In the matter of education, America fell far short in what should be the
strongest of all her institutions: the public school. A more inadequate,
incompetent method of teaching, as I look back over my seven years of
attendance at three different public schools, it is difficult to
conceive. If there is one thing that I, as a foreign-born child, should
have been carefully taught, it is the English language. The individual
effort to teach this, if effort there was, and I remember none, was
negligible. It was left for my father to teach me, or for me to dig it
out for myself. There was absolutely no indication on the part of
teacher or principal of responsibility for seeing that a foreign-born
boy should acquire the English language correctly. I was taught as if I
were American-born, and, of course, I was left dangling in the air, with
no conception of what I was trying to do.
My father worked with me evening after evening; I plunged my young mind
deep into the bewildering confusions of the language--and no one
realizes the confusions of the English language as does the
foreign-born--and got what I could through these joint efforts. But I
gained nothing from the much-vaunted public-school system which the
United States had borrowed from my own country, and then had rendered
incompetent-either by a sheer disregard for the thoroughness that makes
the Dutch public schools the admiration of the world, or by too close a
regard for politics.
Pages:
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453