Education: 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.