Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools - Upton Sinclair - Страница 17

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The education of a million children, and the control of twenty-five thousand teachers in the metropolis, is entrusted to a school board of seven people. The president of this board is a leading real estate operator; the retired president, still a member of the board, is a manufacturer of chemicals, who profiteered extensively during the World War; the next member is a manufacturer of cigars; the next is a leading real estate operator; the next is the private physician to the mayor of the city; the next is a woman of wealth and leisure, who represents the Tammany machine; the last is a lawyer. As always, you will note that there is not one educator on the board. There are few who know anything about education; but all know about business—especially those kinds of business which are transacted with school boards.

What are those kinds of business? To be able to pick the location of handsome new schools is worth a fortune to real estate interests; and that this is regularly done in New York is not my charge, but that of the comptroller of the city. To be able to determine the placing of contracts for school buildings and supplies is worth a fortune to any member of a political machine; and I talked with a former clerk of the school board, who told me he had seen so much graft that he had run away from the sight. I do not mean that this Tammany school board personally carries off the money, as it did in the days of Tweed; the method now is “honest graft”—that is, the placing of school contracts with companies in which your wife’s relatives and the members of your gang are interested. The amount to be expended in New York amounts to a hundred million dollars a year, and Tammany gets it all. At least four of the members of the board are “dummies,” having no function save to vote as the machine directs. All of them are Democrats, and the majority are Catholics; that is to say, the educating of a million American children is in the hands of people who teach that public education is a crime against God.

So it comes about that the principal indictment of this Tammany regime is not the money it spends, but the money it withholds. New York is the wealthiest city in the world; the masters of the city have money for palatial town houses, for country estates many square miles in extent, with homes as big as summer hotels; they have money for private yachts as big as ocean liners, and for luxurious motor cars by the tens of thousands; but they have no money to provide a decent education for the children of the poor. While their own children go to elegant private schools, the children of the poor are herded into dark, insanitary fire-traps, some of them seventy-five years of age; and even of these there is an insufficiency! Ever since my boyhood the refusal of New York City to accommodate the children who clamor for an education has been the blackest crime of the Tammany ruffians. At present one-third of the children are on “part time”; that is, they are turned out of school after two or three hours, to make room for another relay. The rest of the day they pick up the vices of the streets; and if they are made into young criminals, the city is ready and able to build whatever jails may be necessary.

Two years ago a committee of women representing a score of civic organizations—the Women’s Municipal League, the Women’s Department of the National Civic Federation, the Civitas Club of Brooklyn, the Women’s City Club, the League of Catholic Women, etc.—made a careful study of forty of the school buildings of New York City; they reported that twenty out of these forty were fire-traps, old wooden buildings with narrow stairways and no fire escapes. Sanitation was reported “bad” and “wretched” in twenty-one of these schools, and “fair” in eleven more. Twenty-one out of thirty-six were in need of repairs, twenty-seven had only dark basement playgrounds, and so on. I quote a few phrases, just to give you the flavor of these reports:

Boys’ toilets terrible; no basins and towels.... Toilets old and in bad condition; foul air unavoidable.... Plumbing too old to operate, inadequate and unsanitary; few basins and no towels.... Garbage dump nearby, inexcusable menace to health and comfort of the children.... Twelve toilets for twelve hundred boys, old, bad conditions, bad odor. No repairs in years, furniture and woodwork almost falling to pieces.... Fearfully dilapidated; paint and repairs needed on walls; stairs worn down to danger point.... Buildings so old as to be beyond repair, should be abandoned.... Insufficient lighting and ventilation; two rooms with only one window, eight rooms with only two windows.... Fire escapes incomplete and badly constructed.... Wooden buildings, no fire escapes reported.

These reports were given wide publicity; the ladies waited six months, over the summer vacation, and then came back to see what had been done. Out of twenty-three buildings reported dangerous as to fire conditions, twenty remained unchanged. Only two out of twenty-two schools had made any improvement as to provisions for the comfort of the teachers. As regards sanitation, fourteen had been improved, twenty-three had not been changed; and so on. How much the public authorities were concerned about such matters was shown by the experience of the Teachers’ Union, which prepared for an exhibit of the Public Health Association a series of posters and charts showing the physical condition of the schools. “Over nine hundred thousand children suffer from lack of a good ventilation system,” declared one of these posters. “No soap, no water, no towels,” declared another; and so on. Privately the nurses of the Health Department at this show all admitted that the posters represented the truth; but for three days the man who was then commissioner of health and the man who is now commissioner of health sought desperately to compel the Teachers’ Union to remove these posters; failing in this, the publicity agencies of the show cut out all the press notices of the teachers’ exhibits.

What this means to the teachers was set forth to me by the victims. One was teaching a class of children on a dark stone staircase. Another was teaching in a room on a level with the elevated railroad, with trains coming and going on four tracks; she would have to stand in the middle of the room and shout in order to be heard by all the pupils; and this in a new school, just built! An inspector of some sort came along and entered on his report, “room noisy”; the teacher was denied promotion, for some reason which could not be explained, and it was over a year before she could get the matter straightened out—the words “room noisy” had been taken to mean that she did not maintain discipline!

Another woman was teaching physical culture in a dark basement, with water always on the floor. She had seven classes every day, with fifty children in each class; and the gas lights were so feeble that she could not see the children she was supposed to be teaching. She said to one boy: “Stand with your feet together.” He answered: “There’s a puddle of water under me.” And when the physical culture classes got through with this hole, it became a play-ground for the other children!

I am reluctant to introduce into this book any statements which may add to the income of the Grand Imperial Kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan; nevertheless, it is impossible to discuss school conditions in such cities as New York, Boston, St. Louis and San Francisco without mentioning the fact that we have in our country some ten or fifteen million people, held by fear of eternal torment in subjection to a priestly system, which repudiates democracy, repudiates freedom of opinion and of teaching, repudiates everything we know as Americanism. The Catholic church denies the power of the state over marriage and divorce, and above all things else, it denies the right of the state to educate the child. I am going to prove that in detail before I finish; for the present I merely point out that in city after city we shall encounter this influence.

The Catholics, you see, have their system of parochial schools, in which the children are taught the priestly view of life. The church is enormously wealthy, and some of these schools are, as buildings, very fine. Manifestly, the priestly admonition to the faithful, to send their children to church schools, will be much more effective if the public schools are old and filthy and insanitary; and more especially if they are fire-traps! Tammany Hall is a semi-religious institution, maintained by the votes of Irish and Italian and Polish Catholics. Practically the entire list of public officials are Catholics—and this includes the majority of the public school board and of the superintending force. So, to the natural greed of the plutocracy is added the power of priestly intrigue. Mr. Stewart Browne, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, attends every hearing of the Board of Estimate, and of other public bodies having anything to do with appropriations for the schools. His one function is to prevent appropriations; and with the secret help of the Catholic prelates, he succeeds. Thus we observe, in full operation in our modern age, the ancient alliance between the secular arm and the spiritual; we see God and Mammon united to rivet the chains of wage-slavery upon the poor.