How do diverse societies integrate newcomers? How do they balance the need to develop a sense of community with the desire to maintain one's ancestral culture? Every multiethnic society faces these questions, and those that fail to agree on an approach are doomed to fall apart. In Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants, historian Jeffrey Mirel challenges examines the civic instruction European immigrants received in the first half of the twentieth century.
Second-Generation Success
One of the most valuable things America can do is show the world that a society made up of people from every corner of the globe — where in a generation or two no race will be a majority — can be a place where people can choose to preserve their ancestral cultures even as they truly become one people as Americans. We can serve as an alternative model to societies that reject pluralism, that look to suppress dissent and diversity because their majority believes its culture or beliefs are the only acceptable ones. One report doesn't mean the task has been accomplished. But it does mean that, on an issue of paramount importance for us and for the world, we are on our way.
