The Reopening of the Schools

Year
1900
Month
9
Day
1
Article Title
The Reopening of the Schools
Author
----
Page Number
4
Article Type
Language
Article Contents
THE REOPENING OF THE SCHOOLS. The reopening of our schools affords seasonableness and pertinency to the discussion of certain phases of parental neglect in the education of children. The great bulk of our Catholic people, as the school-registers show, are anxious that their children should profit fully by the educational facilities at their service. They send them to school, and they keep them there as long as it is possible for them in their circumstances to do so. Such parents have a proper sense of the educational needs of their offspring. They show their love for their children by preparing them for the battle of life. Nowadays success is a matter of competition, and he who is best prepared will win. This truth is becoming yearly more obvious. Yet there is a percentage of children, much larger than would be expected, who in this city of St. John are growing up practically illiterate, and thus sadly unprepared for life’s contingencies. It goes without proof that this is not the fault of the children. It is their great and irreparable misfortune, but the fault lies elsewhere. Their parents bear the burden of this crying sin against humanity. The parents who are thus wanting in a sacred duty towards their off spring may be divided into two classes. In the first class we would place those who are so callous and indifferent to the rights of their children as not to care whether they go to school or not. Parents of this class are happily few, but they are nevertheless to be found, and they offer a sad commentary on the degeneracy of human kind. We shall barely stop to notice them in this article, because ordinarily it is a waste of time and a mistake of zeal to bother about them. Only a law of compulsory attendance at school, provided with the proper machinery for its execution, can bring the offspring of such parents to the school-room. No amount of private remonstrance or reprehension can awaken parents of this class to a sense of duty. The lower down on the social scale men get, we notice, the more indulgent they are, or claim to be, towards their children, and the more apt are their children to get their own way in the very matters on which they are most easily misled. There are children enough of this class growing up in our city to fill the largest teaching room in St. Malachi's or St. Joseph's. By and by they will form the black margin that always encircles the most advanced civilization. In the second class we place parents who are indeed willing that their children should receive a rudimentary education, but who are so selfish as to be unwilling to give them more. To read a little, to write without being able to spell, to know the elementary rules of arithmetic is sufficient education for their children in the minds of parents of this clans. Perhaps it would be more correct and in accordance with facts if we said boys instead of children, for it is remarkable facts that parents who claim they are too poor to educate their boys beyond the primary grades will often skimp themselves to have their daughters learn music and painting. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, often earlier, a boy's schooling is thus completed and he is sent out to work. It would surprise those who are not acquainted with the extent of this evil did they know the instances of parental greed that come under the notice of the observant man – the callousness of heart and indelibilty of parental instinct which a little close observation will expose. We have in mind as we write the case of a boy thirteen years of age whose mother keeps him from school and makes him hire out to work in physicians' or lawyers' offices, and yet that boy’s father annually earns from $1,800 to $2,200. Such cases as this are happily rare, but the fact that they happen is deplorable. It proves that some parents need making over again, and that the idea so prevalent among our working classes that a boy must work because he has entered his teens needs to be recast. A boy should get all the schooling that self-sacrifice on the part of parents can possibly allow him to have; and when the extreme limit of this parental sacrifice is reached he should still get another term at school. He will need it all and much more in the strenuous battle of life.