Intermarriage has long been of interest to both the general public and to American social scientists because of its connection to assimilation. This is because intermarriage is a process by which group members cross a recognized boundary with increased frequency, and eventually with such frequency that the boundary becomes blurred or disappears. Since the crossing involves decisions about the most intimate social connections, and the creation of new family contexts, it is hard to imagine how to study issues of ethnic group interactions without giving it an important conceptual place. However, it is important to understand -and this point will reverberate throughout our discussion --that the behavior of intermarriage is significant to assimilation in two specific ways: first, in measuring a decline in social divisions that has already occurred and second, as an indication that those social divides will decline still further -as a result of intermarriage itself.This latter point--that intermarriage is important to the study of race and ethnicity because it signals that old social divisions will fall still farther in the future -is, in terms of the intermarriage studies themselves, often only an assumption, because the studies typically measure intermarriage at only one point in time. Despite the focus on the rates of intermarriage at one moment in time, however, the substantive importance of intermarriage is that it is part of a social evolution that
American educators have hailed the public high school as the ultimate guarantor of equal opportunity in a modern educational system. Avenues to Adulthood assesses how the high school played this role. Professor Ueda's book discusses the reasons for the modernisation of the high school at the turn of the twentieth century, the kinds of opportunities the high school offered and the way in which it became a focus of civic life that reshaped the American sense of community and generation. To the extent that a small share of poor immigrant children gained access to the high school and received its advantages, that institution counteracted the disadvantages of inherited social status. Academics, interscholastic sports and journalism turned the high school into a focal point of civic pride. Ultimately by supplying educational advantages that affected adult career patterns, the high school was a powerful force in reshuffling the social elites of the early twentieth-century city.
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