The lure of the wild (Brands)
June 28th, 2007 | Published in Education, History, Quotes
Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
–H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 221