Friday, June 30, 2006
The Absence of Homogeneity
Today's selection for coffee shop reading was Chapter 23, "Immigration and Education in the United States," Companion to American Immigration (Blackwell, 2006) by Paula S. Fass, a Professor of History at UC Berkeley, and editor of Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society. I've already written here about the foundational Marxism in many of these essays, but it is also important to hear the drumbeat for distinctive and continued separateness of La Raza, based on what these writers see as important patterns in the immigration of the 19th century.
"The absence of homogeneity in population, experience, and social habits was from the beginning an American characteristic, related to the unsystematic manner in which the British North American colonies were settled." p.492 However, she is careful to announce that the "expansive definition" of immigration [i.e. colonizers of Spanish and French America, African slaves, and British settlers of the east coast] will not be used in her chapter on education.
This technique of severing the United States from its northern European, British and African roots--its entire pre-civil war history--permeates modern immigration studies. It also effectively isolates the authors' views from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the rise of a republican and representative form of government, the various contracts and creeds of the early colonists, the national debate on slavery and any struggles and accomplishments of European people who had endured great hardship to strike out for more freedom and liberty.
Since we didn't have a huge federal goverment in the 19th century pulling every string from prayer to safety belts to grams of fat, leftist scholarship superimposes a mythical federal nanny on U.S. history of education, which Fass says was an important expression of the development of state authority as the American economy grew. "Nineteenth schooling (which was virtually all under local control) intersected in important ways (a favorite academic phrase)" with "the growth of industry and the need for a disciplined well-socialized labor force which the schools could provide. . . Schooling permitted public oversight of the habits and manners of the young." It [the hodge podge of common schools, academies and colleges] became a system tied to the state. "Above all, they [immigrant children] were exposed to a social institution not within their parents' control." All efforts by the immigrants to retain their culture were "strangled by the nativist sentiment and laws." Poor confused parents--by 1870 61.1% of the children of the United States were enrolled in school, becoming upwardly mobile, and leaving the lower classes! If it weren't for the fact that so many home-schoolers are Christians, analogies could have been drawn in this essay to that movement as a desire of parents to keep the education of children within their control
Bi-lingual education is lauded here--even trotting out the 19th century German schools and Italian language classes that flourished in various communities before WWI. But statistics have a sneaky way of over riding myths. For instance, Fass notes that Asian immigrants are less likely to be bi-lingual than children of Hispanics. She also concludes that more Jews than Italians, more Magyars and Czechs than Poles, and more Japanese than Mexicans took advantage of an educational system designed to be a tool of the government as it consolidated its power for the benefit of industry, and "suppressed home language."
So which groups were/are more successful and less likely to flounder in the bottom quintile? One might conclude that the goal of "immigration studies" is to keep a "forever poor" class in America.
"The absence of homogeneity in population, experience, and social habits was from the beginning an American characteristic, related to the unsystematic manner in which the British North American colonies were settled." p.492 However, she is careful to announce that the "expansive definition" of immigration [i.e. colonizers of Spanish and French America, African slaves, and British settlers of the east coast] will not be used in her chapter on education.
This technique of severing the United States from its northern European, British and African roots--its entire pre-civil war history--permeates modern immigration studies. It also effectively isolates the authors' views from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the rise of a republican and representative form of government, the various contracts and creeds of the early colonists, the national debate on slavery and any struggles and accomplishments of European people who had endured great hardship to strike out for more freedom and liberty.
Since we didn't have a huge federal goverment in the 19th century pulling every string from prayer to safety belts to grams of fat, leftist scholarship superimposes a mythical federal nanny on U.S. history of education, which Fass says was an important expression of the development of state authority as the American economy grew. "Nineteenth schooling (which was virtually all under local control) intersected in important ways (a favorite academic phrase)" with "the growth of industry and the need for a disciplined well-socialized labor force which the schools could provide. . . Schooling permitted public oversight of the habits and manners of the young." It [the hodge podge of common schools, academies and colleges] became a system tied to the state. "Above all, they [immigrant children] were exposed to a social institution not within their parents' control." All efforts by the immigrants to retain their culture were "strangled by the nativist sentiment and laws." Poor confused parents--by 1870 61.1% of the children of the United States were enrolled in school, becoming upwardly mobile, and leaving the lower classes! If it weren't for the fact that so many home-schoolers are Christians, analogies could have been drawn in this essay to that movement as a desire of parents to keep the education of children within their control
Bi-lingual education is lauded here--even trotting out the 19th century German schools and Italian language classes that flourished in various communities before WWI. But statistics have a sneaky way of over riding myths. For instance, Fass notes that Asian immigrants are less likely to be bi-lingual than children of Hispanics. She also concludes that more Jews than Italians, more Magyars and Czechs than Poles, and more Japanese than Mexicans took advantage of an educational system designed to be a tool of the government as it consolidated its power for the benefit of industry, and "suppressed home language."
So which groups were/are more successful and less likely to flounder in the bottom quintile? One might conclude that the goal of "immigration studies" is to keep a "forever poor" class in America.
# posted by Norma : 6/30/2006 09:02:00 AM
