HOW HAS THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM CONTRIBUTED TO EQUALITY?
An examination of how different groups have been treated in our educational system over the past four centuries provides insights into the importance of education in the struggle for equality in the United States. All groups have fought for quality education for their children. The progress toward ridding the nation of inequality and providing equal education for all students has involved committed people of color as well as whites. The joy in this sad history of discrimination and inequality is that much has changed, especially in the past 50 years. In addition, teachers are key in providing a quality and equitable education for all students. Our understanding of how we got to where we are today should encourage us to make a commitment to ensure that all of our future students have every possible opportunity to learn. A chronology of significant events in providing equality for students is shown in Table 6.3.
First Americans
European colonists thought that American Indian leaders should be educated in the schools of the colonists for the purposes of learning Christianity and the Anglo-Saxon culture, with the goal of replacing their native cultures and languages. When Virginia’s William and Mary College was established in 1693, a part of its mission was the education of Native American students (Glenn, 2011). New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College had the same goal when it was established in 1780, but most of its students were white (Spring, 2011).
Deeper Look Read more about the history and current state of Native American education.
Resistance to Conversion
The conversion of American Indians to the Anglo-Saxon culture met with great resistance from tribes and their members. The conversion that did occur was most often among the families formed by marriages of whites and American Indians. Because the government’s plans for deculturalizing Native Americans were ineffective, Congress passed the Civilization Act of 1819 with the explicit purpose of culturally transforming the native population, especially the southern tribes. To move the effort forward, the Superintendent of Indian Trade, Thomas L. McKenney, encouraged the establishment of tribal schools with missionary teachers. The Protestant churches that joined this effort believed that the spread of Anglo-Saxon culture around the world was part of the nation’s manifest destiny . Most Native American families who participated in the missionary schools had a different goal than the federal government. They were interested in literacy, not the extinction of their cultures or the adoption of Christianity (Spring, 2011).
One of the federal government’s goals for the tribes in the south was to convince tribal members to divide tribal lands into private property that could then be sold to Anglo settlers—a goal that was reinforced by missionary schools. When few Native Americans were willing to sell tribal lands, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, authorizing the president of the United States to set aside land west of the Mississippi River for Native Americans who then were living in the southern states east of the Mississippi River. Within a few years, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaw, Chickasaws, and Seminoles were forcibly moved to the new “Indian Territory.” In the Trail of Tears one in four Cherokees died on the trek west from their ancestral homeland in Georgia. In the new territory, which is now Oklahoma, tribes established their own schools. By 1848 the Choctaws had nine boarding schools with many Choctaw teachers. The Choctaws also established segregated schools for the children of freed slaves after the Civil War and a system of schools that included academies for boys and girls (Spring, 2011).