EDUCATIONAL ADVANCE 549 



principle, one which could hardly have risen into consciousness if a 

 great mass of fertile and easily accessible land was still our national 

 heritage. Such a change as this calls insistently for new ideals in 

 education. 



America is an enormous assimilative cauldron. Here are gathered 

 nearly all the tribes and peoples of the earth in one great hetero- 

 geneous mass; and the public-school system is the official assimilator. 

 It deals with the young and plastic. Excepting those who attend 

 private and parochial schools, our laws bring all the children of the 

 entire country under the influence of the public school system. The 

 immigrant comes to us from an entirely different environment; he has 

 developed under different influences. His home life is not the same 

 as ours ; his child possesses other concepts, traits and ideals than those 

 of the American boy or girl. The process of assimilation usually means 

 the molding of this people in conformity to the so-called Anglo- 

 Saxon cast. It is forgotten that these people have many character- 

 istics and traits which might well be grafted into our civilization and 

 thus perpetuated. Miss Jane Addams has done much to emphasize 

 this important fact. She points out that it is characteristic American 

 " complacency " to utterly ignore the past experience of the immigrant 

 who comes to our shores. Earnest Crosby makes the indictment more 

 sweeping and severe : " And not content with stifling the originality 

 of the immigrant, we must needs carry our missionary zeal for uni- 

 formity to foreign lands in the hope of destroying all individuality. 

 In Anglo-Saxonizing India and Japan we are crushing out the most 

 wonderful of arts beyond a possibility of resurrection. We are the Goths 

 and Vandals of the day. We are the Tartars and the Turks. And 

 the countries which we overrun have each their own priceless heritage 

 of art and legend which we ruthlessly stamp underfoot." Some at- 

 tempt certainly should be made to preserve and continue the desirable 

 traits and gifts of the different alien peoples who crowd to our shores; 

 and to assimilate these traits into the sum total of our national char- 

 acteristics. Few educators have as yet seen the possibilities and the 

 desirability of progress in this direction. 



It should be noticed that not until after our frontier was practically 

 a thing of historical significance only, did the immigration from 

 Southern Europe begin. These people lack individual initiative; they 

 live in little communities. With the rise of modern industrialism and 

 of urban life, our civilization took on aspects which were attractive to 

 the more docile and less individualistic emigrant of many sections of 

 Europe. The traits of these people are more nearly consonant with the 

 life of to-day than that of the early individualistic Anglo-Saxon 

 frontiersman. The assimilation of these races and of their culture may 

 modify our civilization and traits in a very desirable manner. A Greek 



