[fla-left] [news] Elian gets bizarre "guidance" from school (fwd)

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Jan 20 13:11:04 PST 2000


At 10:36 AM 1/20/00 -0800, alex lantsberg wrote:
>amen to wojtek, although i would temper the "opposed to education" or
"zealously
>religious" part. the question is how do their kids turn out?

it depends on several factors. Nationality is probably the biggest one: asians and eastern europeans generally value formal education while hispanics generally oppose it. Class is another one, especually among Eastern Europeans: manual laborers / farmers more likely opposed to it. These factors seem to affect the kid's prospects of getting higher education.

Religiosity is often fused with nationalism and general conservatism rather than fundamentalism - i think that is true about hispanics and eastern europeans, but not sure about asians. Prominent display of religious paraphernalia is thus more like waving a national flag or pride in one's national heirtage than acceptance of biblical message.

Another factor (emphasized by Thomas & Znaniecki in their classical work on immigration) is the process of assimilation - successful economic assimilation usually leads to the acceptance of the host society's core values, whereas unsuccessful one - retreat to ritualistic embrace of the old country values in a rigid and conservative way.

wojtek



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