SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION STATE OF CALIFORNIA BULLETIN No. 5 B soinr 490 UNIVERSE Of M UBR*' THE IMMIGRANT CHILD IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS PREPARED BY Daliforn ETHEL RICHARDSON Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction icility FEBRUARY, 1922 CAI.IKOISNIA STATE PRINTING OFFICE SACK \MEXTO, 1922 THE IMMIGRANT CHILD IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. When immigrant education is spoken of, it is generally assumed that the foreign adult is the recipient of such education. Departments of immigrant education in our schools are usually concerned with night schools^ mother classes and the like ; but there is a phase of immigrant education that is just as important and probably more important to which little thought has been given, and that is the education of the non-English-speaking child. One takes for granted that all the needs of this child are adequately cared for since he passes through the grades of the public school and receives the same education as English-speaking children. To take so much for granted is to fall far short of the truth. The course of study, the graded system, and usually the teacher herself are all prepared for children who speak and understand our language and traditions. The handicap which the child who does not speak English suffers has never been completely estimated. Meeting his needs, helping him to catch up, interpreting his reactions, understanding his foreign home and old-world up bringing ; these essentials in his school life are left to the initiative and intuition of a teacher. She undertakes a task for which she has received no training and for which no time is given in the school day. As a result many children sit through two and even three y^ars of school repeating the grade and understanding only a little more the second year than they did the first. In one district in California twenty-seven children were promoted, twenty-one of whom were repeaters, averaging 2.7 years in a grade for each child ; or the twenty- one children had almost fifty-seven years of school. The result is serious for the child and the school. Very often this child is obliged to work at the earliest possible age, and therefore has a short school term in which no time should be wasted. The loss of self-confidence, the sense of being "queer," the continued isolation and silence have effects upon his personality which are disastrous for Mm and for his future citizenship. It is said that the English-speaking countries educate children primarily for their own good and secondarily for the good of the State, in contradiction to the Prussian ideal which educates for the State. The non-English-speaking child who wanders through the grades as a dullard, always in a fog, never clearly follow- ing J,he work, is apt to develop morbidities which make his education a failure, for whichever of these ideals we may be striving. From the standpoint of the school, failure to meet this situation pro- duces equally serious results. All through the system the children who are deficient in everything where language is necessary create a drag on every grade. Many high schools in California are forced to have sixth grade English because their freshmen can do no better. Their teachers are often impatient and annoyed at the extra burden and with those pupils who make it. It is obviously a question which educators have to face. It presents several phases. In the first place, there is the child of primary grade who has never heen to school, speaks no English, who can not read or write in any Ian- 4 guage. Then there is the child whose age and maturity would warrant his entering a class beyond the primary grade and yet he can not speak or understand enough English to keep up. The subject matter of the ordinary primary grade is too childish to interest him and he is humiliated by associating with much younger children. He may or may not be able to read and write in his native tongue. Often he is the child of the migratory laborer and has been out of school most of his life and is therefore illiterate. Sometimes he is well educated in his own language. The various situations in which these children of any age are found adds to the difficulty of formulating a plan for their education. First and most easily handled, there is the school in the congested districts of our large cities w r here the foreign child makes up almost the entire school population. Any methods or devices which the teachers adopt to make English the spoken language of the group are equally service- able for all the children in the class. The great difficulty here is to modify the course of study to fit the needs of the school. The teacher is often hampered by city supervisors of special subjects, music, draw- ing, etc., who plan their work for the whole city without reference to the language problems and want all the schools to meet the standards they have set. The task presents even greater difficulties where this child is found in all the grades of the school from the first to the sixth (he seldom gets beyond the sixth) and in each grade forms the minority. Here most of the children speak English fluently; learning to read is for them merely learning to connect the written with the known oral word. Numbers, geography, all the work of the grade is a matter of exploring new fields by a well known path. The minority the nine or ten chil- dren who do not understand the language have no such easy road. They sit in silence, learning to understand certain expressions, not through knowing the meanings of the words, but through recognizing the tone of the voice, just as a dog responds when his master says, "Let's take a walk!" Because they are self-conscious about their deficiencies, they are quick to follow the other children and pretend to understand. Many teachers are misled by this responsiveness into believing that their pupils can understand the language. I have exam- ined many children who knew the meaning of less than twenty-five English words when the teachers had assured me that they understood everything that was said in the classroom. Besides this, there is the one or two-room school where the teacher is handling many grades and finds her task further complicated by chil- dren of all sizes and ages who do not yet speak English. Inasmuch as the rural schools are very apt to get the young teachers without expe- rience, the most difficult problem of elementary education is left to those least fitted to solve it. For teaching in any one of these fields special preparation and train- ing is necessary. It is important that a teacher appreciate the view- point of her class. The environment, the traditions, the race and religious prejudices of a group must be sympathetically understood before a teacher can reach her pupils. 5 A teacher should be able to picture the innumerable ways in which the life in America is in contrast with ideas and conditions in the foreign country whence the foreigner came. Generally speaking, the foreigner in America may be compared to a mariner without a com- pass on a strange sea. Even the school regulations are often misunder- stood. A festivity may thoughtlessly be set on a religious holiday, and all unknown to the inquiring teacher, the children's parents may be as much horrified as would be the parents in a Puritan community, if the school gave a dance on Sunday. A school which is continually going at variance to all the old world ideals, of which it is in ignor- ance, can not perform its educational function. It sets up chaos and anarchy in the minds of the children. It is necessary for the teacher to value the struggle which has given immigrant peoples the courage to leave their old home, and her imagination must be fired with the possibility of utilizing all these pioneer values in the upbuilding of the next generation; without this sociological background that makes real to the teacher the life and history of the folk she is hoping to teach, no amount of precise method will be of any use. However, once the point of view is gained, and the situation is under- stood, the teacher will be looking about for the tools with which to work. Special administrative methods are necessary. In a Admmis- sc hool where practically all of the children come from foreign homes, this is comparatively easy. While the variations and individual differences are greater in such classes than in schools where all of the children come from American homes, there is a reasonable homogeneity. The grading, although it should not follow the standards of an English-speaking school, can be comparatively regular. Of course, there should be great flexibility about passing a child forward into the class which his age and maturity justifies, if his progress is tem- porarily delayed by his English handicap. Such a school will always require some special classes. There will be new families moving into the neighborhood whose children can not keep up with the others of their own age who have attended the school regularly. These will need special intensive coaching in English and should be put into classes where practically all the attention can be given to that one subject. As attendance in a foreign school is often more irregular than in an American school and as many children are taken away from the city to go with their parents harvesting crops, it is often necessary to make special provision for these children when they return. It is not fair to those who have been in school for a full year to be held back by a large group which returns after a long absence. From the standpoint of the migratory child, since he leaves school and returns at about the same time each year, he is always repeating the same part of the term and will never make up that part of the course he has missed unless put in a class by himself and given special instruction. The administrative problem is more difficult in the school where some of the children speak English fluently and others do not under- stand it at all. Recognition of that fact will necessitate arrangements. 6 Obviously, it is unfair that one child should be held back until another learns the language, and it is equally unfair to allow a child to sit through a class in confusion and darkness. When the child does not understand, or is slower than the majority to grasp the meaning, he stops trying to recite and unless he is called on directly, he makes no effort to formulate his replies. This soon produces a habit of silence and a conviction of his own incompetence that is seldom obliterated. Consequently all children with a language handicap should be put in classes by themselves. The primary 7 class will probably be the largest. It is important that these little children should not be in a class with the older ones, who are also learning the language. The most important factor in teaching children English is making them leant to talk by creating a situation where they are so interested that they are eager to express themselves. This can not be done when there are such variations in the children's ages that no common inter- ests can be found. For the children above primary grade there should be at least two other special classes those representing the third and fourth, i