We shall see when we come to study our education from the national viewpoint, that these superintendents meet together in county and state and national conferences, to work out plans for the holding down of the teachers and the regimenting of the school system. This clean-sweeping Broome of Philadelphia put into effect an ingenious method of enforcing conformity; he has a group of what he calls “superior teachers,” who are given extra pay and promises of advancement for exceptional scholarship, writing of theses, and other outside activity. The result has been gross favoritism, and the wrecking of the morale of many schools by the forming of cliques and political gangs.
Teachers who fall out of favor are treated like the policemen in New York; they are given jobs at the other end of the city from their homes—and Philadelphia is geographically the largest city in the United States. Three teachers were driven to suicide by such methods, and great numbers have left the service. In certain schools the system has now reached the stage of development with which we are familiar in the moving picture world, where promotion for women employes depends upon sexual favors extended to the men in power. Such is the reason which Philadelphia teachers assign for the sudden rise of certain ladies in the teaching force; and this condition is so common throughout the rural schools that the city teachers assign it as their main purpose in demanding tenure for all the teachers of the state.
A great many of the schools, and especially the high schools, are organized politically; the alumni associations and parent-teachers’ associations are used, not merely to get favors for their schools, but to serve the political bosses and their interests. The principal of a South Philadelphia school not long ago circulated among his staff a “request” that no teacher should “flunk” a certain notoriously poor scholar, the reason being given that “his father is the police lieutenant of our district, and we cannot afford to antagonize him.” This boy passed triumphantly; and of course the same favors are extended to prominent athletes, who would otherwise be[be] barred from the school contests.
You will be prepared to learn that in such a city the feeble effort of the teachers to start a union was crushed by the discharging of some and the intimidating of the rest. (There were about a hundred members, and a prominent leader sold them out for a promotion.) You will be prepared to learn that the teachers get low salaries, and work all their lives without promotion, unless they belong to the “gang.” You will be prepared to hear that the Chamber of Commerce is strong, and has an “educational bureau,” which formulates the policy for the schools, especially as regards the training of Chamber of Commerce clerks and mechanics. You will also be prepared to hear that civil rights are things forgotten in this corrupt and contented city.
There used to be a certain old-fashioned type of gentleman who had read the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, and believed in civil liberty as a thing to be trusted and fought for; but that type is now out of date, and the hustling young business man, with his “under cover” agent and his “strong arm” detective, runs both the city and the schools. The spirit was shown by Superintendent Broome, when he heard a rumor from the Daughters of the American Revolution (delicious irony of that name!) that there were supposed to be some revolutionists among school teachers. The clean-sweeping Broome set to work at once to sweep out “un-Americanism.” “There are too many insidious influences at work today,” he declared. “If there are any persons with such ideas in our schools here, I wish they would resign before I am put to the embarrassing position of asking them to resign.” The same newspaper quoted “other school officials” as declaring that “if any teacher was suspected to be a radical, it was the duty of a citizen to inform the school authorities.”
Needless to say, education in Philadelphia is not inspiring to children; and, as we have seen in other cities, under such conditions the children get drunk. Early in 1923 Director Davis of the Prohibition Enforcement Bureau ordered his investigators to look into reports of drunkenness on the part of children in three public schools, who were said to be coming to school in a half stupefied condition. I asked a friend about this, and he wrote me that they were the children of Italian parents, who make wine. But then I inquired further, and I learned that among the English speaking mill-workers in the Kensington district the pastors of the churches found it necessary to band together to protect the children from the activities of boot-leggers. The brother of one of the highest teachers in the city was arrested on this charge, and there have frequently been charges of teachers imbibing during class sessions. Also, the use of drugs by school children is prevalent, as in our other great cities. How can you expect either the children or the boot-leggers to obey the law, when the public reads in its morning papers that, nearly five years after the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, the police of Philadelphia Corrupt and Contented are solemnly informing the keepers of thirteen hundred saloons that they must positively close next month! And they don’t!
CHAPTER XLIII
THE SCENES OF MY CHILDHOOD
Let us move farther south to Baltimore, another old and slow-moving city, with a dynasty of long-established merchant princes. For forty years, to my knowledge, their political gang has run the city and pocketed the proceeds. It is a community in which you can lose yourself in miles of brick houses, all exactly alike—little two-story brick houses for the working class and larger three and four-story brick houses for their “betters.” I was born in one of these larger brick houses, and spent my childhood playing on the cobble-stoned streets of “Ballamaw”—as we called it. I never went to school there, because in my childhood the family doctor thought I was learning too fast, and did not realize that to send me to school might be the quickest way to stop me. In Baltimore, as in Philadelphia, the children of the rich have beautiful private schools, and leave the children of the poor to the politicians. As one teacher said to me: “The people take it for granted that the school system is working, like the water system under the pavement.” After I had looked a little farther into school matters, I wanted to substitute for the “water system” the “sewers.”
It is the old story of the business partnership between God and Mammon. The Catholics are strong in Baltimore, and are doing everything in their power to choke the public schools; at the same time the merchant princes are holding down taxes, and their politicians are leaving the old buildings out of repair, without fire escapes, without proper heat—in some cases even without books. The salaries of the teachers are inadequate; but if ever there were two of them who had the courage to start a union, they kept it so quiet that I was unable to find them.
Baltimore is an old-fashioned city, and the middle-class respectabilities hold it immovable. I was invited to the home of a lady and gentleman who were interested in education, and there I found a large company assembled. I asked them what was the economic control of their schools, and found that in an audience of twenty-seven educators there was apparently only one who knew what I meant by the phrase. They were not conscious of any such thing, they said. I wanted to point out to them that a horse never feels the rein until he starts to travel in an undesired direction; but having been brought up in Baltimore, I knew what politeness required.