Outside In Minorities and the Transformation of American Education

Ever since the massive immigration from Europe of the late 19th century,American society has accomodated people of many cultures, religions, languages,and expectations. The task of integration has increasingly fallen to theschools, where children are taught a common language and a set of democraticvalues and sent on their ways to become productive members of society. HowAmerican schools have set about educating these diverse students, and how thesestudents' needs have altered the face of education, are issues central to thesocial history of the United States in the 20th century.In her pathbreaking new book Paula S. Fass presents a wide rangingexamination of the role of "outsiders" in the creation of modern education.Through a series of in-depth and fascinating case studies, she demonstrates howissues of pluralism have shaped the educational landscape and how variousminority groups have been affected by their educational experiences.Fass first looks at how public schools absorbed the children of immigrantsin the early years of the century and how those children gradually began to usethe schools for their own social purposes. She then turns to the experiences ofother groups of Americans whose struggles for educational and socialopportunities have defined cultural life over the last fifty years: blacks,whose education became a major concern of the federal government in the 1930sand 1940s; women, who had access to higher education but were deniedcommensurate job opportunities; and Catholics, who created schools thatsucceeded both in protecting minority integrity and in providing Catholics witha path to American success. Along the way, she presents a wealth of fascinatingand surprising detail. Through an examination of New York City high schoolyearbooks from the 1930s and 1940s, she shows how a student's ethnic identitydetermined which activities he or she would engage in and how ethnicity wasetched into schooling. And she examines how the New Deal and the army in WorldWar II succeeded in educating large numbers of blacks and making theinequalities in their educational opportunities a critical national concern.A sweeping and highly original history of American education, Outside Inhelps us to understand how schools have been shaped by their students, howeducational issues have merged with wider social concerns, and how outsidershave recreated schooling and culture in the 20th century. By opening up newhistorical terrain and rejecting a vision of outsiders as merely victims ofAmerican educational policy, the book has important implications forcontemporary social and educational issues.

Paula S. Fass is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University, she is the author of The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's and numerous articles.