Chapter V: Part 5

In sharp contrast to all these ogres, the board of education shines benignant and bland. Here is power making itself manifest in the form of young ladies, kindly of eye and speech, who take a sweet and friendly interest in the children and all that concerns them. Woman meets woman and no policeman interferes. The little ones are cared for, instructed, kept out of mischief for five hours a day, taught the language and customs of the country in which they are to make their living or their fortunes; and generally, though the board of education does not insist upon it, they are cherished and watched over. Doctors attend them, nurses wait upon them, dentists torture them, oculists test them.

Friendships frequently spring up between parent and teacher, and it often lies in the power of the latter to be of service by giving either advice or more substantial aid. At Mothers' meetings the cultivation of tolerance still goes on. There, women of widely different class and nationality, meet on the common ground of their children's welfare. Then there are roof gardens, recreation piers and parks, barges and excursions, all designed to help the poorer part of the city's population--without regard to creed or nationality--to bear and to help their children to bear the killing heat of summer. So Jew and Gentile, black and white, commingle; and gradually old hostilities are forgotten or corrected. The board of education provides night schools for adults and free lectures upon every conceivable interesting topic, including the history and geography and natural history of distant lands. Travelers always draw large audiences to their lectures.

The children soon learn to read well enough to translate the American papers and there are always newspapers in the different vernaculars, so that the emigrant soon becomes interested not only in the news of his own country, but in the multitudinous topics which go to make up American life. He soon grasps at least the outlines of politics, national and international, and before he can speak English he will address an audience of his fellow countrymen on "Our Glorious American Institutions."

It is not only the emigrant parent who profits by the work of the public school. The American parent also finds himself, or generally herself, brought into friendly contact with the foreign teachers and the foreign friends of her children. The New York public school system culminates in the Normal College, which trains women as teachers, and the College of the City of New York, which offers courses to young men in the profession of law, engineering, teaching, and, besides, a course in business training. The commencement at these institutions brings strangely contrasted parents together in a common interest and a common pride. The students seem much like one another, but the parents are so widely dissimilar as to make the similarity of their offspring an amazing fact for contemplation. Mothers with shawls over their heads and work-distorted hands sit beside mothers in Parisian costumes, and the silk-clad woman is generally clever enough to appreciate and to admire the spirit which strengthened her weary neighbor through all the years of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter. The feeling of inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good. It will certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and conditions unknown to her. It will also utterly do away with many of her prejudices against the foreigner and it will make the "Let them eat cake" attitude impossible.

And so the child, the parent, the teacher and the home-staying relative are brought to feel their kinship with all the world through the agency of the public school, but the teacher learns the lesson most fully, most consciously. The value to the cause of peace and good-will in the community of an army of thousands of educated men and women holding views such as these cannot easily be over-estimated. The teachers, too, are often aliens and nearly always of a race different from their pupils, yet you will rarely meet a teacher who is not delighted with her charges.

"Do come," they always say, "and see my little Italians, or Irish, or German, or picaninnies; they are the sweetest little things," or, if they be teachers of a higher grade, "They are the cleverest and the most charming children." They are all clever in their different ways, and they are all charming to those who know them, and the work of the public school is to make this charm and cleverness appreciated, so that race misunderstandings in the adult populations may grow fewer and fewer.

The only dissatisfied teacher I ever encountered was a girl of old Knickerbocker blood, who was considered by her relatives to be too fragile and refined to teach any children except the darlings of the upper West side, where some of the rich are democratic enough to patronize the public school. From what we heard of her experiences, "patronize" is quite the proper word to use in this connection. A group of us, classmates, had been comparing notes and asked her from what country her charges came. "Oh, they are just kids," she answered dejectedly, "ordinary every-day kids, with Dutch cut hair, Russian blouses, belts at the knee line, sandals, and nurses to convey them to and from school. You never saw anything so tiresome."

It grew finally so tiresome that she applied for a transfer, and took the Knickerbocker spirit down to the Jewish quarter, where it gladdened the young Jacobs, Rachaels, Isadors and Rebeccas entrusted to her care. Her place among the nursery pets was taken by a dark-eyed Russian girl, who found the uptown babies, the despised "just kids," as entertaining, as lovable, and as instructive as the Knickerbocker girl found the Jews. Well, and so they are all of them, lovable, entertaining and instructive, and the man or woman who goes among them with an open heart and eye will find much material for thought and humility, and one function of the public school is to promote this understanding and appreciation. It has done wonders in the past, and every year finds it better equipped for its work of amalgamation. The making of an American citizen is its stated function, but its graduates will be citizens not only of America. In sympathy, at least, they will be citizens of the world.

FINIS