Composition: History & Theory: 1800 - 1865
Multicultural “Education”
Description
In The American School From the Puritans to No Child Left Behind (2008), Joel Spring chronicles a number of developments in multicultural “education” during this time period. 1845-1855 brought the Irish potato famine and English control of Ireland. Both of these factors, Spring notes, led to massive emigration to the U.S. At the time, people resented the Irish immigrants and their Catholicism. This conflict led to the development of independent parochial schools for Catholics following a debate over the secularism of public schools (and their anti-Catholic reading materials and Protestant Bible study courses). Plenary councils held in Baltimore in 1852, 1866, and 1884 argued for the protection of Catholic schools and emphasized religious instruction standing alongside standard instruction. In order to ensure the construction of Catholic schools, individual churches were to build schools nearby. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 gave U.S. citizenship for all native-born Americans (except American Indians). This was followed by the 14th Amendment 1868 which guaranteed U.S. citizenship to naturalized and native-born citizens (again, except for American Indians). In 1870, the Naturalization Act passed in which U.S. citizenship was granted to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent” (185). Segregated schools developed in the late 18th century, but by the 1820s it is evident that the schools do not receive equal funding and support. Whites were ambivalent about educating blacks (there was, essentially, fear in both directions). Literacy was still a punishable crime for enslaved Africans in the South. Circa 1857, Spring notes that “Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were not intended to provide protection for the political rights of blacks” (197).
In order to convince powerful American Indian tribes to sign treaties to sell their land, it became imperative for the government to “civilize” them through education. The missionary educators working with American Indians during this time began the public school day with a prayer and a reading from the Protestant Bible, and classrooms were openly used as a space to convert American Indians. Cultural indoctrination (to agriculture and capitalism) was essential in making tribes agreeable to the notion of selling their lands. In 1819 the Civilization Act allowed funds to employ people of “good and moral character” to educate the “Indians”. American Indians were divided into two camps: progressives were interested in acculturation while traditionalists were opposed to any form of acculturation.
Educators also did not want American Indians to develop a written language. In 1821 Sequoyah developed a system of written language for Cherokees to preserve Cherokee culture. In 1828, the first American Indian newspaper was published, the Cherokee Phoenix , which utilized Sequoyah’s system of letters. This preservation of culture was counteracted with the 1830 Indian Removal Act. In the 1840s schools were developed inside “Indian Territory,” and boarding schools were established. In the 1850s, the Choctaw and Cherokee nations established schools with their own members as instructors. As a result of these bilingual schools, “anthropologists have determined that […] the literacy level in English of western Oklahoma Cherokees was higher than” the populations of “either Texas or Arkansas” (129).
Date of Upload
3/13/09