Then imagine you are an American Indian student returning from a year at one of these schools. You decide to write a letter explaining why no more children should be sent to the white boarding schools. What arguments would you make, and how? Put your case in a three to four paragraph persuasive essay.
Answers
The government paid religious orders to provide basic education to Native American children on reservations. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) founded additional boarding schools based on the assimilation model of the off-reservation Carlisle Indian Industrial School.The federal government began sending American Indians to off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870s, when the United States was still at war withIndians. An Army officer, Richard Pratt, founded the first of these schools.In the 1870s and 1880s a few small reservation boarding schools were established on the Chehalis, Skokomish and Makah Reservations. These institutions, which had fewer than 50 students, were all closed by 1896 and replaced by day schools.By the 1880s, the U.S. operated 60 schools for 6,200 Indian students, including reservation day schools and reservation boarding schools.The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was founded in October 1879 and was designed to assimilate students into the mainstream culture. It was housed in Carlisle, PA at the Carlisle Barracks, now the home of the U.S. Army War College.A boarding school provides education for pupils who live on the premises, as opposed to a day school. The word "boarding" is used in the sense of "room and board", i.e. lodging and meals. As they have existed for many centuries, and now extend across many countries, their function and ethos varies greatly.Boarding school students can focus better on their studies because television, video games, phones and other distractors are limited. These young scholars usually perform better academically because they live in an environment that is conducive to learning.