Paper 2

English 101

Instructor-

10 February, 2014.

A journey towards civilization

“Civilize them with a stick” is an article authored by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes

conjointly, which portrays the personal experiences of the author Mary Crow Dog when she was

forced to attend a Catholic school as a Lakota Indian. After experiencing several inhumane

treatments from that school, she became suspicious and started to question the education she was

receiving. From my point of view it seemed that the students of that boarding school did not

know how a proper learning environment should be like. In fact, the basic aim of providing

education should be to let the children feel attracted towards the learning process and to make

them interested to learn any topic with enormous enjoyment.

Mary Crow Dog took a very determined, opinionated and strong posture for describing

the faulty teaching methods of the boarding school in this article. She started by comparing the

Native American children in boarding schools with the victims of Nazi concentration camps.

Nazi camps were established by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. About 20,000 camps

were established to imprison millions of victims and the victims used to live inhumane lives

there. Similarly, the poor children of that catholic school used to be tortured by their teachers

instead of being loved and educated properly. The author described it following way:

Even now, when these schools are much improved, when the buildings are new,

all gleaming steel and glass, the food tolerable, the teachers well-trained and

well-intentioned, even trained in child psychology – unfortunately the psychology

of white children, which is different from ours –...