Similarly, the boy attends the "free" schools. Here is further advantage without the thought of service in return, something for nothing--the open end of the public crib. But the public schools are not exactly free schools. Everything, whether at home or school, costs, and someone pays the bills. The prospective citizen should be made to realize this, and it would do him no harm actually to compute the cost. Through home and school, society is making an investment in him. Let him estimate in dollars and cents his indebtedness for food and clothing and shelter, travel, medical care, education and recreation, and all the other items of expense which have entered into his care and training for the fourteen or seventeen years of his dependency.
Such an exercise, which cannot include those invaluable offices of parental love and personal interest, may have a sobering effect, as will also a conscious appreciation of the social institutions and utilities which are the gift of former and contemporary generations of toilers.
But how can the schoolboy come into the self-respect of partnership? Probably by building up the consciousness of "our school" and by being sent from home with the idea of helping teacher and school in every way to accomplish the most and best for all concerned. Ordinarily the home supplies the child with no such suggestion and in some cases works even counter to the school and against good citizenship. The teacher is added to the ranks of the child's natural enemies, where unfortunately the policeman has long since been consigned; and the school?--that is something for which he carries no responsibility. Actual experiment of the opposite kind has proved most gratifying, and this immediate attitude toward his first public institution sets the child's will toward the practice of good citizenship in the years that lie ahead.
The curriculum of the elementary schools of Chicago makes a very thorough attempt to train the child in good citizenship, an attempt beginning with the anniversary days of the kindergarten and proceeding throughout the eight grades. In addition to history, civics of the most concrete and immediate kind is so presented that the child should be brought to an appreciation of the city's institutions and organized forces and of the common responsibility for the health and security of all the people. The same policy is pursued, unfortunately with diminishing attention, throughout the high-school course, and yet the superintendent of schools testifies that public education is failing to secure civic virtue. The children have not come into partnership with the school and other agencies of the common life, they have not achieved a nice sense of the rights of others, they have not been lifted to the ideal of service as being more noble than that of efficiency alone.
Of course there are many reasons for this: the quizzical temper of the community at large, the constant revelation of graft, the distorted school discipline which makes tardiness a more serious offense than lying or theft; the neglect to organize athletics and play for ethical ends; the criminal's code with regard to examinations--a code very prevalent in secondary schools, both public and private--that cheating is in order if one is not caught; the bitter and damaging personalities of party politics and the very transient honors of American public life; and, perhaps chief of all, the very elaborate provision for every child with the implication that he does the school a favor to use what is provided rather than the imposition of an obligation upon him both to help in securing the efficiency and beauty of the school and to discharge his just debt to society in the measure of his ability as boy and man.
Another productive cause of poor citizenship is the general contempt in which immigrants are held, and especially the treatment accorded them by the police and by most of the minor officials with whom they come in contact. This primitive disdain of "barbarians" is common among the school children and tends to make the foreign children more delinquent and anti-social than they would otherwise be. A very recent case sums up the situation. A gang of five Polish boys "beat up" a messenger boy, apparently without provocation. A Juvenile Protective officer visited the home of one of these young thugs for the purpose of talking with the mother and getting such information as would aid in keeping the boy from getting into further trouble.
The mother was found to be a very intelligent woman and explained to the officer that her boy had been constantly angered and practically spoiled at school; that it had been ground into him that he was nothing but a "Polack," and that no good thing was to be expected of him. The school boys had taken a hand in his education; and by reflecting in their own merciless way the uncharitable judgment of their elders had helped to produce this young pariah.
If one will but travel on the street cars in the crowded districts of our great cities and note the churlish discourtesy and sarcastic contempt with which "the foreigners" are generally treated, or will take the pains to ascertain how cruelly they are deceived and fleeced at almost every turn, one will soon conclude that we are making it very hard for these people and their children to become grateful and ardent citizens of the republic.
Looking to the improvement of this condition, while vocational training promises something by way of an economic basis for good citizenship, too much must not be expected of it alone. For if vocational efficiency be created and released in an environment devoid of civic idealism it will never pass beyond the grub stage. It will merely fatten a low order of life, and this at the expense of much that would otherwise lend verdure and freshness, shade, flower, and fruit to the garden of our common life. The able man or the rich man is not necessarily a good citizen.
That the state, like the home and school, should incessantly give its benefactions without binding youth to service in return is an egregious blunder. There should be some formal entrance into full citizenship, not only for those of us who, coming from other nations, must needs be "naturalized," but for all whom the years bring from the fair land of boyhood into the great and sober responsibilities of citizenship.