Once upon a time there was a little boy; a little boy unusually eager, and curious about the world he lived in. He was a nuisance to old gentlemen who wanted to read their newspaper; but young men liked to carry him on their shoulders and maul him about in romps, old ladies liked to make ginger cakes for him, and other boys liked to play “shinny” with him, and race on roller skates, and “hook” potatoes from the corner grocery and roast them in forbidden fires on vacant lots. The little boy lived in a crowded part of the city of New York, in what is called a “flat”; that is, a group of little boxes, enclosed in a large box called a “flat-house.” Every morning this little boy’s mother saw to his scrubbing, with special attention to his ears, both inside and back, and put a clean white collar on him, and packed his lunch-box with two sandwiches and a piece of cake and an apple, and started him off to school.
The school was a vast building—or so it seemed to the little boy. It had stone staircases with iron railings, and big rooms with rows of little desks, blackboards, maps of strange countries, and pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Aurora driving her chariot. Everywhere you went in this school you formed in line and marched; you talked in chorus, everybody saying the same thing as nearly at the same instant as could be contrived. The little boy found that a delightful arrangement, for he liked other boys, and the more of them there were, the better. He kept step happily, and sat with glee in the assembly room, and clapped when the others clapped, and 2laughed when they laughed, and joined with them in shouting:
Oh, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, The—ee home of the Bra—ave and the Free—ee!
The rest of the day the little boy sat in a crowded classroom, learning things. The first thing he learned was that you must be quiet—otherwise the teacher, passing down the aisle, would crack your knuckles with a ruler. Another thing was that you must raise your hand if you wanted to speak. Maybe these things were necessary, but the little boy did not learn why they were necessary; in school all you learned was that things were so. For example, if you wanted to divide one fraction by another, you turned the second fraction upside down; it seemed an odd procedure, but if you asked the reason for it, the teacher would be apt to answer in a way that caused the other little boys to laugh at you—something which is very painful.
The teacher would give out a series of problems in “mental arithmetic”—tricks which you had been taught, and you wrote the answers on your slate, and then marched in line past the teacher’s desk, and if you had done it according to rule, you got a check on your slate. You learned the great purpose of life was these “marks.” If you got good ones, your teacher smiled at you, your parents praised you at home, you had a sense of triumph over other little boys who were stupid. You enjoyed this triumph, because no one ever suggested to you that it was cruel to laugh at your weaker fellows. In fact, the system appeared to be designed to bring out your superiority, and to increase the humiliation of the others.
In this school everything in the world had been conveniently arranged in packages, which could be stowed away in your mind and made the subject of a “mark.” Columbus discovered America in 1492; the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776; Switzerland was bounded on the north by Germany. This business of “boundings” appeared in little diagrams; Switzerland was yellow and Germany pink, and no one burdened your mind with the idea that these spots of color represented places where human beings lived. At this same time the little boy was going to Sunday school, where he learned something called “the creed,” with a sentence declaring that 3“from Thency shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” The little boy pondered hard, but never made sure whether “Thency” was the name of a person or a place.
Some thirty-five years have passed, but the little boy still remembers the personalities of these teachers. There was a middle-aged lady, stout and amiable, and always dressed in black; then one who was angular and irritable; then one who had pretty brown eyes and hair, but to the puzzlement of the little boy had also the beginnings of a mustache. Next came a young man with a real mustache, and pale, washed-out eyes and complexion; but he was dreadfully dull. The novelty had worn off the school by this time, and the boy had got tired of stowing away packages of facts in his mind. He had become so expert that he was able to do two years’ work in one, and at the age of twelve was ready for what was called the City College. But he was judged too young, and had to take one year in the grammar school all over. The fates took pity on him, and gave him as teacher for that year a jolly Irish gentleman, so full of interest in his boys that he did not keep the rules. If you wanted to ask him questions you asked, and without first raising your hand; you might even get into an argument with him, as with any boy, and if he caught you whispering to your neighbor, his method of correcting you was novel, but highly effective—he would let fly a piece of chalk at your head, and you would grin, and the class would howl with delight.
In this strange, happy group the little boy went by the nick-name of “Chappie”; for the school was located on the East side of New York, and most of the boys were “tough,” and had never before heard the English language correctly spoken by a boy. “Chappie” owned a collection of one or two hundred story-books which had been given him by aunts and uncles and cousins at a succession of Christmases and birthdays. The priceless treasure, when he left the school, became the foundation of a class library, to the vast delight of the other boys and of the Irish teacher. So the boy ended his grammar-school life in a blaze of glory, and went away thinking the public school system a most admirable affair.
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