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Show ao REPORT OF CoMMIssIoNEB OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. certain .features in each, with the purpose of letting it gradually specialize in the lihe which its location, climate, and other conditions particularly suit it to follow. For example, the school at Carlisle, Pa., is the only one of its kind which is situated in the East.' As some of the industries hitherto most prominent in the instruction given at this school can he experi-mentally demonstrated only in the region where they are later to be followed for a livelihood, I have preferred to emphasize herethose applied arts whose products find the largest market in the East, nnd to encourage the attendance only of those Indian youth who entertain a notion of settling in the East, or who need a certain familiarity with eastern conditions in order to succeed somewhere else, and who in any event are strong enough physically and well enough trained in taking care of themselves to he safely sent so far away from home and into an absolutely alien climate. Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kans., being situated in the Middle West, is near the best market for Indian clerical labor, and hence a special emphasis ought to he given there to the business course, wit:h its training in stenography; type-. writing, bookkeeping, and the lie. Sherman Institute is in the heart of the southwestern orange country, so that fruit culture ought to, and does,fill a large space in its curriculum. These examples will suffice to convey ths idea of what I have in view in the develop- - ment of nonreservation schools along the lines which nature, rather than human whim or artifice, has marked out for them. PROJECTED SCHOOL IXPROVEMENTS. Apropos of this general subject of our schools and the health and welfare of the pupils in them, I am now engaged in studying out some possible improvements in other schools than those remote from the reservations. The boarding schools on the reservations, as long as we are to continue them, demand more or less overhauling as to methods. For one thing, the present practice of keeping all pupils for a ten-months term I consider a mistake, especially in those places where the adult Indians are already well along on the road to civili-zation and self-support. The youngest of the children-say, from 5 to 12 years--ought not to he separated for the better part of a year from their homes and parents; it would he wiser, in my judgment, to let them attend three months in the fall and three months in the spring, choosing those seasons in which they would need least cod-dling and when they could spend all of each day except a, few study hours out of doors. The well-grown boys and girls-from 15 to 20 and upward-whose help is really a necessity to their parents on the family farm and in the household, could he taken only for the winter months, when there is least of their kind of work to do at home and when, consequently, they could be spared without inconvenience. The |