Slums and Schools

DR. Conant’s New Report

IN HIS study of education in American high schools, entitled The American High School Today, Dr. James B. Conant encountered the wrath of the teaching profession, largely because he proved that our bright students were not working hard enough. With his latest book, Slums and Suburbs, in my opinion the most important of Dr. Conant’s reports on education, he has brought down upon himself the wrath of Negro leadership and that of our sentimental liberals who, with more heart than head, favor desegregation of our public schools regardless of its effect upon the education and the welfare of Negro children. In addition, he has shocked those who wrongly believe that the Supreme Court decision of 1954 makes all segregation in our schools illegal.

I have long admired Dr. Conant’s courageous defense of our public schools and his insight into their fundamental importance to the future of democracy. We met on various occasions many years ago, when he was president of Harvard University, sometimes at huge national conventions of teachers, sometimes at small suburban gatherings, and in the halls of Congress, where we were both arguing for higher standards of public education and for federal aid to the public schools.

It was heartening to me that the president of Harvard University, who, as a distinguished chemist, was also deeply involved in the development of atomic energy, could find the time to take an active part in the struggle to improve the schools and to express his conviction that higher education could not be improved unless the foundation of our educational system, the public schools, was strengthened throughout the nation.

Let me confess that his initial report was a disappointment to me, largely because the title, The American High School Today, promised too much. Obviously, Dr. Conant was obliged to set limits to his task. He chose the comprehensive high schools, which enroll a third of the high school population and exist chiefly in smaller cities, of ten to sixty thousand inhabitants. I rebelled against Dr. Conant’s arbitrary figure of 15 per cent of the student body as comprising the gifted ones who alone should be encouraged to pursue an academic career. The other 85 per cent were brushed off as fit only to be trained in ‟marketable skills” with as much academic work as such a vocational curriculum would permit. The Council on Basic Education has just issued a report that 35 per cent of our schoolchildren are seriously retarded in reading, and 40 per cent more are not reading as well as they might. Surely these children, with remedial-reading lessons, could learn even in high school to prepare themselves to cope with academic work instead of being relegated to Dr. Conant’s 85 per cent who are to be excluded from the elite.

I agreed enthusiastically, however, with Dr. Conant’s just criticisms of the curriculum in our large high schools, his insistence on continuity of study in the fundamental academic subjects, his accusation that our bright boys, and especially our bright girls, are not encouraged to work hard enough, and instead of doing homework are allowed to fritter away their energies in senseless afterschool activities. These accusations, made by so distinguished an educational authority, stung the pride of the teaching profession. Instead of admitting these shortcomings, the educators pounced on Dr. Conant’s call to greater excellence and greater student motivation by denouncing his program as ‟aristocratic,” because he insisted that any bright high school student could readily carry five, rather than the traditional four, academic subjects a year.

IN HIS new book on schools in the metropolitan areas, Slums and Suburbs, Dr. Conant fills the lacunae of his first volume and, by citing the records of six so-called lighthouse schools, confounds the critics who maintain that his demands on American youth are too severe. For these six high schools, and he could have cited more, prove beyond doubt that five academic subjects can be carried successfully by any bright boy or girl without undue tension and strain.

His latest volume has met with sharp criticism from another direction. It has aroused the indignation of Negro leadership. Since the education of Negro children should progress with all deliberate speed, their parents ought to realize that Dr. Conant’s advice for the improvement of education in the large Negro ghettos of our big Northern cities is sound. In fact, of his several valuable treatises on American education. Slums and Suburbs is the most important one Dr. Conant has written.

He points out that the prime responsibility of schools, instruction and learning, is hampered if students — white or Negro — are disturbed, sick, or hungry and their parents are irresponsible or, worse, in prison or on probation. Dr. Conant dismisses as irrelevant the academic curriculum demanded of the comprehensive high schools. ‟The nature of the community,” he says, ‟largely determines what goes on in the school. Therefore to attempt to divorce the school from the community is to engage in unrealistic thinking, which might lead to policies that could wreak havoc with the school and the lives of children. The community and the school are inseparable.” Given the unavoidable social responsibilities of the urban slum school, what becomes of our democratic boast of equality of opportunity when the wealthy suburban communities spend S1000 a year per child and the large cities less than half that amount?

Dr. Conant’s book is thus a powerful appeal to the American conscience, an appeal for justice to our Negro fellow citizens all the more effective because it is based on his scientific analysis of grim facts. But the calm objectivity of the scholar is shaken by the shock of discovery, of his exposure to the sordid living conditions in the slums and their effect on the process of education. As a result, he makes a passionate appeal for equality of opportunity for the Negro child, which brings into sharp focus the heights and depths of American culture.

‟I have walked through school corridors in slum areas and, looking into classrooms, have seen children asleep with their heads on their hands. Is this situation the result of poor teachers without either disciplinary control or teaching ability? No, the children asleep at their desks have been up all night with no place to sleep or else have been subject to incredibly violent family fights and horrors through the night. Checking into one case, a principal told one of my staff that after climbing six flights of a tenement he found the boy’s home — one filthy room with a bed, a light bulb, and a sink. In the room lived the boy’s mother and her four children. I might add that it is not unusual for teachers in these schools to take home with them children with no place to go at night.” Seeing through Dr. Conant s eyes,

I felt as if I were being confronted with such misery for the first time. I share his indignation when he adds: ‟It is after visits to schools like these that I grow impatient with both critics and defenders of public education who ignore the realities of school situations to engage in fruitless debate about educational philosophy, purposes, and the like. These situations call for action, not hairsplitting arguments.”

The actions he prescribes are definite and salutary.

The most acute problem in Negro slums is unemployment of youths between sixteen and twentyone. It ranges from 17 per cent on a nationwide average to 70 per cent in some areas. This is social dynamite, says Dr. Conant. It is not the sole cause of delinquency and crime, but it is a major contribution to them. The educational experience of youth should fit their subsequent employment. Vocational training should be upgraded. One solution lies in study and work programs. An auto-mechanics shop for boys should exist in every metropolitan high school. But the best vocational training does no good whatever when it prepares boys and girls for nonexistent jobs. Indeed, highly trained Negro boys and girls who cannot find a market for their skills are apt to become all the more embittered.

Racial discrimination now makes unemployment chronic for the Negro male, North and South. In the largest cities, the employment of youth is literally nobody’s affair. Discrimination extensively practiced by employers and unions is a serious roadblock. Effective placement services and the cooperation of labor-management committees are essential; the obligation of the school should not end when the students drop out of school or graduate. Guidance officers ought to be given the responsibility of follow-up from the time pupils leave school until they are twenty-one years of age. This total program will cost money for additional staff. Not only more guidance officers but more teachers, and higher salaries for them, are necessary, as well as special training programs for teachers in slum schools. They must enlist the interest of parents in the slum areas through adult-education programs.

Indeed, the whole problem of financing public education in the large cities is a major national concern. Federal aid to improve education in our urban slums is essential if we are to avoid serious social unrest. For a mass of unemployed and frustrated Negro youth in congested areas of a city may be compared to the piling up of inflammable material in an empty building in a city block. Potentialities for trouble arc surely there. What can words like ‟freedom,” ‟liberty,” and ‟equality of opportunity” mean to these young unemployed Negroes? How well prepared are they to face the struggle with Communism, which shows no signs of abating? Our success against the spread of Communism in no small measure depends upon the successful operation of our own free society.

Dr. Conant makes it crystal clear that he is much more concerned about the plight of urban parents whose children drop out of or graduate from school without prospects of further education or employment than about the plight of suburban parents whose chief ambition is to enter their children, regardless of intellectual qualifications, in prestige colleges. Moreover, he urges suburbanites to take an active interest in improving urban education.

‟I have sought to create anxious thoughts in the minds of the conscientious citizens who, while living in the suburbs, work in the city,” declares the author. ‟To improve the slum schools requires an improvement in the lives of the families who inhabit the slums; but without a drastic change in the employment prospects for urban Negro youth, little can be accomplished. We need to know the facts of urban educational problems. When these facts indicate a dangerous social situation the American people should be prepared to take prompt action before it is too late.”

WITHOUT becoming an alarmist. Dr. Conant, in Shums and Suburbs, makes a most ardent and effective plea for equal educational opportunities for Negro children and for their parents. Nevertheless, he has been severely criticized by Negro leaders, by ‟professional” friends of the Negro, and by many other advocates of school desegregation who feel that he has hurt their cause by his treatment of this stormy, emotion-laden problem. What does Dr. Conant actually say? First, he makes the point that the Supreme Court decision declared ‟the segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race” illegal. In other words, de jure segregation as practiced in the South is condemned by the Court, but de facto segregation. which is unavoidable in huge Negro ghettos, is a very different situation. ‟The justices,” he points out. ‟appear to have expressed no view as to whether the pupils in a completely Negro school are deprived of equal educational opportunity if they are not assigned solely because of their race. In short, if one group of children is separated from another group because of the neighborhood in which they live, the fact of this separation is, of and by itself, no evidence of an inequality of education.” Whether the facilities and instruction are equal is to be determined by examining the schools. To assume that Negro education can be satisfactory only if in each schoolroom there are some white children is, in Conant’s opinion, to take a defeatist view of Negro education in our large cities. I agree with him in his belief that a sense of inferiority can be removed by the expenditure of sufficient money to augment staff and facilities and by an integrated staff of white and Negro administrators and teachers.

The situation in New York City, where Negro children have been transported by bus to distant white schools, has proved that this is a trivial, costly, ineffective solution to desegregation, and in the case of the elementary-school children, may even be detrimental. There are in the New York City school system about 170,000 Negro children in the kindergarten and grades one to eight. Of these, slightly more than 6000, or a little more than 3 per cent, are transported to white schools. How was this token group chosen? I do not know, but if such an experience is essential for all Negro children, it seems a great injustice to the vast majority, since tossing 170,000 children around the city is impossible. Why make an exception for a handful? Why not use the money, instead, for improving the schools?

Moreover, is it not too great a strain for Negro children to have to journey every day to a remote white school for a few hours, and then return to their Negro neighborhoods? I discussed this procedure with some Negro high school students in another city, who, after attending a distant white high school, had returned to their Negro high school, and I am convinced that artificial desegregation is harmful. “When I left my friends and went to the white high school.” said one tall young athlete, ‟it made me so nervous to compete with white children who are strangers to me that my hands would sweat. What, then, does being tossed between a strange white school and a familiar Negro neighborhood do to a little boy or girl?

Another point is of major importance. How can the teacher in some remote white school know the imported Negro child’s home and background? Yet, without such knowledge, she is handicapped in teaching the child. No, the little elementaryschool children are much better off in their community schools, with their friends, in a familiar background, even though it may be a slum.

Take, for example, the situation in Washington, D. C., where de jure segregation used to exist. The schools have now been integrated as far as this was possible. But the Capital still has, and always will have, all-Negro schools, because 81 per cent of the children are Negroes, and their ratio to white students has been increasing annually. Many schools cannot be desegregated except as to the teachers, since there are not enough white students to make it possible. This does not mean that these Negro children are receiving an inferior education. More of them go to college every year. This fact proves Dr. Conant’s point that the Negro child in an all-Negro school does not suffer from a harmful sense of inferiority, provided that the children and their parents realize that they are not segregated on the basis of race, but out of sheer necessity.

The attacks on Dr. Conant’s position are unjust. He is as much opposed to de jure segregation as any other law-abiding truly democratic American. Gerrymandering a district is just as abhorrent to him as de jure segregation. But I agree with him that ‟it would be far better for those who are agitating for the deliberate mixing of children to accept de facto segregated schools as a consequence of a present housing situation and to work for the improvement of slum schools whether Negro or white.” This is in the best interests of the Negro and of the nation. It is, indeed, the only hope for upgrading the education, both academic and vocational, of the total Negro population in our Northern cities.

Since these cities contain almost half of our Negro population, the improvement of Negro education and job opportunities is the quickest route to raising the economic and social status of the race.

These improvements cannot be achieved as rapidly as they should without federal aid. The Negroes should not be afraid to use their considerable political power to urge passage by Congress of a bill for federal aid to public schools. Nor should they fear that segregation will be strengthened in the South if the all-Negro schools benefit by federal assistance. If the segregated Southern schools were made wholly equal in the quality of staff and facilities, white children would not travel for miles to go to a white school. They would go to the nearest Negro school and thus contribute in many areas to a voluntary process of desegregation.

But Negroes should insist that federal aid be refused to all private and sectarian schools. For nothing would segregate the Negro more effectively and permanently, both in the North and the South, than the proliferation of private schools, which are free to select their student bodies, and which, in any case, most Negroes cannot afford to attend. If the federal government should yield to the pressures, now heavier than ever before in the nation’s history, for the support of private schools, the public schools would become pauper schools in our large cities, attended only by Negroes and poor whites.

The struggle to improve education of the urban slum schools, Negro or white or desegregated, will triumph more quickly if Dr. Conant attains his goal of arousing the conscience of our country.

Equality is the moral imperative of our era. The problem is how best to achieve it. If Negro leaders and Negro parents accept Dr. Conant’s sage advice. I am convinced that his latest book. Slums and Suburbs. will prove to be a turning point in the history of their race, and eventually they will be grateful to him.

Not satisfied with the wound stripes he has already earned, Dr. Conant is now engaged in a study of teacher education and training. Other people have been known to step into a horne’s nest, but not deliberately. I can only say with more devoutness than I usually feel: I pray the Lord his soul will keep.