Stephen Lassonde: Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class 1870-1940

Précis by Jonathan Wise

            Stephen Lassonde’s Learning to Forget catalogues the evolution of schooling as a public institution and as an acculturating process. The arc of public schooling in New Haven, Connecticut from basic elementary towards compulsory attendance in junior high and high schools is studied with a particular emphasis on the class based ideals of both school reformers, and especially the working class.  He focuses especially on the effects of public schooling on the Italian population of New Haven, particularly of Southern Italy’s immigrant stock.

            According to Lassonde, his goal is to demonstrate, “how schooling has shaped children, and how some children have managed to evade its iron impositions” (ix). This general framework is narrowed by placing closer emphasis on working-class Italian families, and the conflict of values that compulsory schooling brought to the surface, both on the familial and on the societal level.

            Lassonde begins his study by outlining the impact of immigration upon the city and the formation of immigrant neighborhoods between 1840 and 1930. He demonstrates how immigrant groups were able to reconstruct their previous societies within New Haven, forming specifically immigrant collectives within the city. This process coincided with advancements in shipping technology which allowed for speedier and safer trans-Atlantic journeys for far more migrants.  Lassonde notes how the Southern Italian immigrant population came to outnumber the other immigrant groups in New Haven over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

            In the realm of education, Lassonde argues, the middle class imposed its ideals upon other groups. He emphasizes the concept of sentimentalized childhood, which is a belief that children should be of sentimental value rather than a cog in the familial work machine. This middle-class ideal contrasted starkly with the realities of working class families, where the work and financial contribution of child labor was essential to the family’s survival. This conflict is assessed in two periods, from 1852-1871 when public schooling gradually developing, and 1872-1911, when school attendance was mandatory. Lassonde asserts that the element of compulsory attendance was the most controversial aspect of changes in schooling, as it came directly at the expense of working-class ideals of reciprocity in the family power structure.  He describes compulsory education as, “coercive, altruistic, invasive, disinterested, fearful, and idealistic” (33).

            Lassonde posits that with schooling comes a change in the perception of time. He insists that truancy and vagrancy came to be viewed as the social “vice” of idleness. Indeed, the middle-class ideal stressed only two ways children should spend their time, either in school or at work. This concern over idleness spurred the compulsory attendance movement.  Middle-class reformers failed to mention, however, that these periods of “idleness” were often the by-product of circumstance. Work shortages in particular fed the perception of youth wasted in idleness. Working-class kids were especially vulnerable to wage-cutting and peer competition, just like their fathers (40).

            In early schooling there were many instances of casual attendance. This was often due to episodic withdrawal based on the need of the family. Working-class parents were eager for their children to receive an education as long as doing so did not unduly restrict their family income. For working class kids, youth was a training ground in how to make a living. Leaving school to join the workforce became a basic rite of passage.

            Lassonde details the background and ideology of Italian working-class immigrants, demonstrating how the middle-class educational ethos threatened their cultural ideals. To the Italian working-class, he observes, the school “trampled on the traditional rights of parents to cultivate in their children conduct and attitudes most dear to them” (55).  Indeed, they dreaded the consequences of this change. Lassonde’s point is demonstrated in the structure of the Southern Italian immigrant family. Its view of childhood differed substantially from the middle-class sentimental ideal.  Italian parents saw the family as an economic collective. Forced schooling, as experienced by Italian parents, taught the wrong lessons about obligations. The traditional structure was based on the support of the entire family unit. Children from a young age were prepared to follow in their father’s profession, and couples generally had many kids in order to sustain their family – given that the wages of their children was a major financial contribution. Italian parents believed the ideals that the schools promulgated failed to reinforce their values by not instilling the custom of reciprocity. Lassonde stresses that the American schools were challenging the entire way of life of Italian immigrants, and this conflict and culture shock often bred alienation and shame. Italians were unaccustomed to the sharp division of childhood and adulthood, as their societal structure was far more fluid. Lassonde argues that “schooling drew the culture of home life into direct confrontation with the ‘official’ culture of the host society over an extended period of time” (82).

            Likewise, Lassonde maintains, school and social interactions among students were influential in assimilation. Children found that the values of their peer group shaped them more than those of their family.  Constant contact with mass culture also eroded familial authority. Lassonde demonstrates this assimilative process in his analysis of the shift from courtship to dating. Though arranging a marriage in Italian neighborhoods had traditionally been somewhat impersonal, and based on the family’s interests as a collective, the new model gave youth far more agency. Dating emerged as a by-product of increased attendance in high school. The kids who left school early were more likely to uphold Italian traditions, whereas those who continued in high school garnered an appreciation for the Anglo-American conception of romantic love. Lassonde claims this is typified by the fact that Italian high-school graduates were more likely to marry out of their ethnic group.

            Since most immigrant neighborhoods had more homogeneous populations, the numerous local elementary schools generally did not challenge old world perceptions. Lassonde notes, however, that as the age of compulsory attendance increased, kids had to leave their self-segregating neighborhoods to attend comprehensive schools located in downtown New Haven.  Away from their neighborhoods, working-class youth instead became acculturated through their experiences with their new peer groups. The peer groups they encountered included young people from a far more diverse array of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The Italian students often encountered patronizing attitudes which made them feel all the more different, and frequently detached. Lassonde uses the case study of “John” to emphasize the alienation and feelings of social inferiority to Americans that Italian immigrant children felt.

            Lassonde demonstrates that the rise in the age of compulsory attendance coincided with a diminishing youth job market. As the legal age to work rose to 16 by the 1930s, the cultural impact of universal school attendance increased dramatically. Lassonde argues that this point constituted a liminal moment, when youth became a distinct and universal life stage. This transition was cemented by the popularization of high school. Secondary school became the normative teenage experience and morphed into a mass institution. As the high school experience grew more typical, school curricula became tracked. Though tracking occasionally facilitated success and social mobility for some students, others were trapped in inappropriate tracks.  The new curriculum also provided of little value in vocational training.

Parents’ perspectives evolved over time as well, as they put their faith in the idea that school would enhance their child’s future earnings or that high school was a necessary “credential” to assure one’s chances in the job market. Indeed, Lassonde implies as much in his title: Learning to Forget. Ultimately, Lassonde concludes, the democratization of schooling caused parents to “surrender their faith in the past for the promise of a more affluent future for their children, however obscure the path and indefinite the attainment secured in the bargain” (187). Past customs, according to which parents defined the values and career choices of their children, fell by the wayside. Kids learned to integrate themselves into the new mass culture through school, and especially through their peer group interactions. “Families,” Lassonde explains, “began to relinquish the ability to define the young person’s identity, aspirations, obligations, and values in the belief that they were exchanging the power to mold adolescents for the vague prospect of upward social mobility” (188). By the Second World War, the fears of New Haven’s turn of the century Italian parents had finally been realized – their children separated social maturation from the needs of the family unit, and cast aside the values to which their immigrant parents had clung.