New Faces Part 18

GREAT OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS

Among the influences which, in America, promote harmony between alien races, the public school plays a most important part. The children, the teachers, the parents--whether of emigrant or native origin--the relatives and friends in distant countries, are all brought more or less under its amalgamating influences. In the schoolroom the child finds friends and playmates belonging to races widely different from his own; there Greek meets not only Greek, but Turk, American, Irish, German, French, English, Italian and Hungarian, and representatives of every other nation under the sun. The lion lying down with the lamb was nothing to it, because the lamb, though its feelings are not enlarged upon, must have been distinctly uncomfortable. But in the schoolroom Jew and Gentile work and play together; and black and white learn love and knowledge side by side.

And long after more formal instruction has faded with the pa.s.sing of the years a man of, perhaps, German origin will think kindly of the whole irresponsible Irish race when he remembers little Bridget O'Connor, who sat across the aisle in the old Cherry Street school, her quick temper and her swift remorse.

Of course, all these nationalities are rarely encountered in one district, but a teacher often finds herself responsible for fifty children representing five or six of them. In the lower grades eight or ten may be so lately arrived as to speak no English. The teacher presiding over this polyglot community is often, herself, of foreign birth, yet they get on very well together, are very fond of one another, and very happy. The little foreigners, a.s.sisted by their more well-informed comrades, learn the language of the land, I regret to say that it is often tinctured with the language of the Bowery, in from six to twelve weeks, six weeks for the Jews, and twelve for the slower among the Germans' children. And again, it will be difficult to stir Otto Schmidt, at any stage of his career, into antagonism against the Jewish race, when he remembers the patience and loving kindness with which Maxie Fishandler labored with him and guided his first steps through the wilderness of the English tongue.

These indirect but constant influences are undeniably the strongest, but at school the child is taught in history of the heroism and the strength of men and nations other than his own; he learns, with some degree of consternation, that Christopher Columbus was a "Dago," George Washington an officer in the English Army, and Christ, our Lord, a Jew. Geography, as it is now taught with copious ill.u.s.trations and descriptions, shows undreamed-of beauties in countries. .h.i.therto despised. And gradually, as the pupils move on from cla.s.s to cla.s.s, they learn true democracy and man's brotherhood to man.

But the work of the American public school does not stop with the children who come directly under its control. The board of education reaches, as no other organization does, the great ma.s.s of the population. All the other boards and departments established for the help and guidance of these people only succeed in badgering and frightening them. They are met, even at Ellis Island, by the board of health and they are subjected to all kinds of disagreeable and humiliating experiences culminating sometimes in quarantine and sometimes in deportation. Even after they have pa.s.sed the barrier of the emigration office, the monster still pursues them. It disinfects their houses, it confiscates the rotten fish and vegetables which they hopefully display on their push-carts, it objects to their wrenching off and selling the plumbing appliances in their apartments, it interferes with them in twenty ways a day and hedges them round about with a hundred laws which they can only learn, as Parnell advised a follower to learn the rules of the House of Commons, by breaking them.

Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary ideas of the use of a thoroughfare. The new-comer is taught that the street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other trifles for which he has no further use. Neither may it be used, except with restrictions, as a bedroom or a nursery. The emigrant, puzzled but obliging, picks his progeny out of the gutter and lays it on the fire-escape. He then makes acquaintance of the fire department, and listens to its heated arguments. So perhaps he, still willing to please, reclaims the dead cat and the cabbage stalk, and proceeds to cremate them in the privacy of the back yard. Again the fire department, this time in snorting and horrible form, descends upon him. And all these manifestations of freedom are attended by the blue-coated police who interdict the few relaxations unprovided for by the other powers. These human monsters confiscate stilettos and razors; discourage pocket-picking, brick-throwing, the gathering of crowds and the general enjoyment of life. Their name is legion. Their appet.i.te for figs, dates, oranges and bananas and graft is insatiable; they are omnipresent; they are argus-eyed; and their speech is always, "Keep movin' there. Keep movin'." And all these baneful influences may be summoned and set in action by another, but worse than all of them, known as the Gerry Society. This tyrant denies the parent's right in his own child, forbids him to allow a minor to work in sweatshop, store, or even on the stage, and enforces these commands, even to the extreme of removing the child altogether and putting it in an inst.i.tution.

In sharp contrast to all these ogres, the board of education shines benignant and bland. Here is power making itself manifest in the form of young ladies, kindly of eye and speech, who take a sweet and friendly interest in the children and all that concerns them. Woman meets woman and no policeman interferes. The little ones are cared for, instructed, kept out of mischief for five hours a day, taught the language and customs of the country in which they are to make their living or their fortunes; and generally, though the board of education does not insist upon it, they are cherished and watched over. Doctors attend them, nurses wait upon them, dentists torture them, oculists test them.

Friendships frequently spring up between parent and teacher, and it often lies in the power of the latter to be of service by giving either advice or more substantial aid. At Mothers' meetings the cultivation of tolerance still goes on. There, women of widely different cla.s.s and nationality, meet on the common ground of their children's welfare. Then there are roof gardens, recreation piers and parks, barges and excursions, all designed to help the poorer part of the city's population--without regard to creed or nationality--to bear and to help their children to bear the killing heat of summer. So Jew and Gentile, black and white, commingle; and gradually old hostilities are forgotten or corrected. The board of education provides night schools for adults and free lectures upon every conceivable interesting topic, including the history and geography and natural history of distant lands.

Travelers always draw large audiences to their lectures.

The children soon learn to read well enough to translate the American papers and there are always newspapers in the different vernaculars, so that the emigrant soon becomes interested not only in the news of his own country, but in the mult.i.tudinous topics which go to make up American life. He soon grasps at least the outlines of politics, national and international, and before he can speak English he will address an audience of his fellow countrymen on "Our Glorious American Inst.i.tutions."

It is not only the emigrant parent who profits by the work of the public school. The American parent also finds himself, or generally herself, brought into friendly contact with the foreign teachers and the foreign friends of her children. The New York public school system culminates in the Normal College, which trains women as teachers, and the College of the City of New York, which offers courses to young men in the profession of law, engineering, teaching, and, besides, a course in business training. The commencement at these inst.i.tutions brings strangely contrasted parents together in a common interest and a common pride. The students seem much like one another, but the parents are so widely dissimilar as to make the similarity of their offspring an amazing fact for contemplation. Mothers with shawls over their heads and work-distorted hands sit beside mothers in Parisian costumes, and the silk-clad woman is generally clever enough to appreciate and to admire the spirit which strengthened her weary neighbor through all the years of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter. The feeling of inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good. It will certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and conditions unknown to her. It will also utterly do away with many of her prejudices against the foreigner and it will make the "Let them eat cake" att.i.tude impossible.

And so the child, the parent, the teacher and the home-staying relative are brought to feel their kinship with all the world through the agency of the public school, but the teacher learns the lesson most fully, most consciously. The value to the cause of peace and good-will in the community of an army of thousands of educated men and women holding views such as these cannot easily be over-estimated. The teachers, too, are often aliens and nearly always of a race different from their pupils, yet you will rarely meet a teacher who is not delighted with her charges.

"Do come," they always say, "and see my little Italians, or Irish, or German, or picaninnies; they are the sweetest little things," or, if they be teachers of a higher grade, "They are the cleverest and the most charming children." They are all clever in their different ways, and they are all charming to those who know them, and the work of the public school is to make this charm and cleverness appreciated, so that race misunderstandings in the adult populations may grow fewer and fewer.

The only dissatisfied teacher I ever encountered was a girl of old Knickerbocker blood, who was considered by her relatives to be too fragile and refined to teach any children except the darlings of the upper West side, where some of the rich are democratic enough to patronize the public school. From what we heard of her experiences, "patronize" is quite the proper word to use in this connection. A group of us, cla.s.smates, had been comparing notes and asked her from what country her charges came. "Oh, they are just kids," she answered dejectedly, "ordinary every-day kids, with Dutch cut hair, Russian blouses, belts at the knee line, sandals, and nurses to convey them to and from school. You never saw anything so tiresome."

It grew finally so tiresome that she applied for a transfer, and took the Knickerbocker spirit down to the Jewish quarter, where it gladdened the young Jacobs, Rachaels, Isadors and Rebeccas entrusted to her care.

Her place among the nursery pets was taken by a dark-eyed Russian girl, who found the uptown babies, the despised "just kids," as entertaining, as lovable, and as instructive as the Knickerbocker girl found the Jews.

Well, and so they are all of them, lovable, entertaining and instructive, and the man or woman who goes among them with an open heart and eye will find much material for thought and humility, and one function of the public school is to promote this understanding and appreciation. It has done wonders in the past, and every year finds it better equipped for its work of amalgamation. The making of an American citizen is its stated function, but its graduates will be citizens not only of America. In sympathy, at least, they will be citizens of the world.

FINIS