Assimilation Through Education

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Creating One People. More than two million Europeans came to America between 1830 and 1850, mainly from Ireland and Germany. Leaders of public education faced the task of transforming these newcomers—speaking a babble of languages, clinging to diverse cultures, and owing loyalties to the Old World—into one people. Even before the arrival of this flood of non-English Europeans, prominent Americans such as Benjamin Franklin had voiced a concern that new immigrants were not melting into American society: “They will soon out number us, that all the advantages we have will not, in my opinion, be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.” Now the task of assimilating immigrants into a single American identity seemed paramount to many old-stock Americans. School reform, consequently, appealed to native-born Americans alarmed by the swelling tide of immigration. For those who believed that American ideals and traditions should be fixed not fluid, and singular rather than pluralistic, the public school emerged as the favorite device to forge a common American culture out of an increasingly diverse society. Said one advocate of school reform: “We must decompose and cleanse the impurities which rush into our midst” through the “one infallible filter—the SCHOOL.”

Melting Pot. In 1835 the Ohio school reformer Calvin Stowe warned teachers that “it is altogether essential to our national strength and peace, if not even to our national existence, that the foreigners who settle on our soil, should cease to be Europeans and become Americans.” Stowe expressed what so many other school reformers felt, that the emerging public school system should be a tool to melt incoming alien cultures into a distinct American character. The schools must create a national feeling and unity of thought and action, Stowe explained, for “nothing could be more fatal to our prospects… than to have our population become a congeries of clans, congregating without coalescing.” Only a concentrated effort “to shape the rising generation to our own model” in schools common to all could avert the impending “disaster” of cultural pluralism. School reformers were assimilationists in the sense that they sought to use public education to give children common values through shared experiences. In one respect, however, these reformers wore blinders on the issue of assimilation, for few stressed the integration of black and white children. Nonetheless, hope ran high that the public

school system could unify the nation against external threats and internal divisions.

Cultural Conflict. Despite their efforts to unify all who came to America’s shores, public schools seldom achieved complete cultural homogeneity in the classroom, nor did immigrant parents unanimously desire it. In fact the public schools, while revering the institution of the family, in many cases became wedges splitting immigrant children from their parents. Schools that taught children of immigrants to scorn and reject their parents’ culture and traditions caused friction and disrespect within immigrant families. Many youngsters, caught in a conflict of cultures, found it impossible to conform to the wishes of both their families and the public schools. On occasion parents challenged the logic of those who sought to erase all signs of their heritage from the lives of their children. And many immigrant groups supported, often at a great financial sacrifice, their own private schools designed to pass on their religious and ethnic heritage. Norwegian Lutherans in Minnesota, Polish Catholics in Chicago, Russian Jews in Boston, and many other immigrant groups created their own schools in attempts to preserve their cultures. In the end, however, the public schools achieved their goals as most immigrant children learned to speak English and came to prefer American folkways.

Source

David B. Tyack, Turning Points in American Educational History (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell, 1967).