Szasz and Ryan

What struck me about this reading (American Indian Education), actually, was how susceptible education is to the times and the events that are taking place. The Indian children and communities themselves didn't really seem to have much of a say in if or how they were educated by Whites (this paper doesn't really focus on that though, glossing over the issue with phrases like, "...individual Indians were taken into colonial homes; sometimes willingly, sometimes as hostages"(284).)We get a little glimpse of the ideas behind the movement: "The educational and civilizing goals of the Peace Policy did not differ from those of the early nineteenth century. They were "to demolish the Indians' communal life, to wreck tribal identity and values, and to implant different indivualist ideology" (293), and, for the Carlisle Indian School, "...native cultures held no significance; the future of his students lay in their role as mainstream Americans...The end to be gained...is the complete civilization of the Indian...and the sooner all tribal relations are broken up; the sooner the Indian loses all of his Indian ways, even his language, the better it will be" (291). For the most part, all of these schools sound like servant training centers, perhaps with the exception of the community schools on the reservation that taught Indian students in their own language and instructed them in someof their own traditions.
But I feel like this reading is leaving something out. It gives dates and facts, but the ideology behind these quotes points to something more that seemes to be shushed in this essay, and I'm not exactly satisfied with this. Besides war and economics, there must have been much more behind what was causing the shifts in how the schools were operated.