There are eight of these gentlemen who have come over here and are in training, and they cannot speak the English language fluently, and it would be a great hardship for them to come up before the young people who speak English very well and try to preach in English.
POTENTIAL POWERS FOR GOOD
An immigrant church can do much toward the amalgamation of its members. There are a few immigrant churches, Catholic as well as Protestant, which are doing valuable work in this direction. But while an immigrant church can do much good it also can do much harm when its services and activities are conducted in the spirit of preference of the old country to America. To prevent such harm some action must be taken by the public.
The writer recommends that the immigrant church heads (priests, pastors, ministers, rabbis, and others) should be American citizens either by birth or by naturalization. Foreign-language services should be conducted for freshly arrived immigrants only, and for those old-time immigrants who have not mastered English.
Immigrant churches should be required to report regularly on the Americanization progress of their congregations (number of families, home language, service language, naturalization, etc.) to the state or Federal Bureau of Education.
XI
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL
The preceding three chapters show how important is the public school as an instrumentality of Americanization. The question is whether the rural public school meets present-day requirements. Field investigations and search through both public and private reports have convinced the writer that the rural public school is the most neglected class of all the educational institutions in the country. It is far behind the times. It not only does not adequately meet the problem of immigrant children, but it does not even root out illiteracy from the rural population in general. Some of its limiting features are inevitable, while others are gradually being changed.