Education: Boys & Girls Together

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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.