Session Abstract

Since the early days of the Republic, Americans have believed that education held the key to securing the future of their nation. This panel examines the ways in which late nineteenth and early twentieth century immigrants in the United States influenced and controlled educational policy. Immigrants’ insistence on retaining some control over how their children were educated sometimes drove elites to change public education in order to bring immigrants into the American fold. At other times, immigrants retreated from public schooling and created their own social and cultural networks in order to maintain ethnic cohesion. This panel explores how immigrant communities adapted to these challenges.

Mimi Cowan’s paper, “‘To Make Them Love and Respect Our Institutions’: Educating Immigrants in Reconstruction-Era Chicago,” discusses how concerns over national Reconstruction combined with the post-1871 fire reconstruction of Chicago to create an unease about the booming immigrant population and how best to make them into loyal American citizens. To entice immigrants to send their children to public schools, the Chicago Board of Education removed the King James Bible from schools, created compulsory education laws, and increased the availability of German language instruction. Cowan’s paper will examine the steps taken by immigrant communities to control the education of their children and how the responses of local elites shaped Reconstruction-era educational policy.

The changes instituted in the 1870s ultimately did not solve what elites viewed as the problem of immigrant education. Kathryn Wegner, in her paper “Education by Compulsion: Solving the ‘Immigrant Problem’ in Nineteenth Century Chicago,” continues the panel’s exploration of how elites’ desired to control and Americanize immigrants through the assimilatory power of public schooling. Wegner discusses how, in the 1880s, immigrants increasingly perceived compulsory schooling as forced Americanization. Many immigrants turned to Catholic schools, which they believed more carefully preserved students’ ethnic culture. However, parents who kept their children in public schools, perceived compulsory education not as promoting the teacher profession or as child care for the working class, as other historians have suggested, but as an assimilationist mandate.

James Pula’s paper, “Cultural Determinism and the Shaping of Polish American Education,” takes this investigation into the twentieth century, by examining how Polish immigrants responded differently than the Irish and German immigrants who preceded them, rejecting public education during the first half of the twentieth century in favor of creating their own ethnic education system. Pula’s work explores the salient cultural influences that led Poles to develop far more insular political and educational views than any other major European immigrant group, ideas that led them to use their ethnic organizations and networks in a very different manner.

As immigration became a key feature of the American landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, immigrants impacted public policy regarding education and also developed their own networks for maintaining control, while still participating in American democracy. In the face of current discussions regarding the educational rights of migrant children in the U.S., this panel seeks to provide a historicization of the issues at stake.