Learning to Forget: A Rite of Adolescence?

Stephen Lassonde. Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven's Working Class, 1870–1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xvi + 301 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

As a young boy growing up in an Italian immigrant neighborhood in New York City during the early 1900s, Leonard Covello recalled bringing home an elementary school report card for his father to sign. But a conflict between family and school quickly surfaced in their tenement household when the father spotted a different spelling of his last name.

"What is this 'Leonard Covello'?" the father exclaimed. "What happened to the i in Coviello?" A silence fell over the family. "From Leonardo to Leonard I can follow," the father continued. "A perfectly natural process. In America anything can happen and does happen. But you don't change a family name. A name is a name. What happened to the i?"

Leonard defended his teacher's actions. "Mrs. Cutter took it out," he explained. "Every time she pronounced Coviello it came out Covello. So she took out the i. That way it's easier for everybody."

"And what has this Mrs. Cutter got to do with my name?" the father demanded.

"What difference does it make?" Leonard shot back, one of the first times that he ever dared to oppose his father. "It's more American. The i doesn't help anything."

Leonard watched as his father bitterly fumed over the school's intrusion into their family life, then shrugged his shoulders in resignation, signed the report card, and slid it back across the table to his son. This initial conflict between family and school grew larger over the years, particularly when Leonard and his adolescent peers moved on to a newer, more encompassing institution: the American high school. "We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents," he wrote. "This was the accepted process of Americanization. We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents."¹

Historian Stephen Lassonde's book, Learning to Forget, captures the spirit of these tense relationships between working-class immigrant families and American schools. But he interprets the conflict as more than a second generation failing to identify with the culture of the first. Rather, Lassonde argues that the expansion of American schooling from the nineteenth to the twentieth century led working-class families to abandon traditional expectations for their youth and reluctantly embrace middle-class ideals of a "sentimental childhood" (p. 11). Children's roles as active, obedient contributors to the family wage economy faded away as they spent more time in a special place—school—that valued children's "development" and socialized them for a future adulthood less directly tied to traditional family expectations. "The school was the primary vehicle of this change," Lassonde contends, "but it was the elaboration of a system of schooling for all children and its physical location beyond the child's neighborhood that drew working-class boys and girls into contact with their middle-class peers who embodied the very cultural ideals espoused by the schools" (p. 11). Moreover, at the same time that parents surrendered their children to the official American middle-class culture operated by the schools, these children were also adopted into the unofficial "emerging national youth culture" of their adolescent peers. "In either instance—whether native-born or immigrant—working-class youths were 'learning to forget' . . . the very lessons their parents had taught them about the connection of their needs and aspirations to their commitments to others" (p. 12). Schooling socialized students to disregard the traditional family compact, which held that economic decisions were made within the familial hierarchy, with the goal of providing appropriately for all members from cradle to grave. Disrupting this compact was a far greater issue than dropping a letter from the family name.

Lassonde bridges two fields of historical...