Schools as cultural warfare

These are Native American children at the Carlisle boarding school in Pennsylvania, around the turn of the century. Some were kidnapped outright from their families; some were taken by coercion, while armed US soldiers stood in the road; some were taken through deception. The overt purpose of the Carlisle school and others like it was to assimilate Indian children into white society. Their hair was cut, their traditional clothing and other possessions were burned, their names were changed, and they often went years without seeing their families. As a Christian Science Monitor article explains:

Hundreds of Indian boarding schools dotted the United States from the 1880s through the 1960s. The program was spearheaded by a zealous Army officer named Richard H. Pratt, who embraced the idea after working with Apache prisoners in St. Augustine, Fla. Pratt believed that removing Indian children from their culture and subjecting them to strict discipline and hard work would force their assimilation into mainstream society.

Congress agreed, and in 1897 it gave Pratt roughly 18 students and the drafty barracks at a deserted Army college in Carlisle. Cynical politics – and simple math – played into Pratt's plan. The government hoped to save millions of dollars, "because it cost anywhere from six to ten thousand [dollars] for the Army to kill an Indian," Bates says. "But if Indian children were put in schools and forced to change into 'Americans,' it would only cost a couple of hundred dollars per child."

Pratt's famous dictum was straightforward: "Kill the Indian and save the man." School officials prohibited children from speaking native languages, and punished transgressors. "Every school had a disciplinary jail cell," Bates says. Some even offered bounties for returned children.

Naturally the Native Americans did not willingly let their children go, and quite a few children were successfully hidden from the government. In 1895, 19 Hopi men were sent to Alcatraz when their village refused to surrender its children.

Canada used "residential schools" for even longer than we did; some are still operating, though assimilation is no longer an explicit goal. In both the US and Canada it was traditionally assumed that only manual labor would be of any use to Native Americans, and thus half the day was spent in vocational training, often in farming. (This reminds me of how Woodrow Wilson said that we needed a small group of people with a liberal education, and a much larger group who would forego a liberal education and learn to perform specific manual tasks.) In fact, Native Americans acculturated in these schools were not accepted into white society, but neither could they easily return to their original societies, having often forgotten the native language and skills. One article describes how assimilation was forced on these children:

A typical daily schedule at a boarding school began with an early wake-up call followed by a series of tasks punctuated by the ringing of bells. Students were required to march from one activity to the next. Regular inspections and drills took place outdoors with platoons organized according to age and rank. Competitions were held to see which group could achieve the finest marching formation.

Everything happened by bells, 'triangles' they were called. A triangle would ring in the morning and we would all run, line up, march in, get our little quota of tooth powder, wash our teeth, brush our hair, wash our hands and faces, and then we all lined up and marched outside. Whether it was raining, snowing or blowing, we all went outside and did what was called ‘setting up exercises´ for twenty minutes. (Joyce Simmons Cheeka, Tulalip Indian School, memoirs collected by Finley)

Conformity to rules and regulations was strongly encouraged:

We went from the tallest to the littlest, all the way down in companies. We had A, B, C, D companies. E Company was the Lazy Company, those that just couldn't get up and make it. They had all kinds of demerits for those people. They thought they'd shame them a little bit if they made an extra company and called it the Lazy Company. (Helma Ward, Makah, Tulalip Indian School, from interview with Carolyn Marr) .

. . .

For some students, the desire for freedom and the pull of their family combined with strong discontent caused them to run away. At Chemawa, for example, there were 46 "desertions" recorded in 1921, followed by 70 in 1922. Punishment of runaways was usually harsh, as the offenders became examples held up before their fellow students:

Two of our girls ran away...but they got caught. They tied their legs up, tied their hands behind their backs, put them in the middle of the hallway so that if they fell, fell asleep or something, the matron would hear them and she'd get out there and whip them and make them stand up again. (Helma Ward, Makah, interview with Carolyn Marr)

A similar program, ostensibly put in place for the welfare of children, but in fact used as a method of cultural warfare, was used in Australia all the way up into the 1970's. You may have heard of Australia's "Stolen Generation," referring to the aboriginal children abducted from their homes and placed in chuch- or state-run boarding schools. From Wikipedia:

According to a government enquiry on the topic, at least 30,000 children were removed from their parents, and the figure may be substantially higher (the report notes that formal records of removals were very poorly kept). Percentage estimates were given that 10–30% of all Aboriginal children born during the seventy year period were removed.

Additionally, although it's too depressing for me to locate all the details, the nazis abducted possibly as many as 250,000 Aryan-looking children from Poland, Russia, and other nations. Younger children were sent to German families, while older children were often sent into state-run boarding schools (those who did not meet racial criteria were sent to concentration camps). In the boarding schools children were brainwashed to believe that the German people were superior and that they themselves were German, as evidenced by their blonde hair and blue eyes; they were "Germanized," to use the nazi term. I can't help but note that in the Carlisle and other Indian schools, students were brainwashed to believe that Native Americans were cruel savages who burned towns to the ground and scalped innocent people without provocation. They were told they could choose not to be Indian; they could be anglicized.

Schools, then, have been used in cultural warfare. Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide states:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

One could argue that schooling has been used within a policy of genocide by the United States, Germany, and Australia.

Though I am not making a comparison of our current public schools to the above egregious examples, I think they bear keeping in mind. In the three cases I have mentioned, the authorities claimed that it was being done for the welfare of the children. I ran across recent articles that described the Carlisle school as "drawing students" or "accepting students" as if it were a desirable privilege; a few Australian MPs persist in claiming that removal from their families actually benefitted aboriginal children.

Currently, I think most Americans have an unquestioning, automatic belief that school and institutional education are beneficial, particularly to the poor. But this argument was also made in the US and Australia because native peoples had no running water, or no electricity, or had lower incomes. It would be one thing if public schools did a better job of providing equal opportunity, but they do not (see Disadvantaged Children). When Native Americans were taken away to be assimilated into white culture, it was said (by those in power) to be their only way of surviving; and yet still they faced racism and discrimination, and they were not accepted as whites. Taking children from their homes 35 hours per week is hardly akin to removing all contact with their families; I don't suggest these are equal. (Gatto suggests that his students had roughly 9 hours per week not taken up by sleep, school, or television.) I only suggest that the examples in this post are a relevant part of the context.

Historically, schools have been put to fascist purposes, they have been used by the state as a means of control and assimilation, they have been sold to the public in a paternalistic and false way as a means of lifting up the disadvantaged. And yet many people, and certainly the vast majority of liberals and progressives, continue to treat institutional education as intrinsically helpful to the populace. Seeing schools so simplistically ignores history.