CHAPTER III

WHERE THE SCHOOL LAW FAILED

At five or six years of age, the girl starts to school; between fourteen and sixteen, she leaves school for good and goes to work. The eight or nine years which lie between make up the full period of her formal education. She must acquire during these years of compulsory school attendance all the “learning” which the law of the state fixes as a minimum for its workers.

She has a wide choice of schools. Between Thirty-eighth and Forty-third Streets are the buildings of four different systems. The public schools, the parochial schools, the Children’s Aid Society school, and the American Female Guardian Society school are all waiting with open arms to receive her. Often she is simply sent to the nearest school building. To cross the crowded avenues is more or less hazardous for a six-year-old. Or, she is taken by an older child to the school attended by her protector. In this case, it is “Mary’s school” that is chosen, and the various systems mentioned have nothing to do with the decision. Sometimes, however, one of them is chosen by the parents because of its particular specialty. The church school teaches “prayers,” the “soup” school, as the Children’s Aid Society is called in the neighborhood, gives a free lunch and shoes and warm red petticoats. The children of the poorest poor are likely to go there. The public schools are in general considered best for “learning.”

After the original choice has been made, neither parents nor child feel bound to stick to it. A great deal of shifting about takes place, only a small part of which is necessary. Some of the local schools carry their pupils only through the primary classes and must then transfer their small graduates to another building and another street to enter the grammar grades. For many reasons, this single change may be wise, but very often it is only the beginning of a succession of transfers. The break is an occasion to try out two or three new places before settling down. In the meantime, the little wanderer goes through a period of unsettled plans, and incidentally loses considerable time from her lessons.

A free choice of schools and a free use of the transfer are the chief concessions made by the compulsory school law to parental authority. As a matter of fact, it is not always parental authority which transfers little Mamie from school to school, but the child’s own flitting, aimless spirit. In the middle of a term, for almost any cause, she is likely to drop out of her class and claim the right to transfer. A quarrel with a schoolmate, a friend in another school, a dispute with the teacher,--these are the sort of trivial reasons which result in sudden transfers.

Our girls had made the most of their transfer privileges. One of them had attended nine different schools on the West Side; another had attended eight; two had attended seven; one had attended six; two had attended five; and four had attended four; 16 had attended three; 21 had attended two; and only eight had continued throughout in the same school. There were five girls who had come from institutions, and four whose school careers were unknown.

These interruptions mean a serious waste from the girl’s meager allowance of time for schooling. She passes at each shift to a new set of teachers who know nothing of her record and tendencies. Frequently she is put back a grade. She resents this, grows discouraged, and perhaps loses interest. Besides, so much ease in changing weakens the school’s authority. It is, however, a safeguard against the rigidity of a single autocratic system. It gives some room for experiment with a difficult child, until the régime and the teacher with whom she will fit may be found. A restriction of the transfer would certainly be a blow to the truant officer’s method of dealing with girls. At present it constitutes his one suggestion, his only “golden cure.”

The girl’s schooling begins to suffer as soon as there is any especial need for assistance at home.[78] Two or three days are dropped repeatedly. Wage-earning sisters cannot stop at home to nurse an invalid or care for younger children while the mother works. When a new baby comes, it is the oldest school girl who carries the extra burden of work. Even the most devoted mothers make these encroachments on the time which belongs to the school. They are driven to it by necessity. “What can I do? There ain’t nobody else and I’ve got to keep Mamie t’ help.”

When Mrs. Kersey went to the hospital, it was “Baby,” the eleven-year-old daughter, who was kept out of school to do the work, and not her older sister employed in a factory. “You ought t’ ’a’ seen how Baby run our house,”--her wage-earning sister was giving the account. “Gee, but she was that strict, _believe me_. I couldn’t have a cent o’ my money. No shows them days fer mine. She cried if me father didn’t give ’er his pay an’ she made him, too. She’d give him his quarter fer shavin’ money, but not a cent more. An’ she bought everythin’ an’ run things herself. Me mother was away sick fer nine months. Baby, she’s an awful good girl.”

Emma Larkey, having at last struggled up to Class 5B, had just dropped out of school for good. She was normal in body and mind. She should have been in the graduating class. Why wasn’t she? In the first place, she had changed schools eight times since her start, wandering indifferently from public to parochial school and then back again. In the second place, there were five younger children and she was constantly being kept at home. The mother patched grain sacks in order to pay rent for a well lighted apartment of five rooms. “There are nine of us, and if I don’t work, we’d have to crowd up an’ sleep in those black stuffy bedrooms. I can’t bear for the children to do that.” Decent living quarters and fresh air for the whole family seemed more important than Emma’s schooling. Something must give way under such pressure and so it was Emma who went down. She had braced her young shoulders to tasks more difficult than school lessons and had lost all desire to finish the grammar grades by the time the second girl was old enough to relieve her at home.

The result of so much absence was seen in the great retardation among our girls. Thirteen to fifteen is regarded as the normal age for graduation,[79] and by this standard only 10 of our 65 girls were in the normal grade. All the rest were “laggards.” There were, for instance, 35 girls who were fourteen years old, the normal age for graduation. Some of them had gone to work, while others were still in school. The grades they had left or were still attending are shown in the following distribution: Two had reached the 3B grade; four, 4A; three, 4B; one, 5A; four, 5B; four, 6A; four, 6B; five, 7A; three, 7B; and four, 8A. One girl had been in an institution. The girls are thus seen to have been distributed almost impartially from the third to the eighth grade. There was for them practically no relation between age and grade.

An occasional girl is defiantly truant. Her refusal to fit into the school system marks a deeper vein of rebellion than in the case of the boy, who more commonly slips the leading strings. Or else it marks an undeveloped body and spirit in dealing with which the usual forcible methods of combating truancy are often ineffectual.

Annie Gibson was a slim, undersized girl of fifteen. Her light, almost colorless hair hung down around small, undeveloped features, strikingly vacant and weak. Her teeth, very small and deeply set, might have been the milk teeth of a well-developed baby. Surrounded by a cover of reticence and a surface of embarrassment, her real thoughts were impossible to discover. She would agree to anything but would seldom volunteer an opinion of her own.

In school she was a passive pupil, never “giving trouble” but learning little, and her attendance record was very low. In time she furnished-one of the most stubborn cases of truancy in the school and the truant officer was sent after her. He found her at home alone, the girl’s mother being away at her regular work as chambermaid in a hotel. As the officer laid his hand on her arm to take her back to school, the child’s passivity suddenly broke and she flung herself on the floor, screaming. The man retreated in consternation, fearful that he might be accused of having physically mishandled the child, while Annie was left to recover from her hysterical outbreak as well as she could. This is only one instance of the futility of applying our present method of dealing with truancy to these exceptional cases. This child was primarily in need of careful mental and physical examination and probably of special training which could only be defined after such an examination had been made.

When the difficulty rests with the girl there is no course between threats and a sentence of great severity. The parent may be fined, but then the punishment does not fall on the child. If she is sent away it must be to a reformatory, not to a school. Let us see how these methods would work applied to Christina Cull, another of our girls who was a stubborn truant. At fourteen, she had reached Class 4A. She had not “made her days”; that is, attended school for 130 days during the year prior to her fourteenth birthday. Nor had she gone far enough in her classes to get her working papers. But Christina refused to pass the doorway of a school. She had gone far beyond the influence of the ordinary school.

Five years before, one of the Catholic fathers had found her loitering in the rear of his church. It was soon after Christmas and he stopped to ask about her holiday. She answered shortly that she had had neither presents nor a good time. His interest in the pathetic, sullen child took him later to her home. The family was squalidly poor. They lived in three dark basement rooms, without comfort or decency. The father, after four years of desertion, had returned home in the final stage of tuberculosis to be cared for until his death.

Christina had grown into a forbidding girl. Her face was so lined and so hard that she looked years older than she was. The childlike effect of her flowing hair and long bangs contrasted oddly with the age and hardness of her features. She might almost have been a middle-aged woman masquerading as a little girl. The truant officer went after her time and again, only to listen to the mother’s repeated complaint. Christina was “out from under” her; she went where she listed. Threats were long since outworn and useless. She had heard them from babyhood. “Aw--they talk but they won’t do nothin’.” Occasionally she would grow frightened and penitent for the moment. But re-enter the ordinary school and sit in the classes with the younger children, she would not.

No course was left but to take the culprit before the superintendent and enter a formal complaint against her. There would then be two plans of action which might be followed: Christina’s mother--her father had died in the meantime--might be fined in the magistrate’s court or Christina might be committed to a reformatory. To fine the mother of a family already on the verge of dependency was manifestly futile. On the other hand, a reformatory sentence for a girl whose only offense was that she refused to go to school seemed much too severe. In the face of this dilemma no action at all was taken. Christina, without working papers, without work, was left to employ her illegal holidays in her own way. Her only chance for positive discipline was that she might soon become a serious offender for whom a reformatory sentence might not be too severe. For girls like Christina the only remedy seems to be that they shall grow worse before they can grow better. Such a roundabout and wasteful course might be obviated if we had a truant school for girls, as we already have for boys, especially planned for their needs.

It is a common occurrence for a girl to escape from school at thirteen or fourteen without open defiance of the labor law. Of our 65 girls, at least nine had left school illegally. Their escape was accomplished by petty frauds of various kinds. One girl gave the school a false address; another altered the date on her birth certificate. Two had been absent for illness and had never returned. Others simply “dropped out” and their defection was not followed up by the school, which with its limited number of attendance officers is bound to neglect many such cases. These are some of the usual loopholes by which the girl evades the school law.

The young refugee does not always find it easy to get her working papers at once. The required record of 130 days’ attendance during the previous year is a serious stumbling block, although it allows for 70 absences out of a possible 200 attendances. In the public schools she has to reach a 5B grade[80] and pass an educational test before the school papers which she must present at the board of health are signed. There the mental test is simpler--a mere proof of ability to read and write. She is tested on two or three primer sentences, such as, “Is my mother in this room?” She is then weighed and measured; and occasionally a child much under average is rejected. Failing in any of the requirements, the girl must wait until she is sixteen, when she may legally go to work without papers. In the meantime she helps at home, or “lives out,” or finds an employer who is willing to connive at her lack of working papers.

These are the girls who evade the law. Those who are obedient to its requirements are scarcely less eager to escape. Almost without exception, the girls of our district step eagerly forth from the school at the earliest possible moment. Not a girl of our clubs had stayed in school longer than the law required or long enough to “graduate” from the eighth grade. To continue in school after you can get your working papers is a sign of over-education and is not popular.

In thus leaving school as soon as the law allows, family need very often plays a part. Sometimes the younger girl has begun to lend a hand during vacations. The Donovans tell how “Sissy” got a job at eleven. It was the summer when both parents were ill and out of work. They still chuckle with appreciation of Sissy’s enterprise. “You’d ought to ha’ seen her. She let down her skirts and done up her hair. She was just a bit o’ a thing--not twelve then. She come out one mornin’ an’ said, ‘Ma, I’m goin’ to go to work’s well as Mame.’ We laughed at ’er but she set out. So that day she come back an’ sure enough she’d got a job in a chewin’ gum fact’ry, wrappin’ packages. There was a graphophone an’ at lunch time all the girls danced. Oh, she had a grand time, be-_lieve me_. There was a lot o’ little girls whose mothers were poor. When the inspector come, they’d hide Sissy under the table. We most died laughin’ when she brought her first week’s pay--85 cents! Now, what d’ye think about that? She come in here an’ give it t’ me as proud ’s if it had been dollars instead.”

It is not surprising that after a vacation adventure like this Sissy began to lose interest in school. Working in a factory is not all fun, but it brings a measure of independence which the young personality craves beyond all else. It is not always stern need alone which sends the girl out to work at such an early age. Parents may call on her in times of special stress and insist on her returning to school as soon as the pressure is removed. But public opinion among the girls themselves is strong and decided on this point. “I don’t mind studyin’, but all my friends are goin’ t’ work, an’ I don’t want t’ stay. My mother an’ brothers all holler at me, but I’m kickin’ to leave. Graduate? Gee, stay two years? Not for me--it’s too slow.”

The girl’s restlessness demands at this age something very new and vivid. This the school has so far failed to supply. She thinks she may find it in work. And by the time she has discovered that work too grows tedious and monotonous, her greater independence has enabled her to make free use of her evenings for the changes and new experiences she craves.