IN WRITING THE SCHOOL UPON A HILL AND PARTICULARLY CHAPTER 6 above, I was forcibly struck by the contrast between the educational styles and results of the Indians and the English colonists. Although the colonists were reasonably adept at educating their own kind for the limited number of social and spiritual roles they could expect to play in New (or old) England, they were much less successful at fitting other, ethnically different peoples for those roles or any roles other than the most demeaning. As I tried to show in Chapter 4, the major cause of failure was the unwillingness of the English to take their Indian students into their hearts and homes, the primary agencies of enculturation for their own children. This reluctance was rooted in their overweening sense of cultural and later racial superiority, attitudes that the Indians had no difficulty in perceiving.
At the same time, I learned what a few anthropologists had already known but colonial historians had virtually ignored, namely, that the Indians were not only proficient in educating their own children without resorting to physical compulsion or emotional undercutting, but also in converting enemies--Indian and white, young and old--to their way of life. In "Scholastic Philosophy" I could do no more than sketch the dimensions and seriousness of the Indians' educational threat to the "City upon a Hill," but as soon as the book was completed I returned to the subject of the "white Indians" in order to probe the process of
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