Abstract
As the common schools emerged during the second third of the nineteenth century, almost nothing prevented some of them from becoming bilingual institutions. The American tradition of localism and, with it, control over community institutions facilitated public bilingual schooling. So too did the nation’s enormous land holdings; groups of linguistically similar folks could simply establish a town and its common schools would reflect the language of the community. The foreign-language-speaking immigrants also were anxious about the America’s language. Ethnics, therefore, used bilingual education to subdue some of their nervousness by simultaneously promoting both the language of their home and the language of their new homeland. Some nineteenth-century schools became dual-language institutions naturally because of the populations they served, while others developed as bilingual as a way of enticing foreign-language speakers into the public sector. In addition, some common schools emerged as bilingual institutions because of the demands of politically powerful immigrant groups within the community, groups that insisted that their perceived superior culture and educational practices be included in the public school curriculum. Occasionally schools transformed into bilingual institutions as a political appeasement, while some schools, although officially opposed to bilingual education, utilized dual-language instruction in a covert manner.
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Annual Report, State of New York, 1868, 107–109; Annual Report, State of New York, 1877, 115–119; Anne Ruggles Gere, “Indian Heart/White Man’s Head: Native-American Teachers in Indian Schools, 1880–1930,” History of Education Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2005): 38–65; Jon Reyner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 78–80; K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa L. McCarty, “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), 77–81. Other sources indicate that local officials were sometimes less than forthcoming about bilingual education to state educational leaders, particularly when it contradicted the state’s aims; see Handschin, The Teaching of Modern Languages, 67–68.
Handschin, The Teaching of Modern Languages, 74; Theodore Frelinghuysen Chambers, The Early Germans of New Jersey: Their History, Churches and Genealogies (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1969), 34–43; Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–2; Dieter Cunz, The Maryland Germans, a History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 11–93.
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Annual Report, State of Pennsylvania, 1858, 31; Annual Report, State of Pennsylvania, 1862, 43; Annual Report, State of Pennsylvania, 1863, 44; Annual Report, State of Pennsylvania, 1864, 114.
17._Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of Public Schools, to the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, for the Year Ending October 31st, 1873 (Baltimore: King Brothers, 1874), xxxiii; J. G. Morris, “The German in Baltimore,” in Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Annual Reports of the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland, 1894–1896 (n.p., n.d.), 11–19.
Cunz, The Maryland Germans, 203–232, 334–338; Morris, “The German in Baltimore,” 11–19; Ernest J. Becker, “History of the English-German Schools in Baltimore,” in Twenty-fifth Report, Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland (Baltimore: n.p., 1942), 13–17; Douai and Straubenmueller, “German Schools in the United States,” 581–586; Carolyn R. Toth, German-English Bilingual Schools in America: The Cincinnati Tradition in Historical Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 43–44.
Gerber, “Language Maintenance, Ethnic Group Formation, and Public Schools,” 31–61; Fessier, “Speaking in Tongues,” 35–39; Douai and Straubenmueller, “German Schools in the United States,” 581–586; Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of Public Schools, to the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, for the Year Ending October 31, 1875 (Baltimore: King Brothers, 1875), xx-xxi, 13, 173; Forty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of Public Schools, to the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, for the Year Ending October 31st, 1876 (Baltimore: King Brothers, 1877), xxxvii-xxxviii, 29; Cunz, The Maryland Germans, 231–232, 248–251, 334–338.
Newman, “Antebellum School Reform in the Port Cities of the Deep South,” 17–35; Kamphoefner et al., News from the Land of Freedom, 124–126, 319–322; Carl Bethold, June 3, 1854, in News from the Land of Freedom, 329; Hennighausen, “Reminiscences of the Political Life of German-Americans,” 4–5.
Howard A. M. Henderson, The Kentucky School-Lawyer: Or A Commentary on the Kentucky School Laws and Regulations of the State Board of Education (Frankfort, KY: Major, Johnston and Barrett, 1877), 3–11; Barnard, “Subjects and Courses of Instruction in City Public Schools,” 537–542; Douai and Straubenmueller, “German Schools in the United States,” 591; Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, with Summaries of Statistics from the School-Year Ending June 30th, 1881, to the School-Year, 1886 (Frankfort, KY: John D. Woods, Public Printer and Binder, 1886), 54–55; Report of the Superintendent [of] Public Instruction of the State of Kentucky for Four Scholastic Years Ended June 30, 1891 (Frankfort, KY: E. Polk Johnson, Public Printer and Binder, 1892), 150–152; Second Report of the Board of Education of Louisville, Kentucky from July 1, 1912 to June 30, 1913 (Louisville: Gross Parsons and Hambleton, n.d.), [ii-iii].
Newman, “Antebellum School Reform in the Port Cities of the Deep South,” 20–23; Donald E. Devore and Joseph Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans, 1841–1991 (The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991), 5–25.
Newman, “Antebellum School Reform in the Port Cities of the Deep South,” 20–23; Devore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 25–30.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000), 201; Devore and Logsdon, Crescent City Schools, 40–55; Louisiana State Department of Education, Public School Statistics, Session of 1914-’15: Part II of the Biennial Report of 1913-’14 and 1914-’15 (Baton Rouge: Ramires-Jones Printing Company, 1915), 117.
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Ramsey, P.J. (2010). Building the Polyglot Boardinghouse in the Northeast and the South. In: Bilingual Public Schooling in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106093_3
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