Historically, America is known for its “melting-pot” culture. We used to take everyone who wants to become an American, just as the plaque on the Statue of Liberty says: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (Lazarus). Sometimes, however, this process also removes any trace of their previous culture. A German-descendant is only a German by ancestry, and any part of them that also defined this was removed via assimilation. But there is also a broader context, beyond that of the “cultural assimilation” America performs for its immigrants. It is the “education” schools do for its children. This education has larger, more detrimental effects that the author wants to define beyond the message of “cultural assimilation.” Karen Russell shows, through the plot of St Lucy 's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, this process of education, its flaws and how it affects children.
In the beginning of the story, the wolf children are introduced to St. Lucy’s school. At first, they act in a barbaric fashion, not unlike little children who have no sense of what is ‘proper.’ The first way Russell shows this connection is through the beginning of the education process, which is what the wolf girls’ parents desired for their children. She describes that they “wanted them to use towels, get braces and be bilingual,” or that these werewolves want their child to learn something and become better than them (Russell 227). This is the reason why children are sent to school in the first place: to learn new things and become more successful than their parents. However, the consequence of this action is that their child is no longer raised by them exclusively. Most simply believe they are no longer taught exc...
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...ng and understood nothing, thereby resulting in a panic like Claudette’s. Although the situation blows over, this cites a contention brought up in Stage 5, informing the reader that “they find it easy to move between the two cultures,” meaning they find it easy to adapt (Russell 245). It was made clear by Claudette that this was not the case, because she panicked and failed to adapt at all in the end.
It is clear Karen Russell has a few contentions with the current state of education, and her short story is her subtle way of pointing them out. Education treats all children as if they were “uncivilized”, and restricts their growth, personalities, creativity and nearly everything that shapes them. America is certainly a “melting pot,” in that respect: a bland soup that has no defining qualities from the ingredients that were there, nor from the ones that were added.
In Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, Angela Valenzuela investigates immigrant and Mexican American experiences in education. Valenzuela mentions differences in high schools between U.S born youth and immigrants such as how immigrants she interviewed seemed to achieve in school as they feel privileged to achieve secondary education. However, she found that her study provided evidence of student failure due to schools subtracting resources from these youths. Both are plagued by stereotypes of lacking intellectual and linguistic traits along with the fear of losing their culture. As a Mexican American with many family members who immigrated to the U.S to pursue a higher education, I have experience with Valenzuela’s
In Karen Russell’s short story St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen uses evidence to show whether or not Claudette has conformed to humanity.
With the beginning of mandatory education in 1852 and the influx of large numbers of immigrants with their children (Reddy, p5), America was faced for the first time with educating a heterogeneous group of students. These children had diverse social and cultural backgrounds, as well as something the educators of the previous, homogenous schools had not been forced to deal with. Many of these children showed signs of various learning, developmental, physical, and emotional/behavioral problems.
Everyone had to prove they were independent, capable, and willing to integrate into the cultural melting pot with its own identity of hard work, grit, and determination which established and fostered success in American society. But, not everyone who chooses to take the adventure and risk associated with becoming American wishes to share in this identity. Many feel it necessary to shun the American identity and observe it with a level of disdain. Disregarding the reasons themselves or previous generations may have immigrated to America for. In the short story “Mericans”, Sandra Cisneros illustrates this concept through a character in the story. “The awful grandmother knits the names of the dead and the living into one long prayer fringed with the grandchildren born in that barbaric country with its barbaric ways. (Cisneros)”. In the story it is later identified the children in reference were indeed born in the United States. “Awful grandmother” has an incredibly low opinion of the society in which her grandchildren were born. Barbaric, let’s take a look at that word shall we—“without civilizing influences; uncivilized; primitive (barbaric)”. The detriment of that perception seems to be counterproductive to the melting pot concept of the United
In the story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell, the characters, Claudette, Jeanette and Mirabella are humans living with a wolf family. The girls were sent to St. Lucy’s to learn human behaviors. “The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock” is used to show how the girls will react to their development. Claudette, by the end of the story, has fully adapted to human society.
“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell is about a group of girls who are sent to a school, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls, where they are taught the human culture and eradicated of their wolf culture. Claudette, the narrator, is in the middle of the pack throughout the story and is able to do what is expected of her in that stage of lycanthropic culture shock. She is able to adapt quickly and do what is required from her. Although she is able to adapt, she has wolf tendencies embedded in her that cannot diminish which causes her to not be able to fully adapt by the end of the story.
There are many fictional elements that are important when it comes to short stories. These elements help the reader understand the story in more depth, and help to gain a better understanding of what the author’s purpose is. One of these elements is setting. Setting is the time and place in which a story takes place, it can help determine the mood, influence how characters’ act, change the dialog in the story and can reflect how the characters interact in society. In the short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” the setting is a very important element to show the development of the girls and how they changed throughout the story. There are two different places which we consider the setting. There is the church and the cave. With these two different settings we see different lessons being taught in each
The subject of this paper is Liz, a 52-year old, 1.5 generation female immigrant from Hong Kong. What this means is that she immigrated to the United States when she was a child, around 7-years old (Feliciano Lec. 1/4/2016). As a child of a family that consists of five siblings and two parents that did not speak any English prior to immigrating, the focus of this paper will be on the legal processes that the family went through to become legal immigrants and the various factors that aided in her path towards assimilation.
In the 20th century, the melting pot is not working, and the whole idea is under attack (Evans 76). The United States has changed from a melting pot to a vast culture with varying backgrounds. In years before, America was a collection of Chinese, Germans, Italians, Scots, Croats, etc., all craving freedom. Today, even the simple concept of an English-speaking nation is fading off the continent. In the old days, immigrants were taught in English in the public schools. (76). In America today, children are taught in German, Italian, Polish, and 108 other languages. Most of these schools are funded by 139 million federal dollars.
One way to distinguish a person from the billions of other people in the world is by looking into their ethnicity. Ethnicity may be simplified as just a person’s origin, but arguments have been made that there is more to the world. Joane Nagel, author of “Constructing Ethnicity”, writes about what makes up the word ethnicity along with its uses in social and political spectrums. Nicholosa Mohr also writes about the different perspective of ethnicity and the way people embrace them in her writing “The English Lesson”. From reading both texts, it is possible to make the argument that Mohr’s text supports Nagel’s ideas on the fluidity and situational nature of ethnic identity in the United States. Mohr finds themes from different scenarios in the classroom that can perhaps correspond to many of Nagel’s ideas and theories about ethnicity.
In Joel L. Swerdlow’s 2001 essay, “Changing America,” he writes about the current cultural differences among kids in high school. He goes on to talk about how you can gather a large variety of kids, coming from all over the world, yet they still somehow manage to develop the same “American Teenager” attitude toward life. The essay talks about how people used to view America as a “melting pot” of nations, and how over time that view is starting to change.
“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, by Karen Russell is the story of a pack of human girls who were born of werewolves. They are taken from their families in the wilderness and brought to a St. Lucy’s. It was here that they were to be civilized. The process of civilization involved stripping them of their personal and cultural identities and retraining them in a manner that was acceptable to the human world. This is a close analogy to the Residential Schools of Cultural Assimilation for native Americans from 1887 to the early 1950’s.
In the second epigraph in the short story “St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By wolves’’ by Karen Russell discusses how it’s not easy going from a wolf to being a human. The girls must work hard and try their all to make it. They feel like they don’t belong there, it’s like going from a small school to a big school. They day dream of their old way of life. They feel uncomfortable and depressed.
The United States education system would look quite different without the ideas brought to America by the German immigrants. Germany’s influence can be traced back to the beginning of our country. Their impact goes back to the first German settlement in 1608 at Jamestown, Pennsylvania. German immigrants to Colonial America brought with them their culture, traditions, and philosophy about education. Much of the formal education system currently in place in the United States has their roots in Germany. The German immigrants are responsible for the first kindergarten in America, introducing both physical and vocational education, and establishing a universal education for all students. They also had a strong impact on the beginning of universities in our country. The German people were deeply religious. These religious beliefs carried over into our new schools as our nation was formed. As far back as the 1700’s, the school was an avenue to establish superiority over other nationalities. This paper will investigate the influence that German immigrants have had on American education during the time when America was being colonized and onto later years . This paper will also examine how our modern education system has roots from the early German schools. It is my thesis that our modern education system has been strongly influenced by the German people that immigrated to America.
This quote is symbolic of the expressed opinions and ideology of the founding fathers of America. History, especially the history of the American educational system, paints a contradictory portrait. Idealistic visions of equity and cultural integration are constantly bantered about; however, they are rarely implemented and materialized. All men are indeed created equal, but not all men are treated equally. For years, educators and society as a whole have performed a great disservice to minorities in the public school sector. If each student is of equal value, worth, and merit, then each student should have equal access and exposure to culturally reflective learning opportunities. In the past, minorities have had a muted voice because of the attitude of the majority. Maxine Greene summarizes a scene from E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, after which she poses questions that many minorities have no doubt asked silently or loud. “Why is he unseen? Why were there no Negroes, no immigrants? More than likely because of the condition of the minds of those in power, minds that bestowed upon many others the same invisibility that Ellison’s narrator encounters” (Greene,1995, p. 159). Multicultural education is needed because it seeks to eradicate “invisibility” and give voice, power, and validation to the contributions and achievements of people with varied hues, backgrounds, and experiences.