246. The City School.—The school is expected to be the foster-mother of every American child, whether native or adopted. It is expected to take the children from the avenue and the slum, those with the best influences of heredity and environment, and those with the worst, those who are in good health and those who are never well, and putting them all through the same intellectual process, to turn out a finished product of boys and girls qualified for American citizenship. It is an unreasonable expectation, and the American school falls far short of meeting its responsibility. It often has to work with the poorest kind of material, sometimes it has to feed the pupil before his mental powers can get to work. It has to see that the physical organs function properly before it can get satisfactory intellectual results. The school is the victim of an educational system that was made to fit other conditions than those of the present-day city; the whole system needs reconstructing, but the management is conservative, ignorant, or parsimonious in many cases, or too radical and given to fads and experiments. Yet, in spite of all its faults and delinquencies, the public schools of the city are the hope of the future.
The school is the melting-pot of the city's youth. It is the training-school of municipal society. In the absence of family training it provides the social education that is necessary to equip the child for life. It accustoms him to an orderly group life and establishes relations with others of similar age from other streets or neighborhoods than those with which he is familiar. It teaches him how intelligent public opinion is formed, and brings him within the circle of larger interests than those with which he is naturally connected. He learns how to accommodate himself to the group rather than to fight or worm his way through for a desired end, as is the method of the street. He learns good morals and good manners. He finds out that there are better ways of expressing his ideas than in the slang of the alley, and in time he gains an understanding of a social leadership that depends on mental and moral superiority instead of physical strength or agility. As he grows older he becomes acquainted with the worth of established institutions, and his hand is no longer against every man and every man's hand against him. He likes to share in the social activities that occur as by-products of the school—the musical and dramatic entertainments, the athletic contests, and the debating and oratorical rivalries. By degrees he becomes aware that he is a responsible member of society, that he is an individual unit in a great aggregation of busy people doing the work of the world, and that the school is given him to make it possible for him to play well his part in the activities of the city and nation to which he belongs.
READING REFERENCES
Veiller: Housing Reform, pages 3-46.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives.
Clopper: Child Labor in the City Streets.
Martin: "Exhibit of Congestion," art. in The Survey,20: 27-39.
Goodyear: "Household Budgets of the Poor," art. in Charities, 16: 191-197.
"The Pittsburgh Survey," arts, in The Survey, vol. 21.
Lee: Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy, pages 109-184.