On Immigrant Education

{Progress journal entry from White teacher in Los Angeles school circa 1910}

It seems that more and more the good old way of teaching is no failing to have an impact on this new brand of students. My classes have become increasingly comprised of immigrants or their children, which has meant a whole slew new problems. I am beginning to see more and more that I am charged with Americanizing these children just as much as educating them. Simply leaving with knowledge of arithmetic and Basic English will not mean that they will assimilate properly into our society and way of life.

The real problem has been the real increase in the Mexican children who don’t seem to accept the lessons I’m delivering. Far from an issue with just the language barrier, which is a real problem as most of them don’t know but a few words, the students often seem to have an outright rejection of the lessons about the history of America and their place in that. I just don’t understand how they think they are ever going to succeed in America without assimilating.  They just don’t get that America isn’t a place for speaking Spanish or wearing funny clothes, but no matter how often I tell them they still revert to their Mexican ways.

It isn’t just the students that seem to get in the way of proper assimilation, their parents don’t seem to care about their success either. Whenever I meet with the Mexican parents I can just seem that they don’t care about what it takes to succeed in America, one of them even told his child in my presence to “learn everything that the gringos teach you, but don’t believe half of it.” So no matter how hard I try I suppose that I am fighting an uphill battle. I see the futility of this battle all around me in the changes that Los Angeles has been undergoing. I just don’t understand why someone would go through all of the trouble to immigrate to these great United States but wouldn’t take the time to learn English or even try to join the greater community.

I see as my foremost role to instill in these Mexican children the values of America, the “Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order and popular government” as the leading scholar Ellwood P. Cubberley describes it. These children have to understand that they must become truly American to survive and succeed.

Kyle Adams, October 13, 1910

Photo of Ellwood p. Cubberley whose education philosophy is taken as the standard for teaching immigrant children.