New Homes for Old

by Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge

A NATIONAL RECEPTION COMMITTEE

As this visiting developed among the different groups, several results could be anticipated. Just as the needs of the unaccompanied girls have been learned in this way, the needs of the families in the different groups could become more exactly understood, and devices for meeting those needs more efficiently worked out. It would perhaps be possible to urge the woman to learn English when she is first confronted with the strangeness of her situation, and before she slips into the makeshifts by which she later is apparently able to get on without learning English. Instruction in English might be made to appear the path of least resistance, if it were made attractive and available to the immigrant housewife at a sufficiently early moment.

These visitors might preferably be English-speaking members of the foreign-speaking groups. If there were a sufficient staff, they might also render many similar services to other women in the foreign-born groups. They could persuade those who have not yet learned English to come into English classes; they could organize groups for instruction in cooking, child care, house and neighborhood sanitation; and gradually accumulate both additional knowledge as to the need and experience in meeting it.

A point to be emphasized in connection with this service is that it is not related in any way to the problem of dependency, but is directed wholly toward meeting the difficulties growing out of the strangeness of the newcomer to the immediate situation. By developing a method for lessening the difficulties connected with the migration of any group from one section to another differing in industrial or social organization, light would be thrown on analogous problems such as the movements among the negroes from the South to the North during the war, or of the mountain people to the cotton-mill villages at an earlier date.

Another point to be emphasized is that while the method of approach and of immediate service can be developed independently, and while the amount of discomfort and genuine distress that can be prevented is very great—as is shown in the experience of families whom such organizations as now attempt work along this line have aided—the opportunity for swift and efficient adjustment will be dependent on the development of a body of educational technique.

It has been made clear that there are certain kinds of information that should be given to the newcomers, with reference, for example, to the change in the legal relationships within the family group, the new responsibilities of the husband and father, and the rights of wife and children to support. Attention has been called to the need of giving instruction regarding sanitary and hygienic practices, with reference to the new money values, and to the new conditions under which articles of household use are to be obtained, to the requirements in food and clothing, particularly for the children, in the new locality as compared with that from which the family comes. And, as has been suggested, above all there is always the question of teaching English.

Sometimes the necessary facts can be conveyed briefly and immediately. Sometimes patient individual instruction will be necessary. Sometimes group or class instruction will be the proper device. It is highly important, then, that these various forms of instruction be developed into a technique. Courses of instruction to be given according to these different methods to those for whom a particular method is appropriate must be organized, and a body of teachers developed.

The question then arises as to the extent to which this task has been undertaken and the agencies that have undertaken it. As to the first great body of material, it may be said to have been ignored. Only when one is summoned to the Juvenile Court of Domestic Relations, or when one learns of another's being summoned, is the body of family law called to the attention of the group. In English, in cooking, and child care, some agencies have attempted instruction. They are the public school, organizations like the Immigrants' Protective League, the State Immigration Commission, the social settlement, recreation centers of various kinds, the Young Women's Christian Association in its International Institutes. The possibilities in the work of these agencies are numerous.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL

The public school touches the foreign-born family at two points: First, in the compulsory education of the children, and second, in the opportunities that it offers to the adult members of the family to learn English, to fit themselves for citizenship, and to adjust their lives to the new community.