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Alienation in America: The Immigrant Catholic and Public Education in Pre-Civil War America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Vincent P. Lannie
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Extract

It has become commonplace in the 1960's to talk about the alienated American, the disinherited American, the culturally different American. Most people talk in general terms but they almost always mean the Negro American. For the Negro is an alienated American of the largest minority group in the United States. In its historical quest for a unified society, the nation has called upon the public schools to live up to their traditional socializing responsibilities. At the present time, however, the focus is not upon the European immigrant coming from foreign shores but rather upon the segregated black man living in the most alienated ghettos of America. Martin Luther King spoke about educating the minds and hearts of white Americans in a concerted attempt to usher in the true kingdom of an integrated and just society. And what better place to begin this process than in the schools! Yet many Negroes have begun to lose faith in the schools as they have come to view them as an unreconstructed part of a basically racist society. A few are calling for the total rejection of the white man's society including his inflexible school structure. Others are demanding community — and this often means black — control of the schools in order to make them more responsive to the total needs of their youngsters. They want schools that will nurture the self-identity of the Negro child, deepen his pride in his color and heritage, and develop his capabilities to help create a truly democratic society which is “worthy, lovely, and harmonious.” That grand old lady of the social settlement movement in America, Jane Addams, once stated these desires in another way — indeed quite a contemporary way — when she concluded “that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , October 1970 , pp. 503 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1970

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References

1 For a good analysis of the relationship of the Negro and American education, see Perkinson, Henry J., The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865–1965 (New York, 1968), pp. 13–61Google Scholar.

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4 This idea that immigrants lacked the requisite background and experience to participate fully in a republican society was a common theme voiced during the decades before the Civil War.

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