I found this article to be very interesting because it made some claims that seem to go against what I had believed before reading it. Sometimes I wished Gerstle and Mollenkopf would give more reasoning to their claims or to the claims of the authors they discuss.
One idea that baffled me was Gleason’s idea of the American civic culture before the civil rights movement in his book “Sea Chnage in the Civic Culture of the 1960s”. This culture seems like the American Dream, but I don’t think people lost the American dream after the civil rights movement. If people no longer had dreams of equality, liberty, and individual opportunity when in America after the civil rights movement began, why would people bother coming to America? Also, during the time that this civic culture existed, the 1925 quotas were in place. I would think that these quotas would detract from this civic culture that Gleason talks about because it does not seem that the United States was very welcoming to immigrants before the Hart-Cellar Act. I wish Gerstle and Mollenkopf dove further into Gleason’s argument, so his argument made sense considering the laws that were in place.
Another interesting idea that I wish had been explained further is idea that Tyack discusses of schools emphasizing different ideas during different time periods in America. The first few time periods discussed make perfect sense. When the country was first born, teachers tried to get students to accept a republican form of government. Then when more ethnicities were introduced to the country, teachers tried to create a common culture and then when there were huge surges of immigrants teachers tried to Americanize the immigrant children. In the fourth wave there were progressive teachers who taught about different types of tolerance. I am confused on why Tyack believes that now teachers use school as “a form of human capital”, so students are taught more, so they can make money. What is specific about this current time period that is causing teachers to focus more on money rather than on creating good American citizens? Is it because immigration has been occurring for so long?
