From the beginning of white settlement in America, Indian relations presented a major dilemma. The fate of American Indians, confronted as they were with the inexorable, dispossessing creep of white settlement, became a source of white concern. With the exception of a small handful of individuals, that concern was manifested not in a sense of basic human equality, but rather as an expression of white elitism and expansionist expediency. This perplexing dilemma was often referred to as the “Indian question,” as it posed an outwardly simple, yet deceptively complex question: What do we do with the Indians?

“Woman is the guardian of the foyer. Her place is at home, in the house of her parents or husband…; it is for the foyer that she must reserve all her grace and good humor…. A woman who does not love her home, who has no taste for household duties… cannot remain a virtuous woman for long.” Such were the instructions and warnings about the domestic mission of women which Madame Henry Gréville offered to French schoolgirls in one of the most widely used textbooks for moral and civic education in girls' public primary schools during the late nineteenth century. Gréville's teaching conformed to the wishes of the Ministry of Public Instruction which ordered that primary schools should prepare boys to become workers and soldiers and initiate girls in the “care of the household and ouvrages de femmes.”

The United States has produced a lively and impressive body of scholarship on the education of freedmen during Reconstruction The story has a consistently melancholy tone— that of the hopes, aspirations and rhetoric which accompanied the perilous journey from unschooled bondsman to schooled freedman — a journey which culminated in broken promises and repressive realities. It is too frequently forgotten that such an experience had been shared some thirty years previously in the British West Indies after the 1833 Act of Emancipation. The story however is somewhat different in that formal schooling had been available to some of the black population during slavery. When the dubious regulations of servitude were lifted while its real abuses remained, the British Government's Negro Education Grant, which spanned a decade from 1835–45, expanded existing missionary facilities so that during the apprenticeship period, 1834–38, the ex-slaves could be satisfactorily prepared for freedom. This preparation intended that they comprehend the skills, qualities, and virtues requisite for taking upon themselves the apparently onerous burden of their emancipation, thus becoming a “grateful peasantry.”

Seventeenth century England, like the rest of western Europe in the early modern period, was a patriarchal society. It had been such for a long time and would remain so until industrialization and the concept of greater individualism began to upset traditional values. The notion of family was quite different then from what it is now: the family included all persons living in a household whether they were related or not. Thus, servants, apprentices, and live-in employees were part of the employer's family and the head of the household was its absolute master, serving as surrogate father to those not actually his children. His relationship with the younger members of the family was similar to the relationship between the absolute monarchs of the era and their subjects. Of course, not all subjects were dutiful and obedient sons or daughters of the father figure, either in the state or in the family, but the ideal was patriachalism in every social unit. This ideal was perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the institution of apprenticeship. This essay will concentrate on the apprentices of London during the early seventeenth century and will describe both the ideal and the reality of apprentice-master relationships.