The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.10

c4.10

In the beginning, ‘the teachers were seldom competent’, and ‘Lancaster insinuates that the men were not only ignorant but drunken.’¹⁶ As regards the number of years of schooling, Dobbs writes that ‘allowing for irregularity of attendance, the average length of school life rises on a favourable estimate from about one year in 1835 to about two years in 1851.’¹⁷