When the French were able to recruit some students for their new seminary, it was only after inducements were held out and on a conditional and temporary basis.

      In spite of the Jesuits’ conniving, blandishments, and pressure, it did not prove easy to recruit and retain Indian students in the seminary. The missionaries well knew that Indian society permitted a degree of individual freedom that would make schooling children in European fashion difficult. Indians, Le Jeune noted, ‘only obey their chief through good will toward him,’ not from any fear of authority.

      Since ‘all these Barbarians have the law of wild asses,’ it was not surprising that sometimes the Indian students at the boarding school ran off to hunt. They had to be permitted recreation ‘in their own way,’ and the Jesuits raised not objection when the Huron boys attempted to grow maize and build a storehouse in the Iroquoian manner.

      In part, difficulties originated in the rigid and Euro-centric methods that the black robes employed. Pedagogical practice in contemporary France made little allowance for children’s different nature, for in the seventeenth century the Europeans viewed children simply as small adults, to be treated much like men and women. Moreover, the Society of Jesus was primarily a missionary, rather than a teaching order in North America.