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Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women Immigrants maria parrino 1992 In 1912, an autobiographical work written by a Russian Jew pointed out the influence of American schools on young immigrants.1 In a highly apologetic tone, Mary Antin maintained that the ‘‘public school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the country, when it has made us into good Americans . I am glad that it is mine to tell how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad to hear of it—you born Americans.’’2 Antin had arrived in America in 1892, at the age of twelve. Thanks largely to the positive effects that the American school system had on her, she described contact with the New World as a ‘‘second birth.’’ The book, which according to Cecyle Neidle is ‘‘a dithyramb to everything in American life, schools, people, the language,’’3 was meant to show how teachers, social workers, and every person in charge of education devoted themselves to the not easy task of making a ‘‘good American’’ out of an immigrant. Enthusiasm for the American institutions, although not always as flattering as Antin’s, affected many of the Eastern and southern European immigrants who arrived in the New World between 1880 and 1924. As Neidle says, ‘‘Undreamed-of possibilities opened before those who were not too old or apathetic to satisfy their intellectual yearnings.’’4 The enormous expansion of formal schooling that coincided with—or was accelerated by—the arrival of the great wave of southern and Eastern European immigrants at the turn of the century posed special problems for American educators .5 Public schools in the United States became responsible for the shaping of immigrants, both children and adults, into well-behaved American citizens . Fearing the social consequences of mass immigration, school represented a homogenizing agent that could break down immigrant cultures and traditions and replace them with more acceptable American habits, beliefs, 57 58 Maria Parrino and values.6 Often neglecting ethnic backgrounds, the American school became a melting pot in which all immigrant children were melted into a not always familiar structure.7 Those who maintain that immigrants ‘‘entered the life of the United States at a status equal to that of the older residents’’8 cannot deny that discrimination based on ethnic origins often placed the immigrant student in a position of inferiority to the native-born.9 How were Italian immigrants affected by the American educational system ? Was their concern for schooling part of the social experience of migration ? As with most historical questions, the answer is multifaceted. The controversy with respect to the value of education, particularly in regard to minority groups, is based on the different emphasis given to either the American educational establishment or the ethnic group background. To many scholars, the Italian immigrants’ documented limited presence—at times, absence—in the American schools was due to cultural heritage.10 In 1944, the Italian-born educator Leonard Covello who studied the social background of Italian-American children maintained that the ‘‘antagonism toward the school, which was manifested in Italy and which constituted a part of the cultural tradition, was carried over to America and paved the way for the still current lack of rapprochement between the American school and the Italian parents.’’11 The idea that Italians were far less likely than others to receive an extended education has been echoed by many scholars who stress the minimal school arrangements in rural southern Italy from which most Italian immigrants originally came, together with their propensity to return to their homeland.12 Nevertheless, other observers have argued these formulations and have proved that Italian families not only did not object to schooling but even encouraged and supported their children, whose school achievement was not much different from that of other working-class children. Italians’ reluctance to invest in schooling did not depend on a value system that discouraged education, ‘‘since these values themselves only reflect the operation of social class factors and the unfavorable structure of educational opportunity that confronts the lower classes generally.’’13 Many factors should be taken into consideration when investigating an Italian attitude toward schooling. Explanations can be found in the nature of the rural social and economic structure from which the immigrants came; religious sources of behavior (depicting the tradition of literacy in Protestant societies as opposed to Catholic ones);14 and the quality of the curricula offered by American schools, which implicitly sought to assimilate...

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