

they were assimilated into the white mainstream.

He called it, quote, killing the Indian to save the man.

Pratt persuaded the US Interior Department to authorize his establishment of

an experimental Indian industrial school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The first Indian children and

youths arrived at the new school in the fall of 1879.

Enrolling hundreds of young people from the reservations, Carlisle was

the inspiration for other federally sponsored Indian boarding schools.

Quote, killing the Indian, meant giving Carlisle students English names,

dressing the boys in military outfits or jacketed uniforms, and the girls in frumpy

Victorian dresses, and operating the school as a type of military institution.

Military rigor required military style haircuts,

which the Indian children regarded as shaming.

English was the only language allowed.

Serious breaches of Carlisle's code of conduct, including trying to get out of

the place, were punished by incarceration in a six foot thick limestone guardhouse.

In one case, two girls who tried to burned down the school were shipped off to

a state women's prison.

>> Education at Carlisle followed the industrial model championed by

northern philanthropists.

Elementary school studies co-mingled with industrial training in carpentry,

blacksmithing, shoe making, and other vocations.

Ironically, Carlisle's fame rested not on its program of Indian assimilation, but

rather on its illustrious football program.

Under coach Pop Warner, Carlisle fielded some of the best football teams in

the United States, frequently, knocking off the nation's top collegiate teams.

It helped, of course, that Warner had the talents of Jim Thorpe of the Sa, Sac and

Fox Nation of Oklahoma, arguably the best all-around athlete in US history.

We conclude our module on the postbellum era with a signal educational

development of the last half of the 19th century, the American high school.

This institution, an extension of the common school,

arose in splendid architectural forms in cities of the north and Midwest,

took root in the rural areas of those states, and lagged in the south.

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