Adams, David Wallace. Education For Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Summary
This book is a history of the assimilation era in American Indian education and how policymakers sought to use the schoolhouse – specifically the boarding schools – as an instrument for acculturating Indian youth to “American” ways of thinking and living'. 'Adams contends that boarding schools were the federal government's key means (central policy) for addressing its American Indian issues. Balanced with academics, classes in “industrial training and domestic science, a rotating system of institutional chores,” as well as Sunday sermons, midweek prayer meetings, patriotic drills and football contests would all contribute to the “cultural metamorphosis” of the native population. Acculturation, however, was not a smooth process, as the reformers envisioned; Indians resisted, in some cases bolting the institution, torching buildings, or engage in other schemes to undermine the school program. Although the schools failed to fully assimilate Indians as the reformers hoped, the schools left a "psychological and cultural mark" on Indian students'. 'One impact was the enlarged sense of being an “Indian,” in which distinctions between Comanche and Navajo were lost by reformers’ gaze. Wallace explores this process through three different lenses: how reformers and government officials looked upon education as a central feature; how this policy was translated into institution practice through Indian agents, school superintendents, teachers, and staff; and finally how students responded and resisted these efforts, including the story of what happened when they returned to the reservation-home.

Example: Indian Bureau envisioned a "one best system" for boarding schools and attempted to strip the outward signs of Indian identity by cutting the long hair, imposing western dress, renaming the students, and requiring English. Students in the schools also had citizenship training and workforce traing, including wagon building, shoe making, carpentry, and trailoring; domestic chores for girls).

See also: David Tyack, James D. Anderson, Michael Katz