I’m sending you this reading guide sheet to help you understand the two articles due for class on Tuesday.  (It is also posted on the website.)  You are not required to fill it out, it will not be graded – it is simply to help you read more carefully and to improve the quality of class iscussion.  It is in your interest, however, to try to answer these questions – as always, you will be allowed to use your notes for any quiz.  Take the time to read the articles carefully – they are more challenging than the material in the first half of the course and you may not get the argument the first time through.

TM
 

“Should I Go or Should I Stay?: Adolescence, School Attainment, and Parent-Child Relations in Italian Immigrant Families of New Haven, 1900-1940”

1. What does the author mean by the development of “adolescence” and what is the role of the school in defining it?
 

2. Chart the “drop-out” problem.  Note the years and students’ average ages and attendance rates.
 

3. What is the role of class and race in the history of “drop-outs”?
 

4. Chart the role of class in Italian immigrant families.
 Name the groups; describe each group’s expectations for children (both boys and girls), school, work, and family obligations/expectations.  (It will be helpful to describe these in terms of Italians’ experience in Italy and in America.)
 

5. Why didn’t Italian parents believe their children needed to attend school?  What didn’t they like about the American schools?
 

6. Why did younger Italian siblings fair better in school?
 

7. Describe the different expectations for girls and boys.
 

8. How did the opening of the Commercial High School in 1920 change education for girls?
 

9. Why did the enrollment rates for second-generation Italians increase throughout the 20th century?
 
 

“Origins and the ‘Dropout Problem’”

1. What is the relationship between adolescence and school?  Is it “natural” or culturally determined?
 

2. How has the “dropout problem” been defined throughout the twentieth century?
     In the 1900s?

     In the 1950s?

     In the 1960s?
 

 List the factors that made “dropouts” a public concern in the early-1960s.
 

3. What is de-industrialization?  (Look it up if you don’t know – assess its meaning in the context of this article.)
 

4. What is the relationship between the changing nature of work and the need for school attendance?
 

5. What did educators fear were the larger social consequences of dropping out?
 

6. Who did educators see as the “typical” dropout in the 1960s?
 

7. Why were some writers concerned about female dropouts?  What were their characteristics?
 

8. The author posits a “chicken and egg” argument about normative behavior and social expectations – in this case, that once more students attend school on a regular basis, the more society believes that this is a “norm.”  What three underlying issues does the author suggest are bound up in society’s concerns about dropouts?