The principles of democratic society, institutions and the political structure would give the students citizenship training. Religious training in Christianity would be taught. Arithmetic, science, history and the arts would be added to open the possibility of discovering the “self-directing power of thought.” Indian youth would be individualized. The first priority of the boarding schools would be to provide the rudiments of academic education: reading, writing and speaking of the English language. Schools would quickly be able to assimilate Indian youth. The reformers assumed that it was necessary to “civilize” Indian people, make them accept white men’s beliefs and value systems.īoarding schools were the ideal instrument for absorbing people and ideologies that stood in the way of manifest destiny. Indian people would be taught the importance of private property, material wealth and monogamous nuclear families. ![]() The goal of these reformers was to use education as a tool to “assimilate” Indian tribes into the mainstream of the “American way of life,” a Protestant ideology of the mid-19th century. These schools were part of a plan devised by well-intentioned, eastern reformers Herbert Welsh and Henry Pancoast, who also helped establish organizations such as the Board of Indian Commissioners, the Boston Indian Citizenship Association and the Women’s National Indian Association. The boarding school experience for Indian children began in 1860 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the first Indian boarding school on the Yakima Indian Reservation in the state of Washington.
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