8. The Park Department.
How it protects health. How our park system arose and what it has cost. How the parks are managed. The need of small parks. What parks have accomplished in New York. Boulevards as parks. The need and benefit of playgrounds as conducive to health, educative and preventive of crime. The desirability of school playgrounds. Dangers threatening parks.
9. Department of Charities.
The hospital and ambulance service. Out-door relief. Asylums. How the destitute may be aided. The city’s aid to private charitable institutions.
In this connection it is both desirable and feasible for the pupils to visit the more important departments and get some first-hand impressions of their work. Our experience has been that the city officials willingly and helpfully coöperate with the school. Not only have they furnished us much valuable material, but they have also facilitated the inspection of their departments, and have not infrequently themselves given helpful talks to the boys.
IV. Following close upon the study of the departments comes a consideration of the cost to the city. The pupil has noted the extensive activities of the municipality and the important question of how they are all paid for looms up before him. The budget must be studied, and the manner of levying and collecting taxes must be understood, as well as the raising of money by loans. Under proper guidance he will come to realize how extravagant and inefficient government affects him personally, how honest and economic government has a money value to every citizen. He will want to know what city officers determine the amount of money to be spent, and just what officers spend the money. New York City has had a Board of Estimate and Apportionment in control of its finances for a decade, yet it remained for the recent three-cornered fight for the mayoralty, with its resulting choice of a Democratic mayor and a Fusion Board of Estimate, to bring home to the average citizen what the professional politician had long understood, that this Board have really much more to do with the government of the city than the mayor, that in reality New York has a sort of government by commission.
V. We come finally in our study to a consideration of the citizen’s part in the administration of municipal affairs. Topics such as the following should be taken up:
Becoming a citizen. Becoming a voter. Registration. Voting. Voting but a part. The party organization. The cause of good or bad government. How the citizen may govern the city through the party organization. Enrollment. The district captain. The district committee. The district leader. The general committee. The leader of the organization. How the leader reaches his place. Organization the key to success in politics. Candidates for office, how selected, formally, actually. Why the high school graduate should work through an organization for an honest, business-like government.
The preceding part of the course will have failed of its purpose if it hasn’t established in the pupil’s mind certain elementary ideas and ideals concerning the purpose of government and a sense of the duty and responsibility which every citizen owes to the community in which he works and lives. He will be an intelligent reader of the numerous items in the daily press bearing upon the administration of city affairs, and he will know how as a voter he may take an active and effective part in that administration alike for his own best interests and that of the community.
The course outlined is not an artificial affair based upon pure theory. It has been successfully carried on in one high school for half a decade, winning the enthusiastic interest of first-year pupils as well as of the teachers charged with its conduct. It can be adapted to the high school of any community, and will fail of its purpose only if it is managed in a perfunctory fashion by instructors who have not a professional interest in their work, or a high sense of their great responsibility and their great opportunity. It would be a splendid thing if we could require of all teachers in the public schools a knowledge of the governmental activities of the municipality they are called upon to serve, for surely they of all citizens, ought to be familiar with the purpose and practice of government.