Author David Wallace Adams grew up in southern California and on family outings his parents would drive past Sherman Institute, a school for Native Americans. As a child, the school deeply interested Adams and this fascination carried into adulthood. This interest led him to question “how policymakers sought to use the schoolhouse—specifically the boarding schools—as in instrument for acculturating Indian youth to ‘American’ ways of thinking and living.” His argument takes a tripartite structure and claims that policy formation used education as a key in new policies concerning Indians, educational policy institutionalized the practice of “civilizing” Indian youth, and that students responded to these efforts in various life-altering ways.…show more content… He supports the first statement of his tripartite argument concerning the use of education in Indian policy in the second chapter by describing the heightened focus that policymakers engaged in when deciding which type of school would be best for Indian children for assimilation. Policymakers considered the day school method at first, but it was not effective enough in civilizing the youth. Policymakers then tried reservation boarding schools, which fared better than day schools and they allocated a significant amount of government resources to them for their construction and instruction. Furthermore, with the success of Pratt and Armstrong, policymakers gained confidence in off-reservation schools and more than twenty-five schools opened. This heavy focus on schools for Indian youth shows the importance that education played in Indian
