Assimilation

Assimilation is a voluntary or involuntary process by which individuals or groups completely take on the traits of another culture, leaving their original cultural and linguistic identities behind. The absorption of European immigrants into U.S. society and their adoption of American cultural patterns and social structures has generally been described as a process of assimilation. For many years, school programs in the United States strove to assimilate minority children. The process has also been called Americanization. The education of American Indian youth, for example, focused on enabling them to blend into the majority culture, while discouraging the retention of their tribal customs, beliefs, and languages. As late as the 20th century, many Native American children were physically removed from their families and transplanted to distant towns and villages, where they lived with White families in order to speed up this process.

The concept of assimilation continues to polarize teachers, school administrators, academics, researchers, politicians, and others with an interest in the place of schools in public life. On one side, there are those who feel strongly that in a democratic, pluralistic, and egalitarian society embedded in an interdependent world, the primary mission of public schools is to promote the intellectual, social, linguistic, and personal development of all students, whatever their background. According to this camp, public schooling should promote social justice; caring and advocacy for students, their parents, and their communities; curriculum reform; prejudice reduction; linguistic fairness; and respect for the cultures of those who differ from ourselves. The assimilation research literature suggests that culturally, linguistically, and socially responsive schooling produces students who feel less alienated and who tend to do well academically, socially, and emotionally. According to this view, students who take pride in their backgrounds and are able to maintain their original languages and cultures have a greater chance of doing well in school and society, while maintaining important intergenerational communication patterns in their homes and communities. This set of beliefs is common among bilingual educators.

On the other side are those who feel equally strongly that the public schools should continue to emphasize the assimilation of minorities into society and the modern economy by focusing on the core intellectual and cultural values of the Western world. Those who hold this position still believe in the notion of the “melting pot,” our best-known assimilation metaphor. Although it was originally intended as a metaphor for leveling the sociocultural and racial playing field in the United States, the melting-pot concept has been criticized for being discriminatory in practice. (The author once asked the Black civil rights leader Jesse Jackson Jr. whether he believed in the melting pot—to which Jackson responded that in his opinion, most Blacks were stuck on the side of the pot.)

Advocates of the melting pot claim that multiculturalism lowers academic standards by establishing preferential policies for minority students for admission to colleges and universities; substituting “feel-good” learning for academic rigor by overemphasizing self-esteem gained through reverence for one's ethnicity and linguistic traditions; and dividing U.S. society by segregating students and teaching them competing ethnocentrisms through curricular approaches, such as Afrocentric education and bilingual/bicultural education. These critics believe that such programs undermine U.S. common culture by denying its Western roots, teaching the “wrong” values, and deemphasizing traditional moral authority based on Western religious principles.

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