Did I tell you of my friend whose house stands in a garden with a sand-heap in which the children dig and romp with their cat and the kittens and the terrier dog? Of how the dog will try to smother a kitten now and then in an opportune sand-hole, with the children ever on the watch to avert the threatened catastrophe? And of how they did avert it, until one unlucky day they found a dead kitten in the sand-heap. Whereupon the little girl rushed into her mother’s presence with it in her apron and cried out indignantly:
“There, mamma, a perfectly good cat spoiled!”
Just so with these children of the tenement. Perfectly good, as good as any on the avenue with the brown stone mansions, they are spoiled in the tenement house slum, and the loss is ours, an irreparable loss. The chief prop under the character of the growing boy is gone. Nothing can replace it; nothing ever does.
The school is another. How about the lad’s school? The census of which I spoke told us that story seven years ago; and we were surprised. It would have been more to the point had there been no cause for surprise. Two chief props of the to-morrow, of the state—the home and the school—and both neglected! Fifty thousand children in the street who should have been in school! Where the prop had not been knocked out, what had our neglect made of it?
I remember my efforts to catechize a sewing class of girls, all out of the public school, on the subject of Napoleon, of whom there was a big picture on a poster just across the street. Not one of them knew who he was. They thought the picture was of some wild west show character, Buffalo Bill perhaps. Yes, there was one who “believed she had heard of the gentleman before.” She said it timidly and was evidently not sure that she might not be doing an injury to some innocent citizen who might rise and object. This was what she had heard “that he had two wives.” Not that he was a great general, not that he was a soldier, a lawgiver, a ruler, a leader of men; but that he had two wives. It was Napoleon scaled down to the level of the slum.
We found out what our neglect had made of the public school when three applicants for appointment as policemen under Theodore Roosevelt wrote in their examination papers that five of the thirteen states that formed the union were, “England, Ireland, Wales, Belfast, and Cork”! Another wrote that Lincoln was murdered by Ballington Booth! We had made our public schools into stuffing machines. Where they should have taught the young to think, they jammed them full of all sorts of things that made manikins of them—not men. And the “truants” we made by slamming the school-doors in their faces, we took and locked up in a jail behind iron bars, with burglars and thieves and bad boys of every kind, and divided them there—not into the good and the bad; not into the sheep and the goats, remembering that in mingling them there was fearful danger, for how should the young burglar, bursting with pride in his exploit, keep from bragging of it to his admiring side-partner?—not that way were they classified, with a sense of the peril of such a contact, but into squads according to height: four feet, four feet seven, and over four feet seven! That was how we ran our school machinery, without sense or soul; and, where there is neither, character does not grow. That prop—the school—was gone, knocked out from under the boy, the to-morrow.
However, we have done our best to put it back since we made out how badly off we were, for we understand at last the peril of that. Our schools are every day getting nearer to the ideal school that turns out men and women who think, to do the work of the world. The reformatory I spoke of is no longer guilty of such outrages upon common sense. It is to-day leading the way in an attempt to restore, as nearly as possible, family life and family training in home groups, instead of the deadening institution life, to the children whose greatest misfortune was that they never knew home in the saving sense while they—and we—could so easily have been saved.
And now here is a prop which, certainly during a most critical period of the boy’s life, should stand ahead even of the school. I mean his play. Froebel, the great kindergartner who gave us the best legacy of the nineteenth century to its successor, said that play is “the normal occupation of the child through which he first perceives moral relations.” Upon this truth and the other, that the child “learns by doing,” he built his whole common sense system, which we now know to be the right beginning of all education, whether of rich or poor. How have we dealt with this strong bulwark? As sacredly should it be guarded as the right of habeas corpus; the one is not of greater moment to the commonwealth than the other. You cannot make a good citizen out of the lad whom you denied a chance to kick a ball across lots when that was his ambition and his right. I have said it before: it takes a whole boy to make a whole man.
How did we guard this bulwark of play? In the chief city of the land, up to half a dozen years ago, the lad had not one place where he might play, safe from the policeman. Not a single playground was there, even on that East-side where half a million tenants were pent up in the big barracks, out of sight and reach of a green spot. Not a school was there with a playground belonging to it. Yes! there was one; over behind the public school in First Street was a little patch in the middle of the block that had once been a graveyard, but had become a mere litter of tin cans and ash-heaps. It took three years and, I think, as many legislative bills to obtain this sorry boon for the living; but, when it was at last made into a playground, the “gang” in that block went out of business. What became of it? Where did it go? To school, probably. That school became the most popular one on the East-side, and the most orderly.
For all that, however, this playground long remained the only one. It took years to make us see what a clear-headed man across the sea had made out many years before; namely, that crime in our large cities is, to an unsuspected extent, a question of athletics merely—of giving the boys a chance to play when that is what they need. Boys are like steam boilers with steam always up: the steam has to have a safe outlet, or it will find an unsafe one. Boilers have safety-valves with which it is best not to meddle. The boy’s safety-valve is his play. Let the landlord hang up his sign in the yard that he will have no ball playing there, and let the policeman refuse the lad the chance to play in the street, which is a bad place to play at best—let these two sit on the boy’s safety-valve, and you need not marvel at the explosion you will hear. You can read of it in the papers every day: such and such a “gang” waylaid the policeman on their beat last night and beat him with his own club. It is nothing to marvel at, no special depravity; it was just the boiler that went bang.