Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ...concentrate its best efforts. Three and one half years ago, when I had been a year iu the Indian school service, I wrote from Fort Defiance, N. Mex., to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and to the Secretary of the Interior, as follows: On my arrival tit this place, I entered my thirty-third Indian reservation, in all of which I have studied to the best of my ability the question of Indian education. Not a little time has been spent in each of the larger training schools, but much more time face to face with the great needs of the reservations, which present the primary phases of the Indian educational problem. As the result, some ideas held tentatively at first have been settling into clearer and more decided convictions. Having thus studied this problem in llicfield, in personal contact with the living issues, I respectfully avail myself of the advisory functions of my ofliee, and speak with greater confidence upon some matters than heretofore I have done. When I left Washington the attention of the office was much directed to the enlargement of the great training schools--(, 'arlisle, Haskell, Genoa, and C'hilocco, and to the building of another such at Pierre. S. Dak. I tacitly assented to the policy, though not without grave doubts as to its wisdom, at this time. It is not from lack of faith in those schools, for I have the fullest confidence, but from a growing conviction that the present most important and urgent work is in reservation schools, which greatly need to be enlarged and multiplied, and which, I fear, will be hindered, and possibly prevented, by the absorption of so much of the limited appropriations granted by Congress, for those large schools. The time has come to build more at the base and less at the apex. The.