Failure of students in the sophomore year at the Sacramento high school to solve problems involving the subtraction of 2 from 3 was announced today in connection with arithmetic examinations recently given to 500 pupils at the institution. In multiplying 3 by 2 eleven students failed, the test papers show, while fifteen gave incorrect answers when asked to divide 6 by 3. Though a check of the examination papers has not yet been completed, early returns establish that 416 boys and girls could not multiply a mixed decimal by a plain decimal.
The second is from the New York “Times,” July 22, 1923, and presents a column of data collected from examination papers on “current events” in the high schools of a Tennessee city. The “Times” mercifully withholds the name of this city—no doubt figuring that all are alike. Prizes were offered, and 1,160 high school students entered a competition, to answer a list of sixty questions; the first discovery was that less than 28% knew the name of the governor of their own state! Michael Collins, Irish Free State leader, was described as “ex-President of England,” “a noted boot-legger,” “real estate agent,” “head of labor union,” “manager Boston Red Sox,” “Chicago ball player,” “manager of Piggly-Wiggly store.” Clara Barton was classified as a “movie actress,” “nurse whom the Germans murdered,” “race horse,” “noted writer,” “woman who is to sing for Kosmos Club,” “candidate for Mayor of a city,” “an unmarried woman who lives in exile.” It would appear that not many students in these Tennessee high schools have read “The Goose-step”; for when they were asked to identify Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, they guessed: “President Harding’s private physician,” “a well-known Bible teacher,” “newspaper editor,” “a leader in the medical convention,” “minister,” “writer and essayist.” Needless to say, they scored a hundred per cent of correctness on the identity of “Babe” Ruth; and they doubtless would have done the same for “Fatty” Arbuckle; and who won the last prizefight or the last world’s baseball series, and who are Mutt and Jeff, and have we any bananas today. On the other hand, it would have been easy to frame questions dealing with the higher culture, on which the high school students would have scored one hundred per cent of failure. Mr. O. G. Wood, for four years a teacher and for two years clerk of the school board of Butte, Montana, writes:
The average American boy of today does not care a fig about the beautiful and art side of life. He wants to see the wheels go round and run an automobile and fix a spark plug. He is not studious. The foreign-born boy or the boy born of foreign parentage is far more studious than the American boy, and I have made an especial study of this subject right in the class room. The American boy wants to “get by.” He will shuffle in and out of every class he can. He “fakes” from morning to night with all kinds of lies and excuses on his mind. It is doubtful if a single parent will think their boy does this, yet there are millions of them in the country.
In the course of our travels from city to city we have seen our miseducated school children indulging in rowdyism, patronizing boot-leggers, racing in high-powered automobiles, and spending the night at road-houses. Someone with a sense of humor sends me a copy of a Texas newspaper, the Dallas “Morning News,” October 4, 1923, in which there are three items on one page, which seem to have been especially placed to vindicate my thesis concerning American education. The first item tells that a committee of preachers are investigating the Southern Methodist University, to make sure that no one is teaching modern science. The second reports the director of physical training at this university, speaking at a luncheon of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, telling the youngsters that “foot-ball is character building and training for life.” The third item tells how nine boys and five girls have been arrested and thrashed, either by their parents or their principals, for raiding a Jewish synagogue and doing more than a thousand dollars worth of damage. The Junior Ku Klux Klan!
CHAPTER LXXVIII
DESCENSUS AVERNO
The person who can tell us about the morals of our school children is Ben B. Lindsey, judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver. Lindsey knows, not merely because he has been on the job for twenty-five years, but because he has evolved a technique for getting this particular information. The children come to him literally by thousands—not merely to tell him their troubles, but to ask his advice on every sort of question. Instead of sending delinquent children to jail, Lindsey has fought and exposed the gang politicians, the saloon-keepers, the proprietors of wine-rooms and dives who were preying on the young. At every election he has been fought by these powers, backed by the money of Big Business; he has been supported and elected by the children and their friends. “Our little Ben,” they call him; and “court” is more like a home—or like what a school ought to be.
The first principle upon which Lindsey proceeds is that he never “snitches.” Several times the powers that rule Denver have threatened to send him to jail, and on one occasion they fined him five hundred dollars for contempt of court, because he refused to betray a child’s confidence. As I write, the grand jury is threatening him with imprisonment, because he has made the statement that the abortion rate of Denver is one thousand per year, and he will not tell who the abortionists are, because he has learned their names from women and school girls “in trouble.”
The Denver board of education has adopted a righteous attitude upon this question; any teacher or principal who learns of immorality on the part of any Denver student is required to expel the student and notify the parents; which is an excellent way for the school authorities to keep from knowing uncomfortable facts! Lindsey tells me of a school superintendent who made a statement to reassure the parents: “In more than twenty years’ experience in the Denver schools I have known of but three of our high school girls who were guilty of immorality.” It happened that on that very day four such girls had come to Lindsey’s court to seek his advice! He tells me that he knew of more than three hundred sexual cases involving high school girls in a two-year period of investigation; and two-thirds of these girls came to him of their own free will. More than a thousand of high school age have confessed to him.
And, mind you, these are not servant girls and shop girls and waitresses, the victims of poverty, but the daughters of Denver’s leading families, copper kings and coal kings and iron kings and gold kings and silver kings, together with the lawyers who protect their property, and the doctors who look after their bodies, and the clergymen who save their souls. A prominent Denver churchman dramatically denounced Lindsey before a public body because of his attitude on the question of censorship; and this churchman’s beloved daughter, a high school student, had confided her troubles to Lindsey, who helped her to be secretly treated for venereal infection! Another minister’s daughter became involved with the son of a high-up school official; both of them were recent high school students, and the affair developed under the steps of a school building while the young couple were on their way from church!
You might hunt the moving pictures through and find no stranger incidents. Here comes a father, one of the great public utility men, who has been fighting Lindsey tooth and nail in politics. Now the man is broken; he has discovered that his beloved daughter is in trouble, and he is going to shoot the youth who seduced her. But Lindsey persuades him to wait, and the man promises to come back next day; he comes, and in Lindsey’s chambers, by a coincidence not of Lindsey’s planning, he meets his own son. The son, thinking the father has been brought there to confront him, breaks down and tells how he, the son, is responsible for the pregnancy of a young girl!