Training for Citizenship in the North Central Association Secondary Schools

OF MICHIGAN, followed with a report prepared for the March (1920) meeting of the North Central Association, the presentation of which was authorized for this occasion.Within the last two years, as never before, there has echoed and re-echoed across our country a demand for full-blooded American- ism everywhere.The nation has, within that time, been newly impressed with Lincoln's famous dictum that a house divided against itself cannot stand.It has accepted without reservation the Biblical precept that he who is not for our state is against it, and has set itself the task not alone of rooting out existing forms of anarchy and hyphenism, but also of protecting itself in the future against the unchallenged development of anti-American doctrines and of divided national allegiances.To accomplish this job governmental machinery of improved patterns has lately been set in motion and corrective social agencies of many types have recently been established.Among the later organizations are the various societies interested in the so-called Americanization movement.Their primary aim is to indoctrinate adult residents of foreign birth with the principles of democracy as these are set forth in the American Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution of the United States, and to habituate them to the national customs, the social forms, and the personal practices which have become the very foundations of our national life and character.