Indian boarding schools

     In the 1870s, the US government was struggling to introduce the "American lifestyle" to Native Americans. Two men named Herbert Welsh and Henry Pancoast, formed a school for Native American children just off of a reservation in Washington. Their purpose was to teach these children how to be more like all of the white Americans living around them. Their logic was that if they could teach the children the best way to act off of the reservation, then the children could teach the parents how to act. Children took classes in reading and writing, but the most important class that they took was learning how to speak the English language. These classes were to help break the cultural divide between the  By the end of the decade, over 60 schools had been built in different parts of the US. 

     Some people didn't feel as though the schools close to the reservations were getting through to the children. So Col. Richard Henry Pratt chose do take a slightly different route with his school. He opened a boarding school, so as to remove the children from their everyday lives as Native Americans. He was headmaster of his school for 25 years, and all of those years, he lived by the phrase "kill the Indian, save the man", and that's exactly what he tried to do. He gave the children uniforms and new names to go by, as well as white families to live with and be a part of when school wasn't in session. He tried to absolutely destroy the background that these children knew from birth, all because the Indian way of life wasn't suitable to white people. 

     I personally don't believe that these schools were necessary, nor were they morally right for these kids to be uprooted from their families and the culture of their ancestors taken away from them for the comfort and convenience of others. 

Sources:

http://americanindian.si.edu/education/codetalkers/html/chapter3.html

http://www.pbs.org/indiancountry/history/boarding.html

http://www.nrcprograms.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools