Boys & Girls Together

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"Nobody warned me about a thing before I went to a near-slum district in Brooklyn," the young schoolteacher said. "I was full of ideals, and after six months I was certain I just couldn't stand another day of it. I made myself stick--I told myself that my ideals wouldn't be worth much if I didn't fight for them, and I stayed on for four years before I gave up. I learned a lot of things about teaching that aren't in the books. In a high school like ours, you have a few tough ones and a few vicious ones in almost every class. and you have to watch them every second or they will take over your control of the others. If they do. you're lost.

"They're easy to spot the first day. The boys wear pistol pants and a lot of them have colored jackets with their gang names on the back. The girls, in Brooklyn anyhow, wear a sort of uniform, too--heavy makeup, long black hair (they dye it if it isn't dark), long, dangling earrings and low shoes that tie halfway up to the knee. But you'd know anyhow--they sit watching you like snakes, waiting for the first sign of weakness. It's frightening when you know that some of the boys carry switchblade knives. There's always a first test. One of them will start yelling, or singing, or jumping over chairs, or begin saying something unmistakably plain about, well . . . your legs.

"You must remember that none of these children want to be in school. They do not want to learn. They already belong to the streets. They know you cannot punish them physically or expel them. You must never raise your voice to them--if you argue, you are conceding their right to yell at you. You must never stand near them and never, never touch them--hatred for a teacher is part of their code and they must react or lose face if you do. You must never present them with ultimatums. But you must never cater to them in the slightest and never lie to them --they can sense fear or phoniness like animals. Your job is to keep them quiet while you teach those who can be taught. I don't know why, but they are especially difficult on Fridays, on rainy days or any time the temperature is above 80 degrees."

The Struggle. More than a million children of every station and every national background are living today in that enormous arena, the metropolis of New York City. The city, which stifles thousands of them in jammed tenements and garbage-littered lots, also attempts, with genuine compassion and real hope, to educate them and to fit them for useful, decent, even happy lives. It is not a simple or idyllic process: the classroom struggle for the minds and hearts of New York's young is as complex, as baffling and painful as the struggle for gain and survival which goes on in the perpendicular jungles of masonry outside.

In a sense, the two struggles are not separate at all. The city's cynicism, its vast impersonality, its conflicting, multiracial prejudices, its respect for luck and ruthlessness are inevitably stamped on the minds of its children, and invade the classroom with them. Nowhere are the problems of mass education more dramatically evident than in New York City.

Thousands of its long-established citizens as well as thousands of startled newcomers from the outlands recoil each year at the prospect of sending their own flesh & blood to the public schools. In some strata of the city's big professional, business and intellectual communities, a man not only loses face, but is likely to be considered downright heartless if he democratically consigns his offspring to a public school. Brigades of men & women who love the city for its theaters, shops and bridge-laced distances move to the suburbs each year because their young have reached school age. More than 335,000 children of those who stay on are sidetracked to parochial or private schools, although the strain of paying the bill at Miss Jones's Academy for Young Ladies of Good Family may all but shatter the family finances.

There are reasons for this mania to escape from an institution which is the pride and joy of other U.S. cities and towns. While school-age hoodlums are the small minority of students in New York, their precocious propensity for vandalism, gang "rumbles." narcotics, sex orgies and extortion make them an eternal menace in many a school. Even in quieter districts, the public-school child is still gulped up by the world's most enormous* --and in many ways its most faceless and impersonal--educational system. He becomes simply one by this autumn's figures, of 934,105 students. "At home," said one new boy. "I knew everybody. Down here nobody would even come to my funeral."

Warehouses & Mops. New York's tall (6 ft. 3 in.), calm. Cadillac-borne School Superintendent William Jansen presides over a plant, a payroll and a complicated executive bureaucracy which might startle even a Detroit motormaker. The school system owns and operates 816 schools (which, with warehouses, shops, and twelve office buildings, have a total replacement value of $2 billion), a 20-acre farm and a Liberty ship (on which selected high-school students are trained as seamen, marine engineers and stewards).

The system employs 51,201 people--among them, 37.609) teachers, 772 custodians. 402 truant officers and hundreds of clerks, mechanics, architects, engineers and elevator operators. Many of its subsidiary works, such as legal condemnation of land for new schools and the purchase of supplies (411,500 rolls of toilet paper, $18,965 wet mops. $6,900,000 worth of books and school equipment every year) are big businesses in themselves.

Although the total floor space devoted to New York schools equals that of 20 Empire State Buildings or ten Pentagons, the system is overcrowded, understaffed and eternally in need of maintenance and new construction. The newest of New York schools are as handsomely conceived and well built as any in the U.S., but the worst are dark, prisonlike antiques which stand wall-to-wall with brick tenements and factory buildings, and offer little play space other than the littered and noisy streets. Over a hundred are more than 50 years old; many are older.

Half-Won Battle. The battered, sprawling and endlessly criticized New York school system dramatizes the failures and difficulties of mass education, but it also dramatizes many of its triumphs and hopes. Its faults and sins are largely those of the enormous city around it, but it does not accept them with equanimity. In a sense, it attempts an all but impossible role. For more than a century and a half, as the catalyst in the greatest U.S. melting pot, New York's schools have been assaulted by wave on wave of immigrants from abroad and have been forced to spread their light amidst squalor, machine politics, and fogs of apathy, racial prejudice and ignorance.

In its long, half-won battle, it has never accepted Nietzsche's contention that education in large states must inevitably be mediocre. It has rejected the spirit of Michel de Montaigne's bitter witticism: an inept child should be strangled "if there are no witnesses, or else . . . apprenticed to a pastry-cook in some good town." But harsh reality has often forced it to modify the classical educational concepts in order to give its raw levees of children some simple understanding of the language, of the country and its ideals, and of their duties as citizens.

This basic process still goes on. In the last ten years, an airborne migration of one-third of a million Puerto Ricans has invaded New York and jammed Harlem to the last mean, overcrowded corner of its last mean, cold-water flat. The school system still creaks under the unexpected strain of this new and wrenching load. The financial and legal difficulties involved in condemning property and building new schools are staggering. So is the task of fitting the newcomers into their strange new world. More than a thousand teachers, for instance, have learned Spanish simply to be able to communicate with parents of their new charges and attempt some explanation of what New York--and the U.S.--hopes from them.

Most of those who labor among the Puerto Ricans, like most of the other thousands of New York teachers, are themselves products of the city's public schools. Decade after decade the system has not only educated the new masses but provided the steppingstones toward social and intellectual advancement for their sons & daughters. A big percentage of today's teachers are Jewish; many of them studied under second or third generation Irishmen who had gone to school in turn under the sons of Englishmen or Germans. Negro teachers are increasing in New York; in another generation, Puerto Ricans will take their place in the schools.

Children of the Poor. For all its imperfections, the New York system has come a long and difficult way in the century and a half since its forerunner, the Free School Society, was established by public subscription to educate the children of the poor. The school used the Lancasterian method--a system by which children taught younger students, and were in turn taught by older students, thus making it possible, at least in theory, for one teacher to educate 500 pupils at a total annual expenditure of but $3 a head.

The free schools were soon superseded by a city system dedicated to education for all. But generations of illiterates lived and died before this idealistic concept was even close to fulfillment. During periods in the1800s, the city tripled its population every generation. In uptown areas "splendid squares and streets are opening on every side," but amid the slums of Five Points thousands of "wretched outcasts" slept in ragged piles amid "a rubbish of bones and dirt," and "swarms of . . . barefooted, unbreeched little tatterdemalions" ran the muddy lanes like animals. As late as 1890, thousands of children of Jewish and Bohemian immigrants were "working at cigarmaking or needlework as soon as their little fingers could master a detail"--or were living by "thievery or . . . prostitution."

Trying to educate these swarming children of the poor and the ignorant was not a simple or often a popular task.1900s. Until 1928, students were allowed to quit school at 14 (the present age: 17). But the schools grew nevertheless, and in growing were moved to both experiment and reform. Corporal punishment was condemned in 1850--an era when most U.S. schoolmasters, as a matter of course, still whipped by the chart (one lash for every foot above three climbed up a tree, two lashes for blotting a copybook). New York instituted night schools in 1847, children's classes in hygiene and sanitation in 1885, in sewing, cooking and manual training in 1887, lectures for workingmen in 1888.

From these small adventures in utilitarian education, it has set out in the last half-century to accomplish a dizzying task --to embrace, instruct and elevate every child and seeking adult of all classes, all nationalities, all shades of intellectual capability: to teach the sick, the neurotic and the healthy, to inspire the genius and to give the sluggard some manual ability to earn a living. The problems which lie between this noble objective and its fulfillment, the differences between the men who attempt to carry it out and the politicians who control them, have shaped the New York school system of today.

Dedicated Endeavor. Few men symbolize the system as well as Superintendent Bill Jansen, who has stood steadily, even stolidly at its helm since 1947. Like many of his students and many of his teachers, he is the son of an immigrant himself. His father, a Danish cabinetmaker from Kiel, settled in The Bronx, toiled diligently at his exacting trade (Jansen's Park Avenue apartment boasts a collection of intricately inlaid tables fitted by his father's hands), endured hard times and planned better lives for his children. Jansen, a big, strong boy. knew what he wanted to do soon after he entered Grammar School No. 60 in The Bronx. He liked school. He decided to stay there.

New York's first daytime high schools had been completed for only three years when he finished grammar school in 1900. He went to Morris High School. He went on to Columbia University's Teachers College, the academic nest in which John Dewey hatched his theories of progressive education (theories which the New York school system began adopting after World War I and from which Middle-of-the-Roader Jansen still cautiously borrows today). He went back to the public schools as a teacher, married a fellow teacher -- a vivacious physical education instructor named Frances Allan -- and in 45 years of ambitious and dedicated endeavor has risen to the top of the system's intricate hierarchy.

It took Mayor Bill O'Dwyer ten long months to get around to giving Bill Jansen his blessing to run the schools back in 1947 -- ten months in which the Board of Education scoured the whole country to find a superintendent from another city. This executive reluctance--something which has done the superintendent no harm at all in the years since O'Dwyer tumbled from public esteem--was understandable enough. So was O'Dwyer's final decision. Jansen has all the basic virtues. He is a strong, calm, kindly man, able to soak up work like a sponge, make endless speeches and never offend anyone. He understands the school system, its people, its aspirations. He is not a crusader, a scholar or a showman. He still likes and understands children.

Delicate Balances. Bill Jansen fits his job well, for his most trying task is that of preserving a delicate and highly disconcerting series of political balances. By an unwritten law of New York politics, the mayor's Board of Education--to which Jansen answers--consists of three Protestants, three Catholics and three Jews (at present also, one of the nine is a Negro). The schools cannot afford to risk the veto of any group. In picking his own board of superintendents--the general staff which executes his commands--Lutheran Jansen likewise keeps a balance of three Protestants, three Catholics and three Jews.

Despite this rigid top hamper, the innate cumbersomeness of the school system, and the enormous tasks to which it has addressed itself, Jansen feels well justified in pointing with modest pride to dozens of its accomplishments. He makes no apologies for its elephantine proportions. "New York," he says simply, "is a fact. You can't break it into smaller cities."

New York's very bigness has enabled it to accomplish near-miracles of specialization in courses of study. Its adult education classes (currently attended by 75,000 grownups) offer everything from ceramics to amateur magic. Its four special high schools, open only to elite students who qualify by stringent entrance exams, are educational show places which offer high-level training for aspiring engineers, chemists, biologists, physicians, musicians and artists. Its trade and vocational schools offer a more dazzling variety of study. One whole high school is devoted to instructing would-be garment workers, another turns out printers, another automobile mechanics. A meat merchandising course produces embryo butchers, a catering course trains embryo cooks.

New York runs a special school for young narcotic addicts on the East River's North Brother Island, and diligently instructs them in academic subjects while they take the cure. It holds special classes for 93 blind children, 384 deaf children, 3,613 youngsters with heart trouble and other enervating ailments. 7,391 children of deeply retarded mental development. It runs a whole series of schools for young delinquents.

There are few cities in the world where a handicapped child can receive such thorough and expert training, and few where a bright, industrious and resolute student can gain such a fine technical or scientific background. The New York public schools which produced such notorious gangsters as Frank Costello and Arthur ("Dutch Schultz") Flegenheimer have also sent a stream of eager youngsters out to fame, fortune and high public service. Among them: Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch, Panama Canal Engineer George W. Goethals. Opera Star Rise Stevens, Singer Robert Merrill and Comedian Eddie Cantor. About two-thirds of last year's graduates went on to college this autumn and collected $2,500,000 in scholarships in the process.

Scratch Deeper. But the bright and conscientious boy or girl is frequently forced to endure, at least in elementary schools, an atmosphere of jostling vulgarity and revolt against authority. It is an atmosphere reflected in the persistent vandalism with which the school system must eternally contend. New York replaces 150,000 broken school windowpanes annually and has long since resigned itself to the fact that a particularly obscene four-letter word will be continually scratched on the wall surfaces of nearly every building (since replastering is expensive and ineffective, janitors simply scratch deeper, change the word to BOOK and leave it as mute evidence of evil confounded). The city has ceased installing hot-air hand dryers in school washrooms (children quickly began filling their nozzles with ink, which blew over the next user).

New York's Associate Superintendent Ethel F. Huggard boasts: "We teach everything. Anything you name, we teach somewhere." But in its attempt to "fill every cup, no matter how big or how small" with learning, the public schools have as yet failed to interest a great stratum of intelligent, but recalcitrant or lazy boys & girls. In what might be termed the era of the slob, young worshipers of the'television comic, the bookie and the comic-book monster can slip off into easy "general" courses and finish their school years with their minds practically ungrooved by thought.

The Bootleggers. In the mid-30s, a thoughtful New York Board of Education member named James Marshall was shocked and disturbed by regimentation in the city's elementary schools. He was fresh from inspecting a reformatory, and was convinced that its inmates were treated more helpfully and informally than little children in the New York City grades. In the years since, New York has swung more & more to "permissive" education, in which children are encouraged to learn, by doing, to set the pace of their own learning and to be spared the accusation of failure simply because their perception, interest or mental capacity does not match that of their contemporaries. This approach is a heartfelt attempt to humanize the vast school system and to lure rather than drive children to learning. But it breaks down a teacher's direct authority, and particularly in "sump" areas of the city, makes the tasks of instructing and maintaining order tremendously difficult and exacting.

Many a teacher secretly rebels, "bootlegs" reading early in the first grade (which is not yet considered ready to begin it) and script writing in the second grade simply because she feels it is her duty to the children. Others "bootleg" hard, oldfashioned, rigid authoritarianism and rule their charges with threats and fear. A great majority, however, conscientiously try to bring understanding and sympathy to their classrooms.

It is a wearing job. Said one Harlem junior-high-school teacher of his all-girl classes: "You've got to get between them before they start fighting--they don't just scratch; they dig in and bring away skin and meat." Said another instructor: "I have to fight to avoid sinking into the mire of their emotions." Said a Brooklyn science teacher: "I have to be 90% warden, 7% wet nurse and 3% teacher."

A Look at the Future. But in New York today the most harassed teacher need not feel that his toil is wasted or that the labored grinding of the city's huge educational mill is without effect. It is already possible, here & there across the city, to look into the system's hopeful future. The astounding effects of enlightened slum clearance and enlightened teaching are dramatically evident, for instance, at P.S. 133, a clean, airy new kindergarten-to-sixth-grade elementary school in deepest Harlem.

Less than ten years ago, the district, near the sluggish Harlem River, was a dreary wasteland of filthy, overcrowded brick-and-stone tenements. Today dozens of blocks of them have been torn out and in their places stand two big, modern apartment projects whose high sunbathed and lawn-bordered buildings have given their Negro tenants a bright new standard and concept of living. Seventy-five percent of P.S. 133's Negro pupils (95% of its enrollment) come from the two big projects--25% are from one jammed block of dreary "old-law tenements." It is difficult to distinguish between the two groups.

Because of the neighborhood's changed atmosphere--and because of the shrewd and kindly efforts of the school's principal, a direct, distinguished-looking Negro woman named Margaret Douglas--politeness, cleanliness and the will to study are the vogue at P.S. 133. The school is so overcrowded that pupils attend in two shifts. But the children are sent to school in clean dresses, clean white shirts (and bow ties) and seem to be scrubbed daily within an inch of their lives. They work "like little angels." "In years to come," says Mrs. Douglas proudly, "these children are going to be something]"

* Tokyo boasts a bigger public-school enrollment--1,200,000--although New York's public and private school total is 1arger, and the physical and financial assets of the municipal system far exceed those of the Japanese capital. Other big city enrollments: Moscow, 630,000; Greater London, 418.000; Chicago, 510,000.

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