Part 16 (1/2)

A TRULY ”RAGGED SCHOOL.”

It is remarkable that the School which is most of a ”Ragged School,” of all these, is in one of the former fas.h.i.+onable quarters of the city. The quaint, pleasing old square called St John's Park is now occupied as a freight depot, and the handsome residences bordering it have become tenement-houses. Between the grand freight station and the river, overlooked by the statue of the millionaire, are divers little lanes and alleys, filled with a wretched population.

Their children are gathered into this School. An up-hill work the teachers have had of it thus far, owing to the extreme poverty and misery of the parents, and the little aid received from the fortunate cla.s.ses.

FOURTEENTH WARD SCHOOL.

This is a large and useful charity, and is guided by two sisters of great elevation of purpose and earnestness of character, who are known as ”Friends of the Poor” in all that quarter.

THE COLORED SCHOOL.

Here gather great numbers of dest.i.tute colored children of the city.

Some are rough boys and young men, who are admirably controlled by a most gentle lady, who is Princ.i.p.al; her a.s.sistant was fittingly prepared for the work by teaching among the freedmen.

The colored people of the city seldom fall into such helpless poverty as the foreign whites; still there is a good deal of dest.i.tution and exposure to temptation among them. The children seem to learn as readily as whites, though they are afflicted with a more sullen temper, and require to be managed more delicately--praise and ridicule being indispensable implements for the teacher. Their singing far surpa.s.ses that of our other scholars.

Among our other schools is a most useful one for a peculiarly wild cla.s.s, in the Rivington-street Lodging-house; one in West Fifty-third and in West Fifty-second Streets, and a very large and well-conducted one for the shanty population near the Park, called

THE PARK SCHOOL.

A very spirited teacher here manages numbers of wild boys and ungoverned girls. The most interesting feature is a Night-school, where pupils come, some from a mile distant, having labored in factories or street-trades all day long--sometimes even giving up their suppers for the sake of the lessons, with a hunger for knowledge which the children of the favored cla.s.ses know little of. Two other Schools shall conclude our catalogue--one in the House of Industry (West Sixteenth Street), and the other in the Eighteenth-street Lodging-house. Both Schools are struggling with great obstacles and difficulties, as they are planted in the quarter which has produced the notorious ”Nineteenth-street Gang.”

The teacher in the latter has already overcome most of them, and has tamed as wild a set of little street-barbarians as ever plagued a school-teacher.

A rigid rule has been laid down and followed out in these Schools--that is, not to admit or retain pupils who might be in the Public Schools.

Our object is to supplement these useful public inst.i.tutions, and we are continually sending the children forth, when they seem fit, to take places in the Free Schools. Many, however, are always too poor, ragged and necessarily irregular in attendance, to be adapted to the more systematic and respectable places of instruction. As been already mentioned, the plan has been steadily pursued from the beginning by the writer, to make these as good Primary Schools as under the circ.u.mstances they were capable of becoming. The grade of the teachers has been constantly raised, and many of the graduates of our best training academy for teachers in New York State--the Oswego Normal School--have been secured at remunerative salaries.

Within the last four years, also, a new officer has been appointed by the Board of Trustees, to constantly examine the schools and teachers, keep them at the highest grade possible, and visit the families of the children. This place has been ably filled by an intelligent and educated gentleman, Mr. John W. Skinner, with the best effects on our system of instruction.

Our plan of visitation among the families of the poor, whereby the helping hand is held out to juvenile poverty and ignorance all the while, has been effectually carried out by a very earnest worker, Mr. M.

Dupuy, in the lower wards, and by a young German-American of much judgment and zeal, Mr. Holste, in the German quarter, and by quite a number of female visitors.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”PLEASE SIR, MAY I HAVE A BED?” (A sketch from life.) NO.

1.]

CHAPTER XIX.

THE BEST REMEDY FOR JUVENILE PAUPERISM.

”Ameliorer l'homme par le terre et la terre par l'homme.” DEMETZ

Among the lowest poor of New York, as we stated in a previous chapter, the influence of _overcrowding_ has been incredibly debasing. When we find half a dozen families--as we frequently do--occupying one room, the old and young, men and women, boys and girls of all ages sleeping near each other, the result is inevitable. The older persons commit unnatural crimes; the younger grow up with hardly a sense of personal dignity or purity; the girls are corrupted even in childhood; and the boys become naturally thieves, vagrants, and vicious characters. Such apartments are at once ”fever-nests” and seminaries of vice. The inmates are weakened and diseased physically, and degraded spiritually. Where these houses abound, as formerly in the Five Points, or now in the First Ward, or near Corlear's Hook, or in the Seventeenth Ward near the Tenth Avenue, there is gradually formed a hideous society of vice and pauperism. The men are idle and drunken, the women lazy, quarrelsome, and given to begging; the children see nothing but examples of drunkenness, l.u.s.t, and idleness, and they grow up inevitably as sharpers, beggars, thieves, burglars, and prost.i.tutes. Amid such communities of outcasts the inst.i.tutions of education and religion are comparatively powerless. What is done for the children on one sacred day is wiped out by the influence of the week, and even daily instruction has immense difficulty in counteracting the lessons of home and parents.

For such children of the outcast poor, a more radical cure is needed than the usual influences of school and church.

The same obstacle also appeared soon with the homeless lads and girls who were taken into the Lodging-houses. Though without a home, they were often not legally vagrant--that is, they had some ostensible occupation, some street-trade--and no judge would commit them, unless a very flagrant case of vagrancy was made out against them. They were unwilling to be sent to Asylums, and, indeed, were so numerous that all the Asylums of the State could not contain them. Moreover, their care and charge in public inst.i.tutions would have entailed expenses on the city so heavy, that tax-payers would not have consented to the burden.

The workers, also, in this movement felt from the beginning that ”asylum-life” is not the best training to outcast children in preparing them for practical life. In large buildings, where a mult.i.tude of children are gathered together, the bad corrupt the good, and the good are not educated in the virtues of real life. The machinery, too, which is so necessary in such large inst.i.tutions, unfits a poor boy or girl for practical handwork.