Children of a New World

Society, Culture, and Globalization

Paula S. Fass

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814727843
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Paula S. Fass, a pathbreaker in children’s history and the history of education, turns her attention in Children of a New World to the impact of globalization on children’s lives, both in the United States and on the world stage. Globalization, privatization, the rise of the “work-centered” family, and the triumph of the unregulated marketplace, she argues, are revolutionizing the lives of children today.

Fass begins by considering the role of the school as a fundamental component of social formation, particularly in a nation of immigrants like the United States. She goes on to examine children as both creators of culture and objects of cultural concern in America, evident in the strange contemporary fear of and fascination with child abduction, child murder, and parental kidnapping. Finally, Fass moves beyond the limits of American society and brings historical issues into the present and toward the future, exploring how American historical experience can serve as a guide to contemporary globalization as well as how globalization is altering the experience of American children and redefining childhood.

Clear and scholarly, serious but witty, Children of a New World provides a foundation for future historical investigations while adding to our current understanding of the nature of modern childhood, the role of education for national identity, the crisis of family life, and the influence of American concepts of childhood on the world’s definitions of children's rights. As a new generation comes of age in a global world, it is a vital contribution to the study of childhood and globalization.

PART I

Children in Society

Introduction to Part I

The three essays in this section address a fundamental question of American social life: How does a nation of immigrants become a cohesive but still democratic community? In the first of these essays (Chapter 1), an introduction to education and immigration written for Blackwell’s A Companion to American Immigration, I suggest that the school has from the beginning been organized to address this task. But, unlike those historians who describe the school as simply an instrument of control and order, I believe that it has functioned as a more flexible institution that has demonstrated the capacity to respond to the populations it serves. While American education has been committed to the task of nation building, schools have also been forced to respond to the diverse aspirations of their constituents. In this way, the schools have been part of the pluralistic reality of American social life. Almost from the beginning of publicly supported, common schooling, Catholic schools have competed among the immigrant population. With available alternatives, American schooling has never been monolithic. And schools both rewarded certain kinds of conformity in behavior and were forced to accept a fair amount of continuing diversity.

What it means to build a national community has also changed over time in the United States, with economic rewards steadily gaining ground and eventually overriding civic concerns as the primary responsibility of schooling with regard to immigrants. Similarly, from the point of view of national policy, the locus of political debate has shifted. In the nineteenth century, it was primary education that was most urgent, in the first half of the twentieth century, secondary schooling, and then after that higher education at colleges and universities. While the rewards of schooling have always been more individual centered rather than community oriented, this tendency became steadily more apparent throughout the twentieth century.

The essay on IQ (Chapter 2), published in 1980 in the American Journal of Education, is the oldest in the book. It represents my first effort to examine the relationship between schools and their minority populations, and to appraise the matter of school rewards. In it, I suggest that the very commitment to educational democracy expressed in individualistic terms pushed the schools to find efficient means toward the ends of serving a large and diverse population. The IQ as a particular kind of sorting device allowed schools to remain democratic and technically to become attuned to modern demands for scientific means that gave priority to individual achievement. At the same time, the IQ also encoded a set of limiting cultural preconceptions about the talents and abilities of the immigrant communities who began to send their children in such large numbers to the schools starting in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. The IQ was thus an ambiguous cultural instrument, framed to respond to democratic goals but deeply tainted by contemporary cultural values and anxieties.

The third essay (Chapter 3) attempts to look directly at student experience in the schools, and specifically at how ethnicity remained alive in the schools for the second generation of European immigrants. Using New York as the primary site for second-generation experience, I created a large sample of student yearbooks from eight high schools across the city’s three major immigrant boroughs during the 1930s and 1940s. By charting each individual’s participation in voluntary extracurricular activities, I found strong evidence for the continuing existence and importance of ethnic identification among members of the second generation even in this most assimilative arena. This, I suggest, is what “Americanization” really entailed, a melding of the incorporative drives of school framers with the complex generational, individual, and group-oriented needs of the students served by the schools. The patterns of ethnic association varied by school environment and were flexible and dynamic. American diversity was thus contained within the boundaries of the schools, but never squeezed out. Rather, ethnicity was reframed in new terms that could vary from one setting to another. This article first appeared in a longer version as Chapter 3 of Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (1989). It was condensed and reprinted as “Creating New Identities: Youth and Ethnicity in New York City High Schools in the 1930s and 1940s,” for the collection Generations of Youth (New York University Press), which is the version that is published here.

1

Immigration and Education in the United States

Education has been central to immigrant experience in the United States and fundamental to the creation of the American nation. Education broadly understood is the whole manner in which the young are inducted into the society and enculturated to its norms, habits, and values. For the children of immigrants, this could be a very complex and conflicted experience which involved a variety of sometimes competing formal and informal institutions and organizations—family and other relatives, church, work, peers, sports, clubs, and, in the modern period, expressions of popular entertainment, such as music, movies, television, the Internet, and mall culture. For the purposes of this article, however, our attention will be limited to the education of immigrants at and through school and I will address these other matters only as they intersect with schooling.

Similarly, it can be argued that all European and African migrants to those parts of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that became the United States were immigrants. This would include the colonizers of Spanish and French America, and African slaves, as well as the British settlers of the East Coast. I will not be using this expansive definition in this essay, but will instead restrict myself to those peoples who freely came to the United States after the establishment of the union articulated by the Constitution in 1789. This is not intended to deny the immigrant nature of those early settlers. It is rather to clarify the ways in which schooling, which did not exist as a nation-building enterprise until after the formation of the permanent union, was an expression of national goals and purposes, and to distinguish immigrants who came freely from slaves who did not. Indeed, in the American context, schooling and immigration are two profoundly interconnected elements in the process of creating a nation in a society that, unlike other societies, could not draw upon common history and memory, rituals, or language toward this end.

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. Benjamin Rush had this in mind in 1786, on the eve of the formation of the permanent American union, when he proposed that schools, “by producing one general, and uniform system of education” would make Americans “more homogeneous,” and “fit them for uniform and peaceable government.”¹ Rush’s insight, based on already existing experience, would subsequently govern school development as immigration became a serious and important component of the rapid national expansion in the nineteenth century. Indeed, during the nineteenth century America became at once much more heterogeneous as immigrants from three continents–Europe, Asia, and Latin America—reached its shores, and ever more devoted to schooling as a necessary component of social development and national cohesion. These two were vitally connected, something often obscured by the fact that American schools are locally based and their regulation within the domain of state power. This relationship is also complicated since schools were not created simply as a result of immigration. Nevertheless, the way schools developed and their strategic importance at particular times is inseparable from immigration and its powerful contribution to American nationality.

This intertwined development would continue throughout the twentieth century and assume a more urgent economic dimension as schooling became more manifestly bound up in the achievement of individual success. It is for this reason that as the twenty-first century unfolds the issue of schooling remains ineluctably connected to the continuing reality of immigration and its ever wider population sources. American nationhood is obviously more institutionalized and empowered in the twenty-first century than it was in 1850, but it remains culturally malleable and open-ended as the nature of its population evolves and as America’s role in the world is redefined. It is for this reason, too, that when Americans seek to address the cultural, economic, or social issues that successive immigrations have raised, they have looked to the schools for assistance. Many of these issues—above all the identity, allegiance, and future of the second generation—have remained the same. Others have changed, but over the course of almost two centuries, ever wider and higher reaches of schooling—first “common” primary schools (1830–1880), then secondary education in high schools (ca. 1890–1950), and then finally colleges and universities (1960–present)—have been seen as vital and enlisted in this effort. While America is not unique in this upward expansion of educational resources, which is common to advanced societies, it has been historically the leader in this educational democratization, a leadership fundamentally connected to its early and steady exposure to issues introduced by immigration. Just as the Constitution propelled American imperial expansion into a continent while permitting the incorporation of incoming states on the same terms as the original colonies that thus together constituted the American realm politically, so has schooling provided the institutional mechanism through which the nation constitutes itself socially in the context of an almost continuous but ever changing immigration. While schooling has been under continuous pressure toward this end, its history can best be described and understood by examining three stages in its evolution from the early republic through the early twenty-first century.

Creating the Civic Realm: Education and Immigration in the Nineteenth Century

When the Constitution was adopted in 1789, the young republic’s population had not yet reached four million. By the end of a century of explosive development and expansion, it was close to 75 million. Immigration contributed significantly to that growth. During the same period, schooling grew from an irregular, unsystematic, congeries of ad hoc arrangements that were either privately funded, publicly supported, or provided through charity, into an elaborate state-sponsored system that affected practically every child in America in some form of elementary instruction. The great majority of those students attended free public primary schools that were then seen as an expression of a vibrant American democracy. That system had also developed many upper and lower branches, including secondary education in public high schools and a network of state universities underwritten by national land grant legislation (the Morrill Act in 1862) as well as new public kindergartens for preschool children. For most of the nineteenth century, the central public policy issues looked to the lower levels of schooling. A much smaller parallel system of parochial (largely Catholic) schools was by then also quite vigorous and significant.

Immigrants were deeply involved in this vast growth of schooling. Their experience needs to be understood from two perspectives: how the schools developed in response to issues relating to immigrants; how immigrants experienced the schools. This dual interaction was complex and multivalent, not only because the issues meandered over a long nineteenth-century history, but because different groups in different places, not to say different individuals, could have quite divergent relationships and experiences with public education. During this century of national self-definition, schooling became an important expression of the development of state authority as the American nation and economy grew. Many prominent historians have pointed out that early nineteenth century schooling in the United States intersected in important ways with the growth of industry and the need for a disciplined, well-socialized labor force that the schools could provide. And certainly schooling permitted public oversight of the habits and manners of the young. Nevertheless, schooling itself should not be exaggerated either as an ingredient in that economic development or as an individual means for success. Indeed, schooling throughout most of the first century of American life expressed republican ideals of citizenship far more then it trained in skills necessary to either the individual or the society. By the end of the century those skills and the knowledge that schooling could provide became more significant and required more advanced schooling, which consequently grew in importance and moved to the center of policy discussions.

In the early years of the nation, much was said about the importance of schooling as an essential for republican life, not least by Thomas Jefferson, who proposed a system of graduated merit-based selection and advancement together with rudimentary training for the entire population. And Jefferson’s vision has remained resonant through much of American history. But very little was actually done. American students, the children of immigrants among them, were schooled in either private or publicly supported institutions in most of the states, although the new western areas often lacked adequate facilities of any kind and were frequently traversed by zealous missionaries who advocated for schools. The immigrants to the early republic were mostly British, like those who dominated the peopling of the coastal colonies, and their education culturally and socially fell into familiar patterns. A small educated elite graduated from colleges and were highly educated in a classical format. Most Americans were literate and their knowledge and skills grew from a familiar complex of institutions—family, work, church, augmented by rudimentary formal instruction. This changed in important ways starting in the 1830s. The period from 1830 to 1860 was coincident with the first large and significant wave of immigrants to arrive into the United States, a time that also saw the development of a market economy and the earliest system of factory manufacture. It was in this context that the ideal of a public common school first took root in the United States, and it grew alongside other schemes that valued commitment to public improvements. That common school ideal was based in a “republican style” of education which Lawrence Cremin has summarized as composed of four commitments: “that education was crucial to the vitality of the Republic; that a proper republican education consisted of the diffusion of knowledge, the nurturance of virtue (including patriotic civility), and the cultivation of learning; that schools and colleges were the best agencies for providing a proper republic education; … that the most effective means of obtaining the requisite number and kind of schools and colleges was through some system tied to the polity.”²

During these middle decades of the nineteenth century, educational development moved vigorously along all these routes. It established a host of academies and colleges for advanced instruction. It became a system tied to the state. But, most spectacularly it grew by expanding to larger proportions of the population, a population now strongly augmented by the migration of Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants whose cultural education could no longer be taken for granted. Immigrants were also believed to bring poverty and crime. In 1830, 35 percent of the population of those aged 5–19 were enrolled in school. This grew to 38.4 percent in 1840, 50.4 percent in 1850, and then to 57.7 percent in 1860. In 1870, after the Civil War, 61.1 percent of this broadly defined age group of American youth was enrolled in school. Enrollment should not be confused with attendance, but the very rapid growth testifies to the state’s ability to enforce schooling as something for which children were required at least to register. By then the schools had been transformed from a hodgepodge of forms, types, and variously financed institutions into a systematic education that was publicly funded and publicly supervised. A common school regime, for which Horace Mann is remembered as a pioneer and toward which goal he had created an active reform society in the 1830s, described this ideal in a host of his reports and writings as an American necessity. By the last third of the nineteenth century, it had largely come into being. Mann had sought three things: to make a single school the common environment for all groups and classes so that the schools would “obliterate factitious distinctions in society”;³ that they be financed through public taxation; that they be centrally overseen in each state. For the most p...