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Page 37
Let us take one of these boys, who has learned in his six or eight years
to speak his native language, and to feel himself strongly identified
with the fortunes of his family. Whatever interest has come to the minds
of his ancestors has come through the use of their hands in the open
air; and open air and activity of body have been the inevitable
accompaniments of all their experiences. Yet the first thing that the
boy must do when he reaches school is to sit still, at least part of the
time, and he must learn to listen to what is said to him, with all the
perplexity of listening to a foreign tongue. He does not find this very
stimulating, and is slow to respond to the more subtle incentives of the
schoolroom. The peasant child is perfectly indifferent to showing off
and making a good recitation. He leaves all that to his schoolfellows,
who are more sophisticated and equipped with better English. His parents
are not deeply interested in keeping him in school, and will not hold
him there against his inclination. Their experience does not point to
the good American tradition that it is the educated man who finally
succeeds. The richest man in the Italian colony can neither read nor
write--even Italian. His cunning and acquisitiveness, combined with the
credulity and ignorance of his countrymen, have slowly brought about his
large fortune. The child himself may feel the stirring of a vague
ambition to go on until he is as the other children are; but he is not
popular with his schoolfellows, and he sadly feels the lack of dramatic
interest. Even the pictures and objects presented to him, as well as the
language, are strange.
If we admit that in education it is necessary to begin with the
experiences which the child already has and to use his spontaneous and
social activity, then the city streets begin this education for him in a
more natural way than does the school. The South Italian peasant comes
from a life of picking olives and oranges, and he easily sends his
children out to pick up coal from railroad tracks, or wood from
buildings which have been burned down. Unfortunately, this process leads
by easy transition to petty thieving. It is easy to go from the coal on
the railroad track to the coal and wood which stand before a dealer's
shop; from the potatoes which have rolled from a rumbling wagon to the
vegetables displayed by the grocer. This is apt to be the record of the
boy who responds constantly to the stimulus and temptations of the
street, although in the beginning his search for bits of food and fuel
was prompted by the best of motives.
The school has to compete with a great deal from the outside in addition
to the distractions of the neighborhood. Nothing is more fascinating
than that mysterious "down town," whither the boy longs to go to sell
papers and black boots, to attend theatres, and, if possible, to stay
all night on the pretence of waiting for the early edition of the great
dailies. If a boy is once thoroughly caught in these excitements,
nothing can save him from over-stimulation and consequent debility and
worthlessness; he arrives at maturity with no habits of regular work and
with a distaste for its dulness.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of boys of various nationalities
who conscientiously remain in school and fulfil all the requirements of
the early grades, and at the age of fourteen are found in factories,
painstakingly performing their work year after year. These later are the
men who form the mass of the population in every industrial neighborhood
of every large city; but they carry on the industrial processes year
after year without in the least knowing what it is all about. The one
fixed habit which the boy carries away with him from the school to the
factory is the feeling that his work is merely provisional. In school
the next grade was continually held before him as an object of
attainment, and it resulted in the conviction that the sole object of
present effort is to get ready for something else. This tentative
attitude takes the last bit of social stimulus out of his factory work;
he pursues it merely as a necessity, and his very mental attitude
destroys his chance for a realization of its social value. As the boy in
school contracted the habit of doing his work in certain hours and
taking his pleasure in certain other hours, so in the factory he earns
his money by ten hours of dull work and spends it in three hours of
lurid and unprofitable pleasure in the evening. Both in the school and
in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his
recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness
of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a
day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes
more apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to the
industrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to a
time when work shall cease to be senseless drudgery with no
self-expression on the part of the worker. It sometimes seems that the
public schools should contribute much more than they do to the
consummation of this time. If the army of school children who enter the
factories every year possessed thoroughly vitalized faculties, they
might do much to lighten this incubus of dull factory work which presses
so heavily upon so large a number of our fellow-citizens. Has our
commercialism been so strong that our schools have become insensibly
commercialized, whereas we supposed that our industrial life was
receiving the broadening and illuminating effects of the schools? The
training of these children, so far as it has been vocational at all, has
been in the direction of clerical work. It is possible that the
business men, whom we in America so tremendously admire, have really
been dictating the curriculum of our public schools, in spite of the
conventions of educators and the suggestions of university professors.
The business man, of course, has not said, "I will have the public
schools train office boys and clerks so that I may have them easily and
cheaply," but he has sometimes said, "Teach the children to write
legibly and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits of
punctuality and order; to be prompt to obey; and you will fit them to
make their way in the world as I have made mine." Has the workingman
been silent as to what he desires for his children, and allowed the
business man to decide for him there, as he has allowed the politician
to manage his municipal affairs, or has the workingman so far shared our
universal optimism that he has really believed that his children would
never need to go into industrial life at all, but that all of his sons
would become bankers and merchants?
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