"I met a Greek fruit dealer the other day," said Miss Jane Addams yesterday, "and he said that in all the eighteen years he had been in Chicago no one had asked him about the Acropolis or showed interest in any other part of the country he loved so well. The poor fellow felt aggrieved and, was truly a stranger in a strange land. This complaint of the fruit dealer, it seems to me, strikes the keynote of one defect in our school system."
Miss Addams was addressing the members of the Cook County Teachers' Association in the association building on the subject, "The Newer Ideals as They Are Affecting Life." She said it is wrong to treat the children of foreigners as though they were "the scum of Europe" and always to make them feel strange among their fellow pupils in the public schools.
The speaker laid stress on the point that under existing conditions these children are made to believe there is no hope for them while they show traces of their mother tongue and that they must despise the customs of their parents.
"Teach these children," she said, "that it is no disgrace for them to retain traces of foreign birth, and that the American-born pupils have something to learn from them."
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