Education: Boys & Girls Together

(7 of 8)

The Bootleggers. In the mid-30s, a thoughtful New York Board of Education member named James Marshall was shocked and disturbed by regimentation in the city's elementary schools. He was fresh from inspecting a reformatory, and was convinced that its inmates were treated more helpfully and informally than little children in the New York City grades. In the years since, New York has swung more & more to "permissive" education, in which children are encouraged to learn, by doing, to set the pace of their own learning and to be spared the accusation of failure simply because their perception, interest or mental capacity does not match that of their contemporaries. This approach is a heartfelt attempt to humanize the vast school system and to lure rather than drive children to learning. But it breaks down a teacher's direct authority, and particularly in "sump" areas of the city, makes the tasks of instructing and maintaining order tremendously difficult and exacting.

Many a teacher secretly rebels, "bootlegs" reading early in the first grade (which is not yet considered ready to begin it) and script writing in the second grade simply because she feels it is her duty to the children. Others "bootleg" hard, oldfashioned, rigid authoritarianism and rule their charges with threats and fear. A great majority, however, conscientiously try to bring understanding and sympathy to their classrooms.

It is a wearing job. Said one Harlem junior-high-school teacher of his all-girl classes: "You've got to get between them before they start fighting—they don't just scratch; they dig in and bring away skin and meat." Said another instructor: "I have to fight to avoid sinking into the mire of their emotions." Said a Brooklyn science teacher: "I have to be 90% warden, 7% wet nurse and 3% teacher."

A Look at the Future. But in New York today the most harassed teacher need not feel that his toil is wasted or that the labored grinding of the city's huge educational mill is without effect. It is already possible, here & there across the city, to look into the system's hopeful future. The astounding effects of enlightened slum clearance and enlightened teaching are dramatically evident, for instance, at P.S. 133, a clean, airy new kindergarten-to-sixth-grade elementary school in deepest Harlem.

Less than ten years ago, the district, near the sluggish Harlem River, was a dreary wasteland of filthy, overcrowded brick-and-stone tenements. Today dozens of blocks of them have been torn out and in their places stand two big, modern apartment projects whose high sunbathed and lawn-bordered buildings have given their Negro tenants a bright new standard and concept of living. Seventy-five percent of P.S. 133's Negro pupils (95% of its enrollment) come from the two big projects—25% are from one jammed block of dreary "old-law tenements." It is difficult to distinguish between the two groups.