What Share of the Blame for Their Continued Existence Belongs to Schools? Educational Foundations 1909

We are engaged in a great civic struggle testing whether the influence of the school is strong enough to combat those adverse forces, born of immigration, economic conditions, parental neglect,  municipal corruption, and industrial inequalities which tend to degrade standards of American citizenship.

Truancy and incorrigibility are closely interrelated; they are almost interdependent. Each phase requires special treatment, but the limitations of a single paper require general treatment. This neglects the girls' side of the problem. The troublesome boy up to this time has monopolized attention.

Most investigators and educators lay the heaviest share of the blame for truancy and incorrigibility to unfavorable home conditions. Summarized into four conditions: subnormal physical conditions; inefficient parenthood; degraded parenthood; vicious associates.

There are other causes, among which we find that school work under some teachers is not sufficiently attractive to appeal the child who finds more attraction on the street.

Teachers must be held accountable for the keeping of children in school. If work which appeals to some children fails to appeal to all, the teachers must note this and must plan something specially attractive to keep the interest of the little fellow who seems bored.  The majority of children get on despite the dullness of the day's work, but the others, the special and difficult cases, must have special work, or schools must take the blame.  One other phase - to my mind one of the most important and least recognized - is the improper characterization of boys' acts. All school types of badness need classification. Many of them under careful classification would no longer be considered 'bad.' A boy's wrong acts are often due not to much to the deliberate choosing of wrong AFTER he knows right, but to lack of sense of right or wrong. Children's badness is often due to unmorality, not immorality.   Go thru the list of 'bad boys' in your school or town. Classify their offenses. Is immorality or unmorality the cause. If the latter, what share of the blame for this condition rests with the school? Is not the process of training, is not the ethical development of a child, as much the school's affair as the intellectual? 

Truancy and waywardness in children must be regarded as moral diseases and must be dealt with scientifically.

Child rescue is our duty; child-ruin is our shame. The best way to keep a child from doing something bad is to set him to work doing something good. It is our duty to find that something good. It is our shame if that child chooses the bad. A child's soul cannot be reclaimed by means of the multiplication tables or long division. Shall we never learn that lesson?