Ch. 16 Section 2 Education and Culture

Ch. 16 Section 2 Education and Culture

Objectives
To trace the expansion of public education at the turn of the century.
To summarize the educational opportunities open for immigrants.
To describe the expansion of higher education.
To show how expanding education enhanced American culture.

Focus & Motivate
Starting With the Student
What kinds of futures is your education preparing you for?
How might an educational system help a nation meet its social needs.

Objective 1 Instruct
Expanding Public Education
Discussing Key Ideas
States try to improve and expand public education to produce good citizens and skilled workers.
High schools emerge as industrial work demands more educated workers.
Discriminatory educational policies deny most African Americans equal educational opportunities.

History From Visuals
Expanding Education/Decreasing Illiteracy
Reading the Graph
Each stick figure in the graph equals 2 million students. Therefore, the six stick figures in the top row (1870) equal 12 million students.

Extension
The total school enrollment for the years given in the graph is below. Create an additional column for the graph.
Year Enrollment 1870, 6,872,000; 1880, 9,868,000; 1890, 14,479,000; 1900, 16,885,000; 1910, 19,372,000; 1920, 23,278,000.

Objective 2 Instruct
Education for Immigrants
Starting With the Student
How might a student assimilate to new schools and lifestyles if they immigrated to a different country?

Discussing Key Ideas
Public schools and employers attempt to Americanize immigrants.
Some immigrants resist the pressure to abandon their native cultures.

Now & Then
Technology and Schools
Critical Thinking:
Evaluating
What is the value of computers in the classroom or in instruction? Do you think computers are overrated as an educational tool or that computer skills are essential in today’s world?

Objective 3 Instruct
Expanding Higher Education
Discussing Key Ideas
Higher education greatly expands at the turn of the century, drawing students mainly from upper- and middle-class backgrounds.
The college curriculum changes to suit the new technological age.
African Americans establish colleges of their own to overcome their exclusion from most white schools.

Historical Spotlight
Women in College Life
Critical Thinking:
Hypothesizing
Even though the number of women attending college was climbing at the turn of the century, they still remained a minority on campus. How would college administrators and professors address the presence of female students.

More About. . .
Stanford University
Railroad magnate Leland Stanford donated a Palo Alto farm to provide land for the new University. The sandstone buildings, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, were styled to resemble the old Spanish missions of California.

More About. . . .
W.E.B. Du Bois (pronounced doo bois) attended Fisk University in Nashville before going to Harvard for graduate school. Although his doctorate was in history, he was more of a sociologist who devoted his scholarship to fighting racism. Du Bois used statistical evidence to disprove racist myths that were used to support segregation. Among he early writing with this goal was The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first case study of an African-American community in the country.

Objective 4 Instruct
Education Influences Culture
Starting With the Student
What kinds of topics, issues, and activities (such as music, literature, film, or other hobbies) has education helped you to appreciate?

Discussing Key Ideas
The expansion of education broadens American’ cultural horizons, with art galleries, libraries, and museums making culture available to more people.
Many turn-of-the-century artists and writers embrace social realism, attempting to portray life as it is really lived.
Increased literacy boosts sales of “dime novels” and other light fiction.

More About
Thomas Eakins
Except for four years in Europe, when he studies art in France and viewed the masterpieces of Spain, Eakins spent virtually his entire life in the city of his birth, Philadelphia. His pioneering efforts in realism at first met with scorn. The Gross Clinic, the realistic depiction of a surgery, now deemed a masterpiece, was rejected for display at the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876.

More About. . . .
Mark Twain
Clemens grew up in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, and took his pen name from a riverboat pilot’s cry, “Mark twain!”—which meant the water was two fathoms deep, or safe for a boat to cross. Twain’s satirical pen gave late 19th-century American its nickname, the Gilded Age, which was the title of a novel he coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner. A pioneer work of American realism, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is usually cited as Twain’s masterpiece. “All modern American literature,” Ernest Hemingway once, said, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

Close
Education, which expanded to train the work force and teach good American citizenship, also led to new cultural achievements.

Skillbuilder
Interpreting Graphs
Answer
Rate: 14%
Immigrants: Possible Answer: More impressive, because millions of immigrants could not read when they arrived in America.

Drawing Conclusions
Answer: Public schools multiplied and improved their curricula, and they granted many more children the opportunity to be educated for jobs and citizenship.

Analyzing Causes
Answer: Public schools and adult classes taught English to all members of the family; Americanization also took place in the workplace.

Recognizing Effects
Answer: Because of the number of death from infection during the war, reformers sought changes in medical schools to ensure a rigorous education for doctors.

Synthesizing
Answer: All-black colleges and universities opened, but only a tiny percentage of African Americans received a college education.

Summarizing
Answer: New printing technologies and America’s growing literacy rate.

Section 2 Assessment

Terms & Names
W.E.B. Du Bois, p. 470
Booker T. Washington, p. 471
Thomas Eakins, p. 471
Mark Twain, p. 472

Summarizing
Compulsory education laws; Literacy increased.
Increase in number of kindergartens; immigrants become “Americanized.”
Growth of high schools; college enrollments increased.
Discrimination against African Americans; all-black colleges founded.
New curricula led to advances in science and medicine.

Students should be able to articulate reasons for their choices.

Developing Historical Perspective
Possible Answer: Students may note that in the early 20th century, cultural institutions promoted high culture, rather than the mass culture that was emerging. Today, museums and libraries are more integrated into mass culture and reach larger audiences.

Hypothesizing
Possible Answer: Without public schools, economic growth, the adapting of immigrants to American life, and the growth of high culture might have slowed. However, private schools might have developed more rapidly.