| Chapter 1: | Italian Americana 1920s–1930s |
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Education
Although an overwhelming Catholic population, limited financial resources meant that a relative minority of Italian American children attended parochial schools, with large numbers enrolled in the public schools. The prevailing system found children attending local public elementary schools, followed by junior and senior high schools. During the Great Depression, education for many Italian Americans, especially females, terminated at age 16—the legal age before one could quit school to go to work. Economic exigencies now comported with a peculiar mentality about women. “To give a daughter more education than that required by law was an extravagant waste of time and money,” was the way novelist Jerre Mangione described it.12 This pattern of sacrificing a female’s education in preference for males was not considered unusual; indeed, it occurred in my family as my sister, although a more than able student, departed from school to obtain a full time job in order to help the family income. By contrast, notwithstanding our family’s dependency on relief and the child welfare program to get by, there was no pressure for me to quit school.
Which type of New York City high school to attend was a decision of great moment for Italian American youngsters in the 1920s and 1930s as they were required to make a choice while still in eighth grade between traditional academic institutions or vocational high schools? The vocational school movement was based on the premise that these institutions were desirable alternatives for students presumably unable or uninterested in competing successfully in academic programs. It is not by accident that vocational schools were deliberately located in poor, immigrant neighborhoods; it comported with the prevailing stereotyped belief that these people were not desirable academic material.13 This negative attitude was reinforced by extensive use of the Binet Test that was widely used during the First World War which purportedly measured natural intelligence and seemed to indicate an inferiority complex among first and second generation Italian Americans since so many did not score very high.