African Americans

assimilation The strategy that immigrant children should be schooled into the dominant “American” culture by learning to speak and read the English language, the values of hard work and punctuality prescribed by the Protestant ethic, and respect for the laws of the United States. ethnicity The first generation of immigrants, especially in large northern cities such as New York, Chicago, and Cleveland, generally lived in homogenous communities with members of their own ethnic, language, and religious group. Except for some work situations, they generally spoke the language of their country of origin, attended church services in that language, and read the same foreign-language newspapers. They were members of the same ethnic, social, and athletic societies.

Through much of the twentieth century, public-school students attended schools in specifically designated attendance areas. When these attendance areas were coterminous with an ethnic community, the majority of a particular school’s students were often from the same ethnic and language group. When the schools overlapped ethnic neighborhoods, their student populations were somewhat more ethnically and culturally diverse. Because immigrant adolescents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to drop out of high school to enter the labor force, secondary education had limited effects on their integration into the larger society.

The Assimilationist Ideology Ethnic groups sometimes ran into conflict with the dominant public-school ideology of Americanization, which stated that immigrant children should be assimilated as quickly as possible into American society. Assimilation meant that immigrant children should learn to speak and read the English language, learn the values of hard work and punctuality prescribed by the Protestant ethic, and obey the laws of the United States. The assimilationist ideology grew out of the common school philosophy that public schools should be agencies of constructing shared knowledge and values. When seen through the lenses of the assimilationist ideology, the ethnic neighborhoods were viewed as obstacles to bringing immigrants into American society. Public schools were identified as agencies that could teach immigrant children to become Americans. The prominent educator, Ellwood P. Cubberley, whose books were widely used in teacher-education programs, clearly articulated the assimilationist ideology. In describing the challenge to assimilate the new immigrants, Cubberley stated:

Everywhere these people tend to settle in groups or settlements, and to set up here their national manners, customs, and observances. Our task is to break up these groups of people as a part of our American race, and to implant in their children, so far as it can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government, and to awaken in them a reverence for our democratic institutions and for those things in our national life which we as a people hold to be of abiding worth.46

The strategy of assimilation that was applied to European immigrants was also used in the education of other racial and language groups such as African-, Latino-, Asian-, and Arab Americans.

5-6b african americans

The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States. Emancipation brought with it the challenge of educating the freed men, women, and their children, especially in the South.

In 1865, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide economic and educational assistance to African Americans in the South during the Reconstruction period. Under the leadership of General O. O. Howard, the Bureau established schools that by 1869 had enrolled 114,000 African American students. Bureau schools followed a New England common-school curriculum of reading, writing, grammar, geography,

46Ellwood P. Cubberley, Changing Conceptions of Education (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1909), pp. 13–15.