A. PURSUIT B. CONCERN C. TRADED. BUSINESSREAD THE PASSAGES AND CHOOS...

45: A. pursuit B. concern C. tradeD. businessRead the passages and choose the best answer to each question.As the twentieth century began, the importance of formal education in the United Statesincreased. The frontier had mostly disappeared and by 1910 most Americans lived in towns andcities. Industrialization and the bureaucratization of economic life combined with a new emphasisupon credentials and expertise to make schooling increasingly important for economic and socialmobility. Increasingly, too, schools were viewed as the most important means of integratingimmigrants into American society.The arrival of a great wave of southern and eastern European immigrants at the turn of thecentury coincided with and contributed to an enormous expansion of formal schooling. By 1920schooling to age fourteen or beyond was compulsory in most states, and the school year was greatlylengthened. Kindergartens, vacation schools, extracurricular activities, and vocational education andcounseling extended the influence of public schools over the lives of students, many of whom in thelarger industrial cities were the children of immigrants. Classes for adult immigrants were sponsoredby public schools, corporations, unions, churches, settlement houses, and other agencies.Reformers early in the twentieth century suggested that education programs should suit theneeds of specific populations. Immigrant women were once such population. Schools tried toeducate young women so they could occupy productive places in the urban industrial economy, andone place many educators considered appropriate for women was the home.Although looking after the house and family was familiar to immigrant women, Americaneducation gave homemaking a new definition. In preindustrial economies, homemaking had meantthe production as well as the consumption of goods, and it commonly included income-producingactivities both inside and outside the home, in the highly industrialized early-twentieth-centuryUnited States, however, overproduction rather than scarcity was becoming a problem. Thus, theideal American homemaker was viewed as a consumer rather than a producer. Schools trainedwomen to be consumer homemakers cooking, shopping, decorating, and caring for children"efficiently" in their own homes, or if economic necessity demanded, as employees in the homes ofothers. Subsequent reforms have made these notions seem quite out-of-date.