The Washington area is the nation s seventh largest portal for immigrants, and while there are plenty of advocacy groups eager to help recent arrivals access government benefits, only one – Liberty s Promise (www.libertyspromise.org), an Alexandria-based non-profit is teaching immigrant youth about the responsibilities that go along with the privileges of living in the United States. Since 2005, the group has offered twice-weekly after-school classes in Civics and Citizenship which hundreds of low-income adolescents, aged 15 to 21, have attended in Arlington, Fairfax, Silver Spring and Gaithersburg. Students go on field trips and learn about how our system of government works, including such simple things as how to use a public library – a totally mystifying experience if you come from a country without much in the way of public amenities. The program also sets up internships for young people who are legally eligible to work in the U.S. During the last major wave of immigration, America was seen as a giant melting pot where foreigners were expected to adopt new identities as Americans. My father was one of the millions of children of immigrant families for whom the public school system was the major catalyst in that transformation. With the rise of multiculturalism, however, retaining one s own cultural, racial and ethnic identity became paramount. Instead of uniting students with diverse backgrounds by teaching them about the history and government of their shared new home, public schools started emphasizing their differences instead. Now even some children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents don t consider themselves Americans because the schools have largely abandoned their traditional role of assimilating them. All I do is give them the opportunity to understand and become part of American civic life that s what being an American is all about, executive director Bob Ponichtera told me. People who live here have to know what s great about this country. He s right, of course, but the fact that a group like Liberty s Promise has to step in and do what our tax-supported public schools are not doing is disturbing, to say the least. A working knowledge of American history, warts and all, and its great democratic traditions is essential to preserving the little that s left of our diminishing freedoms for future generations. But when even American-born kids aren t learning much history and civics, as disappointing standardized test results confirm, you can be sure their immigrant classmates will have an even more tenuous grasp of what it means to be a self-sufficient citizen of a self-governing republic. Unlike past generations, immigrant children don t learn to love their adopted home of the free and the brave sitting at a desk in the neighborhood public school. And while we should all be grateful that Liberty s Promise is doing its best to step into the breach, it s a great shame that it has to.
