ABSTRACT
Conflict and confusion in everyday life were inescapable facets of the response to industrialism. That the people of the United States succeeded in adjusting at all to such far-reaching change was due in some measure to the public schools. Whatever their faults, and they were many, the common schools gave city children some common background and induced in parents awareness of the common needs and aims that, John Dewey said, tie society together. True, the ‘melting p o t ’ did not melt well enough to fully assimilate the 17 million foreign-born who came during the half-century. True, also, that Protestant-Catholic hostility endured; the opening of city parochial schools lessened but did not eradicate the feuding, since some citizens saw dangers in thus cutting off Catholic children from wholesome contacts with the non-Catholic majority. Equally true, Southern cities, where private and charity institutions had done duty in antebellum days, first inaugurated public schools in the Reconstruction era, and then only for children in the elementary and grammar grades. Under an educational system of racial segregation, tax-supported Negro schools were generally badly equipped, taught by ill-trained teachers, and rarely offered more than five years of instruction. Even in the national capital, where Northerners in Congress dictated the establishment of coloured public schools in
101 the last year of the Civil War, Negro children for four generations attended segregated schools labelled ‘separate but equal’, but manifestly far from equal.
