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Show 26 . REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. matriculates there. Both principle and precedent seem to me to har-monize with sound reason. The only .argument with even a color of merit that I have ever heard advanced in favor of the perpetuation of the noureservation school system was propounded to me this summer by a good woman who has done much benevolent work among our Indian tribes. After admitting that there was no logical defense forthe system under pres-ent conditions, she added : But I shall be sorry to see these schools disappear, for they offer the only chance the children on my reserva-tion have for seeing the outside world." When I inquired how much of the real outside world a child saw while mewed up within the compound of a school run under the strict institutional discipline necessary in one of these large schools, she admitted that it was little; "Still," she persisted, " they do learn a great deal when they are sent from the school into the homes and farms of the neighbor-hood, under the ' outing system.' " I was-obliged to remind her that this was actually an argument against the schools, as the " outing " system was so called because it took the children out of a school in C' order to teach them something they eonld never learn inside of it. Moreover, as I have explained in earlier reports, I am building up an outing system on a vastly bigger, broader, and more practical basis than was ever known before, and extendingit to the schools in the reservations as well as those outside. The actual employment of the yonng people, at wages measured by the honest market value of their labor instead of by the artificial standards.of philanthropy, will give them a much clearer and more useful view of life than any outing sys-tem devised as a part of a school curriculum. It also has the virtue of serving as a test of character under the very conditions which will confront them when they leave schools of all sorts behind them and join in the universal struggle for a livelihood. An objection to all boarding schools for Indian children, whether on or off the reservations, is that the pupil grows up amid surroundings which he will never see d ~ l i c a t e din his own home. Steam heating, elect& lighting, mechanical devices for doing everything-these cul-tivate in him a contempt for the homely things whihh must make up his,environment as a poor settler in a frontier country. His ideas of the relations of things are distorted; for his mind is not developed enough to enable him to sift and assort his observations and distin-guish between essentials and non,essentials, between the comforts which are within his reach and the luxuries which are beyond his legitimate aspirations. Nay, the cost of maintaining one of these establishments with its army of employees will hardly .be appreciated |
