After reading The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune (in preparation for my September 30th session), I took to Tik Tok to express how deeply I enjoyed it. Who wouldn’t enjoy it? It’s a story about a magical found family, and V.E. Schwab said reading it was “like being wrapped up in a big gay blanket.”

Then the people of Tik Tok told me to do a little more research – so I did. In a podcast on the novel, Klune explained his inspiration behind The House in the Cerulean Sea was

the Sixties Scoop, which was in Canada during the fifties and sixties, where indigenous children were taken from their homes and put into government sanctioned orphanages, for lack of a better word… I didn’t want to co-opt, you know, a history that wasn’t mine. I’m a cis white dude, so I can’t ever really go through something like what those children had to go through. So I sat down and I was like, I’m just going to write this as a fantasy.

Whether or not you think that T.J. Klune co-opted a history that wasn’t his, he definitely romanticized the realities of residential schools.

The Realities of Residential Schools

Klune references Canada in the fifties and sixties, but residential schools existed in the U.S., Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, and South Africa. These schools began in the early 1800s and continued for more than 150 years; the last Canadian school closed in 1996. In Canada alone, an estimated 150,000 children attended these schools, and at least 6,000 died there.

These “federal Indian boarding schools”, also called the “industrial school” system, were funded by governments and generally run by Christian denominations. The schools abducted Indigenous children from their families, cut their hair, dressed them in uniforms, changed their names, and punished them for any display of their native language, customs, or beliefs.

The majority of the school day was dedicated to unpaid labor that prepared Native American children for domestic service and maintenance work. Upon graduating, the children would be undereducated, assimilated workers for low-paying jobs. As U.S military officer Captain Richard Henry Pratt said in 1892, the goal of the residential schools was to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

This is all pretty shocking to read about, but it makes a lot of sense when you look into the history of the public education system. Since its origins in the Industrial Revolution, the public school system has taught Protestant values to white children in order to create better workers.

Common Schools: Origins in Assimilation

Horace Mann, the Father of Common Schools, was a devout Protestant. He believed in original sin, which meant he thought children were inherently “bad” and needed to be trained to be “good” by memorizing and reciting Bible passages. He said things like: “From our very constitution there is a downward gratification forever to overcome” and “While it is sometimes said that labor is a curse…it is an inevitable condition of our well-being in this life” (Reese, 23, 40-41).

School was meant to get children used to work being an “inevitable condition” of life. The McGuffey Reader is a great example of how this worked. It was the first textbook used widely in schools, and it taught Calvinistic ethics using practical stories and Bible excerpts that emphasized the rewards of “morally upright living”. The Readers showed that hard work and discipline led to personal happiness, social respectability, and economic success.

Educators agreed that children should spend their days obediently copying and reciting passages – no critical thinking necessary! Henry Vail, who wrote A History of the McGuffey Readers in 1911, said: “the chief aim of the school readers must be to teach the child to apprehend thought from the printed page and convey this thought to the attentive listener with precision”.

Education was the opportunity for a better future, but only if you could be assimilated into the burgeoning industrial economy by demonstrating “good moral character” (punctuality, obedience, dutiful work habits, etc.).

The Role of Racism

The next big question the American education system faced was who to assimilate. Before the 1880s, rigorous admission tests meant most high school students were native-born, “bourgeois characters” (in other words, the white elite). Then, between 1870-1900, a wave of Irish Catholic immigration crashed into the public school system.

James A. Garfield, who helped create the U.S. Bureau of Education, claimed: “We must pour upon them all the light of the public schools. We must make them intelligent, industrious, patriotic citizens, or they will drag us down to their level” (Reese, p. 52). Irish Catholic immigrants experienced discrimination, but they were identified as white. Therefore, they could be ‘reformed’ through assimilation into the public school system.

The same was not true for people of color. One speaker at the all-white Alabama Educational Association meeting of 1891 stated: “even the Italian, or the lowest and meanest of the Slavic race, may in time be assimilated…[but whites and blacks] are separated by as broad a gulf as divides Dives and Lazarus, and as impassible.” Just as the leopard cannot change his spots, he claimed, “the Ethiopian cannot change his skin” (Reese, p. 74).

White elites fought to prevent people of color from accessing education. Examples of barriers included Southern anti-literacy laws, which criminalized teaching Black people to read or write between 1740 and 1834, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the segregation of Mexican-Americans into barrios in California and the Southwest. In the late 1800s, the South maintained a dual system of segregated schools to educate Black and white children separately, while requiring Black freedmen to pay taxes for whites-only schools. The North was not welcoming to Black migration, nor were they supportive of Black equality; most Northern educators either acquiesced or endorsed racial segregation (Reese, p.74).

White supremacy is a consolation prize for poor white people. It makes racial identity more important than class solidarity, which prevents poor white people and Black people from aligning. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie continues to profit from the working class.

And Along Came Rockefeller…

John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board (GEB) in 1902. The Board’s stated goal was “the promotion of education within the United States of America, without distinction of race, sex, or creed.” Between 1902 and 1964, the board distributed over $325 million (approx. $5.3 billion today) to support education in the United States.

Rockefeller was an industrialist and a capitalist. He knew America needed workers. Like Horace Mann, Rockefeller wanted the school system to prepare America’s children to enter the workforce. One of his major areas of focus was reforming Southern schools, which were chronically underfunded. In the words of James D. Anderson, the GEB quickly acquired “virtual monopolistic control of educational philanthropy for the South and the Negro”.

In his booklet “The Country School of Tomorrow”, Frederick Bates, a member of Rockefeller’s General Education Board, wrote:

We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. We are to follow the admonitions of the good apostle, who said, “Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low degree” (p. 6).

Historically, education is a tool of assimilation. It taught the white elite that they could be successful if they were obedient, and it prepared poor people in the South to be agricultural laborers. The structure of the classroom has not fundamentally changed; it still is designed to prioritize discipline and obedience over critical thinking and creativity.

Philosophers, orators, poets, and artists are exactly what our society needs. Education should give children the tools to make their voices heard. That’s why I find the end of The House in the Cerulean Sea so frustrating. Linus (a government worker) goes to speak for the children, saying, “I need to be your voice” (381). If we want real change, we need fewer bureaucrats speaking for children, and more children speaking for themselves.

Works Cited:

Goldberg, Barry, and Barbara Shubinski. “Black Education and Rockefeller Philanthropy from the Jim Crow South to the Civil Rights Era.” Rockefeller Archive Center, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/black-education-and-rockefeller-philanthropy-from-the-jim-crow-south-to-the-civil-rights-era/.

Holm, Journey. “A History of American Education in the 1800s.” Owlcation, https://owlcation.com/humanities/the-history-of-education-in-the-1800s.

Iacobelli, Teresa, and Barbara Shubinski. “Without Distinction of Race, Sex, or Creed”: The General Education Board, 1903-1964. Resource.rockarch.org, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-general-education-board-1903-1964/.

James D. Anderson, “Northern Foundations and the Shaping of Black Rural Education, 1902-1935,” History of Education Quarterly, Winter 1978, Vol. 18, No. 4, 378-79, 380.

Sierra, Ashlee . “The History and Impact of Residential Schools.” PBS, 19 Dec. 2023, www.pbs.org/articles/the-history-and-impact-of-residential-schools.

William J. Reese. America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.