The public school as the great assimilator: From civic ideal to contested battleground

“ Here are gathered nearly all the tribes and peoples of the earth in one great heterogeneous mass; and the public-school system is the official assimilator. It deals with the young and plastic. Excepting those who attend private and parochial schools, our laws bring all the children of the entire country under the influence of the public school system. The immigrant comes to us from an entirely different environment; he has developed under different influences. His home life is not the same as ours; his child possesses other concepts, traits and ideals than those of the American boy or girl. ”

“ The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal. ”

“ It is quite likely that the new environment will do much to remedy this condition and that the second generation, through the work of the public schools, may measure up to the native-born. These public schools are the most potent of all forces in the work of Americanization. It is upon them that we must depend to make the ultimate social effects of assimilation beneficial to the country. ”

“ It does not mean that they have been really Americanized. It means that, letting slip from them whatever native culture they had, they have substituted for it only the most rudimentary American—the American culture of the cheap newspaper, the “movies,” the popular song, the ubiquitous automobile. The unthinking who survey this class call them assimilated, Americanized. The great American public school has done its work. With these people our institutions are safe. We may thrill with dread at the aggressive hyphenate, but this tame flabbiness is accepted as Americanization. ”

“ From wandering on a foreign strand?
What sort of an American could be made out of one able in any circumstances—worst of all under repressive compulsion—to turn his back upon the tongue, the traditions, and the associations of his fathers? We are not such ourselves, and in our sane minds we do not want those who join us to be such. The process of [39] real assimilation is a process slow in its nature, reaching not forms and words, but sentiments of the highest and most subtle kind. ”

“ By giving parents more control over their children’s education, we are making strides toward a future of unprecedented educational attainment and freedom of choice. Under the leadership of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, we will continue to advance school choice so that every child in America has access to the tools best suited to enabling them to achieve the American Dream. ”

“ Communities that provide academic options — traditional public, public charter, private, magnet, parochial, virtual, and homeschooling — empower parents and guardians to select the best educational fit for their children.
School choice helps alleviate common hindrances to success and creates the space necessary for students’ aspirations to flourish. Families that participate in school choice programs are not the only ones who benefit from expanded educational options. Children in traditional public schools benefit as well. ”

“ When our children receive a rigorous education and are held to high standards, they can achieve their goals, rise out of poverty, and actively engage in our democracy.
For too long, however, students across this country have been trapped in failing or underperforming schools simply because of their zip code. The Washington one-size-fits-all approach has not worked for far too many of our children. Fortunately, we have seen how allowing families the freedom to choose other schooling options ‐‐ including charter schools ‐‐ delivers life-changing results. ”

“ Tonight, I am asking you to defend our very dangerous southern border out of love and devotion to our fellow citizens and to our country.
No issue better illustrates the divide between America’s working class and America’s political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.
Meanwhile, working class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration—reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools and hospitals, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net. ”

“ Isolation and particularism are the negative of that ideal, and operate like a piece of iron or wood in the human body which produces ulceration and gangrene. All our institutions should therefore be calculated to encourage assimilation. If we adopt the opposite policy, we inevitably alienate the privileged from the unprivileged sections of the community, generate enmity between them, cause endless worries to the administration and paralyze in advance our best-intentioned endeavors to fuse the various ethnic ingredients of the nation into a homogeneous whole. ”

“ The movement in favor of the creation of a teaching force, employed by the public and organically a part of the public-school system, to go into the neighborhoods and into the homes and carry instruction in English, common-school branches, and the elements of civics, follows logically from the treatment of the foreign-born woman citizen as an individual, and from the fact that she must be dealt with in or close to her home. ”

“ With the growth of localized colonies of a single race, or of several foreign races, the schools in many of our large cities are losing their American character, as far as the pupils are concerned, so that the immigrant child finds himself associating with others equally foreign with himself, instead of with children from American families. ”

“ The State Department of Public Education has no authority whatever over the private and parochial schools in the state. There is no legal ground for collecting information in regard to them.... There have been cases when children of immigrant groups, attending a private or parochial school, had to learn the foreign tongue of other groups.
A Catholic bishop stated:
The first grades in the parochial schools use German because the children who enter the schools do not know English, and it is far better and more successful to start work with them in their mother tongue as a teaching language. ”

“ However, the crowning insult offered to the intelligence of the American people by the Americanization movement is the soberly uttered and persistently reiterated proposition that the best way to cure the evils of a heterogeneous population is to naturalize the foreigners! In the voluminous literature issued by the group of organizations directly connected with this movement, the three injunctions to the foreigner which appear with the greatest frequency and emphasis are: “Attend night school,” “Learn the English language,” “Become an American citizen.” ”

“ To the foreigner who comes to this country, America means one thing above all else, and that is the chance to emerge from the class in which he was born. The rebellion among the foreign population of New York against the Gary system, was not a rebellion against industrial education as such, but a rebellion against the idea that their children were to have industrial education and nothing more. Our practical man, even if he is unwilling to look forward a million years, must at any rate look back a million years. ”

“ To be merely a good man is not now sufficient to be a good citizen. Good citizenship requires more than 'the diffusion of general knowledge and good and virtuous sentiments,' if the tide of municipal corruption is to be turned back. Here the school fails. The civic function of our school system has no doubt suffered greatly from the fact that teachers are so little interested in current politics. Fear of 'mixing in politics' has held the teacher aloof from matters of this kind; and the teaching of civil government is often a perfunctory task. ”

“ For generations we have waited, and are still asked to wait, for our school children to develop and rise to carry these burdens; to improve politics; to enact more righteous laws; to secure to the people a more uniform and beneficent government; and we forget the while that when they leave, with meager education, the public school, they must immediately plunge into the breadwinning maelstrom to emerge the same fatigued, misguided voters that their fathers are. ”

“ By finally enforcing our immigration laws, we will raise wages, help the unemployed, save billions and billions of dollars, and make our communities safer for everyone. We want all Americans to succeed, but that can't happen in an environment of lawless chaos. We must restore integrity and the rule of law at our borders.
For that reason, we will soon begin the construction of a great, great wall along our southern border. As we speak tonight, we are removing gang members, drug dealers, and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our very innocent citizens. ”

“ The foundation of a good life begins with a great education. Today, too many of our children are stuck in schools that do not provide this opportunity.
Because the education of our young people is so important, the parents of every student in America should have a right to a meaningful choice about where their child goes to school. ”

“ One of the fruitful sources, as I hold it, of the errors which prevail in our country, is the theory that this is a Government of one people; that the Government of the United States was formed by a mass. The Government of the United States is a compact between the sovereign members who formed it; and, if there be one feature common to all the colonies planted upon the shores of America, it is desire for community independence. ”

“ The American revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in the townships and municipalities, took possession of the State: every class was enlisted in its cause ”

“ Ninth, the United States must reform American education, equipping students to shoulder the enduring responsibilities of citizenship in a free and democratic society by understanding America’s legacy of liberty and also preparing them to meet the special demands of a complex, information-age, globalized economy for expertise in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ”