Rebuilding the Boardinghouse: The Interwar Years

  • Paul J. Ramsey
Chapter

Abstract

After the Great War, the polyglot boardinghouse, like the French countryside “over there,” had been torn to sheds and was left in shambles. Nevertheless, portions of the boardinghouse remained—just scattered ruins really, but enough foreign-language rubble to use as materials for reconstructing at least sections of multilingual America, a multilingual America that was partially supported by bilingual education. The notion that dual-language instruction did not simply stop after World War I runs counter to the assertions of language scholars who, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, began to explore the history of bilingual education in the United States. In 1971, Theodore Andersson, a professor of language education at the University of Texas, claimed that “[b]ilingual schooling…disappeared from the United States scene between 1920 and 1963.” Although Andersson was a leading authority on the history of dual-language instruction in America, his perspective underestimated the bilingual activities in the nation’s schools during the 1920s and 1930s, decades that were pivotal in the development of the modern bilingual education movement of the 1960s, a movement in which Andersson was a central figure.1

Keywords

Ethnic Identity Immigrant Student Bilingual Education Interwar Period Mexican Child 
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Notes

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