The Survey, Volume 30, Number 3, Apr 19, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 3, Apr 19, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
The idea is permeating the leading colleges and universities. The old
Yale boat house is being used as a school for teaching English, civics,
and hygiene to foreigners. Students at the University of Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, and Ames are holding classes for foreign men and boys in
railroad box-cars. Men from Columbia, Harvard, Williams, Brown,
Pennsylvania, and other colleges are conducting educational classes in
labor unions, talking in shop meetings, and leading clubs of working
boys. University of Wisconsin engineering students are instructing
American mechanics and boiler makers in the round house, and convicts in
the jail. Undergraduates of Amherst, Massachusetts Agricultural College,
Princeton, Penn State and other institutions are doing deputation work
in rural industrial communities. Men from Cornell, Worcester Polytechnic
Institute, McGill University, California and the University of Puget
Sound are visiting the homes of immigrants and are teaching groups in
boarding houses. Students of South Carolina, Furman, and other southern
colleges, are doing extension work in cotton mill villages.
[Illustration:
CLASS OF RUSSIAN AND ROUMANIAN JEWS
]
Students have made possible unusual community meetings. In New York city
sixty classes in English and civics for foreigners have been taught by
students, and on several occasions the members of these classes,
representatives of sixteen nationalities, came together under their
respective flags to hear a lecture on American citizenship, to tell what
the work was doing for them, to sing their national songs and to unite
in learning “America.” The Working boys’ clubs came together on one
occasion to hear addresses by Ernest Thompson Seton and Dr. George J.
Fisher. In Pittsburgh, a foreign singing contest was attended by several
thousand people, and a huge American flag of silk was awarded to the
winning group. In San Francisco a mass meeting and entertainment was
attended by men of twenty-five nationalities.
In Tacoma last spring, the notable immigration conference, attended by
several hundred delegates, including five state governors, a Canadian
premier and representatives of capital and labor, was planned and
promoted by the Y. M. C. A. immigration secretary and his student
workers. The conference resulted in the formation of the Coast-wide
Immigration League, to cope with the problems of Pacific immigration
which will be aggravated on the opening of the Panama Canal. In April of
this year a similar conference was held in San Francisco. The man who
conceived and is promoting these conferences acquired his first
experience in teaching foreigners English as a graduate student at
college. It was this effort that determined his life work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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