80 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I33 



cation. Although attendance at school is compulsory, some children 

 attend only one or two years. Ages of children in the first year of 

 school ranged from 5 to ii ; rarely does a child attend after 15. Grad- 

 ing is done by readers, there being four readers ; usually a child needs 

 two years to cover a reader. In addition to learning to read children 

 must learn to spell, write, and draw ; simple mathematics and geog- 

 raphy are also required. Learning horticulture is encouraged. 



Parents do not always see the need of formal education — "We had 

 none, and got along." When children are chided for not being at 

 school, they not infrequently say, "Well, mama did not send me; she 

 said she did not go to school either." 



In general, however, parents are interested in having their sons 

 attend school ; they recognize a man's need of formal education in 

 dealing with Chileans. Girls, in all probability, would receive little 

 or no formal education if attendance at school were not compulsory. 

 When a teacher told a man that his daughter should be at school, he 

 replied that if his wife decided that the girl was to attend school, then 

 he would send her ; that it was not for him to say what education his 

 daughters should have ; that it was his duty to see that his boys at- 

 tended school. His attitude may have been due to the custom of 

 mothers training daughters and fathers, sons. A father said about 

 his 18-year-old daughter who had married recently, "What do I now 

 have of the education my girl received? Nothing! She is just out of 

 school and marries. Her education goes to the man who married 

 her." A teacher remarked : "I heard an old woman say today, 'These 

 small girls know more than we old people do,' but she seemed to be 

 pleased about it. I have heard young women blame their parents for 

 not sending them to school." 



Of 30 families whose children attended an Alepue area school, 

 20 fathers and 3 mothers were able to read and write. Four families 

 owned a book each: three, a New Testament, and one, a book of 

 miscellaneous collections. None of the 30 families subscribed to a 

 newspaper, but occasionally when a father or an older son went to a 

 Chilean village he bought one there. There was no mail delivery in the 

 area. Of 59 school children of these families, one boy had seen two 

 motion pictures ; another had seen one ; the rest none. 



MENTAL TRAINING 

 LANGUAGE 



In homes where both parents are Araucanian the native language is 

 spoken. Consequently, on entrance to school, children from such 

 homes know only Araucanian and must be taught Spanish as a foreign 



