upon the fact that their children learn the
English language and American customs before they do themselves, and the
children act not only as interpreters of the language, but as buffers
between them and Chicago, resulting in a certain almost pathetic
dependence of the family upon the child. When a child of the family,
therefore, first goes to school, the event is fraught with much
significance to all the others. The family has no social life in any
structural form and can supply none to the child. He ought to get it in
the school and give it to his family, the school thus becoming the
connector with the organized society about them. It is the children
aged six, eight, and ten, who go to school, entering, of course, the
primary grades. If a boy is twelve or thirteen on his arrival in
America, his parents see in him a wage-earning factor, and the girl of
the same age is already looking toward her marriage.

Let us take one of these boys, who has learned in his six or eight years
to speak his native language, and to feel himself strongly identified
with the fortunes of his family. Whatever interest has come to the minds
of his ancestors has come through the use of their hands in the open
air; and open air and activity of body have been the inevitable
accompaniments of all their experiences. Yet the first thing that the
boy must do when he reaches school is to sit still, at least part of the
time, and he must learn to listen to what is said to him, with all the
perplexity of listening to a foreign tongue. He does not find this very
stimulating, and is slow to respond to the more subtle incentives of the
schoolroom. The peasant child is perfectly indifferent to showing off
and making a good recitation. He leaves all that to his schoolfellows,
who are more sophisticated and equipped with better English. His parents
are not deeply interested in keeping him in school, and will not hold
him there against his inclination. Their experience does not point to
the good American tradition that it is the educated man who finally
succeeds. The richest man in the Italian colony can neither read nor
write--even Italian. His cunning and acquisitiveness, combined with the
credulity and ignorance of his countrymen, have slowly brought about his
large fortune. The child himself may feel the stirring of a vague
ambition to go on until he is as the other children are; but he is not
popular with his schoolfellows, and he sadly feels the lack of