Education vs Re-Education
Education has always meant more than acquiring knowledge. It means participating in institutions and cultural traditions that preserve knowledge for future generations.
When John Eliot, the New England Company, and Harvard College marketed themselves to the British Parliament and wealthy British families for funding in colonial America, they did so under the banner of a philanthropic endeavor to bring Christianity to the indigenous nations they encountered. There was a sense that these nations were not merely different as the ones they grouped into the “Orient”, but primitive relative to the standards of “civilization” established by the European powers. Thus begins the infamous “White Man’s Burden” as a moral justification for a wide range of atrocities.
I don’t believe it was insincere for many of the missionaries and financial sponsors. Eliot’s frustration with the difficulties in establishing new educational infrastructure seemed genuine, even if much of the correspondence was marketing to grow support from a Puritan Parliament looking to prove the growth potential of their sect after the Reformation. They did seem to believe they were acting in the greater good to bring nations out of poverty and into what they considered “civilization”, and they were willing to accept that educational rational discourse in English-speaking institutions could bring members of indigenous nations into the Puritan framework.
However, Eliot eventually concluded that it was nearly impossible to spread the Puritan framework if the children of indigenous nations were returning home everyday to their communities and kinship networks. After all, the 17th century colonialists considered the mere implication of magic or remote causes aside from God heretical enough to burn women as witches without a fair trial with due process. Indigenous nations and their pantheons of spirituality were generally viewed as Satanic and demonic in defiance of a monotheistic and omniscient Christian God’s will. So destroying or separating existing community networks was seen as a necessary step in “civilizing” these nations. Ironic given how heavily dependent the early colonists were on the knowledge shared by these very groups, including a fascinating history of Western alchemists who evaded the Salem hysteria in their exchanges with the elders, diplomats, healers, and leaders to understand the science behind the world they just discovered.
So re-education is often a way of communicating that a new system will be designed that either destroys the old system or converts individuals into a new one. This is sometimes desirable, like our attempts to reeducate Nazis in Germany after World War II or religious scholars who talk to detainees with extremist beliefs to try and deradicalize them from martyrdom using religious scriptures. This is also sometimes undesirable, like when it was signaling the beginning of waves of genocidal movements to purge multiple continents of any institution that did not submit to the Eurocentric powers, under the belief that only they were capable of constructing “civilization.” Re-education is a very dicey concept to flippantly throw around when discussing social reforms.
Missionary Re-Education in America
When European colonialists began propping up settlements along the East Coast, they dealt heavily with the Algonquian-speaking peoples: the Massachusett, the Wampanoag, the Nipmuc, and the Narragansett. In 1643, the British trader and Puritan missionary Roger Williams penned A Key Into The Language of America which contained the vocabulary and practices of the Narragansett he encountered as a trusted diplomat. Since Williams was educated in traditional elite European institutions, we might expect him to look for institutions or norms he would map into an education system as he understood it, but he didn’t.
Rather than any dedicated delivery of lectures by designated instructors who often had elite backgrounds, children seemed to learn from the adults around them by directly imitating their dynamics. Rather than corporal punishment or institutionalization, evidence seems to suggest that these nations were largely correcting their children through affectionate means like demonstrating behavior to imitate or making jokes about mistakes to lighten the sting of a failed effort. Pain and fear were not necessarily seen as good motivators to rely on. Some modern historians point to Williams’ observation that in teaching situations, words that are best translated as “accompany” or “imitate” were used rather than “lecture” or “recite.
Another aspect of Williams’ description of the Narragansett’s lifestyle was the seasonal fluctation of it, so that what children learned directly tracked changes in the environment. As adults sought different tasks that required different schedules and places, so too did the children find new tasks to imitate and physical terrain to travel. They didn’t need to be told that most practical skills are learned on the job instead of in textbooks, or that real-world impact is the ultimate metric of successful projects.
It might even seem bizarre to tell these children they are not to perform any tasks adults are doing, and they must instead study the history and religion of a place thousands of miles away that they had little direct interaction with before and would likely never see once in their lives. I don’t blame any kid today for asking their teacher what the point of what they’re learning is when we wiped out a bunch of practical learning systems to establish this one that gives no clear feedback except abstract metrics. “Obey with faith, and it might make sense later” is a hard sell if you’re used to seeing the practical outcomes of what you’re learning immediately.