Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/277

 of the age and grade until which schooling is compulsory ensures a wide educational gap between many parents and their children. And occupational shifts like the present movements of farmers and farm workers into urban occupations, give the same picture, When the agricultural worker pictures urban work as a step up in the social scale, and the introduction of scientific farming is so radically reducing the numbers needed in agriculture, the movement of young people born on the farm to city jobs is bound to dazzle the imagination of our farming states during the next generation at least. The substitution of machines for unskilled workers and the absorption of many of the workers and their children into positions where they manipulate machines affords another instance of the kind of historical change which keeps our myth of endless opportunity alive. Add to these special features, like the effect upon the prospects of Negro children of the tremendous exodus from the southern corn fields, or upon the children of New England mill-hands who are deprived of an opportunity to follow dully in their parents’ footsteps and must at least seek new fields if not better ones.

Careful students of the facts may tell us that class lines are becoming fixed; that while the children of immigrants make advances beyond their parents, they move up in step; that there are fewer spectacular successes among them than there used to be; that it is much more possible to predict the future status of the