dream became real. There stands another school in Hester Street to-day
within easy call, that has a playground measuring more than twelve
thousand square feet on the roof, one of half that size down on the
ground, and an asphalted indoor playground as big as the one on the
roof. Together they measure a trifle less than thirty thousand feet. To
the indignant amazement of my captor, the janitor, his school was thrown
open to the children in the last summer vacation, and in the winter they
put a boys' club in to worry him. What further indignities there are in
store for him, in this day of "frills," there is no telling. A
resolution is on record which states, under date of May 18, 1897, that
"it is the sense of the Board of Superintendents that the schoolhouses
may well be used in the cause of education as neighborhood centres,
providing reading-rooms, branch offices of public libraries, etc." And
to cut off all chance of relapse into the old doubt whether "such things
are educational," that laid so many of our hopes on the dusty shelf
of the circumlocution office, the state legislature has expressly
declared that the commonwealth will take the chance, which Boards of
Education shunned, of a little amusement creeping in. The schools may be
used for "purposes of recreation." To the janitor it must seem that the
end of all things is at hand.
[Illustration: PLAYGROUND ON ROOF OF NEW EAST BROADWAY SCHOOLHOUSE
_Area 8,348 square feet_]
In the crowded districts, the school playgrounds were thrown open to the
children during the long vacation last year, with kindergarten teachers
to amuse them, and half a score of vacation schools tempted more than
four thousand children from the street into the cool shade of the
class-rooms. They wrought in wood and iron, they sang and they played
and studied nature,--out of a barrel, to be sure, that came twice a week
from Long Island filled with "specimens;" but toward the end we took a
hint from Chicago, and let the children gather their own specimens on
excursions around the bay and suburbs of the city. That was a tremendous
success. The mere hint that money might be lacking to pay for the
excursions this summer set the St. Andrew's Brotherhood men on Long
Island to devising schemes for inviting the schoolchildren out on
trolley and shore trips. With the Christian Endeavor, the Epworth
League, and kindred societies looking about for something to try their
young strength and enthusiasm on, we may be here standing upon the
threshold of something which shall bring us nearer to a universal
brotherhood than all the consecrations and badges that have yet been
invented.
The mere contact with nature, even out of a barrel, brought something to
those starved child lives that struck a new note. Sometimes it rang with
a sharp and jarring sound. The boys in the Hester Street school could
not be made to take an interest in the lesson on wheat until the teacher
came to the effect of drought and a bad year on the farmer's pocket.
Then they understood. They knew the process. Strikes cut into the
earnings of Hester Street, small enough at the best of times, at
frequent intervals, and the boys need not be told what a bad year means.
No other kind ever occurs there. They learned the lesson on wheat in no
time, after that. Oftener it was a gentler note that piped timidly in
the strange place. A barrel of wild roses came one day, instead of the
expected "specimens," and these were given to the children. They took
them greedily. "I wondered," said the teacher, "if it was more love of
the flower, or of getting something for nothing, no matter what." But
even if it were largely the latter, there was still the rose. Nothing
like it had come that way before, and without a doubt it taught its own
lesson. The Italian child might have jumped for it more eagerly, but its
beauty was not wasted in Jew-town, either. The baby kissed it, and it
lay upon more than one wan cheek, and whispered who knows what thought
of hope and courage that were nearly gone. Even in Hester Street the
wild rose from the hedge was not wasted.
The result of it all was wholesome and good, because it was common
sense. The way to fight the slum in the children's lives is with
sunlight and flowers and play, which their child hearts crave, if their
eyes have never seen them. The teachers reported that the boys were
easier to manage, more quiet, and played more fairly than before. The
police reports showed that fewer were arrested or run over in the
streets than in other years. A worse enemy was attacked than the trolley
car or the truck. In the kindergarten at the Hull House in Chicago there
hangs a picture of a harvest scene, with the man wiping his brow, and a
woman resting at his feet. The teacher told me that a little girl with
an old face picked it out among all the rest, and considered it long and
gravely. "Well," she said, when her inspection was finished, "he knocked
her down, didn't he?" A two hours' argument for kindergartens or
vacation schools could not have put it stronger or better.
The awakening of the civic conscience is nowhere more plainly traced
than in our public schools. The last five years have set us fifty years
ahead, and there is now no doubling on the track we have struck. We have
fifty kindergartens to-day where five years ago we had one, and their
method has invaded the whole system of teaching. Cooking, the only kind
of temperance preaching that counts for anything in a school course, is
taught in the girls' classes. Five years ago a minister of justice
declared in the Belgian Chamber that the nation was reverting to a new
form of barbarism, which he described by the term "alcoholic barbarism,"
and pointed out as its first cause the "insufficiency of the food
procurable by the working classes." He referred to the quality, not the
quantity. The United States experts, who lately made a study of the
living habits of the poor in New York, spoke of it as a common
observation that "a not inconsiderable amount of the prevalent
intemperance can be traced to poor food and unattractive home tables."
The toasting-fork in Jacob's sister's hand beats preaching in the
campaign against the saloon, just as the boys' club beats the police
club in fighting the gang.
The cram and the jam are being crowded out as common-sense teaching
steps in and takes their place, and the "three H's," the head, the
heart, and the hand,--a whole boy,--are taking the place too long
monopolized by the "three R's." There was need of it. It had seemed
sometimes as if, in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were
in danger of stuffing the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of
him. It is a higher function of the school to teach principles than to
impart facts merely. Teaching the boy municipal politics and a thousand
things to make a good citizen of him, instead of so filling him with
love of his country and pride in its traditions that he is bound to take
the right stand when the time comes, is as though one were to attempt to
put all the law of the state into its constitution to make it more
binding. The result would be hopeless congestion and general
uselessness.
It comes down to the teacher in the end, and there are 5600 of them in
the old city alone, 10,000 for the greater city;[7] the great mass
faithful and zealous, but yoked to the traditions of a day that is past.
Half the machine teaching, the wooden output of our public schools in
the past, I believe was due to the practical isolation of the teachers
between the tyranny of politics and the distrust of those who had good
cause to fear the politician and his work. There was never a more
saddening sight than that of the teachers standing together in an almost
solid body to resist reform of the school system as an attack upon
them. There was no pretense on their part that the schools did not need
reform. They knew better. They fought for their places. Throughout the
fight no word came from them of the children's rights. They imagined
that theirs were in danger, and they had no thought for anything else.
We gathered then the ripe fruit of politics, and it will be a long
while, I suppose, before we get the taste out of our mouths. But the
grip of politics on our schools has been loosened, if not shaken off
altogether, and the teacher's slavery is at an end, if she herself so
wills it. Once hardly thought worthy of a day laborer's hire, she will
receive a policeman's pay for faithful service[8] in the school year now
begun, with his privilege of a half-pay pension on retirement. Within
three weeks after the passage of the salary bill forty-two teachers in
the boroughs of Manhattan and Bronx had applied for retirement. The
training schools are hard at work filling up the gaps. The windows of
the schoolhouse have been thrown open, and life let in there too with
the sunlight. The day may be not far distant when ours shall be schools
"for discovering aptitude," in Professor Felix Adler's wise plan. The
problem is a vast one, even in its bulk; every year seats must be found
on the school benches for twenty thousand additional children. However
deep we have gone down into our pockets to pay for new schools, there
are to-day in the greater city nearly thirty thousand children in
half-day or part-time classes, waiting their chance. But that it can and
will be solved the experience of the last five years fully warrants.
[Footnote 7: The exact number for April, 1899, was 9989; number of
pupils registered, 401,761; average daily attendance, 370,722.]
[Footnote 8: The teacher's pay, under the new act, is from $600 to
$1400. The policeman's pay is $1400.]
In the solution the women of New York will have had no mean share. In
the struggle for school reform they struck the telling blows, and the
credit for the victory was justly theirs. The Public Education
Association, originally a woman's auxiliary to Good Government Club E,
has since worked as energetically with the school authorities as it
before worked against them. It has opened many windows for little souls
by hanging schoolrooms with beautiful casts and pictures, and forged at
the same time new and strong links in the chain that bound the boy all
too feebly to the school. At a time when the demand of the boys of the
East Side for club room, which was in itself one of the healthiest signs
of the day, had reached an exceedingly dangerous pass, the Public
Education Association broke ground that will prove the most fertile
field of all. The Raines law saloon, quick to discern in the new demand
the gap that would divorce it by and by from the man, attempted to
bridge it by inviting the boy in under its roof. Occasionally the girl
went along. A typical instance of how the scheme worked was brought to
my attention at the time by the manager of the College Settlement. The
back room of the saloon was given to the club free of charge, with the
understanding that the boy members should "treat." As a means of raising
the needed funds, the club hit upon the plan of fining members ten cents
when they "got funny." To defeat this device of the devil some way must
be found; but club room was scarce among the tenements. The Good
Government Clubs proposed to the Board of Education that it open the
empty class-rooms at night for the children's use. It was my privilege
to plead their cause before the School Board, and to obtain from it the
necessary permission, after some hesitation and doubt as to whether "it
was educational." The Public Education Association promptly assumed the
responsibility for "the property," and the Hester Street school was
opened. There are now two schools that are given over to evening clubs.
The property has not been molested, but the boys who have met under Miss
Winifred Buck's management have learned many a lesson of self-control
and practical wisdom that has proved "educational" in the highest
degree. Her plan is simplicity itself. Through their play--the meeting
usually begins with a romp--in quarters where there is not too much
elbow-room, the boys learn the first lesson of respecting one another's
rights. The subsequent business meeting puts them upon the fundamentals
of civilized society, as it were. Out of the debate of the question, Do
we want boys who swear, steal, gamble, and smoke cigarettes? grow
convictions as to why these vices are wrong that put "the gang" in its
proper light. Punishment comes to appear, when administered by the boys
themselves, a natural consequence of law-breaking, in defense of
society; and the boy is won. He can thenceforward be trusted to work out
his own salvation. If he does it occasionally with excessive unction,
remember how recent is his conversion. "_Resolved_, that wisdom is
better than wealth," was rejected as a topic for discussion by one of
the clubs, because "everybody knows it is." This was in the Tenth Ward.
If temptation had come that way in the shape of a pushcart with
pineapples--we are all human! Anyway, they had learned the right.
With the women to lead, the school has even turned the tables on the
jail and invaded it bodily. For now nearly two years the Public
Education Association has kept school in the Tombs, for the boys locked
up there awaiting trial. Of thirty-one pupils on this school register,
the other day, twelve were charged with burglary, four with highway
robbery, and three with murder. That was the gang run to earth at last.
Better late than never. The windows of their prison overlooked the spot
where the gallows used to stand that cut short many a career such as
they pursued. They were soberly attentive to their studies, which were
of a severely practical turn. Their teacher, Mr. David Willard, who was
a resident of the University Settlement in its old Delancey Street
home,--the fact that the forces for good one finds at work in the slum
usually lead back to the settlements shows best that they have so far
escaped the peril of stiffening into mere institutions,--has his own
sound view of how to head off the hangman. Daily and nightly he gathers
about him in the house on Chrystie Street, where he makes his home,
three hundred boys and girls, whom he meets as their friend, on equal
terms. The club is the means of getting them there, and so it is in its
right place.
Once a week another teacher comes to the Tombs school, and tells the
boys of our city's history, its famous buildings and great men; trying
so to arouse their interest as a first step toward a citizen's pride.
This one also is sent by a club of women, the City History Club, which
in three years has done strange things among the children. It sprang
from the proposition of Mr. Robert Abbe that the man and the citizen has
his birth in the boy, and that to love a thing one must know it first.
The half-dozen classes that were started for the study of our city's
history have swelled into nearly a hundred, with quite eighteen hundred
pupils. The pregnant fact was noted early by the teachers, that the
immigrant boy easily outstrips in interest for his adopted home the
native, who perchance turns up his nose at him, and later very likely
complains of the "unscrupulousness" of the Jew who forged ahead of him
in business as well.
"Everything takes ten years." Looking back from the closing year of the
century, one is almost tempted to turn Mr. Hewitt's phrase about, and
say that everything has been packed into ten years. The tenth winter of
the free lectures, which the city provides to fill up in a measure those
gaps which the earlier years left, has just passed. When the first
course showed an attendance of 22,149 upon 186 lectures, we were all
encouraged; but the last season saw 1923 lectures delivered upon every
topic of human interest, from the care of our bodies and natural science
to literature, astronomy, and music, and a multitude of 519,411 persons,
chiefly workingmen and their wives, the parents of the schoolboy, heard
them. Forty-eight schools and halls were employed for the purpose. The
People's Institute adds to this programme a forum for the discussion of
social topics, nineteenth-century history, and "present problems" on a
wholly non-partisan, unsectarian basis. The Institute was launched upon
its educational mission within six weeks after the disastrous Greater
New York election in 1897. It has since drawn to the platform of the
Cooper Institute audiences, chiefly of workingmen more or less connected
with the labor movement, that have filled its great hall. The spirit
that animates its work is shown in its review of the field upon the
threshold of its third year. Speaking of the social issues that are
hastening toward a settlement, it says: "Society is about to be
organized, gradually, wisely, on the lines of the recognition of the
brotherhood of man. The People's Institute holds to-day, as no other
institution in this city, the confidence of all classes of the working
people; also of the best minds among the well-to-do classes. It can
throw all its influence upon the side of removing misunderstandings,
promoting mutual confidence.... This is its great work." A great
undertaking, truly, but one in which no one may rashly say it shall not
succeed. As an installment, it organized last spring, for study,
discussion, and social intercourse, the first of a chain of People's
Clubs, full of a strong and stirring life, which within three months had
a membership of three hundred and fifty, and a list of two hundred and
fifty applicants.
While the Institute's plan has met with this cordial reception downtown,
uptown, among the leisure classes, its acceptance has been nothing like
so ready. Selfish wealth has turned a cold shoulder to the brotherhood
of man, as so often in the past. Still the proffered hand is not
withdrawn. In a hundred ways it is held out with tender of help and
sympathy and friendship, these days, where distrust and indifference
were once the rule. The People's University Extension Society, leaving
the platform to its allies, invades the home, the nursery, the
kindergarten, the club, wherever it can, with help and counsel. Down on
the lower East Side, the Educational Alliance conducts from the Hebrew
Institute an energetic campaign among the Jewish immigrants that
reaches fully six thousand souls, two thirds of them children, every day
in the week. Sixty-two clubs alone hold meetings in the building on
Saturday and Sunday. Under the same roof the Baron Hirsch Fund has
taught sixteen thousand children of refugee Jews in nine years. It
passes them on to the public schools within six months of their landing,
the best material they receive from anywhere.
So the boy is being got ready for dealing, in the years that are to
come, with the other but not more difficult problems of setting his
house to rights, and ridding it of the political gang which now
misrepresents him and us. And justice to Jacob is being evolved. Not yet
without obstruction and dragging of feet. The excellent home library
plan that proved so wholesome in the poor quarters of Boston has failed
in New York, except in a few notable instances, through the difficulty
of securing the visitors upon whom the plan depends for its success. The
same want has kept the boys' club from reaching the development that
would apply the real test to it as a barrier against the slum. There
are fifteen clubs for every Winifred Buck that is in sight. From the
City History Club, the Charity Organization Society, from everywhere,
comes the same complaint. The hardest thing in the world to give is
still one's self. But it is all the time getting to be easier. There are
daily more women and men who, thinking of the boy, can say, and do, with
my friend of the College Settlement, when an opportunity to enter a
larger field was offered her, "No, I am content to stay here, to be
ready for Johnnie when he wants me."
Justice for the boy, and for his father. An itinerant Jewish glazier,
crying his wares, was beckoned into a stable by the foreman, and bidden
to replace a lot of broken panes, enough nearly to exhaust his stock.
When, after working half the day, he asked for his pay, he was driven
from the place with jeers and vile words. Raging and impotent, he went
back to his poor tenement cursing a world in which there was no justice
for a poor man. If he had next been found ranting with anarchists
against the social order, would you have blamed him? He found instead,
in the Legal Aid Society, a champion that pleaded his cause and
compelled the stableman to pay him his wages. For a hundred thousand
such--more shame to us--this society has meant all that freedom
promised: justice to the poor man. It too has earned a place among the
forces that are working out through the new education the brighter day,
for it has taught the lesson which all the citizens of a free state need
most to learn,--respect for law.
VIII
REFORM BY HUMANE TOUCH
I have sketched in outline the gains achieved in the metropolis since
its conscience awoke. Now, in closing this account, I am reminded of the
story of an old Irishman who died here a couple of years ago. Patrick
Mullen was an honest blacksmith. He made guns for a living. He made them
so well that one with his name on it was worth a good deal more than the
market price of guns. Other makers went to him with offers of money for
the use of his stamp; but they never went twice. When sometimes a gun of
very superior make was brought to him to finish, he would stamp it P.
Mullen, never Patrick Mullen. Only to that which he himself had wrought
did he give his honest name without reserve. When he died, judges and
bishops and other great men crowded to his modest home by the East
River, and wrote letters to the newspapers telling how proud they had
been to call him friend. Yet he was, and remained to the end, plain
Patrick Mullen, blacksmith and gunmaker.
In his life he supplied the answer to the sigh of dreamers in all days:
when will the millennium come? It will come when every man is a Patrick
Mullen at his own trade; not merely a P. Mullen, but a Patrick Mullen.
The millennium of municipal politics, when there shall be no slum to
fight, will come when every citizen does his whole duty as a citizen;
not before. As long as he "despises politics," and deputizes another to
do it for him, whether that other wears the stamp of a Croker or of a
Platt,--it matters little which,--we shall have the slum, and be put
periodically to the trouble and the shame of draining it in the public
sight. A citizen's duty is one thing that cannot be farmed out safely;
and the slum is not limited by the rookeries of Mulberry or Ludlow
streets. It has long roots that feed on the selfishness and dullness of
Fifth Avenue quite as greedily as on the squalor of the Sixth Ward. The
two are not nearly so far apart as they look.