Thirty-fifth Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City and County of New York, for the Year ending December 31, 1876.
Much has been written on the school question within the past few months; not, however, by opponents of the public schools as they exist here, but by those who pay for them—the taxpayers. Four million dollars for the Department of Public Schools alone is a great load. This tax increases yearly, and no doubt will soon reach the fifth million. The strange enthusiasm that led sects to trample on the religious convictions of their neighbors also led them to make light of the burden that came with the victory. But five millions is terrifying. Why not six? Will there be no end to the increase?
Perhaps the originators of the present school system recognized the moral baseness of severing the instruction which may enable the child to act with judgment from the training which teaches him moral responsibility for the judgment as well as for the action springing from it. They certainly desired to accomplish indirectly the chief end of education by placing the school machinery in the hands of philanthropists who serve without pay or emolument.
The result has been a gradual complication of the common-school system, so as to include technical education, and even the higher branches of learning. Years ago a Free College was successfully engrafted. Next came a Normal College for young ladies. In order to render this latter offshoot permanent, it was deemed necessary to provide the graduates with positions in the common schools. The first step was to raise the standard of proficiency for a teacher’s certificate; the next, to declare that the college diploma was sufficient evidence of qualification, without a public examination by the city superintendent. The report tells us that “under the by-law by which the graduates are licensed to teach without a second examination, the city superintendent and the president of the college have performed their duties in perfect harmony.”
When the mode of testing the qualification of applicants who are not Normal College graduates is discussed, the report states, “a system of rigid examinations in the superintendent’s office precludes the possibility of incompetent persons being foisted upon the system through political or social influence.”
Nor is this the only injury to the common schools. The favored graduates are not to be allowed to work for the low salaries received by primary teachers during the past thirty-five years. An adjustment of salaries is demanded. These primary teachers must receive as large a sum as grammar-school teachers. This simply means an increase in the cost of the common-school system.
If that system, as it now exists here, answer to the purposes for which it was intended, it is high time for that fact to appear. Yet the gentlemen who have charge of the board, from the president down, seem strangely to disagree on most important matters. Without committing ourselves to one side or the other in the discussion, we take a few instances. The grammar schools surely form a very important branch of the system. Here is how the president treats of them in the report: “Our primary-school teachers have a lower rate of pay than our grammar-school teachers, and the primary schools have been used as training places for the better-paid positions in the grammar schools. The plan for uniformity in salaries in these two departments has received serious consideration by a committee of the board, and deserves to be carried out. The majority of our pupils receive all the education they have in the primary, and never enter the grammar schools. This majority deserves the first consideration. Instruction and discipline are no more difficult in one than in the other, and in neither department is the range of knowledge required to be mastered extensive.”
The president asserts that the common-school system only succeeds in furnishing primary instruction to a majority of pupils, and he would seem to imply that the enormous sum of four million dollars should be spent on the primary schools, reserving, of course, a sufficient sum for the Normal College.
Lest his opinions as to the range of knowledge required in a teacher should dishearten those who are toiling through Normal College, he inserts a few lines for their benefit: “An erroneous idea seems to prevail that a primary teacher can dispense with the higher studies. The truth is that this class of teachers more than any other class needs trained faculties and sound judgment, and these are only obtained by the discipline of hard and close study. Normal study and normal practice, to be effective, must be based on the broad foundation of a liberal education.”
Compulsory education the city superintendent pronounces a complete failure, while those who are paid to enforce it consider it successful. In the discussion some interesting facts are brought to light. The city superintendent states: “Many parents, finding that our schools are unable to govern their wilful and unruly children, send them to the parochial schools. In connection with this, it is proper to call the attention of the board to the fact that, while the average attendance of pupils in the schools immediately under its care has, during the past year, increased less than two and a half per cent., in the corporate schools it has increased more than five per cent. It is also of interest to observe that, at the close of 1875, the number of pupils enrolled in the Catholic parochial schools was 30,732, while in 1867 it was only 16,342, showing an increase, in less than ten years, of nearly 90 per cent.; while the increase in the attendance of the pupils in the public schools has, during the same time, been only about 13 per cent. The increase in attendance at the corporate schools, during the same period, has been more than 57 per cent.... The question, therefore, very properly suggests itself, why should a system for compelling pupils to attend the schools be sustained at great expense to the city while there is no effective means of controlling and educating those children after they have been brought into the schools?”