In the rural districts the failure to understand the necessity of complying with the compulsory education law is even more marked. In the Rolling Prairie group of Polish families many of the children were not sent to school until after two families had been fined for not sending them. There was the expense for clothes and books, and the extra work for the mother. The roads were bad, the children often had no shoes, even in winter, and, above all, the parents had no understanding of why they should go. After the prosecution, however, the school law was obeyed.
The parents' attitude toward the problem of keeping the child in school comes out quite naïvely in the answers given to visitors for this study. The following comments, given in the quaint but forceful English of our foreign-speaking investigators, show what is meant:
Mother (a Russian woman with three children) visited school when teacher demanded her to send daughter to school when she wished her at home to help.
Mother (a Polish woman with six children under fourteen) feels that children study too much and ought to help their parents more.
Father (Italian) thinks there should be laws for protection of parents as well as child labor.
FOLLOWING SCHOOL PROGRESS
Following the child's progress at school is a difficult matter for parents who themselves have not had the benefit of education, or even for those who have been educated under a different system. It is, however, not impossible for them to do so; by means of reports in the language they can understand, by talking to the teachers or some one of the school authorities who knows about the child's work, they can keep closely enough in touch with his school record to enable them to give help at the point where it is most needed.
Many of them do this in spite of the inherent difficulties and in spite of difficulties which the school itself puts in their way. An Italian father in a little Illinois mining town brought out with pride the last report of his little girl and showed the visitor that she had an average of 90 per cent. In the families studied in Chicago a few were evidently trying to keep in touch with their children's schooling. Thus of one family it is said:
"Mother not only goes to school entertainments, but follows up the children's work with the teachers, consults them, and accepts their advice." This family is Bohemian, and both mother and father are well-educated leaders in progressive Bohemian circles in Chicago.
In another Bohemian family the parents were also making an effort in this direction, but, being less well equipped, their difficulties were greater. The schedule says:
Mother never visits school as she cannot understand English. Parents are very much concerned about their boy who brought a poor mark from school. After family consultation, daughter visited teacher, who advised them to take the boy out of Bohemian school (a nationalistic school to which he went after school hours), because he might be overworked.
These are, however, exceptional cases in the families studied. Among the Bohemians and Slovaks, to be sure, a considerable proportion of the mothers visited the school occasionally or knew some of the children's teachers. Among the families of the more recent immigrants it was almost unheard of for the parents to visit the school. Of the eleven Russian families studied not one reported any visits to the school or contact with the teachers, and only two of the Ukrainian families. One of these visited only when the children did not behave. This mother said that she thought she should know more about her children's school work, but that she had felt so much in the way when she visited the school that she finally stopped going.