Campaigns to Capture Young Minds: A Look at Early Attempts in Colonial Mexico and New France to Remold Amerindians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both French and Spanish authorities saw the education of Amerindians as an essential tool in assimilating them to European ways. Both groups thought that the natives were either uneducated, and therefore clean slates for new teachings, or else sufficiently capable of understanding the superiority of foreign ways. In either case, education was the necessary vehicle for turning the natives towards European habits and norms of behaviour. The approach of each group was different. The Spanish, through the Franciscans, were able to take over an existing system, altering it to suit their own needs. They therefore devised a sophisticated system of institutions quickly, establishing a college by 1536. These efforts enjoyed a huge initial success, largely because the natives in their defeat experienced little difficulty in substituting one set of authority figures for another set already found wanting. The French were not conquerers, and did not face a native society in crisis, as had the Spanish. The French Franciscan friars also initiated christianizing education quickly after first settlement, but the Jesuits superceded them within two decades. The natives agreed to their ministrations because the French made it a condition of trade. Huron society differed radically from that of the Mexico, in its egalitarian structure and flexible institutions. The Huron, an unconquered people in a transitional phase of social and economic life, treated the missionaries as guests and often dictated the conditions of contact. In spite of quite different circumstances, the educational efforts of both groups seem to have reached a similar conclusion: native groups were neither as maleable nor as easy to assimilate as the Europeans had thought.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".