CHAPTER V
EDUCATION AND THE CHILD
Perhaps nothing makes a profounder impression on the newcomer to our end of the city than the value placed by the Jew upon education; an overvaluation, one is tempted to think, in view of the sacrifices which are made, particularly for the boys,—though of late years the girls’ claims have penetrated even to the Oriental home.
One afternoon a group of old-world women sat in the reception-room at the settlement while one of the residents sang and played negro melodies. With the melancholy minor of “Let My People Go,” the women began crooning a song that told the story of Cain and Abel. The melody was not identical, but so similar that they thought they recognized the song as their own; and when a discussion arose upon the coincidence that two persecuted peoples should claim this melody, the women, touched by the music, confessed their homesick longing for Russia—for Russia that had dealt so unkindly with them.
“Rather a stone for a pillow in my own home,” said one woman on whom life had pressed hard. “Would you go back?” she was asked. “Oh, no, no, no!” emphasizing the words by a swaying of the body and a shaking of the head. “It is not poverty we fear. It is not money we are seeking here. We do not expect things for ourselves. It is the chance for the children, education and freedom for them.”
The passion of the Russian Jews for intellectual attainment recalls the spirit of the early New England families and their willingness to forego every comfort that a son might be set apart for the ministry. Here we are often witnesses of long-continued deprivation on the part of every member of the family, a willingness to deny themselves everything but the barest necessities of life, that there may be a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher among them. Submission to bad housing, excessive hours, and poor working conditions is defended as of “no matter because the children will have better and can go to school—maybe college.” Said a baker who showed the ill-effects of basement and night work and whose three rooms housed a family of ten: “My boy is already in the high school. If I can’t keep on, the Herr Gott will take it up where I leave off.”
A painful instance was that of a woman who came to the settlement one evening. Her son was studying music under one of the most famous masters in Vienna, and she had exiled herself to New York in order to earn more money for him than she could possibly earn at home. Literally, as I afterwards discovered, she spent nothing upon herself. A tenement family gave her lodging (a bed on chairs) and food, in return for scrubbing done after her day’s work in the necktie factory. The Viennese master, not knowing his pupil’s circumstances, or, it is possible, not caring, had written that the young man needed to give a concert, an additional demand which it was utterly impossible for her to meet. She had already given up her home, she had relinquished her wardrobe, and she had sold her grave for him.
One young lad stands out among the many who came to talk over their desire to go through college. He dreamed of being great and, this period of hardship over, of placing his family in comfort. I felt it right to emphasize his obligation to the family; the father was dead, the mother burdened with anxiety for the numerous children. How reluctant I was to do this he could not realize; only fourteen, he had impressed us with his fine courage and intelligence, and it was hard to resist the young pleader and to analyze with him the common-place sordid facts. He had planned to work all summer, to work at night, and he was hardly going to eat at all. But his young mind grasped, almost before I had finished, the ethical importance of meeting his nearest duties. He has met the family claims with generosity, and has realized all our expectations for him by acquiring through his own efforts education and culture; and he evinces an unusual sense of civic responsibility.
Those who have had for many years continuous acquaintance with the neighborhood have countless occasions to rejoice at the good use made of the education so ardently desired, and achieved in spite of what have seemed overwhelming odds. New York City is richer for the contributions made to its civic and educational life by the young people who grew up in and with the settlements, and who are not infrequently ready crusaders in social causes. A country gentleman one day lamented to me that he had failed to keep in touch with what he was pleased to call our humanitarian zeal, and recalled his own early attempt to take an East Side boy to his estate and employ him. “He could not even learn to harness a horse!” he said, with implied contempt of such unfathomable inefficiency. Something he said of the lad’s characteristics made it possible for me to identify him, and I was able to add to that unsatisfactory first chapter another, which told of the boy’s continuance in school, of his success as a teacher in one of the higher institutions of learning, and of his remarkable intelligence in certain vexed industrial problems.
Such achievements are the more remarkable because the restricted tenement home, where the family life goes on in two or three rooms, affords little opportunity for reading or study. A vivid picture of its limitations was presented by the boy who sought a quiet corner in a busy settlement. “I can never study at home,” he said, “because sister is always using the table to wash the dishes.”
Study-rooms were opened in the settlement in 1907, where the boys and girls find, not only a quiet, restful place in which to do their work, but also the needed “coaching.” The school work is supplemented by illuminating bulletins on current topics, and the young student is provided with the aid which in other conditions is given by parents or older brothers and sisters. Such study-rooms are now maintained by the Board of Education in numerous schools of the city,—“Thanks to the example set by the settlement,” the superintendent of the New York school system reported.
The settlement children are given instruction in the selection of books before they are old enough to take out their cards in the public libraries. Once a week, on Friday afternoon, when there are no lessons to be prepared, our study-room is reserved for these smallest readers. The books are selected with reference to their tastes and attainments, and fairy tales are on the shelves in great numbers. Of course, no settlement could entirely satisfy the insatiable desire for these.
One day when the room was being used for study purposes a wee neighbor sauntered in and said to the custodian, “Please, I’d like a fairy tale.” Although reminded that these books were not given out excepting on the special day, the child lingered. She saw a boy’s request for “The Life of Alexander Hamilton” and a girl’s wish for “The Life of Joan of Arc” complied with. Evidently there was a way to get one’s heart’s desire. The child went out, reappeared in a few moments, and with an air of confidence again addressed the librarian, this time with, “Please, I’d like the life of a giant.”
It is easy to excite sympathy in our neighborhood for people deprived of books and learning. One year I accompanied a party of Northern people to the Southern Educational Conference. We were all much stirred by the appeal of an itinerant Southern minister who told how the poor white natives traveled miles over the mountains to hear books read. He pictured vividly the deprivation of his neighbors, who had no access to libraries of any kind. When I returned to the settlement and related the story to the young people in the clubs, without suggestion on my part they eagerly voted to send the minister books to form a library; and for two years or more, until the Southerner wrote that he had sufficient for his purpose, the clubs purchased from their several funds one book each month, suited to different ages and tastes, according to their own excellent discrimination.
The first public school established in New York City (Number 1) is on Henry Street. Number 2 is a short distance from it, on the same street, and Number 147 is at our corner. Between their sites are several semi-public and private educational institutions, and from School No. 1 to School No. 147 the distance is not more than three-quarters of a mile.
It is not unnatural, therefore, that the school should loom large in our consciousness of the life of the child. The settlement at no time would, even if it could, usurp the place of school or home. It seeks to work with both or to supplement either. The fact that it is flexible and is not committed to any fixed programme gives opportunity for experimentation not possible in a rigid system, and the results of these experiments must have affected school methods, at least in New York City.
Intelligent social workers seize opportunities for observation, and almost unconsciously develop methods to meet needs. They see conditions as they are, and become critical of systems as they act and react upon the child or fail to reach him at all. They reverse the method of the school teacher, who approaches the child with preconceived theories and a determination to work them out. Where the school fails, it appears to the social workers to do so because it makes education a thing apart,—because it separates its work from all that makes up the child’s life outside the classroom. Great emphasis is now laid upon the oversight of the physical condition of children from the time of their birth through school life; but the suggestion of this extension of socialized parental control did not emanate from those within the school system.
Cooking has been taught in the public schools for many years, and the instruction is of great value to those who are admitted to the classes; but appropriations have never been sufficient to meet all the requirements, and the teaching is given in grades already depleted by the girls who have gone to work, and who will perhaps never again have leisure or inclination to learn how to prepare meals for husband and children,—the most important business in life for most women.
The laboratory method employed in the schools never seemed to us sufficiently related to the home conditions of vast numbers of the city’s population; and, therefore, when the settlement undertook, according to its theory, to supplement the girls’ education, all the essentials of our own housekeeping—stove, refrigerator, bedrooms, and so on—were utilized. But neither were single bedrooms and rooms set apart for distinct purposes entirely satisfactory in teaching domestic procedure to the average neighbor; and the leader finally developed out of her knowledge of their home conditions the admirable system of “Housekeeping Centers” now sustained and administered by a committee of men and women on which the settlement has representation.
A flat was rented in a typical Henry Street tenement. Intelligence and taste were exercised in equipping it inexpensively and with furniture that required the least possible labor to keep it free from dirt and vermin. Classes were formed to teach housekeeping in its every detail, using nothing which the people themselves could not procure,—a tiny bathroom, a gas stove, no “model” tubs, but such as the landlord provided for washing. Cleaning, disinfecting, actual purchasing of supplies in the shops of the neighborhood, household accounts, nursing, all the elements of homekeeping, were systematically taught. The first winter that the center was opened the entire membership of a class consisted of girls engaged to be married,—clerks, stenographers, teachers; none were prepared and all were eager to have the homes which they were about to establish better organized and more intelligently conducted than those from which they had come. When one young woman announced her betrothal, she added, “And I am fully prepared because I have been through the Housekeeping Center.”
Other centers have been established by the committee in different parts of the city. Dr. Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools, always sympathetic and ready to fit instruction to the pupils’ needs, has encouraged the identification of these housekeeping centers with the schools. Whenever an enterprising principal desires it, the teachers of the nearby housekeeping center are made a part of the school system. Perhaps we may some day see one attached to every public school; and I am inclined to believe that, when institutions of higher learning fully realize that education is preparation for life, they too will wonder if the young women graduates of their colleges should not, like our little girl neighbors, be fitted to meet their great home-making responsibilities.
Out of the experience of the originator of the housekeeping centers “Penny Lunches” for the public schools have been inaugurated, and provide a hot noonday meal for children. The committee now controlling this experiment has inquired into food values, physical effects on children, relation to school attendance, and so on.
The schools in a great city have an additional responsibility, as many of the pupils are deprived of home training because of extreme poverty or the absence of the mother at work, and a measure of failure may be traced to an imperfect realization of the conditions under which pupils live, or to a lack of training on the part of some of the teachers. The Home-and-School Visitor, whose duties are indicated in her title, is charged to bring the two together, that each may help the other; but there are few visitors as yet, and the effect upon the great number of pupils in attendance (over 800,000 in New York) is obviously limited.
We are not always mindful of the fact that children in normal homes get education apart from formal lessons and instruction. Sitting down to a table at definite hours, to eat food properly served, is training, and so is the orderly organization of the home, of which the child so soon becomes a conscious part. There is direction toward control in the provision for privacy, beginning with the sequestered nursery life. The exchange of letters, which begins with most children at a very early age, the conversation of their elders, familiarity with telegrams and telephones, and with the incidents of travel, stimulate their intelligence, resourcefulness, and self-reliance.
Contrast this regulated domestic life with the experience of children—a large number in New York—who may never have been seated around a table in an orderly manner, at a given time, for a family meal. Where the family is large and the rooms small, and those employed return at irregular hours, its members must be fed at different times. It is not uncommon in a neighborhood such as ours to see the mother lean out of the fourth- or fifth-story window and throw down the bread-and-butter luncheon to the little child waiting on the sidewalk below—sometimes to save him the exertion of climbing the stairs, sometimes because of insufficient time. The children whose mothers work all day and who are locked out during their absence are expected to shift for themselves, and may as often be given too much as too little money to appease their hunger. Having no more discretion in the choice of food than other children of their age, they become an easy prey for the peddlers of unwholesome foods and candies (often with gambling devices attached) who prowl outside the school limits.
Even those students who are better placed economically, or who have the perseverance to go on into the higher schools, may have had no experience but that of a disorganized tenement home. Emil was an instance of this. He supported himself while attending school by teaching immigrants at night. We invited him to a party at one of our country places and instructed him to call in the morning for his railroad ticket. He failed to appear until long after the appointed hour, not realizing that trains leave on schedule time. Apparently he had never consulted a time-table or taken a journey except with a fresh-air party conducted by someone else. Next morning he returned the ticket, and I learned that he had not reached the farm because he did not know the way to it from the station. Somewhat disconcerted to learn that he had taken fruitlessly a trip of something over an hour’s duration, I asked why he had not telephoned to the farm for directions. This seventeen-year-old boy, in his third year in the high school, had not thought of a telephone in the country. Moreover, he had never used one anywhere.
Happily, there is a growing realization among educators of the necessity of relating the school more closely to the children’s future, and it is not an accident that one of the widely known authorities on vocational guidance has had long experience in settlements.[4]
A friend has recently given to me the letters which I wrote regularly to her family during the first two years of my life on the East Side. I had almost forgotten, until these letters recalled it to me, how often Miss Brewster and I mourned over the boys and girls who were not in school, and over those who had already gone to work without any education. Almost everyone has had knowledge at some time of the chagrin felt by people who cannot read or write. One intelligent woman of my acquaintance, born in New York State, ingeniously succeeded for many years in keeping the fact of her illiteracy secret from the people with whom she lived on terms of intimacy, buying the newspaper daily and making a pretense of reading it.
We had naïvely assumed that elementary education was given to all, and were appalled to find entire families unable to read or write, even though some of the children had been born in America. The letters remind me, too, of the efforts we made to get the children we encountered into school,—day school or night school, public or private,—and how many different people reacted to our appeals. The Department of Health, to facilitate our efforts, supplied us with virus points and authority to vaccinate, since no unvaccinated child could be admitted to school. We gave such publicity as was in our power to the conditions we found, not disdaining to stir emotionally by our “stories” when dry and impersonal statistics failed to impress.
Since those days, New York City has established a school census and has almost perfected a policy whereby all children are brought into school; but throughout the state there are communities where the compulsory education law is disregarded. The Federal Census of 1910 shows in this Empire State, in the counties (Franklin and Clinton) inhabited by the native-born, illiteracy far in excess of that in the counties where the foreign-born congregate.
Wonderful advance has been made within two decades in the conception of municipal responsibility for giving schooling to all children. Now the blind, the deaf, the cripples, and the mentally defective are included among those who have the right to education. When in 1893 I climbed the stairs in a Monroe Street tenement in answer to a call to a sick child, I found Annie F⸺ lying on a tumbled bed, rigid in the braces which encased her from head to feet. All about her white goods were being manufactured, and five machines were whirring in the room. She had been dismissed from the hospital as incurable, and her mother carried her at intervals to an uptown orthopedic dispensary. A pitiful, emaciated little creature! The sweatshop was transfigured for Annie when we put pretty white curtains at the window upon which she gazed, hung up a bird-cage, and placed a window-box full of growing plants for her to look at during the long days. Then, realizing that she might live many years and would need, even more than other children, the joys that come from books, we found a young woman who was willing to go to her bedside and teach her.
Nowadays children crippled as Annie was may be taken to school daily, under the supervision of a qualified nurse, in a van that calls for them and brings them home. One of these schools, established by intelligent philanthropists, is on Henry Street; the instructors are engaged and paid by the Department of Education. There are also classes in different sections of the city equipped for the special needs of cripples, to give them industrial training which will provide for their future happiness and economic independence.