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Inevitably, the immigrant is a student, and his more or less permanent occupation is learning. That is a nervous business ("Have I got it right?"); depending on one's temperament, it is also a series of joyful discoveries. For younger immigrants, those discoveries begin in school, and the initial, most amazing one is the openness, the absence of the compulsion and petty tyranny that characterize the classroom almost everywhere else in the world. But if that openness is indeed joyful and liberating to young minds, the accompanying lack of discipline is also frightening and destructive: the heart of the perennial American conflict between freedom and order.
The immigrant's education continues everywhere. He must master not only a new history but a whole new imagination. The process goes on at various speeds, and odd gaps can appear. The immigrant carries different nursery rhymes in his head, different fairy tales. He may have just graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa but not know who Mary Poppins is. He may be taking the bar examination and be rather dim about Popeye. Prince Eugene of Savoy lodges stubbornly in the mind (song learned at the age of seven: "Prince Eugene, the noble knight . . ."), while Patrick Henry appears as a stranger, an image full of gaps, like an unfinished sketch.
A continuing part of the immigrant's education is the comparison between the anticipated or imagined America and the real country. The anticipation depends on time and place, but the reality is always startling. If the vision of America was formed by Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire dancing atop glittering skyscrapers, how to accept the slums? If the vision was noise and materialist chaos, how to account for a Quaker meeting house or the daily, relentless idealism of legions of American do-gooders? If the vision was a childhood fantasy of the Wild West, how can one grasp the fact that Sitting Bull was a real man fighting a real Government and dying a real death?
A new language: nagging impediment to some, liberation to others. There is the constant struggle to achieve the proper accent, like trying to sing one's % way into some strange and maddeningly elusive music. There is the pain and bother of trying as an adult or near adult to learn new words and meanings. But these words and meanings have a certain innocence, a certain freshness, free of the constraint, the boredom, the touches of shame that are imposed on one's native language in the classroom or the nursery.
English is illogical and headily free compared, for example, with the grammatical rigidities of French or German. Some newcomers are lost in this malleable structure; others fall upon English with an instinctive sense of recognition, as one might discover a hitherto unknown brother. Shakespeare and Melville gradually replace Goethe and Racine, though drilled-in passages never quite fade; the experience can begin as vague disloyalty and end in passion. Immigrants who know English as one of the great unifiers of America will never be reconciled to those others -- many Hispanics, for instance -- who refuse to accept English fully, thus creating an ominous dual culture in many parts of the U.S. Language is life. For many immigrants, the true act of naturalization occurs when they start having dreams in English.