Children Out of Hand: The Slum School
by GRACE IRWIN
1
ONE day last fall I read with horror that a New York schoolteacher had been shot in his classroom by two of his pupils. The boys had left the school building and had returned with a gun and had deliberately murdered their teacher in cold blood. It was depressing to realize that it takes the murder of a young husband and father to make the public understand what an evil thing our slum schools have become. One cannot exaggerate a murder.
It was a sorry satisfaction to see that what I had dreaded and expected had at last come to pass. The wonder to me is that murder was not done long ago. In the six years that I had taught in the slums of a large city, I had witnessed near-murders on too many occasions. Suppose that one of those stones thrown by boys lying in wait to “git” a teacher had hit a vulnerable spot, or suppose that loaded gun I removed from a boy’s hand in my classroom had gone off.
The murder of that teacher was not a sudden flare-up of juvenile delinquency due to this war. The causes and events leading up to it have been piling up for a generation — in fact, ever since the last war. The two adolescent murderers were born in a gangster-controlled environment. I was not teaching when gang murders were at their peak but I have heard from teachers something of that period. I do know what it means, however, to teach in an overcrowded slum school, and I shudder to think of the difficulties being any more involved.
It was an overcrowded school in a metropolitan slum neighborhood where I first began to teach, and an incident of those days has always stuck in my memory. Six hundred children were in the auditorium — they had been sent there to hear promotion lists read and to be directed to their new classes. It was the beginning of a new term. There was one horrible half hour in which the principal ran up and down the platform trying frantically to bring peace and quiet. He “shished” right and left, sounding for all the world like a Seltzer siphon being discharged— s-s-shish, s-s-shish! The uproar in the auditorium steadily increased. He was adding to the noise and confusion and was making no headway in bringing order. Two or three teachers moved about trying to assist him. It was painful to watch. They were so miserably ineffective.
The principal and these particular teachers were leading exponents of treating the children patiently, tolerantly, and kindly. A young friend and I were on their side. They did not “hit,” they did not speak harshly, they did not belittle. I watched their ignominious defeat with alarm and dismay. What, in heaven’s name, was the answer? Now, there was one teacher in the school who did “hit,” who did speak harshly on occasions, who could belittle. The principal did not approve of her discipline. But in the end he had to send for her.
She walked up onto the platform coolly and contemptuously. Her disdain was obviously for her confreres who were incompetent to handle these children. She was sure of her power. She had only to walk up on that platform to have those six hundred boys and girls quiet down in groups as each became aware of her presence. In a few seconds there was a deep and profound silence. However, there was one boy who was not yet aware of her. “You — yes, you — down in front, come up here!” she ordered coldly and menacingly. And he came, believe me!
He was inches taller than she and many pounds heavier. I knew him because he came to my drawing room -— and a bigger bully I should hate to imagine. He talked back insolently to most of the seventy or more teachers in the building. He slouched now in a cowed fashion up to that platform. She waited calmly until he had lumbered to her side, and then without any ado she promptly smacked first on one side of his face and then on the other. The smacks resounded throughout the assembly room. To our amazement he began to blubber. “That,” she said with a curl of her lip, “for you. Is there by any chance anyone else in this auditorium who would like to come up here?”
She stood still, her eyes moving over the crowd. There was no answer. Apparently no one wanted to share the platform with her — not even one of the teachers. I have no doubt she would have enjoyed smacking a few of them. She had been called away from her work— to do theirs.
“Now,” she spoke grimly, “I will read the promotion lists. Kindly hand them to me.”
They were handed up to her with alacrity. Within five minutes, one class was on its feet and filing out of the auditorium in perfect order. Then another and another. In an unbelievably short time, six hundred children had silently disappeared. She turned to one of the leading exponents of sweetness and light who believed children should be treated like responsible adults. “There are your promotion lists!” She turned on her heel and walked off the platform. Her contempt was not for the children, I was sure, but for the wishy-washy philosophy of her fellow teachers. They thought they were so superior!
My young friend and I put our heads together. What was the answer? We reluctantly had to admit that, “tough” as she was, she got results. Her classroom was always quiet, her children stood up on their feet and recited their lessons without the interference of general disorder. We younger and gentler teachers did not get the results that she did.
2
AFTER a few months of teaching, or trying to teach against the most unbelievable odds, I felt sadly in need of help and advice. I turned to the educators who had trained and inspired but who had not prepared me for what I had met. I went to a meeting of teachers of the manual arts which was to have as its oracle the high priest of the new child psychology. We were to present our “problems.”
I listened with a sinking heart as one teacher after another took the floor and told his or her story. They were so mockingly removed from mine. I recall two “problems” all too vividly and bitterly. They sounded so sickeningly silly. A young woman got to her feet and in a voice quivering with emotion told the plight of one small boy. He had left home one morning with the beautiful hope that he might, in his kindergarten class, paint a rosy apple. His beautiful hope was throttled, stifled, killed. His teacher compelled (wicked word in this new psychology) him to work along with the rest of his classmates building a store out of blocks. He became the victim of an unhealthy repression. He had gone home to lunch and he could not eat!
A manual training teacher was the next one to take the floor. He, too, presented a “problem.” He had fourteen children in his class. He asked gravely what he should do in a difficulty like this: Six of his boys wanted to make coat hangers and the other eight wanted to make book ends. Should there be any compulsion? Or should he permit them to do exactly what they wished? His, I felt, was a most insincere question. He well knew the answer. Under no circumstance under heaven must a child be compelled to do anything he did not want to —especially and above all when he had an artistic impulse.
After listening to these “problems” for some time, in desperation I got to my feet and put my question.
“What would you do if you had about three hundred children come to your drawing room in one day—that is, six classes of nearly fifty pupils — and in each class there were sure to be ten or twelve who did not want to do anything but disturb the peace of the room? Should you compel these ten or twelve to conform, or should you let them go to it?”
There was a fearful silence. I felt like an iconoclast, an anarchist, an outlaw. I did not belong. Our oracle reluctantly, and with all too apparent distaste, turned his gaze upon me. Then he spoke.
“I would not have them, ” he snapped, and with a disdainful wave of his hand bowed his head to acknowledge another “problem” which was more reasonable and worthy of consideration.
While I was teaching we had several investigations. I remember some of the teachers saying valiantly—and rashly — that they would like these educators to see the school just as it was from day to day. But their valor petered out when it came to them what it would mean if all teachers were not so brave. No one, when it came down to brass tacks, cared to have investigators find her classroom the only one in disorder. She would stand an excellent chance of being put on the spot as inefficient. Accordingly, the whole school was put on its guard — brushed over, warned and threatened within an inch of its life. The investigating educators must find the school running smoothly.
I remember once we had a foreign educator in our midst. She came to my drawing room. I had my back to my class and my heart in my mouth. She smiled approvingly and complimented me. “I see that you believe in the modern theories of education. You allow some liberty in your room. Your children are not suppressed — they walk about and talk normally and naturally while they work.”
“Allow?” I echoed to myself. I had spent a good half hour “suppressing.” What would have happened if I had not? I turned and took a good look at my “modern” classroom. They were walking around. They were talking. More than a dozen of them were lined up at the windows looking down into the street. An elaborate funeral cortege was moving along it. The heart which had been in my mouth took a dive to my boots. I knew that it was only a question of minutes before the whole fortysix children would be pushing and shoving about the windows. Mercifully the “educator” moved on — and just in time.
There has been on all sides in these last twentyfive years a great deal of sentimental mush talked and practiced in the “disciplining and upbringing” of children. It has permeated the home, the school, and the juvenile courts. These last (the juvenile courts) bring to my mind a story told me by a teacher in a slum district. A fifteen-year-old boy had shot and killed his mother’s “lover.” It was brought out that the mother’s irregularity had been known and accepted in the boy’s home for some time. However, the lawyer who defended the boy succeeded in having him exonerated. He had merely defended his mother’s “honor.” The boy was then free to return to his school and mingle with his classmates.
The principal asked that the boy be transferred to another school. He did not dispute the boy’s innocence, but he thought that it would be a mistake to return him to a school where it was generally known that he had shot and killed a man. He would be sure to be a hero to his classmates and an exalted person to himself. It would seem that the principal had made a very reasonable and sensible demand. However, the court thought otherwise and ordered the boy to be returned to his former school since he was innocent and no stigma must be attached to him or his act. He did return and he did swagger about with unbearable and overpowering importance. I cannot see that this benign verdict, this repudiation of the principal’s request, served any good or constructive purpose.
I could cite many other instances of what it means to teach in a big school in the city’s slums. In my six years I was kicked, scratched, and bitten. Yes, bitten! I had attempted to separate two boys who were trying to kill each other. If one of them had met with a disfiguring death within the next few weeks, he could have been identified by the imprint of his upper and lower teeth in my wrist. There were many days when teaching was a horrible nightmare — one that has since become recurring. From time to time I awake in the dead of night with the confused and ghastly thought that I am back in one of those classrooms.
3
THE abnormal living of the moment piled upon the faults of a generation has brought us to a grim crisis. We are in for a wave of juvenile delinquency the like of which we have never faced. Certainly, the murder of a teacher in a slum school classroom is argument enough that something drastic must be done, and done at once.
I should first demand that publicity be turned on the slum schools in our big cities and towns. The slum school has too long festered in the shadows. It has been overlooked by the general public and snubbed by educators; and too often it has been used by Boards of Education as the dumping ground for inferior teachers or the political Siberia for insurgents.
In every city and town there are “show” schools to which the educators and social groups point with pride. They are the “front” for the educational system, but it is a false front so long as we tolerate the overcrowded school in the city’s slums. Until the war is over and as long thereafter as the situation demands, let the slum schools be the show schools! Let them test the powers of our most astute and resourceful educators. We must give up — at least for the duration — the pampered “experimental school” with its favored children taught by hand-picked teachers; it has too long been the plaything of the visionary educator. Instead, let us give our least favored schools all the aid they need.
Again, let us be done with the dishonest and slimy declaration made by the examining board engaging a new teacher: “We recognize no differences among the schools in our system. It is a teacher’s task to make the same success of her work no matter to which school she may be assigned.” This statement has been made in the past because the board has not dared to say: “We are sending you to a school in a district where the police have to work overtime. The children in it do not have to go to the movies to learn crime and vice, for in their daily lives they know more than the Hays office would ever permit to be shown on the screen. In this school your classes will be the largest in the city. You will have a thankless, heartsickening, nerve-racking job, but you won’t get one more cent for your work than if we sent you to one of our best new schools in the pleasant outskirts of the city proper, where your classes would be small. You will stand very little chance of getting a transfer if you find it all too grueling unless you have political pull.”
No, the examining board has not said this because our politically appointed Boards of Education are afraid of offending some racial group. They dare not jar the sensibilities of the ward heeler in these unfortunate districts, for he might resent hearing that his constituents were not the most desirable for a teacher. We must cease catering to these cheap politicians who have never raised their voices or used their powers to improve the schools in their wards. The children of the slums are not getting the same educational advantages as those of the more favored sections of the city.
I firmly believe that this crisis should be treated as a war problem on the home front. There should be a rousing rally of all the teachers in these slum schools. It should be in the largest auditorium in the city. On the platform would be members of the Board of Education, representatives from the juvenile courts, and newspapermen. There should be no recriminations, for the situation is too acute to waste time arguing over what is past, but the teachers themselves ought to speak out without fear of retaliation.
I am confident that the teachers would all agree that the discipline in these schools must be stiffened immediately, and that in the stiffening they must have the vigorous support of the community, the Board of Education, the juvenile courts, and the police. I trust they will all regard the sentimentalist as nothing short of a saboteur. I feel that there ought to be meetings after school hours to check upon the progress of this new program.
And I hope that some teacher has the courage to state what all of them know: that corporal punishment must be accepted. Even the teachers who have never used it themselves have delegated the job to some father. There is of course corporal punishment now in these schools, but it is a bootleg method of discipline and consequently hazardous and uncertain. It is outrageous to leave a teacher defenseless before a boy bent upon assaulting her or one of his classmates. It is intolerable to have thrown in her face an obscene epithet and an insolent reminder that she dare not touch him because it is against the law. Corporal punishment need not be brutal. Devoted parents have used it through all time and have brought up their children to be a credit to them and their country.
In every slum school there are ringleaders who are the potential gang leaders. They should be weeded out promptly and made to feel this stiffening process. I would not waste one instant “appealing” to their better natures, but I would have them thoroughly trounced at their first flare-up of insubordination. Such action would have an immediate effect upon the whole school and a most heartening one. It should be done in the principal’s office with a parent, the teacher, and a policeman present. If the parent preferred he could tackle the job himself, but he must do it in the principal’s office before witnesses. I would insist upon this last, for beatings by parents are often savagely brutal. Obviously such treatment as they often administer does more harm than good.
I am conscious that this stand of mine on corporal punishment may sound reactionary — but I will stick to it. It would be a surprise attack and it would have an excellent psychological effect.
These boys are bullies who have long looked upon school authority as “sissy-like”; they have consequently a great contempt for it. They need a jolt — a shock. They know physical violence and use it themselves, and a controlled form of physical punishment would be something that they could respect and understand. After a few months, corporal punishment will be needed less and less, for the “news” will get around. I once heard a teacher say that she never gave a boy a second chance, for he always took it! There is much to be said for her point of view. Too many of these young thugs have been given not only a second chance but a third, fourth, fifth. Slop this shilly-shallying at once — the boys are on to it.