FINGER PRINTS A BIT OF EVIDENCE
Reading edition
SCOTT NEARING
James Rawley had come to a parting of the ways. Time after time the court had overlooked his truancy and misdoings, but James had taken the pitcher once too often to the well, and the open doors of the state reform school stared him grimly in the face.
“It will be best for him in the long run,” commented the judge. “Each month of this wild life makes him a little less fit to keep his place in the community. He has had his last chance.”
Yet there was one ray of hope, for James lived in and out of Boston, which is fortunate in having the Newton Technical High School. Here let me say, by way of explanation, that the Newton Technical High School is a part of the school system presided over by F. E. Spaulding,[1] a veritable wizard in the organization and direction of educational work. Among his many “queer” ideas, Mr. Spaulding believes that children of high school age should be in the high school, whether they have passed their eight years of grade work or not. An absurd theory? Well, perhaps; but the first year he put this theory into practice, Mr. Spaulding transferred seventy fifteen-year-old boys and girls from the seventh and eighth grades, where they had learned the art of failing, to the high school building, where they were to be taught success.
Grouped in special classes, these “grade-floaters” devoted more than half their time to technical work—cooking, sewing, shopwork and machine work—and the remainder to academic subjects. So prepared more than two-thirds of the youngsters entered the high school on probation in the same class with their former seventh and eighth grade school-fellows, who had spent all their time the previous year at academic work. Here was the test—could these children who had been devoting three-fifths of their time to technical activities keep pace with children from the regular grades?
At the end of the first quarter, when the marks of all the pupils in the school were analyzed, it was found that the 800 scholars had an average of .54 of one failure for each pupil. The twenty-seven girls who were promoted on probation had .17 of one failure each, only a third as many as the school at large. Of the seventeen boys promoted on trial, only one failed and in but one subject. The probationers had therefore made records which were, as a whole, far superior to the records made by the average pupils in the high school.
These facts, pretty generally known in educational circles in and around Boston, led James’ custodians to propose to the judge that he give James one more trial, this time in the Newton Technical High School. The judge agreed to the suggestion, and James, a dismal eighth-grade failure, entered the Newton Technical High School in one of the special transfer classes.
James began life badly. His mother died when he was young, and his father, a rather indifferent man, boarded the boy out during his early years with an aunt. She first spoiled him through indulgence, and then, inconsistently enough, hated him because he was spoiled. Growing up in this uncongenial atmosphere, James became entirely uncontrollable. He was disagreeable in the extreme, wild and unmanageable.
The people with whom James was boarding grew tired of his continued truancy, and he was placed on a farm near Boston. There, too, he was discontented, dissatisfied and disobedient. Time after time he ran away to Boston. He went from bad to worse, falling in with vagrants, learning their talk and their ways, acquiring a love for wandering, and a distaste for regularity and direction. Taken into custody by the juvenile court and placed on probation with a family outside of Boston, James again ran away, mingling with a crowd of his old associates in Boston. It was at this point that the court decided to send him to the reform school. Then it was that an understanding friend took him in charge, found him a home in Newton, and started his life anew in the Technical High School.
That was how the record stood a while ago. How does it stand now? Promoted to the regular freshman class on trial, James has renewed his interest in education and shows an entirely new trait. He does not exactly dote on all his work, but he is doing it and doing it well. He hated school before. The new deal is different, he even likes it at times.
He has found something to interest him. The boy was just bursting with the need of expressing his self, his personality. The street gave his worst half its chance. Now the better stuff that is in him is getting its opportunity and he is taking it.
Good and evil are always contending for the boy as for the man, and the function of education is to give the good the better chance. If there be stale pedagogues who do not understand, let them take notice, for after all the boy is the one to be considered.