Can books not teach children to honor their father and mother, and "that the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump is obey"?
We are told that one of the causes of crime among the children of foreigners is transmitted ambition. "The father left the homeland because he was not satisfied.... He worked hard and saved money, that the dream of better things might be realized.... The son manifests this innate tendency by a desire to excel, by the longings to rise and be masterful, the ambition to beat the other fellow--these are the motives which impel him to an intensive life that carries him to excess and transgression." (Roberts, "The new immigration," p. 325.)
It is for us to interest this ambition and turn it into right channels. We may also discover what special interests are uppermost in the minds of those of different nationalities, things they wish their children to love, traditions they have cherished, and which we may help the children to cherish.
Driven by necessity or by the spirit of the age, the immigrant quickly develops a strong ambition for acquiring money, supposing that he landed on our shores without that impelling force. One of the consequences is that he withdraws his children from school as soon as they are old enough to secure their working papers. "To the Italian peasant, who, as a gloriously street laborer begins to cherish a vision of prosperity, it matters little whether his girls go to school or not. It is, on the contrary, of great importance that a proper dower be accumulated to get them good husbands; and to take them from school to put them to work is, therefore, only an attempt to help them accomplish this desirable end." (Breckenridge and Abbott.)
In 1911 the National Child Labor Committee conducted an investigation of tenement house work in New York City. Among 163 families visited having 213 children, 196 children ranging in ages from 3-1/2 to 14 years were working on nuts, brushes, dolls' clothes, or flowers. These are truly not the good old-fashioned domestic industries in which children received a good part of their education. Those working in factories and tenement sweat shops, where labor is specialized and subdivided into innumerable operations, do not get the variety of employment that cultivates resourcefulness, alertness, endurance and skill. (Child labor bulletin, Nov., 1912.)