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The curriculum must not be uniform and standardized. The text books must not be prescribed. The teacher must be free to gather material from the life of the Indians about her, so that the little children may proceed from the known to the unknown and not be plunged at once into a world where all is unknown and unfamiliar. The little desert Indian in an early grade who is required to read in English from a standard school reader about the ship that sails the sea has no mental background to understand what it is all about and the task of the teacher is rendered almost impossible. The material, particularly the early material, must come from local Indian life, or at least be within the scope of the child’s experience.
To get teachers and school supervisors who are competent to fit the school to the needs of the children, the Indian Service must raise its entrance requirements and increase its salary scale. The need is not so much for a great increase in entrance salaries as for an increase in the salary range which will permit of rewarding efficient teachers and offering them an inducement to remain in the Indian Service. To offer considerable opportunity for advancement in salary with increasing length of satisfactory service, is now the common practice of the better school systems of the country, and the government must adopt the same system if it expects to draw into its service some of the best of the new teachers. The Indian schools as a matter of fact require better teachers than do the city school systems for white children. The teacher in the Indian schools has the harder task and cannot secure so much assistance from supervisory officers.
The boarding schools demand special consideration. Under the section on health the recommendations have been summarized that relate to the health of the child, better diet, less over-crowding, less heavy productive work, more thorough physical examinations, and better correlation of remediable defects. These factors have an important bearing on education itself that need not be discussed in this brief summary. It should, however, be said specifically that the half-day plan, with its large amount of non-educational productive labor, tends materially to reduce the efficiency of the boarding schools as educational institutions.
The objection to the heavy assignments of purely productive labor must not be construed as a recommendation against industrial education. On the contrary it is specifically recommended that the