| Chapter 1: | Italian Americana 1920s–1930s |
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However, as educator Leonard Covello points out, no allowance was made for the absence of home support of the child brought up in slum areas where parents’ poor expressions of English served as a model. Thus the child “usually did not have the vocabulary to express himself and had not the opportunity to absorb the fundamentals of education as thoroughly as a student from a better economic environment.”14 Other scholars of education and its impact of Italian American youngsters were similarly critical of the system for making little effort to relate to the parents of the children and their culture. Sr. Mary Matthews who studied the impact of public school education on Italian Americans in New York City concluded, “That the schools had little contact with the parents and that nothing was done to bring the parents into the educational process so far as their children were concerned are now clearly recognized as defects of the system.”15
It was a comparable story in other Italian American enclaves outside of New York City. Irvin Child’s study of Italian American life in New Haven, Connecticut, during this era indicates a similar disposition on the part of the educational establishment to disparage Italian culture while becoming preoccupied with full-scale assimilation.