Sublime

Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s guiding principle for Indian education, as summed up at the nineteenth annual National Conference of Charities and Correction held in Denver, Colorado, in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” This principle resulted in a policy now widely recognized as the embodiment of cultural genocide.

I had one traditional teacher, Doug Spitz, but the way I was taught was very nontraditional.

Indigenous languages were sites of conflict, too. Starting in the late nineteenth century, reformers pushed tens of thousands of Native American children into white-run boarding schools. There, cut off from their families and communities, the students studied English. “We shall break up all the Indian there is in them in a very short time,”

If only he could have convinced the Indian boy that there was no better way for it to have gone, Pratt’s attempted deliverance of the Indians from themselves to themselves, no better plan for America, no better plan for the Indians, no better plan, there was no better plan than that, he said to no one, and faced the wall, and died. Pratt would

When I was a seminary student, I attended one of the great quadrennial conventions of the Student Volunteer Movement. One afternoon some seven hundred of us had a special group meeting, at which a Korean girl was asked to talk to us about her impression of American education. It was an occasion to be remembered. The Korean student was very

In their report, Intelligence Tests and School Reorganization, Terman called for breaking classes into five tracks (gifted, bright, average, slow, and special—echoing the A–E soldier ranking) based on ability, so that America might get the most out of its children.