One of the greatest myths ever perpetuated by the educational textbook industry is the notion that education in the United States began with the English. According to most introductory textbooks on the market today, education began with the Reformation in Europe, moved through the Enlightenment, and ultimately was brought to the New World by the English under whom the schools flourished and education took its roots. Such an assertion completely ignores thousands of years of human development amongst the aboriginal peoples that occurred before the English arrived; it also shows a blatant disregard for the other African and European groups that were in the New World prior to the English arrival. To fully understand the development of schooling in the United States and its relationship to the building and continuance of the nation, one must fully understand all of the peoples who have lived in this nation.
Was There Education in Pre-European Exploration North America?
Before an exploration of education amongst the multitude of American Indian peoples commences, two serious and significant distinctions must be made. First, the reader must understand the difference between schooling and education. Education is any means that a society uses to transmit its culture. It includes schools, churches, mass media (including social media), families, friends, jobs, coworkers, and all other things/groups from which people learn on a day-to-day basis. Schooling, on the other hand, is the formal apparatus that a society develops to achieve specific educational goals, primarily to perpetuate its own norms and mores. The goals of schooling in the United States have developed over time: while the list has expanded and evolved, we have not fully eliminated any of the purposes that schooling has served throughout history. Goals/purposes of schooling include the following:
- Religious (ranging from preparing citizens to live in a theocracy to teaching character and morality);
- Political (preserving the United States as a republic);
- Social (making âgood Americansâ out of citizens by perpetuating Eurocentric, pan-protestant views);
- Economic (stabilizing the nationâs economy, ranging from preparing workers for the factories to preparing workers for the twenty-first-century global economy); and
- Custodial (keeping children off the streets, out of the workforce, and out of trouble).
A second distinction that must be made is that, while it is easy to discuss education amongst the Native American peoples, this approach relies upon commonalities that border up on stereotype. Prior to Columbusâ arrival, there were between 40 and 90 million people living in North America. It is difficult almost to the point of impossibility to count the number of distinct nations that existed prior to Columbus. Most indigenous peoples in North America followed familial groups, clans, and bands. The number is made even more questionable due to the fact that some smaller groups were constantly merging into newer larger groups or disappearing entirely. It is a European notion to call these distinct groups ânationsâ any time a group of people shared a common language and customs. By 1700, there were between 50 and 60 distinct aboriginal ânationsâ east of the Mississippi River; there were at least 50 to the west. These numbers, of course, do not count the groups that merged without European knowledge. Some more liberal estimates argue there were over 2000 distinct languages and cultures spoken prior to European exploration.
Just as referring to a group of aboriginal peoples as a ânationâ was a European invention, so too is the notion that because American Indian peoples lacked formal schooling, they also lacked education. Nothing can be further from the truth. Using the oral tradition, American Indian peoples had a very systematic method of education for their youth. Characteristic elements that cut across cultures included:
- It was community based; education of youth was the responsibility of all;
- It was deeply rooted in teaching balance in nature and preparing children to be stewards of the environment;
- It combined testing and play (similar to what we would consider a Montessori method today) to challenge and assess the youth via a system that emphasized cooperation, not competition; and
- Then, as now, the purpose of education was ultimately to produce good citizens that knew their role in society and functioned well within it.
Joseph Campbell and other similar scholars remind us the oral tradition was generally used for four overreaching purposes. First, it was a means of preservation of the history of the people, whether a family, clan, band, or ânation.â Most groups had one member whose sole job was to remember the ongoing history of the people and pass it along to the next generationâa formalized history teacher, as it were.
Second, the oral tradition was meant to teach basic moral values. Children were taught essentially the same, if not higher, moral code as that was taught throughout the so-called civilized, formal Christian religious groups. While the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that those who do ill while alive get punished in the afterlife, many indigenous people taught their children the punishment would come while still in this world.
Third, the oral tradition was often meant to teach practical lessons in ways that people could understand. On one level, this meant a formalized system of apprenticeships that rivaled any European model. On another, this meant using faith-based stories to teach practical lessons. Instructing youth, for example, not to wander too far into the woods because either a wild animal or a rival group would get them would be heard as a challenge; telling children from their earliest days that there exist evil monsters beyond the trees and to be good meant they needed to stay near tended to keep the children close.
Fourth, the oral tradition was meant to satisfy curiosity, to explain the unexplainable. The natural world is full of mystery and wonder; throughout time, people have been coming up ways to explain these mysteriesâthe most obvious being, of course, âhow did we get here?â One sample answer comes from the Arapaho people, who taught that the First Pipe Keeper floated on a limitless body of water with the Flat Pipe. He fasted and prayed to the Creator, who inspired him to send the duck to search beneath the waterâs surface. The duck emerged with a little bit of dirt, which the First Pipe Keeper put on the Pipe. Then he sent the turtle to the bottom, and it too returned with dirt which the First Pipe Keeper also put on the Pipe. The First Pipe Keeper blew off the dirt into the four directions which created the earth, sun, and moon. Soon after, he created vegetable and animal life, day and night and the four seasons. He created man and woman, and taught them the rites they would need.
Beyond Campbellâs general purposes of the oral tradition, more specifically education amongst the American Indian peoples instilled all of the most commonly held attributes of being a good citizen: strong spiritual awareness, awareness of cultural heritage, respect for the land and the flora and fauna upon it, and vocational development. Children were playing, but the games were also means of assessing skills and sorting children into their likely future roles. Of course, the specifics of these purposes and techniques used vary greatly from region to region of what would become the United States. Unfortunately, the purposes of education among the indigenous people of the United States did not carry over through European colonization to impact the purposes of schooling in the ânew world.â
What Education Did the Pre-English European Explorers Bring?
- Key terms: Deculturalization
Before the English arrived, there were a great many people who landed in the New World. There is evidence that African explorers reached South America well before any Europeans. The Norse established a relatively temporary colony; the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish and the French all had well established colonies throughout the Americas prior to the Pilgrimâs arrival.
The Spanish primarily settled in what is now the southeastern United States and migrated westward. The Spanish chiefly came for both economic and religious purposes; they wanted to get spices and precious metals, and of course trained the natives to be happy, docile workers. In the process, they also wanted to save the souls of the âheathenâ peoples (who, in actuality, had a much deeper spirituality, sense of community, and sense of morality than their so-called European âsuperiorsâ).
To this end, the Spanish began a program of supervised segregation in which they opened up dormitory schools in an attempt to settle the migratory peoples then countered. These encomiendas were government controlled. Many granted ownership rights over American Indians to the colonists (as well as responsibility for the welfare of the people). Unlike the English that would follow, Indian slave children attended school side-by-side with the children of the colonists; however, this practice ended after the Pope Rebellion, an Indian revolt in 1680. At this time, a group led by Pope overtook the Santa Fe mission in an attempt at uniting the various Pueblo nations. However, internal discord among them led to their quick overturn, and the Spanish retook the city by 1693.
Spanish Jesuits established mission schools known as reductions at the same time. These mission schools used traditional European methods to teach Christian theology to Indian youth. The Jesuits attempted to keep the Indians from being insulated; they taught the aboriginal peoples to be self-governing in the European tradition. In the process, the Jesuits strove to sacrifice the culture of the American Indians in favor of a more âproperâ European culture. Elements of this model of schooling included emphasis on competition, heavy discipline, and a Eurocentric curriculum rooted deeply in the Catholic faith.
The Spanish colonists established two purposes of schooling in the United States that are still perpetuated in some means today. The first is the religious purposeâeducation and to save souls. Why do we teach children to learn to read? So the children can read their catechism and Bible. Why did they teach children civic duty? Because they were essentially living in a theocracy, where all law is Godâs law. The religious purpose of education moved to the fore with the arrival of the Puritans (see Chap. 2).
The second purpose established by the Spanish was, to use a term coined by Joel Spring, deculturalization. Spanish colonists, Jesuit or secular, sought to destroy the culture of the Indian people and completely replace it with what they considered to be a superior culture. This form of cultural genocide was perpetuated in the United States well into the twentieth century, if not (as many argue) still happening today; this was demonstrated by such practices as the reservation system and Bureau of In...