Education for Immigrants.

The United States began as a "melting pot" of immigrants from all parts of the world. During the 1920s a major problem of American education involved the training of new immigrants. As the decade began, there were almost five million illiterate people, ten years of age or older, in the total population. Since most of the newly arriving immigrants settled in the larger cities, illiteracy in those cities rose as high as 15 percent. Among the foreign-born it was not unusual for the rate of illiteracy to be 25 to 35 percent. Therefore, many new educational programs were established to alleviate the illiteracy problem of these new Americans.

Efforts toward Assimilation.

Following World War I, a national movement to assimilate immigrants into American society was organized. The Federal Bureau of Education and the naturalization division of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service...