The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, June 19, 1904, Page 15

News and Press Exchange.) s younger, reading novel used to I find it vexes I was talking to the subject, te the girl in she conf “She makes eal bad. 1f 1 don't think of her myself, and good; her—well, I'm mind her being e can all of us say and then. This away, all the dig for them, g out of her. s a time when she like a fool and it. As for her there are days eased witk never happer feeling ghe 100! my word, g lieve it Is a wi I'd like to get behin ust one pull. It curls of its own acc She don’t seem to have any trouble with it. Look =t this mop of mine. I've been work- g &t it for three-quarters of an hour morning; and now I would not not If you were to tell me the ing you ever heard. for fear would come down again. As for her clothes, they make me tired. She don’t ss & frock that does not fit her to ction; she doesn’'t have to think them. You would imagine she it into the garden and picked them off a tree. She just slips it on and comes down, and then my stars! All the other women in the room may Just as well go to bed and get a good night's rest for all the chance they've got. It isn’t that she’s beautiful. From what they tell you about her, you might fancy her a freak. Looks don't appear to matter to her; she gets there anyhow. I tell you, she just makes me bofl.” Allowing for the difference be- tween the masculine and the feminine outlook, this is precisely how I used to feel when reading of the hero. He was not always good; sometimes he hit the villain harder than he had intended, and then he was sorry—when it was too late—bla; himself severe- . and subscribed toward the wreat Like the rest of us he made mistak: occasionally married the wrong girl But how well he did everything!—does still for the matter of that, I believe. Take It that he condescends to play cricket! He never scores less than a hundred—does not know how to score less than a hundred, wonders how it could be done, supposing, for example, you had an appointment and wanted to catch an early train. I used to play cricket myself, but I could always stop at ten or twenty. There have been times when I have stopped at even less. It Is the same with everything he puts his hand to. Either he does not care for boating at all, or, as a matter of course, he-pulls stroke in the university boat race; and then takes the train on to Henley and wins the Schools* N view of the fact that our new ompulsory educatibn law is in ef- and that action has been taken by the school authorities to establish in San Francisco a spe- 1 glassroom for defective children, ch shall include truants, it is op- ne that we should Inform our- sclves upon what has been accom- plished in other cities for the care of the habitual truant and that we should perfectly understand the situa- n our own city and the great principle for which the parental school should stand. t is & well recognized fact that ig- e is cne of the chief causes of —ignorance of books and igno- ce of & trade. he four great cardinal institutions of education are the family, the voca~ on, the state and the church. The ideal parental school give to every boy that training ness, care of the respectful tre superiors, obedience to au- respect for truth and honesty, should in shing instruct and pave the way for professions. It h patriotism, supply mili- & and the study of mu- al and self government to fit the to become a member of the staté, and it should supplement the work of the church by laying the foundations of his moral character and a sense of human duty. It is safe to say that our one great cause of truancy is our plan of edu- cation. It falls to interest. hoid and develop the child as it should, with its mechanical massing of children, uniformity of curriculum and method. Our social life has undergone a thor- ough and radical change and our edu- cation must pass through an equally complete transformation. OQur system in the past has tended too much toward the making of clerks, when what the world needs is young men who have a practical Enowledge of arts and crafts, one who has been taught in a workshop to ovork out his constructive instincts. ‘rhe school must give to the rising generation a knowledge that will fit him for citizenship. If a school is to make moral, law-abiding citizens of boys it must teach them to do an hon. chid - est day's work upon every working day. In life almost every one has a calling or occupation, something to do, and until the school for the masses has for its chief aim the cultivation of the instincts of construction and pro- duction, the education of the children of the tollers, who comprise the greater part of our population, will be a failure. The university should stand as an open door to all who have the ambi- tion and capacity for higher learning, but we must not leave those whe are not prepared to recelve this higher education in ldleness, to be a menace to the state in after life. Experience has shown that the establishment of free schools is not enough, but a law of compulsion has been Inevitable. Truancy and idleness have always been problems which all educators have had to face, and ever since the establishment in New York in 1805 of the first public schools authorities have had before them the problem of truancy. The first truant law in the United States was passed in Massa- chusetts in 1850 and the people of California have the experience of other States for over fifty years from which to draw conclusions. Children who have been gullty of no greater sin than disliking the usual curriculum of the school have been .confined In prisoners, almshouses, reform schools and asylums, and it s fortunate for the San Francisco truant that no such experiments will have to be tried on him since Eastern cities have demon- strated to the present generation the possibilities of the modern parental school. There are two types of truant or*® parental schools throughout the United States. One is the ungraded day school and the other is the parental boarding school, by far the most suc- cessful being the latter. These institu- tions are conducted on the cottage plan, where boys are grouped together in families. The plan has been to de- velop an institution that wil} surround the inmates with an atmosphere that will wean them away from baser ten- dencies, to place them in an ideal home where they may learn by social converse more ‘than from books. these families of boys statements are made, Inquiries arise, topics are dis- cussed, individuals are unconsciously led to state experiences and miscon- ceptions are corrected. Each one par- THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALILL —_— ticipates in household duties. Thus habits of Industry and order are formed, regard for the rights of others is insisted upon and an opportunity is gl\fn in many indirect ways for the hild to gain knowledge. In many cases the truant who has had the good fortune, it may be called, to be com- mitted to one of these schools has much more interesting and instructive training than the average public school pupil, and it has been proven without doubt that a radlcal transfor- mation has resulted in the lives of hundreds of city boys who took their first step in moral and physical de- struction when they became truants. It has been demonstrated that it is easier to furnish an occasional farm plat than to maintain reformatoriés and prisons, and statistics show that life in workshop, garden, fleld and forest is the life that appeals to the average truant and that almost with- out exception he becomes an honered member of soclety. Now as to what has actually been done in the REastern cities, The cities having only the ungraded classes are New Haven, which main- tains five, Bay City, Detroit and Grand Rapids, in Michigan, each maintaining one; Albany and Binghamton, N. Y., each one; Cleveland, two; Alleghany, one; Philadeiphia, two, and Providence, Rhode Island, seven. Parental boarding schools have been established In Chicago, Boston, Goshen, Lawrence, North Chelmsf, Spring- field, Walpole, Worcester, Mass., and in Buffalo, N. Y., New York City, Rochester and Syracuse. Some citles like Chicago and New York City, Including Brooklyn, 'main- tain both types of truant schools. Some of these cities have had an experience of nine years in which many mistakes as well as fallures have been made. ‘We will first consider the day truant schools. In most places a policeman acts as truant officer, which is a great mistake, as it {s most important that anl: men of education and training and rare tact and judgment should fill so important a position. In many places the sentence is for & certain term of weeks, when it Is far better to have the period of detention indeterminate, and pupils should be transferred to their former classrooms only when the teacher feels assured that no further offenses will be com- mitted. The New Haven school was organized in 1871 and now has five classes; one for truants and incorrigibles, three for children who do not speak English and one for all these classes. In 1899, 585 cases of truancy were reported and 17 boys from these classes were sent to the reform school, there being no par- ental boarding school. The cost of maintaining the truant classrooms at Bay City {s but $600 a vear, this being the salary of the prin- cipal of the building, who acts as teacher. The City Superintendent re- ports that this class has had a strong deterrent effect on truancy. The un- graded school at Detroit has done val- uable work in its time, but now the wisdom of its very existence as an un- graded school has been called into question. A bullding was especially erected for it and first occuplied in 1890, but this was abandoned, as there was but one school to serve an area of thirty square miles and it was too re- mote to return truants to school the same day they were reported. One more central room is now maintained. Nine policemen act as truant officers. The truant school of Grand Rapids is in a fifteen-roomed grammar school and Is dgcidedly objectionable—truants and Incol bles are in classes together and there is no way of separating them from the regular pupils. Teachers are paid $600 @ year and the average num- ber of puplls in the school is 33, Philadelphia has the largest day tru- ant schools in America. The city has been divided into thirty districts and has twenty-eight attendance officers. In 1902 1452 truants were returned to gchool. There' are five ungraded schools, the ‘principals receiving $300 a year and assistants each $600. An appropriation of $37,600 was made of the ost success boarding-school type we must look to diamond sculls so easlly that it hardly scems worth while for the other fellow to have ‘started. Were I living In Novel-land, and had I entered for the diamond sculls, ‘I should put it to my opponent before the word was given to us to go: “One minute’” I should have called out to him, *“‘Are you the hero of this novel or, like myself, only ~** one of the minor characters. Because, if you are the hero you go on; don’t you wait for me. I shall just pull as far as the boathouse and get myself a cup of tea.” There is no sense of happy me- dium about the hera of the popular novel. He cannot get astride a horse without itd going off winnipg a steeple chase agalnst the favorite. The crowd 2in Novel-land dppears to have no power of observation. It worries Itself about the odds, discusses, records, reads the nonsense. published by the sporting papers. At billlards he can give the average sharper forty in a hundred. He does not really want to play; he does it to teach these bad men a lesson. He has not handled a cue for years. He picked up the game when a young man in Australia and it seems to have lingerea with him. He does not have to get up early and worry dumbbells in his nightshirt; he just lles on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle comes to him. That Is the sort of a. boy he is. How I ysed to hate him! If he has a proper sort of father, then he goes to college. He does not work; there Is no need for THOUSIND ZPOTAND.S . - - - him to work; everything seems to come to him! That was another griev- ance of mine against him. I always had to work a great deal, and very little came of it. He fools around doing things that other men would be “sent down” for: but in his case the professors love him for it all the more. He is the sort of man that can't do wrong. A fortnight before the exam- ination he ties a wet towel round his head. That is all we hear about it It seems to be the towel that does it. Maybe, if the towel is not quite up to its work, he will help things on by drinking gallons of strong tea. The tea and the towel combined are ir- resistible; the result is always the senior wranglership. I used to believe in that wet towel and that strong tea. Lord! the things I used to believe when I was young. They would make an encyclopaedia of useless knowl- edge. \ I wonder if the author of the popular novel has ever tried work with a wet towel round his or her head. I have. It is difficult enough to move a yard balancing a dry towel. A heathen Turk may have it in his blood to do so: the ordinary Christian has not got the trick of it. To carry about a wet towel round one’s head needs a trained acrobat. Every few minutes the wretched thing works loose. In darkness and in misery you struggle to get your head out of a clammy towel that clings to you al- most with passion. You return to your books in the wrong temper; the water trickles down your nose, runs in little rivulets down your back. Until you have finally flung the towel out of window and rubbed yourself dry, work is impossible. The strong tea always gave me indigestion and made me sleepy. Until I had got over the effects of the tea, attempts at study were useless. -But the thing that still irritates me most against the hero of the popular novel is the ease with which he learns a foreign language. ‘Were he a German walter, a Swiss bar- (g o ber, or a Polish photographer, I would not envy him. These sort of people do not have to learn a language. My idea is that they boil down a dic- tionary and take two tablespoonfuls each night before going to bed. By the time the bottle is finished they have the language well into their system. But he is not. He is just an ordinary Anglo-Saxon, and I don't believe in him. I walk about for years with dic- tionaries in my pocket. Weird-looking ladies and gentlemen gesticulate and rave at me for months. I hide myself in ly places, repeating idioms to myself out loud, in the hope that by this means they will come readily to me if I ever want them. which I never do. After all this, I don’t seem to know very much. This irritating ass, who has never left his native suburb, sud- denly makes up his mind to travel on the Continent. I find him in the next chapter engaged In complicated psy- chological argument with Fremch or German savants. It appears—the au- thor had forgot to mention it before— that one summer a French, or Ger- men, or Itallan refugee, as the case may happen to be, came to live in the hero’s street; thus it is that the hero is able to talk fluently in the native language of that unhappy refugee. I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying. The herolne and the child were sleeping peacefully in the customary attic. For some reason not quite clear to me the villain had set to the house. He had been complaining through the three preceding acts of the heroine's coldness; maybe it was with some idea of warning her. Escape by way of the staircase was tmpossi- ble. Each time the poor girl ed the door a flame came in and burned her hair off. It seemed to hawe been waiting for her. “Thank Ged!” sald the lady hastily, wrapping the child in a sheet, “that I was brought & wire- walker.” Without a mo: 8 hesita- tion she opened the attic window and toock the nearest telegraph wire to the opposite side of the street. In the same way, apparently, the hero of the popu- lar novel, finding himself mmmn a foreign land, suddenly recollects that once upon a time he met a refugee, and at once begins to talk. I have met refugees myself; the omly thing that they have ever taught me is not to leave my brandy flask about. I don't belleve in these herces and heroines that cannot keep quiet In & foreign language they taught the: in an old-world library. My fixed idea is that they muddle along like the rest of us, surprised that so few people under- stand them, and begging every one they meet not to talk so quickly. These brilliant conversations with foreign philosophers! These passionate inter- views with foreign countesses; they fancy they have had them, I crossed once with an English lady from Boulogne to Folkstone. At Folkstone a little French girl—anxious about her train—asked us a simple question. My companion replied to it with an ease that astonished herself. The little French girl vanished; my companion sighed. “It's so o0dd,” sald my com- panion, “but I seem to know quite a lot of French the moment I get back to England.” -_ = Copy of Paper Read by Hatherine Heath Angelo Before the California Club Civic Day Programme, POy T D el R Chicago, where the most effectual work has been accomplished. This school was opened in 1902. It is located in one of.the suburbs, on a fifty-acre tract of land, of which thirty acres are cul- tivated as a garden and twenty acres are used as building sites and play- grounds. A large reservolr for water supply has been bullt, which serves as a skating pond in wilter for the boys and from which hundreds of tons of ice are cut. The school is organ- ized on the cottage plan, which, when completed, will consist of eleven cot- tages. 5 The number of employes last year was 25. The number of boys received during the year was 191. The inmates are given, as nearly as possible, the course of study of the Chicago schools, besides manual training, domestic sci- ence, gardening, laundry work, gym- nastics and military exercises. The re- ceipts In 1902 were: First appropriation, $40,000; cash from m, $512; sale of clothing to boys, $556; milk from cows, 3600; vegetables used in kitchen, $250; provender fed to stock, $50; vegetables stored for winter use, $332; second ap- propriation, $12,963. Total, $35,254. The expenditure was $53,549. The average daily attendance being $7, made the per capita cost of main- taining the school $8 34 per week. This was considered a high rate, but the school ‘was equipped for the main- tenance of 200 boys, and under simi- lar circumstances the cost of maintain- ing each boy would be but $5 30. No walls, bars or bolts or any other prison features are on the prem- ises. The boys know that it is useless to attempt to escape, for the truant officers would immediately bring them back to the school. Most encouraging reports are recejved from paroled pu- pils, and no account is given of where it has been necessary to commit one of the inmates to a reform school. The garental school of Boston I8 managed almost entirely by the Board of Trustees for Children, the 8School ‘Board having jurisdiction only over the instruction given therein. There are twenty-seven and fronts on the River. buildings consist of a laundry, kitchen May 17. and boller house, an ice house, two cot- tages, farm house, hospital and super- intendent’s home. The course of study is similar to that of Boston, besides sloyd and clay modeling. About half of the boys are employed in the boller house, barn and laundry. Others are engaged in gardening, rak- ing and clearing up, mowing the lawn in summer and shovellng paths in win- ter. f The average dally attendance in 1838 was 171. The average time of deten- tion of each pupil was about twelve months. The ‘expenses in the same year were $29,293, the average expense per week per child being $3 25. The experiments in the city of New Yark do not seem to have been at- tended with the same degree of suc- cess as In other cities. In 1800 the thirty-one attendance officers of New York returned to school 7000 children, 4500 being picked up on the street. New York has two boarding schools, one in a four-story brick building and the other is on a plat of fifteen acres in a suburban district. These schools are found inadequate to the care of the number committed and a desire has been expressed for accommodations for three hundred boys. In the New York school special attemtion is paid to miflitary drill and music. Superin- tendent Maxwell, In his report, says: “Improvement in reading, writing and arithmetic invariably follows cy in military drill, manusl exercise and music. The very idea that he is acquiring a knowledge and a power which most boys do not possess raises him in his own respect and makes him desire the other accomplishments that usually belong to & worthy member of soclety.” ty. This training is certainly of greatest value, for out of thirty-seven boys who ‘were sent back to the public school from the truant school twenty.nine kept the grade of excellent for ten weeks and only two were returned to the school for a second term. Great care is made In the commit- ment of boys. Out of 150 cases brought up, only 30 commitments were made. In Indiana the State Truancy Board states that 25,025 children, in 1900-1901, ‘were brought into the school, at a cost of $27,885. San Francisco, too, has tried its ex- pefiment in the establishment of a school for the reformation of refrac- tory boys. In 1372, through the efforts of Mr. Denman, two classes were form- ed in the basement of a church on Washington street and nearly 250 pu- pils were transferred to them during the year. Mr. Denman’s term of of- fice expired and on account of imper- fect crganization and suj on these classes were a failure. then the law has been revised and S8an Francis- co must in the near future waks up to a realization of what her duty is to the youth within her territory. A campaign to awaken publip inter- est is the first thing pecessary and a sentiment in favor of the movement will surely be created when the peo- ple are made aware of the facts The one question of finance is at the bottom of most educational problems, but this problem has been solved else- ‘whers, and will be here, as soon as the sclution is demanded by the people. California should have a State tru- ancy board. Our city Board of Educa~ tion should be supplemented by a bu- reau of compulsory education, whose executive officer should be the super- intendent of compulsory education. Then we might hope to_have our city properly districted and a sufficient number of attendance officers appoint- ‘When this much can be accomplished then an ideal parental school, such as 1s the pride of Chi perintendent Langdon this year in- cluded In his estimats for school ex- penses an appropriation for a special class in San Francisco and this is a step In the right direction, but we have seen that the experience of other citles has shown that truants should be placed in classes by themselves, and that the only satisfactory solution of the truant problem has been in the ideal parental boarding school and San Franciseo should be satisfled with noth- ing less than the best. If the law as it now reads Is enforced it will be a powerful child saving influence in our community. The number of cases brought before the juvenile court would be lessened and go doubt the number committed to the reform schools would greatly diminish. This is a step toward the formation of character and habit, which Is much more economical and desirable than to delay and make nec- essary the work of reformation.