JUSTICE TO THE BOY
Sometimes, when I see my little boy hugging himself with delight at the
near prospect of the kindergarten, I go back in memory forty years and
more to the day when I was dragged, a howling captive, to school, as a
punishment for being bad at home. I remember, as though it were
yesterday, my progress up the street in the vengeful grasp of an
exasperated servant, and my reception by the aged monster--most fitly
named Madame Bruin--who kept the school. She asked no questions, but led
me straightway to the cellar, where she plunged me into an empty barrel
and put the lid on over me. Applying her horn goggles to the bunghole,
to my abject terror, she informed me, in a sepulchral voice, that that
was the way bad boys were dealt with in school. When I ceased howling
from sheer fright, she took me out and conducted me to the yard, where a
big hog had a corner to itself. She bade me observe that one of its ears
had been slit half its length. It was because the hog was lazy, and
little boys who were that way minded--zip! she clipped a pair of
tailor's shears close to my ear. It was my first lesson in school. I
hated it from that hour.
The barrel and the hog were never part of the curriculum in any American
boy's school, I suppose; they seem too freakish to be credited to any
but the demoniac ingenuity of my home ogre. But they stood for a
comprehension of the office of school and teacher which was not patented
by any day or land. It is not so long since the notion yet prevailed
that the schools were principally to lock children up in for the
convenience of their parents, that we should have entirely forgotten it.
Only the other day a clergyman from up the state came into my office to
tell of a fine reform school they had in his town. They were very proud
of it.
"And how about the schools for the good boys in your town?" I asked,
when I had heard him out. "Are they anything to be proud of?"
He stared. He guessed they were all right, he said, after some
hesitation. But it was clear that he did not know.
[Illustration: The Old.]
[Illustration: The New.]
It is not necessary to go back forty years to find us in the metropolis
upon the clergyman's platform, if not upon Madame Bruin's. A dozen or
fifteen will do. They will bring us to the day when roof playgrounds
were contemptuously left out of the estimates for an East Side school,
as "frills" that had nothing to do with education; when the Board of
Health found but a single public school in more than sixscore that was
so ventilated as to keep the children from being poisoned by foul air;
when the authority of the Talmud had to be invoked by the Superintendent
of School Buildings to convince the president of the Board of Education,
who happened to be a Jew, that seventy-five or eighty pupils were far
too many for one classroom; when a man who had been dead a year was
appointed a school trustee of the Third Ward, under the mouldy old law
surviving from the day when New York was a big village, and filled the
office as well as if he had been alive, because there were no schools in
his ward--it was the wholesale grocery district; when manual training
and the kindergarten were yet the fads of yesterday, looked at askance;
when fifty thousand children roamed the streets for whom there was no
room in the schools, and the only defence of the School Commissioners
was that they "didn't know" there were so many; and when we mixed
truants and thieves in a jail with entire unconcern. Indeed, the jail
filled the title rôle in the educational cast of that day. Its inmates
were well lodged and cared for, while the sanitary authorities twice
condemned the Essex Market school across the way as wholly unfit for
children to be in, but failed to catch the ear of the politician who ran
things unhindered. When (in 1894) I denounced the "system" of
enforcing--or not enforcing--the compulsory education law as a device to
make thieves out of our children by turning over their training to the
street, he protested angrily; but the experts of the Tenement House
Commission found the charge fully borne out by the facts. They were
certainly plain enough in the sight of us all, had we chosen to see.
When at last we saw, we gave the politician a vacation for a season. To
say that he was to blame for all the mischief would not be fair. We were
to blame for leaving him in possession. He was only a link in the chain
which our indifference had forged; but he was always and everywhere an
obstruction to betterment,--sometimes, illogically, in spite of himself.
Successive Tammany mayors had taken a stand for the public schools when
it was clear that reform could not be delayed much longer; but they were
helpless against a system of selfishness and stupidity of which they
were the creatures, though they posed as its masters. They had to go
with it as unfit, and upon the wave that swept out the last of the
rubbish came reform. The Committee of Seventy took hold, the Good
Government Clubs, the Tenement House Commission, and the women of New
York. Five years we strove with the powers of darkness, and look now at
the change! The New York school system is not yet the ideal one,--it
may never be; but the jail, at least, has been cast out of the firm. We
have a compulsory education law under which it is possible to punish the
parent for the boy's truancy, as he ought to be if there was room in the
school for the lad, and he let him drift. And the day cannot be delayed
much longer now when every child shall find the latchstring out on the
school door. We have had to put our hands deep into our pockets to get
so far, and we shall have to put them in deeper yet a long way. But it
is all right. We are beginning to see the true bearing of things. Last
week the Board of Estimate and Apportionment appropriated six millions
of dollars for new schools--exactly what the battleship _Massachusetts_
cost all complete with guns and fittings, so they told me on board.
Battleships are all right when we need them, but even then it is the man
behind the gun who tells, and that means the schoolmaster. The Board of
Education asked for sixteen millions. They will get the other ten when
we have caught our breath. Since the beginning of 1895[37] we have built
sixty-nine new public schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, at a cost of
$12,038,764, exclusive of cost of sites, furnishings, heating, lighting,
and ventilating the buildings, which would add two-thirds at least of
that amount, making it a round twenty millions of dollars. And every
one of the sixty-nine has its playground, which will by and by be free
to all the neighborhood. The idea is at last working through that the
schools belong to the people, and are primarily for the children and
their parents; not mere vehicles of ward patronage, or for keeping an
army of teachers in office and pay.
[Footnote 37: Up to June, 1902.]
[Illustration: Public School No. 177, Manhattan.]
The silly old régime is dead. The ward trustee is gone with his friend
the alderman, loudly proclaiming the collapse of our liberties in the
day that saw the schools taken from "the people's" control. They were
"the people." Experts manage our children's education, which was
supposed, in the old plan, to be the only thing that did not require
any training. To superintend a brickyard demanded some knowledge, but
anybody could run the public schools. It cost us an election to take
that step. One of the Tammany district leaders, who knew what he was
talking about, said to me after it was all over: "I knew we would win.
Your bringing those foreigners here did the business. Our people believe
in home rule. We kept account of the teachers you brought from out of
town, and who spent the money they made here out of town, and it got to
be the talk among the tenement people in my ward that their daughters
would have no more show to get to be teachers. That did the business. We
figured the school vote in the city at forty-two thousand, and I knew we
could not lose." The "foreigners" were teachers from Massachusetts and
other states, who had achieved a national reputation at their work.
There lies upon my table a copy of the minutes of the Board of Education
of January 9, 1895, in which is underscored a report on a primary school
in the Bronx. "It is a wooden shanty," is the inspector's account,
"heated by stoves, and is a regular tinder box; cellar wet, and under
one classroom only. This building was erected in order, I believe, to
determine whether or not there was a school population in the
neighborhood to warrant the purchase of property to erect a school on."
[Illustration: Letter H Plan of Public School No. 165, showing Front on
West 109th Street.]
That was the way then of taking a school census, and the result was the
utter failure of the compulsory education law to compel anything. To-day
we have a biennial census, ordained by law, which, when at last it gets
into the hands of some one who can count,[38] will tell us how many
Jacob Beresheims are drifting upon the shoals of the street. And we have
a truant school to keep them safe in. To it, says the law, no thief
shall be committed. It is not yet five years since the burglar and the
truant--which latter, having been refused admission to the school
because there was not room for him, inconsequently was locked up for
contracting idle ways--were herded in the Juvenile Asylum, and
classified there in squads of those who were four feet, four feet seven,
and over four feet seven! I am afraid I scandalized some good people
during the fight for decency in this matter, by insisting that it ought
to be considered a good mark for Jacob that he despised such schools as
were provided for him. But it was true. Except for the risk of the
burglar, the jail was preferable by far. The woman into whose hands the
management of the truant school fell, made out, after little more than a
year's experience, that of twenty-five hundred so-called incorrigibles,
the barest handful--scarce sixty--were rightly so named, and even these
a little longer and tighter grip might probably win over. For such a
farm school is yet to be provided. The rest responded promptly to an
appeal to their pride. She "made it a personal matter" with each of
them, and the truant vanished; the boy was restored. The burglar, too,
made it a personal matter in the old contact, and the result was two
burglars for one. I have yet to find any one who has paid attention to
this matter and is not of the opinion that the truant school strikes at
the root of the problem of juvenile crime. After thirty years of close
acquaintance with the child population of London, Mr. Andrew Drew,
chairman of the Industrial Committee of the School Board, declared his
conviction that "truancy is to be credited with nearly the whole of our
juvenile criminality." But for years there seemed to be no way of
convincing the New York School Board that the two had anything to do
with one another. Even now it seems to be a case of one convinced
against his will being "of the same opinion still," for, though the
Superintendent of Schools speaks of that bar to the jail as
preposterously inadequate, nothing is done to strengthen it.
[Footnote 38: After two attempts that were not shining successes,
the politicians at Albany and New York calmly dropped the matter,
and for four years ignored the law. The Superintendent of Schools is
at this writing (June, 1902) preparing to have the police take the
child census, without which it is hard to see how he can know the
extent of the problem he is wrestling with. Half-day classes are a
fair index of the number of those anxious to get in; but they tell
us nothing of the dangerous class who shun the schools.]
Nothing on that tack. But there is a long leg and a short leg on the
course, and I fancy Superintendent Snyder does the tacking on the long
leg. Mr. Snyder builds New York's schools, and he does that which no
other architect before his time ever did or tried; he "builds them
beautiful." In him New York has one of those rare men who open windows
for the soul of their time. Literally, he found barracks where he is
leaving palaces to the people. If any one thinks this is overmeasure of
praise, let him look at the "Letter H" school, now become a type, and
see what he thinks of it. The idea suggested itself to him as meeting
the demands of a site in the middle of a block, while he was poking
about old Paris on a much-needed vacation, and now it stands embodied in
a dozen beautiful schools on Manhattan Island, copies, every one, of the
handsomest of French palaces, the Hôtel de Cluny. I cannot see how it is
possible to come nearer perfection in the building of a public school.
There is not a dark corner in the whole structure, from the splendid
gymnasium under the red-tiled roof to the indoor playground on the
street floor, which, when thrown into one with the two yards that lie
enclosed in the arms of the H, give the children nearly an acre of
asphalted floor to romp on from street to street; for the building sets
right through the block, with just such a front on the other street as
it shows on this one. If there be those yet upon whom the notion grates
that play and the looks of the school should be counted in as
educational factors, why, let them hurry up and catch on. They are way
behind. The play through which the child "first perceives moral
relations" comes near being the biggest and strongest factor in it all
to-day; and as for the five or ten thousand dollars put in for "the
looks" of things where the slum had trodden every ideal and every atom
of beauty into the dirt, I expect to live to see that prove the best
investment a city ever made.
We are getting the interest now in the new pride of the boy in "his
school," and no wonder. When I think of the old Allen Street school,
with its hard and ugly lines, where the gas had to be kept burning even
on the brightest days, recitations suspended every half-hour, and the
children made to practice calisthenics so that they should not catch
cold while the windows were opened to let in fresh air; of the dark
playground downstairs, with the rats keeping up such a racket that one
could hardly hear himself speak at times; or of that other East Side
"playground" where the boys "weren't allowed to speak above a whisper,"
so as not to disturb those studying overhead, I fancy that I can make
out both the cause and the cure of the boy's desperation. "We try to
make our schools pleasant enough to hold the children," wrote the
Superintendent of Schools in Indianapolis to me once, and added that
they had no truant problem worth bothering about. With the kindergarten
and manual training firmly ingrafted upon the school course, as they are
at last, and with it reaching out to enlist also the boy's play through
playground and vacation schools, I shall be willing to turn the boy who
will not come in over to the reformatory. They will not need to build a
new wing to the jail for his safekeeping.
[Illustration: Public School No. 153, the Bronx.]
All ways lead to Rome. The reform in school building dates back, as does
every other reform in New York, to the Mulberry Bend. It began there.
The first school that departed from the soulless old tradition, to set
beautiful pictures before the child's mind as well as dry figures on the
slate, was built there. At the time I wanted it to stand in the park,
hoping so to hasten the laying out of that; but although the Small Parks
law expressly permitted the erection on park property of buildings for
"the instruction of the people," the officials upon whom I pressed my
scheme could not be made to understand that as including schools.
Perhaps they were right. I catechised thirty-one Fourth Ward girls in a
sewing school, about that time, twenty-six of whom had attended the
public schools of the district more than a year. One wore a badge earned
for excellence in her studies. In those days every street corner was
placarded with big posters of Napoleon on a white horse riding through
fire and smoke. There was one right across the street. Yet only one of
the thirty-one knew who Napoleon was. She "thought she had heard of the
gentleman before." It came out that the one impression she retained of
what she had heard was that "the gentleman" had two wives, both at one
time probably. They knew of Washington that he was the first President
of the United States, and cut down a cherry tree. They were sitting and
sewing at the time almost on the identical spot on Cherry Hill where he
lived when he held the office. To the question who ruled before
Washington the answer came promptly: no one; he was the first. They
agreed reluctantly, upon further consideration, that there was probably
"a king of America" before his day, and the Irish damsels turned up
their noses at the idea. The people of Canada, they thought, were
copper-colored. The same winter I was indignantly bidden to depart from
a school in the Fourth Ward by a trustee who had heard that I had
written a book about the slum and spoken of "his people" in it.
Those early steps in the reform path stumbled sadly over obstacles that
showed what a hard pull we had ahead. I told in "The Making of an
American" how I fared when I complained that the Allen Street school was
overrun with rats, and how I went out to catch one of them to prove to
the City Hall folk that I was not a liar, as they said. We won the fight
for the medical inspection of the schools that has proved such a boon,
against much opposition within the profession, from which we should have
had only support. And this in face of evidence of a kind to convince
anybody. I remember one of the exhibits. There had been a scarlet-fever
epidemic on the lower West Side, which the health inspectors finally
traced to the public school of the district. A boy with the disease had
been turned loose before the "peeling" was over, and had achieved
phenomenal popularity in the classroom by a trick he had of pulling the
skin from his fingers as one would skin a cat. The pieces he distributed
as souvenirs among his comrades, who carried them proudly home to show
to their admiring playmates who were not so lucky as to sit on the bench
with the clever lad. The epidemic followed as a matter of course. But
though the Health Department put through that reform, when it came to
inspecting the eyes of the children, we lost. The cry that it would
"interfere with private practice" defeated us. The fact was easily
demonstrated that not only was ophthalmia rampant in the schools with
its contagion, but that the pupils were made both near-sighted and
stupid by the want of proper arrangement of their seats and of
themselves in their classrooms. But self-interest prevailed. However,
nothing is ever settled till it is settled right. I have before me the
results of an examination of thirty-six public schools containing 55,470
pupils. It was made by order of the Board of Health this month (August,
1902), and ought to settle that matter for good. Of the 55,470, not less
than 6670 had contagious eye-disease; 2328 were cases of operative
trachoma, 3243 simple trachoma, and 1099 conjunctivitis. In one school
in the most crowded district of the East Side 22.2 per cent were so
afflicted. No wonder the doctors "were horrified" at the showing. So was
the President of the Board of Health, who told me to-day that he would
leave no stone unturned until effective inspection of the school
children by eye-specialists had been assured. So we go, step by step,
ever forward.
Speaking of that reminds me of a mishap I had in the Hester Street
school,--the one with the "frills" which the Board of Education cut off.
I happened to pass it after school hours, and went in to see what sort
of a playground the roof would have made. I met no one on the way, and,
finding the scuttle open, climbed out and up the slant of the roof to
the peak, where I sat musing over our lost chance, when the janitor came
to close up. He must have thought I was a crazy man, and my explanation
did not make it any better. He haled me down, and but for the fortunate
chance that the policeman on the beat knew me, I should have been taken
to the lockup as a dangerous lunatic--all for dreaming of a playground
on the roof of a schoolhouse.
[Illustration: Girls' Playground on the Roof.]
Janitor and Board of Commissioners to the contrary notwithstanding, the
dream became real. There stands another school in Hester Street to-day
within easy call, that has a roof playground where two thousand
children dance under the harvest moon to the music of a brass band, as I
shall tell you about hereafter--the joy of it to have that story to
tell!--and all about are others like it, with more coming every year. To
the indignant amazement of my captor, the janitor, his school has been
thrown open to the children in the 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. The
Superintendent of Schools told me only yesterday that he was going to
Boston to look into new sources of worriment they have invented there.
The world does move in spite of janitors. In two short years our school
authorities advanced from the cautious proposition that it "was the
sense" of the Board of Superintendents that the schoolhouses might well
be used in the cause of education as neighborhood centres, etc., (1897),
to the flat declaration that "every rational system of education should
make provisions for play" (1899). 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.
So the schools and their playgrounds were thrown open to the children
during the long vacation, with kindergarten teachers to amuse them, and
vacation schools tempted the little ones from the street into the cool
shade of the classrooms. 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 later on 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. And there is better still coming, as I shall show
presently. It sometimes seems to me as if we were here face to face with
the very thing we are seeking and know not how to find. The mere hint
that money might be lacking to pay for the excursions set the St.
Andrew's Brotherhood men on Long Island to devising schemes for inviting
the school children out on trolley and shore trips. What if they all,
the Christian Endeavor, the Epworth League, and the other expressions of
the same human desire to find the lost brother, who are looking about
for something to try their young strength and enthusiasm on--what if
they were to hitch on here and help pull the load that may get mired
else? They need men and women in that work. Mere paid teaching will
never do it. If they can only get them, I think we may be standing upon
the threshold of something which shall bring us nearer to a universal
brotherhood than all the consecration and all the badges yet devised. I
am thinking of the children and of the chance to take them at once out
of the slum and into our hearts, while making of the public school the
door to a house of citizenship in which we shall all dwell together in
full understanding. Without that door the house will never be what we
planned. And there is the key, all ready-made, in the children.
[Illustration: The New Idea: a Stairway of Public School No. 170.]
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. Miss Addams 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.
It is five seasons since the Board of Education took over the work begun
by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor as an object
lesson for us all, and I have before me the schedule for this summer's
work, just begun. It embraces seventeen vacation schools in which the
boys are taught basketry, weaving, chair-caning, sloyd, fret-sawing, and
how to work in leather and iron, while the girls learn sewing,
millinery, embroidering, knitting, and the domestic arts, besides
sharing in the boys' work where they can. There are thirty-five school
playgrounds with kindergarten and gymnasiums and games, and half a dozen
of the play piers are used for the same purpose. In twelve open-air
playgrounds and parks, teachers sent by the Board of Education lead the
children's play, and in as many more public baths teach boys and girls
to swim on alternate days. In Crotona Park, up in the Bronx, under big
spreading oaks and maples, athletic meets are held of boys from
down-town and up-town schools in friendly rivalry, and the Frog Hollow
Gang, that wrecked railroad trains there in my recollection, is a bad
memory. Over at Hudson-bank on the site of the park that is coming
there, teams hired by the Board of Education are ploughing up the site
of Stryker's Lane, and the young toughs of the West Side who held that
the world owed them a living and collected it as they could, are turning
truck farmers. They are planting potatoes, and gardening, and learning
the secret of life that the living is his who can earn it. The world "do
move." No argument is needed now to persuade those who hold the purse
strings that all this is "good business." Instead, the mayor of the city
is asking the Board of Education to tell him of more and better ways of
putting the machinery to use. The city will foot the bill, if we will
show them how. And we will show them how.
[Illustration: Truck Farming on the Site of Stryker's Lane.]
The last four years have set us fifty years ahead, and there is no
doubling on that track now. Where we had one kindergarten when I was put
out of the Fourth Ward school by a trustee for daring to intrude there
to find out what they were teaching, we have a hundred and fifteen at
this writing in Manhattan alone, and soon we shall have as many as five
hundred that are part of the public school in the greater city. "The
greatest blessing which the nineteenth century bequeathed to little
children," Superintendent Maxwell calls the kindergarten, and since the
children are our own to-morrow, he might have said to all of us, to the
state. The kindergarten touch is upon 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. 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
other 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.
[Illustration: Doorway of Public School No. 165.]
It comes down to the teacher in the end, and there are ten thousand of
them in our big city.[39] To them, too, a day of deliverance has come.
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 pretence 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 ranks
to-day with a policeman in pay and privilege. The day that sees her
welcomed as an honored guest in every home with a child in school will
break the last of her bonds, and do more for the schools and for us than
any one thing I can think of. Until that day comes the teachers, as a
class apart, will have interests apart, or feel that they have, and will
be bound to stand together to defend them; and they will work for pay.
But for the real work of a teacher no one can ever pay her.
[Footnote 39: On May 31, 1902, there were 10,036 class teachers in
elementary schools in the Greater New York, exclusive of principals
and the non-teaching staffs, and of the high school teachers. With
these, the total number was 11,570, with a register of 445,964
pupils.]
The day is coming. The windows of the schoolhouse have been thrown open,
and life let in with the sunlight. The time 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. In spite of all we have done, 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 no one can doubt. We have just _got_ to, that is all.
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 of the victory was justly theirs. The Public Education
Association, originally a woman's auxiliary to Good Government Club E,
has worked as energetically with the school authorities in the new plan
as it fought to break down the old and secure decency. 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 yet 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
head worker 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 classrooms 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 assumed the responsibility for "the property,"
and the Hester Street school was opened. The property was not molested;
only one window was broken that winter by a stray ball, and that was
promptly paid for by those who broke it. But the boys who met there
under Miss Winifred Buck's management learned many a lesson of
self-control and practical wisdom that 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 defence 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 was 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 push-cart with pineapples--we are all
human! Anyway, they had learned the right.
That was the beginning of a work of which shall, I hope, hear a good
deal more hereafter. It is all in its infancy yet, this attempt on the
part of the municipality to get the boys off the street and out of the
reach of the saloon. A number of schools were thrown open, where the
crowds were greatest, for evening play and for clubs, and sometimes they
laid hold of the youngster and sometimes not. It was a question again of
the man or the woman who was at the helm. One school I found that surged
with a happy crowd. It was over at Rivington and Suffolk streets, No.
160. Oh, how I wish they would soon stop this hopeless numbering of our
schools, and call them after our great and good men, as Superintendent
Maxwell pleads, so that "the name of every school may in itself be made
a lesson in patriotism and good citizenship to its pupils." There they
would be in their right place. One alderman got the idea during the
Strong reform administration, but they hitched the names to the new
parks instead of the schools, and that turned out wrong. So they have
the Ham Fish Park for Hamilton Fish, the "Sewer" Park for William H.
Seward, the Thomas Jefferson Park up-town which no one will ever call
anything but the Little Italy Park, and the good name of De Witt Clinton
put to the bad use of spoiling beautiful "Hudson-bank." Only, the effort
will be wasted. The old name will stick. How different if the new
schools had been called after these statesmen! And what a chance to get
their pupils interested! In the "Alexander Hamilton School," for
instance, where "the Grange" and his thirteen trees abide yet.
[Illustration: Main Entrance of Public School No. 153.]
But that is another story. I was thinking of the Jackson Pleasure Club
of boys from eleven to thirteen which I found in session in No. 160,
and of its very instructive constitution. I am going to print it here
entire for the instruction of some good people who don't understand. The
boys got it all up themselves with the help of a copy of the United
States Constitution and the famous "Stamp Act."
CONSTITUTION OF THE JACKSON PLEASURE CLUB
EVENING RECREATION CENTRE P. S. NO. 160, NEW YORK CITY
We the boys of the J. P. C. in order to form a perfect club, we
establish justice insure domestic tranquillity provide for the
common defence. We promote the general welfare and secure the
blessing of liberty to ourselves and our descendants to establish
the Constitution for the J. P. C.
No boys can be members who are less than thirteen years and must
be from the 7th Grammar on.
No member can be President or Vice President unless 6 months in
club.
All officers will keep their term six months.
The officers can not commit a law until it is passed by the
members. If it is an important one it will be passed by votes. By
this I mean that if 5/8 of the members pass it is passed if 1/2
is passed it is not passed.
Several committees are appointed to look over these rules which
seldom happen on the streets.
If any member or officer is seen gambling, smoking or fighting a
fine of $0.02 will be asked and must be paid the next meeting.
Special meetings will be held each month. Meetings will be held
at 8 o'clock P.M. to 9 P.M.
No secrets or slang language or nicknames allowed or a fine of
$.03 is asked.
If any body recites a recitation and makes a mistake he is not to
be laughed at or a fine of $.02 must be paid.
If any member takes the laws into his own hands and interferes
with the president or any other officers or walks up and down the
meeting room or draws pictures on the boards a fine of $.02 will
be paid.
Any one who is spoken to 3 times about order will be put out for
that meeting.
Amendment I. No member will be allowed to go on a stranger's
roof, or a fine of $.03 will be asked.
Why not on a stranger's roof? Because flying kites, up there the boys
run across and interfere with the neighbor's pigeons, which is apt to
make him wroth. So you see it is all in the interests of "domestic
tranquillity and the common defence." They are not meaningless phrases,
those big words, they are the boy's ideas of self-government, of a real
democracy, struggling through in our sight. And suppose he does walk on
rhetorical stilts, he has precedent and will show it to you. A nation
learned to walk on them. Who shall say they are not good enough for him?
But to return to what I was speaking about: with the women to lead, the
school has even turned the tables on the jail and invaded it bodily. For
now nearly five 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, when I examined it one 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 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, half the
boys and girls of the neighborhood, whom he meets as their friend, on
equal terms. Mr. Willard, though a young man, is one of the most unique
personages in the city. He is now one of the probation officers, under
the new law which seeks to save the young offender rather than to wreak
vengeance upon him, and his influence for good is great. The house in
Chrystie Street is known far and wide as "the Children's House." They
have their clubs there, and their games, of which Willard is the heart
and soul. "I never saw anything remarkable in him," said one of his old
college professors to me; "if anything, he was rather a dull student."
It seems, then, that even colleges are not always institutions for
"discovering aptitude." It was reserved for Chrystie Street in Willard's
case.
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 five years has done strange things among the children. It sprang from
the proposition of Mrs. 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 many scores of times that number, with a small army of
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.
The classes meet in settlement, school, or church to hear about the
deeds of the fathers, and, when they have listened and read, go with
their teachers and see for themselves the church where Washington
worshipped, the graves where the great dead lie, the fields where they
fought and bled. And when the little Italian asks, with shining eyes,
"Which side were we on?" who can doubt that the lesson has sunk into a
heart that will thenceforward beat more loyally for the city of his
home? We have not any too much pride in our city, the best of us, and
that is why we let it be run by every scalawag boss who comes along to
rob us. In all the land there is no more historic building than
Fraunces' Tavern, where Washington bade good-by to his officers; but
though the very Chamber of Commerce was organized there, the appeal of
patriotic women has not availed to save it to the people as a great
relic of the past. The last time I was in it a waiter, busy with a lot
of longshoremen who were eating their lunch and drinking their beer in
the "Long Room," had hung his dirty apron on a plaster bust of the
Father of his Country that stood upon the counter about where he
probably sat at the historic feast. My angry remonstrance brought only
an uncomprehending stare for reply.
[Illustration: Superintendent C. B. J. Snyder, who builds our Beautiful
Schools.]
But in spite of the dullards, the new life I spoke of, the new sense of
responsibility of our citizenship, is stirring. The People's Institute
draws nightly audiences to the great hall of the Cooper Institute for
the discussion of present problems and social topics--audiences largely
made up of workingmen more or less connected with the labor movement.
The "People's Club," an outgrowth of the Institute, offers a home for
the lonely wage-earner, man or woman, and more accept its offer every
year. It has now nearly four hundred members, one fourth of them women.
Every night its rooms at 241 East Fourteenth Street are filled. Classes
for study and recreation are organized right along. The People's
University Extension Society invades the home, the nursery, the
kindergarten, the club, wherever it can, with help and counsel to
mothers with little children, to young men and to old. In a hundred
ways those who but yesterday neither knew nor cared how the other half
lived are reaching out and touching the people's life. The social
settlements labor unceasingly, and where there was one a dozen years ago
there are forty. Down on the lower East Side, the Educational Alliance
conducts from the Hebrew Institute an energetic campaign among the
Jewish immigrants that reaches many thousands of souls, two-thirds of
them children, every day in the week. More than threescore clubs hold
meetings in the building on Saturday and Sunday. Under the same roof the
Baron Hirsch Fund teaches the children of refugee Jews the first
elements of American citizenship, love for our language and our flag,
and 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 only
lately caught on in New York, because of difficulty in securing the
visitors upon whom the plan depends for its success.[40] 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."
[Footnote 40: The managers of the New York Public Library have found
a way, and have maintained twenty-seven home libraries during the
past year (1901): little cases of from fifteen to forty books
entrusted to the care of some family in the tenement. Miss Adeline
E. Brown, who is in charge of the work, reports a growing enthusiasm
for it. The librarian calls weekly. "We come very near to the needs
of these families," she writes, "the visit meaning more to them than
the books. In nearly every case we allow the books to be given out
at any time by the child who glories in the honor of being
librarian. In one wretched tenement, on the far East Side, we are
told that the case of books is taken down into the yard on Sunday
afternoon, and neighbors and lodgers have the use of them." It is
satisfactory to know that the biggest of the home libraries is
within stone's throw of Corlear's Hook, which the "Hook Gang"
terrorized with rapine and murder within my recollection.
Miss Brown adds that "the girls prefer bookcases with doors of
glass, as they like to scrub it with sapolio, but the boys are more
interested in the lock and key."]
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.