Ragged school

“ But the moment you rise as high as a college, nature is violated. First, boys go off by themselves to their own destruction; secondly, home influences withdrawn; and, thirdly,—at Harvard, which the only college I ever visited,—the thorough comeliness which is found in the lower grades of schools does not appeal. The separation of boys and girls in school is a subject which has much talked about, but has not yet come to its adequate discussion. ”

“ It is safe to assume that there is no criminality in the ordinary public school pupil. By treating the breach of decorum of school rules as, in a way, accidental, the actual restraint of pupils from serious excesses is much more certain. ”

“ Apparent, however, when we deal with true education. For the school has for centuries been the victim of a grave injustice. People have been led to consider the classroom as a place of confinement and of punishment, and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the scourge of ridicule cracked in the face of pedantry. ”

“ Accordingly, if it happens anywhere in the state that those who are the less promising candidates, in the teacher's judgment, are debarred from attempting Regents' examinations by failing marks, by demotion and exclusion from their class, or by other means, the school's percentage of pupils passing may be kept high as a result, but the injustice worked upon the pupil in such manner is vicious and reprehensible. ”

“ Repeat, with judicious caution, what is said of the school, both for and against it, and thus endeavor to interest the scholars in its public reputation. This feeling of interest in the institution may very easily be awakened. It sometimes springs up, spontaneously, and where it is not guided aright by the teacher, sometimes produces very bad effects upon the minds of the pupils, in rival institutions. When two schools are situated near each other, evil consequences will result from this feeling, unless the teacher manages it so as to deduce good consequences. ”

“ But even with all this wise precaution, the unprepared and the unqualified have sometimes entered the outer courts; and when compelled at last to reveal their character, have turned to rend their teachers, and have done their utmost to destroy the School and demoralize mankind. ”

“ Our huge city schools are manufactories rather than educational institutions—places where yearly a certain number of the youth of the country are turned out able to some extent to make use of the mechanical arts of reading and writing, and with a smattering of many branches of knowledge, but with little or no training for the moral and civic responsibilities of life. This is evident, it is urged, if we consider how little the school does to counteract and to supplant the evil influences of a bad home or social environment. ”

“ They like to feel the operation of system, and to realize, while they are at the school room, that they form a community, governed by fixed and steady laws, firmly but pleasantly administered. On the other hand, laxity of discipline, and the disorder which will result from it, will only lead the pupils to contemn their teacher, and to hate their school. ”

“ It is a convenient phrase, but beyond it there is the conspiracy of silence. Schoolmasters prefer to deal with straight issues. They dislike the subtleties of action and character which are of such charm to the psychologist. They like to say, 'This is an offence.' Finer shades of meaning trouble them. At least that is their official attitude. And so it has come to be generally accepted that public school morality resolves itself into one main issue: that is, the corruption of a small boy by a big one. ”

“ How far young or delicate children are able to contend with the necessary evils of a public school is, in my opinion, a very grave question, and does not enter into the present discussion.
‘The younger children in all larger institutions are liable to be oppressed; but the exposure to this evil at Cowan Bridge was not more than in other schools, but, as I believe, far less. Then, again, thoughtless servants will occasionally spoil food, even in private families; and in public schools they are likely to be still less particular, unless they are well looked after. ”

“ Whenever this is the case or under any circumstances which keep the pupil behind the school class of his intellectual equals, we have a fundamental cause of distaste for school work. No wonder that such pupils dislike school, become disgruntled and stubborn, run away and rebel at the treatment they receive under the traditional school system. One can hardly blame a self-respecting boy, forced to remain behind his peers, for breaking away from the lock step, playing truant and seeking his education in the streets. ”

“ In any well-regulated school, where all the motives are carefully graded, through a long series of increasing privations and penalties, there should be no cases but what are sufficiently met. The presence of pupils that are not amenable to such means is a discord and anomaly ”

“ The child and the adult each felt keenly his position in the college, and a course of cramming was pursued, injurious to all concerned, to lessen the number in the primary and to increase the number in the college departments. No man can estimate the injury thus inflicted upon not only the student but the cause of education. Even unto to-day there are colleges in localities in the South which run all year while the common school only runs from three to eight months. ”

“ The majority of assailants are anything but socialists. They consider an enlightened oligarchy the ideal form of government, and their chief quarrel with the Public Schools is the absence of that enlightened oligarchy. No one wants to destroy the Public Schools. No one would be so foolish. But we do maintain that the public school system—a very old, a very magnificent, a very venerable mansion—stands in drastic need of repair. ”

“ My own effort in that fight was mainly for decent schoolhouses, for playgrounds, and for a truant school to keep the boys out of jail. If I was not competent to argue over the curriculum with a professor of pedagogy, I could tell, at least, if a schoolroom was so jammed that to let me pass into the next room the children in the front seat had to rise and stand; or if there was light enough for them to see their slates or the blackboard. ”

“ If the school failure is to be administered as a retaliation or convenience by the teacher, how is the moral or educational welfare of the pupil to be served thereby? It is certain to be more efficacious for vengeance than for purposes of reforming the individual if employed in this way. ”

“ Today I want to talk about a subject which also deals with violence and is on our minds as the holidays end and our children go back to school—the problem of classroom discipline. The sad truth is, many classrooms across the country are not temples of learning, teaching the lessons of good will, civility, and wisdom important to the whole fabric of American life; many schools are filled with rude, unruly behavior, and even violence. ”

“ There are, I am given to understand, in the midst of this hitherto well conducted and admirable school, a number of girls who have banded themselves together in disregard of its laws, and who have made for themselves laws contrary to the peace-abiding principles of this great school and noble institution: who meet at unseemly hours, who preach rebellion each to the other, who dare to publicly break the laws of the school, and who defy the express wishes of myself as head-mistress and the governors of the school by insisting on continuing their wicked meetings. ”

“ Among educators as well as among members of the general public a spirit of educational unrest has developed. Everywhere there is an ill-defined feeling of dissatisfaction with the work of the schools; everywhere an earnest desire to see the schools do more effectively the school work which is regarded, on every hand, as imperative.
The facts of school failure are more generally known than the facts of school success; yet there are successful schools. Indeed, some of the school systems of the United States are doing remarkably effective work. ”

“ The chairman of the school board interrupted in rage! “That’s an exploded standpoint, and we won’t have it here!” The trial lasted for a week, and was a grand farce comedy. But, of course like all these Black Hand trials, its end was predetermined, and the teacher was fired.
I asked a large group of teachers what had become of the youngsters, under this regime of hundred per cent capitalism. Their testimony was unanimous upon the point that the schools are retrograding and that the children are not learning as they should. Home study has become a lost art. ”

“ An elementary knowledge of human nature readily leads to the conclusion that the second alternative was not one to which the official schoolmaster would quietly consent. He would look upon the new-comer as an intruder, and would take such steps as were possible to prevent interference with what he claimed to be his monopoly of keeping school in his own district.
It is around this question of the monopoly of school keeping that the educational disputes of the Middle Ages mainly centre. ”

“ Of course, the truth is, as we all know, that the product of the public elementary school is utterly useless, and generally wanting in intelligence. But these facts are only discovered by the victims themselves after years of bitter experience. Totally unfitted for any station in life, many of them leave{36} school full of self-confidence in the belief that their superior education will secure them a good opening. Despising all manual labour, they seek situations as clerks, shop-assistants, and such-like. ”

“ The dangers inherent in this materialistic view is that many young people who could profit from further education do not feel a sufficient inducement to continue study. They leave school too soon, and the broadening influences which could come from further education in the daytime, or the evenings, is lost to them. ”

“ A training school in the art of lying, for example, or burglary, or slander, or fraud, might be efficient in its method and the prizes might be fairly distributed to the most proficient pupils, and yet it would scarcely be argued that the maintenance of the school was in the public interest. ”

“ The very fact that they might do as they chose, and were put upon their honor to uphold the reputation and dignity of the school, usually acted as an incentive to them to do so, whereas the eternal surveillance and suspicion of the average school acts as a mighty inspiration to circumvent all regulations. ”

“ When the teacher is absent for a day, instead of dismissing the school, he perhaps leaves it theoretically in the charge of one of the older scholars. The inevitable consequence is, that at such times the work of the school is reduced not merely to zero, but to forty degrees below zero. The scholars simply bar the front door, and amuse themselves in using the teacher’s ferule for a bat, and the Trimetrical Classic, or the Confucian Analects, for a ball. The demoralization attending such lawlessness is evidently most injurious to the efficiency of the school. ”

“ Your school becomes a University of laziness, as your prison is a University of crime. Make the school free, abolish your University grades, appeal to the volunteers of teaching; begin that way, instead of making laws against laziness which only serve to increase it. ”

“ These are the very children whom the teacher is most tempted to encourage to do more work than is good for them. The process of their mental development is so rapid that it needs no stimulation from outside. But that is not, unfortunately, the concern of the school authorities. The anxiety to produce scholars who will distinguish themselves in public examinations, and thereby advertise the school, invariably leads the schoolmaster to cram and stuff the brains of the brightest and most forward boys. ”

“ Through this injustice, the school has been burdened with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill-masters that are the negation of intelligent education and of inspired ethical discipline. In order to see whether education really limits the free activity of the pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, which may not be after all a school. We must examine an institution at the moment and in the act which 60 realises its significance—when the instructor teaches and the pupils are learning. ”

“ We, e.g., no longer entrust the instruction of the younger children in the school to the older, as was the custom under the monitorial system of Bell and Lancaster, and with the abolition of the pupil-teacher the last remnant of a system introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the only remedy to meet the dire educational necessities of the time, will have been removed. ”

“ The showing that a lack of schools which threw an army of children upon the street went hand in hand with overcrowded jails made us get up and demand that something be done. From the school executive came the helpless suggestion that the thing might be mended by increasing the classes in neighborhoods where there were not enough schools from sixty to seventy-five. Forty or forty-five pupils is held to be the safe limit anywhere. ”

“ I shall not speak of moral conduct, which, if religious principles be kept to, we may believe will be good; but I shall give certain hints that may point out the temptations to which schools are particularly liable. I have observed a want of strict integrity in school-boys, as it respects their school-masters and teachers—a disposition to cheat them, to do that behind their backs which they would not do before their faces, and so having two faces. ”

“ Of course, all boys who go to school are not destined for professions that necessitate the passing of an examination, competitive or otherwise. But that does not disturb the school authorities a jot, or involve the slightest relaxation of the school system. The boys are crammed just the same. Whoever wishes to pass through the mill must go in like a pig at one end and come out as a sausage at the other. ”