The Carlisle Rut: Routines and Pace-of-Life at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

For over a century, it has been commonly observed that the pace-of-life in modern society appears to be significantly faster than in non-modern societies, but exactly what forces drive these differences continue to be both hotly debated and difficult to study. While prior studies on pace-of-life have focused on population-level correlations between these factors and pace-of-life, they provide few details about how changes to pace-of-life associated with modernity actually occur in context. This study addresses the issue from a historical perspective, attempting to identify what factors are relevant to a change of pace-of-life in a non-modern to modern lifestyle transition over a single lifetime. This study performs a historical analysis, examining changes in pace-of-life experienced by students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an Indian residential school operating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as compared to the non-modern lifestyle of the Plains Indian Cultures from the same time period. This study finds that the pace-of-life experienced by students at Carlisle were consistently faster, more intense and more regimented than in non-modern lifestyles. Such changes in pace-of-life were driven in large part by efforts of the school to transform the students behavior into a model the administration considered more suited to life in a modern society, chiefly, time-disciplined, individualistic, future oriented and competitive laborers. This case highlights that the role of individual behavioral manipulation by large-scale institutions is an underappreciated force in changes to pace-of-life in modern society.