Education: Boys & Girls Together

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New York's first daytime high schools had been completed for only three years when he finished grammar school in 1900. He went to Morris High School. He went on to Columbia University's Teachers College, the academic nest in which John Dewey hatched his theories of progressive education (theories which the New York school system began adopting after World War I and from which Middle-of-the-Roader Jansen still cautiously borrows today). He went back to the public schools as a teacher, married a fellow teacher — a vivacious physical education instructor named Frances Allan — and in 45 years of ambitious and dedicated endeavor has risen to the top of the system's intricate hierarchy.

It took Mayor Bill O'Dwyer ten long months to get around to giving Bill Jansen his blessing to run the schools back in 1947 — ten months in which the Board of Education scoured the whole country to find a superintendent from another city. This executive reluctance—something which has done the superintendent no harm at all in the years since O'Dwyer tumbled from public esteem—was understandable enough. So was O'Dwyer's final decision. Jansen has all the basic virtues. He is a strong, calm, kindly man, able to soak up work like a sponge, make endless speeches and never offend anyone. He understands the school system, its people, its aspirations. He is not a crusader, a scholar or a showman. He still likes and understands children.

Delicate Balances. Bill Jansen fits his job well, for his most trying task is that of preserving a delicate and highly disconcerting series of political balances. By an unwritten law of New York politics, the mayor's Board of Education—to which Jansen answers—consists of three Protestants, three Catholics and three Jews (at present also, one of the nine is a Negro). The schools cannot afford to risk the veto of any group. In picking his own board of superintendents—the general staff which executes his commands—Lutheran Jansen likewise keeps a balance of three Protestants, three Catholics and three Jews.

Despite this rigid top hamper, the innate cumbersomeness of the school system, and the enormous tasks to which it has addressed itself, Jansen feels well justified in pointing with modest pride to dozens of its accomplishments. He makes no apologies for its elephantine proportions. "New York," he says simply, "is a fact. You can't break it into smaller cities."

New York's very bigness has enabled it to accomplish near-miracles of specialization in courses of study. Its adult education classes (currently attended by 75,000 grownups) offer everything from ceramics to amateur magic. Its four special high schools, open only to elite students who qualify by stringent entrance exams, are educational show places which offer high-level training for aspiring engineers, chemists, biologists, physicians, musicians and artists. Its trade and vocational schools offer a more dazzling variety of study. One whole high school is devoted to instructing would-be garment workers, another turns out printers, another automobile mechanics. A meat merchandising course produces embryo butchers, a catering course trains embryo cooks.