This authoritative volume puts the schooling of Native American children in the broader context of the country's educational agenda and demonstrates how Native American learning continues to be a challenge to minority education in the United States. This fascinating overview provides a comprehensive introduction to the education of Native Americans in the United States. Historically, schools were seen as essential to formal education but also as the custodians of community values, a way to socialize Native Americans into the European way of life. Native American Education: A Reference Handbook describes the role played by various churches and missionaries and their different approaches to education against a backdrop of mostly unfamiliar social and legal history. For example, most Americans probably do not know that Indians helped write the Constitution and that an Indian served as vice president of the United States. Author Lorraine Hale provides strategies for preserving Indian culture within the framework of modern American education. Presents a historical background on the evolution of Native American education from the advancing colonization of North America beginning in the 1700s to the increasing government involvement in running Native American schools through the 1900s Includes coverage from the efforts of the Jesuits beginning in 1492 to teach Native Americans in Spanish and convert them to Catholicism to the publication in 1991 of Indian Nations at Risk by the Department of Education