In Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes the education of a fictional student who follows his interests and discovers facts by problem-solving. Rousseau’s educational philosophy was embraced by child-centered progressives committed to advancing a distinctively democratic conception of education. They believed that Rousseau outlined principles for forming autonomous and independent citizens – precisely the kind of citizens ready to meet the demands of democratic self-government. In other works, however, Rousseau calls for a system of public schooling that forms patriots. He writes that education “must give souls the national form, and so direct their tastes and opinions that they will be patriotic by inclination, passion, necessity.” Can this authoritarian approach to education be reconciled with the laissez-faire principles of Emile? Should either of these educational visions be called democratic? This chapter offers answers to those questions and argues that, ultimately, both approaches aim to improve how citizens relate to one another.

This essay focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s development of a school for the Paiutes that would avoid the assimilationist violence often associated with white-run schools for Native Americans in the nineteenth century. Following her book Life Among the Piutes into this history gives us a way of thinking about Native American literature more broadly, and the histories that led to its emergence, its necessity, in a nation determined to control the voices and destinies of Native Americans across the country. To become educated at Winnemucca’s school is not to “become white.” A combination of Northern Paiute traditions and Elizabeth Peabody’s feminist-minded educational philosophy, the Peabody Institute was a powerful counterpoint to the U.S. boarding schools of the time. Winnemucca’s interpretation of her school is apparent in several features: the centrality of the mother figure; the emphasis on Native American languages, traditions, and cultures; and the role of the Native American woman – the interpreter – as educator. In these terms, the Native American woman determines the direction of her school, a truly anti-colonial move. As Life Among the Piutes and the nineteenth-century newspaper articles and letters teach us, then, there was an alternative to the colonialist boarding school.