Native American Schools

The case of Theodore Roosevelt School implied how the use of words, a school program, and uniform can be used to modify students’ behavior to be a certain way. In this sense, the influence of teachers and curriculum at school are very powerful. The authors maintained that “The modification of behavior was approached not as an authoritarian reprogramming, but rather as a project where a hidden curriculum inculcated in each student a desire to voluntary identify with the before/after narrative and become useful, healthy, and happy.” In other words, teachers can direct students to voluntarily change their behavior. This is also reflected by the Foucault’s idea that “the students themselves became the vehicles of power, not simply its point of application.”
The essay Assimilation Reborn discusses whether the assimilation process of Indian schools carried the idea of culture in the singular or cultural pluralism. Foucault argues that “the disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is orientated towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an evolutive time.” In Foucault sense, I thought as long as the American government tries to assimilate Native Americans to their culture, the cultural pluralism won’t be achieved because the process of discipline is carried out in a linear way.