Education: Boys & Girls Together

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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.