Americanization and Education

AMERICANIZATION AND EDUCATION

Education for Immigrants

The United States began as a "melting pot" of immigrants from all parts of the world. During the 1920s a major problem of American education involved the training of new immigrants. As the decade began, there were almost five million illiterate people, ten years of age or older, in the total population. Since most of the newly arriving immigrants settled in the larger cities, illiteracy in those cities rose as high as 15 percent. Among the foreign-born it was not unusual for the rate of illiteracy to be 25 to 35 percent. Therefore, many new educational programs were established to alleviate the illiteracy problem of these new Americans.

Efforts toward Assimilation

Following World War I, a national movement to assimilate immigrants into American society was organized. The Federal Bureau of Education and the naturalization division of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service prepared a federal textbook on citizenship training. All accredited schools received the textbook free of charge. In 1921 the National Education Association (NEA) established a Department of Immigration Education to help introduce new immigrants to American culture. Americanization bureaus were established by statute in many states, and most of these bureaus are still in operation in the mid 1990s. During the 1920s churches, labor groups, and local civic organizations helped educate immigrants through classes organized to teach the English language, American history and civics, geography, and industrial arts.

Immigration Acts

In response to the rising number of immigrants, Congress passed immigration acts in 1921 and 1924. The more stringent of the two acts, the National Origins Act of 1924, restricted the admission of new immigrants to 2 percent of each foreign-born group resident in the United States in 1890. Because the major influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe occurred after 1890, the 1924 act in effect insured that most of the new immigrants would be from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. The act banned Oriental immigrants.

Sources:

Lawrence G. Brown, Immigration: Cultural Conflicts and Social Adjustments (New York: Longmans, Green, 1933);

Julius Drachsler, Democracy and Assimilation (New York: Macmillan, 1920);

Henry P. Fairchild, The Melting-Pot Mistake (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926).