The Americanization Syndrome: A Quest for Conformity

The Americanization Syndrome (1987) examines the historical role of education in the process of ‘Americanization’. It argues that beginning with seventeenth century puritan leaders such as John Winthrop and Cotton Maher, the pattern of American education has been not the promotion of a blend of different cultures but the indoctrination of norms of belief of religion, politics and economics and an explicit discouragement of cultural variety. It traces the political role of education at key junctures of American history - after Independence, in the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, in the establishment of settlement houses and the use of scientific management techniques by employers. The author focuses on the period 1900-1925 when new waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe led to a new drive for orthodoxy.