Education: Boys & Girls Together

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The free schools were soon superseded by a city system dedicated to education for all. But generations of illiterates lived and died before this idealistic concept was even close to fulfillment. During periods in the1800s, the city tripled its population every generation. In uptown areas "splendid squares and streets are opening on every side," but amid the slums of Five Points thousands of "wretched outcasts" slept in ragged piles amid "a rubbish of bones and dirt," and "swarms of . . . barefooted, unbreeched little tatterdemalions" ran the muddy lanes like animals. As late as 1890, thousands of children of Jewish and Bohemian immigrants were "working at cigarmaking or needlework as soon as their little fingers could master a detail"—or were living by "thievery or . . . prostitution."

Trying to educate these swarming children of the poor and the ignorant was not a simple or often a popular task.1900s. Until 1928, students were allowed to quit school at 14 (the present age: 17). But the schools grew nevertheless, and in growing were moved to both experiment and reform. Corporal punishment was condemned in 1850—an era when most U.S. schoolmasters, as a matter of course, still whipped by the chart (one lash for every foot above three climbed up a tree, two lashes for blotting a copybook). New York instituted night schools in 1847, children's classes in hygiene and sanitation in 1885, in sewing, cooking and manual training in 1887, lectures for workingmen in 1888.

From these small adventures in utilitarian education, it has set out in the last half-century to accomplish a dizzying task —to embrace, instruct and elevate every child and seeking adult of all classes, all nationalities, all shades of intellectual capability: to teach the sick, the neurotic and the healthy, to inspire the genius and to give the sluggard some manual ability to earn a living. The problems which lie between this noble objective and its fulfillment, the differences between the men who attempt to carry it out and the politicians who control them, have shaped the New York school system of today.

Dedicated Endeavor. Few men symbolize the system as well as Superintendent Bill Jansen, who has stood steadily, even stolidly at its helm since 1947. Like many of his students and many of his teachers, he is the son of an immigrant himself. His father, a Danish cabinetmaker from Kiel, settled in The Bronx, toiled diligently at his exacting trade (Jansen's Park Avenue apartment boasts a collection of intricately inlaid tables fitted by his father's hands), endured hard times and planned better lives for his children. Jansen, a big, strong boy. knew what he wanted to do soon after he entered Grammar School No. 60 in The Bronx. He liked school. He decided to stay there.