2: Immigrants and the Schools

It is hard to imagine anything more characteristically American than faith in the efficacy of schooling. Particularly since the late nineteenth century, public education has been viewed as an antidote for the diminishing equality of opportunity generally thought to be associated with cities, industry, immigration, and hardening class structure. This view of schooling is based on the idea that in advanced industrial societies occupational success depends upon intellectual competence. Al-though Americans are accustomed to the way that notion was expressed in Brown v. Board of Education and the Sputnik debates, Ellwood Cubberly (1909, pp. 18, 19) put it just as aptly when he wrote of industrialism: Along with these changes there has come not only a tremendous increase in the quantity of our knowledge, but also a demand for a large increase in the amount of knowledge necessary to enable one to meet the changed conditions of our modern life. The kind of knowledge needed, too, has fundamentally changed.