The moral and social retrogression indicated in this item of the Comptroller’s report is thrown into bold relief by another item, the expenditures for schools. While the paupers and criminals have grown upon us by an annual expenditure of more than a million in excess of the sum needed in 1879, the school children’s share of the public funds has grown by less than a million in excess of the requirements of 1879.
More shameful still is this retrogression when the item of police expenditure is considered, for this exceeds outright the appropriation for the Department of Education, and has grown more rapidly than the expenditure for schools. It appears that, under existing conditions, when property appreciates half a billion in value, it is necessary to have four and one half millions’ worth of police to watch over and protect the half-billions’ increase in assessed value from the ravages of our paupers and criminals.
It seems also that in 1879 our police cost less than our schools, while they now cost more. The problem assumes a still greater aspect when the expenditure for paupers, criminals, and police are taken together, for it then appears that they cost nearly twice as much as the schools.
Thus the community is clearly moving in the direction of more demoralized masses of population kept in check by the brute force of an armed police, since each year the excess grows which is spent for paupers, criminals, and police over the expenditure for education.
One retrogressive influence fails to find positive official expression, and is, therefore, the more worthy of notice. This is the collusion among officials to reduce primary school attendance. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment never approves the full appropriation made for the schools. The Board of Education strives to live well within the sum allowed it, and crowds the greatest possible number of children upon each teacher, the regular enrolment being seventy primary pupils per teacher. Then to parry the charge of over-filling schoolrooms, it becomes the duty of the principal to reduce the enrolment per schoolhouse to the lowest point. Therefore, when a zealous Sunday-school teacher finds that one of her little charges has gone to work under age, the offices of the city’s solitary factory inspector being out of the question, she hunts up a truant officer, who takes the child before a magistrate, who, in view of the want of school accommodations, promptly discharges the truant. Behind our local municipal administration lies our whole system of capitalistic production, calling for cheap hands and profit, not humane culture. And the school authorities do but seek to supply the demand of that system for lads who can read the papers enough to vote with the machine, and write and cipher enough to be available as clerks.
Everything beyond this being unprofitable, the great mass of our city children are turned out of school at the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve years, to furnish “cheap” hands for industrial purposes.
The Comptroller’s report is substantiated, moreover, by the concurrent testimony of the State Superintendent of Education, who laments that:—[14]
“There is a large, uneducated class in the State, and our statistics show that it is growing larger. The attendance upon the schools has not kept pace with the advance of population. Recent legislation forbids the employment of children under thirteen years of age in any manufacturing establishment, but no adequate provision is made for gathering them into schools, and the number in the streets grows more rapidly than the number in the schools. Indeed, nothing practical has ever been done in this State by way of compelling attendance upon the schools. The result is sadly apparent and the premonitions are full of warning.”
In 1889 (p. 13) the same official, Mr. Andrew S. Draper, says:—[15]
“The total attendance upon the schools, when compared with the whole number of school age, has grown less and less with strange uniformity.”