Among the objectives that Chapter 6 seeks to achieve are these:
This chapter seeks to exercise students' thinking about how modern liberalism operates in the context of a specific historical problem: the coexistence of European Americans and indigenous Americans in the twentieth century.
Students may evaluate the degree to which modern liberal ideology has affected American Indians' efforts to determine their own lives and futures.
In particular, instructors should highlight the conflicts between modern liberal views of progress and Native American commitments to cultural traditions. Students may discuss the issue of school control and rights to curriculum.
This chapter should help students evaluate progressive education as conceived by American government officials, and whether it was an appropriate response to Native American educational needs.
Students should be able to discuss the careers and thinking of John Collier and Willard Walcott Beatty and how they apply liberal educational commitments to Native American culture.
A final objective is to engage students in discussing whether cultural pluralism was a more democratic educational and cultural aim than cultural assimilation for American Indians in the first half of the twentieth century.
