Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools - Upton Sinclair - Страница 18

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On the top of my desk as I work is a five-foot shelf of big envelopes, containing data on the school systems of various cities. I take one envelope, and sort out its contents, marking the material with the letters, G, F, P, and R. That is to say, Graft, Favoritism, Propaganda and Repression—the four products of education by Big Business. Under the letter F in New York City I find the grievances of scores of teachers with whom I talked. Their story was all the same: the system is brutal, the system is rigid, the system is honeycombed with politics and dishonesty.

It fell to my lot while in the city last year to take part in a public debate with some of the school officials at the Civic Club. To my statement that Tammany was running the schools, Examiner Smith rejoined that all promotions in the system depended upon civil service examinations—he knew, because he did the examining. But when he was pinned down, he admitted that the twenty-six district superintendents, the eight associate superintendents, and the thirty high school principals were all excluded from the civil service list; and here, of course, are the prizes for which everyone is striving. At that very moment the schools were in an uproar because of the appointment to a superintendent’s position of Mrs. Grace Forsythe, a Catholic lady who had not even high school qualifications; also of Margaret McCooey, sister of one of the Tammany bosses. Milo MacDonald, a Catholic, had been appointed principal of a high school from the rank of ordinary teacher; Henrietta Rodman told me of another teacher, a Catholic, who took the examination for elementary principalship and failed, and was appointed to a high school principalship. Other cases have happened since.

These are a few out of scores of cases that were detailed to me. I was told of a Catholic who took an examination, and then was permitted to withdraw his papers and write up a new set at home. It is a matter of record that Mr. Somers, member of the board of education—a super-patriot, who called the Teachers’ Union treasonable—let off a clerk of the school board who had been proven guilty of misappropriating funds; also another who was charged with letting people get copies of examination papers in advance, and of selling information to candidates. Both these people, Catholics, got off with a fine of a few days’ pay, and both are still in the system.

A form of “honest graft” which has been widely developed under this Tammany regime is the writing of text-books by school officials. Many of the text-books in use in the public schools of New York bear the names of people in the system; in many cases they were written by teachers, but officials have put their names upon them, and get the greater part of the profits. The principals recommend these books for use, and the board of superintendents adopts them. Former Superintendent Maxwell had a large income from books published by the American Book Company which he himself had not written; and a number of the district superintendents get their share. The New York “Globe,” discussing the case of Maxwell, showed how in his position he had the power to increase the sales of his own books; and this same power is possessed by all the gang. I was told of one head of a department with a book to sell, who got himself transferred three times to different parts of the city—starting in the High School of Commerce in Manhattan, from there to the Commercial High School of Brooklyn, and then to Long Island—and in each place he took with him his commercial arithmetic. The teachers did not want it, but in every school the other texts were thrown out and the new one introduced. All over New York—and all over America, as we shall find—there are school basements and cupboards filled with discarded text-books, or new text-books which are so bad that the teachers will not use them.

Needless to say, many of the Tammany superintendents and principals are ignorant men, utterly unfitted for scholastic duties. I look back on my own days in the College of the City of New York, and recall the comical old boys whom the Tammany machine appointed to teach me literature and philosophy and Latin, and other high-brow subjects. Therefore, I was not surprised to be told of a superintendent who talks about “algebray,” and who says: “As I was a-saying,” etc. The French teachers find amusement in the efforts of superintendents to pretend that they know French. I talked with a charming lady of Spanish birth, who attempted to get by one of these examiners, but he reported her French as “very bad”; she “ran all her words together.” Anyone who has listened to a Frenchman talk will appreciate the humor of this comment; one might say that the first qualification for speaking good French is to run your words together to the utmost possible extent. This lady went to see Professor Cohn, head of the department of French of Columbia University, and one of our leading French scholars. He reported that she spoke French “like a native,” and took occasion to add that he knew the examiner in question, and knew him to be ignorant of French.

This lady got her appointment; but presently she discovered that the head of her French department didn’t know any French; necessarily, her pupils discovered it also; and that made her unpopular with her superior. She was refused promotion upon the ground that she was “a non-conformist.” She told me of her adventures in trying to get something explicit from the examiners; she called several times upon Examiner Smith, the same gentleman who debated with me at the Civic Club. Mr. Smith was in a hurry to catch a train, and asked the lady to tell him her story while he was washing his hands in a lavatory. She was so fastidious as to think that was not quite a courteous examination!

I talked with a young man, who had been for many years in the system, and with whom they had not been able to find fault; his ratings had been “double A” from the beginning of his career. But what chance had the system to hold an energetic man, who saw all promotion depending upon favoritism and graft, and saw himself condemned to a subordinate position, taking orders from pompous ignoramuses? The desirable positions in the system are few—the Board of Estimate sees to that!—and the struggle for them is tense, and the way of promotion is the way of intrigue. Here were people giving courses to teachers, instructing them how to pass examinations for promotion—and then these same people conducting the examinations! Here were examiners with agents out touting for them! (You see, they teach what is called “salesmanship” in the New York schools; and evidently, they practice what they teach!) My young friend went out into the business world, and is making a good living. He explained the difference this made in his life; when he met business men, he was an equal among equals, but as a teacher he had had to tremble before a board of examiners who could not have passed one of their own examinations.

“I do not know of a school system in the United States which is run for the benefit of the pupils; they are all run for the benefit of the gang”; thus District Superintendent Tildsley, debating with me before the Civic Club. Dr. Tildsley added that by “the gang” he meant the superintendents, the principals and the teachers. It was kind of him to add the teachers, but some of them in the audience did not appreciate his compliment. There is quite a group in the New York schools who are really concerned for the children, and feel no sense of solidarity with the bigoted autocracy which at present holds the power.

“It is the duty of a teacher who knows of anything wrong in the school system to complain to her superiors about it,” said the pious Dr. Tildsley; and there came a chorus from all over the room: “Yes, and lose her job!” Dr. Tildsley was pained by the suggestion that a teacher might encounter trouble as result of just complaints, made at the proper time and in the proper manner. As it happened, however, I had spent that morning in the home of Mr. James F. Berry, a teacher of mathematics at DeWitt Clinton High School, who had been for twenty-three years in the system, and took seriously the idea that a teacher has responsibility for teaching conditions. Mr. Berry made complaint against the grossest kind of evils in the school—cruelty to pupils, dishonesty, and acts of injustice by those in authority. As a result, his career in the system was one long misery. He was denied promotion to which he was justly entitled; and he put in my hands a little diary, in which he had kept the record of two decades of struggle for his rights. I glance through it and find entries such as this:

Mr. Tildsley exemplified today his arbitrary and disagreeable way of dealing with those under him, by making a perfectly groundless accusation against me. It was easy to disprove, and then he virtually apologized, though with no sign of regretting his accusation. I have observed this practice of sweeping statements by him, and if they are not promptly disproved one feels that he takes them for granted as true and admitted, and such an impression does not make for good-will.

I shall before long show you how at this same DeWitt Clinton High School there has been established with official sanction an elaborate system of espionage; a teacher drawing full salary devotes the greater part of his time to training pupils to spy upon other teachers, and when these pupils bring reports of unorthodox ideas and utterances, the pupils are praised for a meritorious service. But in the case of Mr. Berry I find that the disposition to report genuine evils is described by Dr. Tildsley as “a tendency to tale-bearing which lessens efficiency!”

Why Dr. Tildsley did not like the “tale-bearing” of Mr. Berry is easy to understand. In 1914 Dr. Tildsley was principal of the DeWitt Clinton High School, and when he was moved on to a higher position, two of his favorite teachers in the school, who were in line for principalships, and who have since been made principals, took five hundred and twenty-five dollars out of the “general organization fund” of the school—that is, money contributed by the students for student activities—and used it to purchase a silver service which was presented to Dr. Tildsley. The source of this money was kept a secret, but Mr. Berry learned about it, and wrote to the president of the board of education, pointing out that this was a clear violation of the law, as well as a great injustice to the pupils, most of whom were poor and many self-supporting. Had not one teacher been turned out of the system for accepting a box of candy from her pupils? A scandal was threatened, but it was hushed up, the newspapers co-operating by not publishing a line. Dr. Tildsley returned the silver service, which was sold, I am informed, to George Sylvester Viereck. For nine years Mr. Berry has been persecuted because of this affair; while Dr. Tildsley was promoted to be deputy boss of the gang!

They have a method of punishing teachers which they learned from the police department in New York. Every now and then some policeman takes it upon himself to enforce a law which his superiors are using as a means of extortion; they will shift this policeman to the Bronx, and a month later they will send him to Brooklyn, and a month later to Staten Island, and so on—the poor wretch spends the greater part of his life on street cars, getting to his job and back. In the case of a teacher they wait just long enough for her to get settled in a new home, and then they move her again. It is something understood by all teachers that anyone who opposes the principal will find herself “transferred,” or lowered in ratings, or will have hard classes, or longer hours with no more pay. Said one to me: “Any teacher who brings charges against a principal is ruined. It matters nothing what the charges are: stealing school funds, or beating the pupils, or offensive advances of a sexual nature. All that happens is the principal denies the charges, and the matter is dropped; a teacher’s testimony counts for no more than the testimony of a Negro in the South.”

New York is not an “open shop” city, and so the teachers have a union. Its leaders suffer discrimination when it comes to promotion, but that does not break the union down. As part of the campaign against it, the authorities maintain a “yellow” union; that is, an organization which is supposed to represent the teachers, but can be controlled by the gang. The name of this is the “Teachers’ Council.” It purports to be a representative body, but the teachers do not vote directly, they vote for delegates from all organizations recognized by the board of education; and the insiders will belong to as many as ten or a dozen organizations, and will have a vote in each. The machine has its henchmen in all the key positions, and the surest way to promotion in the system lies in the rendering of this kind of Judas service. This “Teachers’ Council” is accustomed to attack the reputations of union teachers, and never give them opportunity to reply; the slander, whatever it is, will be quoted in the “Times” as representing the opinion of “twenty-five thousand organized teachers.” We are in New York now, not in Los Angeles, but you note that we still have our “Times,” and it is exactly the same kind of “Times”—it will publish any falsehood about an independent man or woman, and will give the victim no chance to answer.