Chapter 5

This chapter was very interesting to me as orginally I felt that the idea of the common school was to bring all the cultures together and form a single identity in America. This chapter shows that the common school not only brought all the people together but was more excluding certain groups than bringing them together. The view of the Irish in the early 19th century has been echoed in another class I am taking this semester on Immigration in America. The Irish were often discriminated against when they first arrived in the United States many of them left their country because of the Irish potato famine. I do not believe the idea that the Irish came to undermine the Protestant ideals in America so there was no good reason for the common school to just exclude Catholicism the way it did. The early attempts to make the Protestant Anglo-American culture the dominant one resulted in the exclusion of many groups including the Irish Americans, Native Americans and African Americans. It was not fair to subject people of other religions to support and follow Protestant beliefs. When it comes to actually using government money to fund these schools it becomes a complicated issue, the government money would then be going to promote a religion which is unconstitutional but the Catholics need funding for their schools. This chapter shows us that although the common schools were made with good intentions or what appear to be good intentions, the idea was better on paper than in practice. I do not believe these same issues occur today, we are much more open to the mixture of cultures as over time through marriage all the cultures have come together in one way or other. There are very little if any people that are of one pure race, which has led the United States to be multicultural while still having this dominant image.