Even those students who are better placed economically, or who have the perseverance to go on into the higher schools, may have had no experience but that of a disorganized tenement home. Emil was an instance of this. He supported himself while attending school by teaching immigrants at night. We invited him to a party at one of our country places and instructed him to call in the morning for his railroad ticket. He failed to appear until long after the appointed hour, not realizing that trains leave on schedule time. Apparently he had never consulted a time-table or taken a journey except with a fresh-air party conducted by someone else. Next morning he returned the ticket, and I learned that he had not reached the farm because he did not know the way to it from the station. Somewhat disconcerted to learn that he had taken fruitlessly a trip of something over an hour’s duration, I asked why he had not telephoned to the farm for directions. This seventeen-year-old boy, in his third year in the high school, had not thought of a telephone in the country. Moreover, he had never used one anywhere.
Happily, there is a growing realization among educators of the necessity of relating the school more closely to the children’s future, and it is not an accident that one of the widely known authorities on vocational guidance has had long experience in settlements.[4]
A friend has recently given to me the letters which I wrote regularly to her family during the first two years of my life on the East Side. I had almost forgotten, until these letters recalled it to me, how often Miss Brewster and I mourned over the boys and girls who were not in school, and over those who had already gone to work without any education. Almost everyone has had knowledge at some time of the chagrin felt by people who cannot read or write. One intelligent woman of my acquaintance, born in New York State, ingeniously succeeded for many years in keeping the fact of her illiteracy secret from the people with whom she lived on terms of intimacy, buying the newspaper daily and making a pretense of reading it.
We had naïvely assumed that elementary education was given to all, and were appalled to find entire families unable to read or write, even though some of the children had been born in America. The letters remind me, too, of the efforts we made to get the children we encountered into school,—day school or night school, public or private,—and how many different people reacted to our appeals. The Department of Health, to facilitate our efforts, supplied us with virus points and authority to vaccinate, since no unvaccinated child could be admitted to school. We gave such publicity as was in our power to the conditions we found, not disdaining to stir emotionally by our “stories” when dry and impersonal statistics failed to impress.
Since those days, New York City has established a school census and has almost perfected a policy whereby all children are brought into school; but throughout the state there are communities where the compulsory education law is disregarded. The Federal Census of 1910 shows in this Empire State, in the counties (Franklin and Clinton) inhabited by the native-born, illiteracy far in excess of that in the counties where the foreign-born congregate.
Wonderful advance has been made within two decades in the conception of municipal responsibility for giving schooling to all children. Now the blind, the deaf, the cripples, and the mentally defective are included among those who have the right to education. When in 1893 I climbed the stairs in a Monroe Street tenement in answer to a call to a sick child, I found Annie F⸺ lying on a tumbled bed, rigid in the braces which encased her from head to feet. All about her white goods were being manufactured, and five machines were whirring in the room. She had been dismissed from the hospital as incurable, and her mother carried her at intervals to an uptown orthopedic dispensary. A pitiful, emaciated little creature! The sweatshop was transfigured for Annie when we put pretty white curtains at the window upon which she gazed, hung up a bird-cage, and placed a window-box full of growing plants for her to look at during the long days. Then, realizing that she might live many years and would need, even more than other children, the joys that come from books, we found a young woman who was willing to go to her bedside and teach her.
Nowadays children crippled as Annie was may be taken to school daily, under the supervision of a qualified nurse, in a van that calls for them and brings them home. One of these schools, established by intelligent philanthropists, is on Henry Street; the instructors are engaged and paid by the Department of Education. There are also classes in different sections of the city equipped for the special needs of cripples, to give them industrial training which will provide for their future happiness and economic independence.