Education: Boys & Girls Together

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New York runs a special school for young narcotic addicts on the East River's North Brother Island, and diligently instructs them in academic subjects while they take the cure. It holds special classes for 93 blind children, 384 deaf children, 3,613 youngsters with heart trouble and other enervating ailments. 7,391 children of deeply retarded mental development. It runs a whole series of schools for young delinquents.

There are few cities in the world where a handicapped child can receive such thorough and expert training, and few where a bright, industrious and resolute student can gain such a fine technical or scientific background. The New York public schools which produced such notorious gangsters as Frank Costello and Arthur ("Dutch Schultz") Flegenheimer have also sent a stream of eager youngsters out to fame, fortune and high public service. Among them: Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch, Panama Canal Engineer George W. Goethals. Opera Star Rise Stevens, Singer Robert Merrill and Comedian Eddie Cantor. About two-thirds of last year's graduates went on to college this autumn and collected $2,500,000 in scholarships in the process.

Scratch Deeper. But the bright and conscientious boy or girl is frequently forced to endure, at least in elementary schools, an atmosphere of jostling vulgarity and revolt against authority. It is an atmosphere reflected in the persistent vandalism with which the school system must eternally contend. New York replaces 150,000 broken school windowpanes annually and has long since resigned itself to the fact that a particularly obscene four-letter word will be continually scratched on the wall surfaces of nearly every building (since replastering is expensive and ineffective, janitors simply scratch deeper, change the word to BOOK and leave it as mute evidence of evil confounded). The city has ceased installing hot-air hand dryers in school washrooms (children quickly began filling their nozzles with ink, which blew over the next user).

New York's Associate Superintendent Ethel F. Huggard boasts: "We teach everything. Anything you name, we teach somewhere." But in its attempt to "fill every cup, no matter how big or how small" with learning, the public schools have as yet failed to interest a great stratum of intelligent, but recalcitrant or lazy boys & girls. In what might be termed the era of the slob, young worshipers of the'television comic, the bookie and the comic-book monster can slip off into easy "general" courses and finish their school years with their minds practically ungrooved by thought.