Yet there was one ray of hope, for James lived in and out of Boston, a city located near the Newton Technical High School. This fact led James’s custodians to propose to the judge that he give James one more trial, this time in the Newton Technical High School. The judge, also of the initiated, agreed to the suggestion, and James, a dismal eighth grade failure, entered the Newton Technical High School in one of the special transfer classes.
Just a word about James. He began life badly. His mother died when he was young; and his father, a rather indifferent man, boarded the boy out during his early years with an aunt, who first spoiled him through indulgence, and then, inconsistently enough, hated him because he was spoiled. Growing up in this uncongenial atmosphere, James became entirely uncontrollable. He was disagreeable in the extreme, wild and unmanageable.
The people with whom James was boarding grew tired of his continued truancy and he was placed on a farm near Boston. There, too, he was discontented, dissatisfied and disobedient. Time after time he ran away to Boston. He went on from bad to worse, falling in with vagrants, learning their talk and their ways, acquiring a love for wandering and a distaste for regularity and direction. Taken into custody by the Juvenile Court, and placed on probation with a family outside of Boston, James again ran away to mingle with a crowd of his old associates in Boston. It was at this point that the court decided to send him to the Reform School. It was likewise at this time that some friendly people took him in charge, found him a home in Newton, and started his life anew in the Newton Technical High School, which James entered with a special transfer class. Promoted to the regular freshman class on trial, James has renewed his interest in education and bids fair to make his way through the high school.
James is doing well in the Newton Technical High School. Though he does not like all of the regular high school work, he has a full course, and is working at it persistently. Heretofore school has never appealed to him—in fact, he hated it cordially—but the school at Newton offered him such a variety of subjects that he was able to find some which were attractive. Since then he has been working on those subjects.
There are many cities in which every school door would have been closed to James, because he did not fit into the school system, but the superintendent of the Newton schools believes in making the school fit the needs of the boy. A fantastic theory? Well, perhaps a trifle, from one viewpoint; nevertheless, it is the soul of education.
IV The Help-Out Spirit
As a result of this special promotion policy, there are practically no over-age pupils in the grammar schools of Newton. Instead of square pegs in round holes, the Newton High School can boast of sixty or seventy children who come, each year, in search of a new opening for which they are technically not ready, but into which they may grow. After coming to the high school, two-thirds of them find an incentive sufficient to lead them to continue with an education of which they had already wearied.
The Newton High School, recognizing its obligation to serve the people, strains every nerve to enable boys and girls to take high school work. The printing teacher pointed to his class of twenty.
“Only three of them do not work on Saturdays and after school. They couldn’t come here if they didn’t work. Hiney, there, was in a bakeshop all day at three and a half a week. We got him a job afternoons and Saturdays that pays him three dollars. That tall fellow will send himself through high school on the six dollars a week that he gets from a drug store where he works outside of school hours.”
“We aim,” added Mr. Spaulding, “to do everything in our power to make it possible for the boys to come here. If their parents cannot afford to send them, we find work for them to do outside of school hours.”