The term "education" as applied especially to the rural population is a very broad one. It comprises everything which helps to elevate the people materially as well as mentally and spiritually. In this direction various educational agencies are working. The most important of them might be classified as follows:

  1. Schools:
    1. Public:
      1. (1) general.
      2. (2) evening.
      3. (3) home teacher.
      4. (4) vocational (training in agriculture).
    2. Private:
      1. (1) general.
      2. (2) church or parochial.
  2. Churches:
    1. American, service in English.
    2. Immigrant, service in foreign tongue.
  3. Libraries:
    1. Public:
      1. (1) community or town.
      2. (2) traveling.
      3. (3) package.
      4. (4) school.
    2. Private:
      1. (1) church.
      2. (2) school.

Among these agencies the public school is the foremost in the Americanization process. It directly influences the children and through them their parents—the adult immigrants.

BRIDGING DIFFERENCES

An observer of the home life of immigrant families finds a marked difference between the parents and the children who attend American schools, as well as between the American-schooled children and their European-schooled brothers and sisters. These differences lead often to friction and dissension in the families, and though each difference may be concerned with a trivial matter, yet in their entirety they represent the variation of the American from the immigrant.

The writer once entered the home of a large Russian immigrant family just when a quarrel between two sets of children was going on. The European-trained children wanted the window shades rolled entirely up, for the sake of more light, while their American-bred brothers and sisters insisted that the shades be left halfway up, as the Americans have them.

Another illustration of these differences is found in the fact that the immigrants are conservative in clinging to their old-country diet. The first breach is usually occasioned by pie—the American national dessert. The immigrant children learn about it and taste it in the school cooking classes and also in the neighboring American families, insisting that their mothers make it also. As a result the pie appears on the immigrant table, though in the poorer families only on holidays.

In the case of language, the parents and their European-schooled children continue to speak at home their old-country tongue and read newspapers and books in the same language. The American-schooled children prefer to speak English and read American newspapers and books, taking a special pride in this. They answer their parents in English, although the latter do not always understand English. They call themselves Americans, in distinction from their European parents and older brothers and sisters. "My father, mother, and older sisters are Poles, but I am an American!" answered an American-born Polish boy of about twelve years when asked about his nationality.

"How do you know that you are an American?"

"I was born here and I speak the American language."