In light of the strange system that bizarre and outlandish people would try to foist upon them, perhaps the most important features of their educational system were its lack of an institutional structure and the absence of coercion and routine. It made as little sense for a Native child to distinguish between play and education as it did for him or her to discriminate between humans and other beings, or between this plane and the world of the spirits. The same could not be said of the values, objectives, techniques, and attitudes of ‘teachers’ who would come in the seventeenth century to the eastern shores of North America to ‘school’ the Aboriginal peoples.