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Page 36
Many people impelled by these ideas have become impatient with the slow
recognition on the part of the educators of their manifest obligation
to prepare and nourish the child and the citizen for social relations.
The educators should certainly conserve the learning and training
necessary for the successful individual and family life, but should add
to that a preparation for the enlarged social efforts which our
increasing democracy requires. The democratic ideal demands of the
school that it shall give the child's own experience a social value;
that it shall teach him to direct his own activities and adjust them to
those of other people. We are not willing that thousands of industrial
workers shall put all of their activity and toil into services from
which the community as a whole reaps the benefit, while their mental
conceptions and code of morals are narrow and untouched by any uplift
which the consciousness of social value might give them.
We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and
writing, suspecting them to rest upon the assumption that the ordinary
experience of life is worth little, and that all knowledge and interest
must be brought to the children through the medium of books. Such an
assumption fails to give the child any clew to the life about him, or
any power to usefully or intelligently connect himself with it. This may
be illustrated by observations made in a large Italian colony situated
in Chicago, the children from which are, for the most part, sent to the
public schools.
The members of the Italian colony are largely from South
Italy,--Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the
workingmen's quarters of that city. They have come to America with the
distinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies of
themselves and their children. In almost all cases they mean to go back
again, simply because their imaginations cannot picture a continuous
life away from the old surroundings. Their experiences in Italy have
been those of simple outdoor activity, and their ideas have come
directly to them from their struggle with Nature,--such a hand-to-hand
struggle as takes place when each man gets his living largely through
his own cultivation of the soil, or with tools simply fashioned by his
own hands. The women, as in all primitive life, have had more
diversified activities than the men. They have cooked, spun, and
knitted, in addition to their almost equal work in the fields. Very few
of the peasant men or women can either read or write. They are devoted
to their children, strong in their family feeling, even to remote
relationships, and clannish in their community life.
The entire family has been upheaved, and is striving to adjust itself to
its new surroundings. The men, for the most part, work on railroad
extensions through the summer, under the direction of a _padrone_, who
finds the work for them, regulates the amount of their wages, and
supplies them with food. The first effect of immigration upon the women
is that of idleness. They no longer work in the fields, nor milk the
goats, nor pick up faggots. The mother of the family buys all the
clothing, not only already spun and woven but made up into garments, of
a cut and fashion beyond her powers. It is, indeed, the most economical
thing for her to do. Her house-cleaning and cooking are of the simplest;
the bread is usually baked outside of the house, and the macaroni bought
prepared for boiling. All of those outdoor and domestic activities,
which she would naturally have handed on to her daughters, have slipped
away from her. The domestic arts are gone, with their absorbing
interests for the children, their educational value, and incentive to
activity. A household in a tenement receives almost no raw material. For
the hundreds of children who have never seen wheat grow, there are
dozens who have never seen bread baked. The occasional washings and
scrubbings are associated only with discomfort. The child of such a
family receives constant stimulus of most exciting sort from his city
street life, but he has little or no opportunity to use his energies in
domestic manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in any direction. No
activity is supplied to take the place of that which, in Italy, he would
naturally have found in his own surroundings, and no new union with
wholesome life is made for him.
Italian parents count upon the fact that their children learn the
English language and American customs before they do themselves, and the
children act not only as interpreters of the language, but as buffers
between them and Chicago, resulting in a certain almost pathetic
dependence of the family upon the child. When a child of the family,
therefore, first goes to school, the event is fraught with much
significance to all the others. The family has no social life in any
structural form and can supply none to the child. He ought to get it in
the school and give it to his family, the school thus becoming the
connector with the organized society about them. It is the children
aged six, eight, and ten, who go to school, entering, of course, the
primary grades. If a boy is twelve or thirteen on his arrival in
America, his parents see in him a wage-earning factor, and the girl of
the same age is already looking toward her marriage.
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