Final answer:
The purpose of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was to enforce cultural assimilation of Native American children into Euro-American society by eradicating their native languages and traditions, often through harsh and repressive means, reflecting a broader federal initiative of the time.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was founded by Richard Pratt in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with the purpose of forcibly assimilating Native American children into Euro-American culture. The school's program separated children from their families and communities with the intention of eradicating their native languages, traditions, and cultural practices. The motto "kill the Indian and save the man" reflected the underlying agenda of cultural erasure, promoting the idea that to save or civilize Native Americans, their cultural identity had to be extinguished.
The school represented a broader federal initiative which deemed that by keeping Native families intact, children would perpetuate their own cultural traditions and resist assimilation. Thus, the government-established boarding schools aimed to transform Native children into models of American society by enforcing English-only policies, vocational training for men, and domestic science for women, and suppressing all forms of native expression. This nationwide network of boarding schools, of which Carlisle was a flagship, attempted to equip Native children for what was seen as their inevitable future in a rapidly changing America, often through low-paying manual labor jobs.
Despite the purported aim of social reformers and the government to benefit Native American children, boarding schools like Carlisle are now widely recognized as institutions that perpetrated cultural oppression and trauma amongst Native American communities. It was not until the 1920s that such educational practices began to be questioned and eventually discontinued due to escalating costs, living condition concerns, and criticism of educational quality and methods.