Education
Along with reading, writing, and mathematics, schools taught patriotism, piety and respect for authority. Progressive educators looked to the public schools primarily as an agent of “Americanization.” Elwood Cubberely, expressed the views that schools could be the vehicle by which immigrant children could break free of the parochial ethnic neighborhood. In “Changing Conceptions of Education,” he argued, “Our task is to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as part of our American race, and to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government.”
The most important educational trends in these years were the expansion and bureaucratization of the nation’s public schools systems. Children started school earlier and remained there longer. Kindergartens spread rapidly in large cities. High schools multiplied, extending the school’s influence beyond the traditional grammar school curriculum.
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newcentury/5784