His Family: School Days
With the mad city growing so fast, and the people of the tenements breeding, breeding, breeding, and packing the schools to bursting, what could any teacher be but a mere cog in a machine, ponderous, impersonal, blind, grinding out future New Yorkers?
The only facet of Poole’s book that I found genuinely moving and modern was his take on the city schools of his day. The little I know of Poole makes me think he was a champion of reformers and his attitudes about urban education exemplify this: discomfort with teeming masses of uneducated immigrants dovetailed with a devout faith in public schooling as a tool of assimilation and unequivocal improvement. Deborah is the only character in the book whose single-minded preoccupation is described by the narrator with any kind of consistent sympathy; even as Poole is made uncomfortable by this “new woman,” he seems to support the driving force behind her obsessive devotion to her work.
It’s shocking to me how hard the quote above struck me, how alive this notion still is in many aspects of the NYC education system–this idea that there are so many more of “them” than “us” (in this model, the student is nearly always the “the other”) and “they” must be controlled and corralled. I suppose this is inherent in most places where there is one teacher faced with 25-30 students–by nature, you’re out-numbered–but the sense of teeming growth and being a cog an in impersonal bureaucracy is still present in NYC schools today.
My school is a lively, chaotic, and vital place. Students and teachers alike veer from troubled to defeated to triumphant from day to day. It is a far more complex place than the school Poole describes. But I cannot get over how much we’re still struggling with the same issues–immigration, language acquisition, poverty, fractured homes, etc., et al., ad infinitum. Mr. Poole, your book is simplistic, corny, and just plain bad in many places… but at least you managed to attack one issue with a measure of timelessness.
March 18, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I wonder — do you find that the holistic approach Deborah advocates has any heirs in today’s schools? She’s got adult education classes, night school, innoculation clinics, book clubs and sports clubs and god knows what else — aspires, in fact, to slither a tentacle of her school into every aspect of the tenement resident’s lives, and so perhaps provide them a something to cling to as they try and climb out of poverty.
Also — and here I fear I sound like Stuff White People Like — did you catch This American Life a couple weeks ago, when they had the story about the rubber room?
March 18, 2008 at 9:11 pm
That’s a great question, but not one that I think I can answer fairly. My school doesn’t really offer those kinds of programs, but others might… I haven’t seen enough schools to know this.
My impression is that public schools today are generally less paternalistic in design, if not in practice, than the school-complex Poole describes. We do offer health-related screenings for kids that parents can potentially opt out of, but I think most allow. I wish we did more work with adult and family literacy in our school–that’s teaching adults to read more fluently and teaching parents how to teach their kids to read and encourage “a culture of print” in the home, respectively. I think it would be a great draw for many of our parents who are new immigrants… but there just isn’t the money.
In thinking about this, though, this may be a function of being in a secondary school–parents tend to be a lot more hands-off when their kid reaches middle school, at least a lot less visibly involved in the a child’s school. No more class moms, no more parents as field-trip chaperones, and the kids don’t want to be near their folks half the time anyway. Elementary schools operate as extensions of the family in a more natural way, I think, so there are probably more family-oriented programs at that level.
March 19, 2008 at 12:55 am
Hey, d.v., I just listened to that TAL piece on the rubber rooms. Sad on so many levels. I haven’t heard too many other front-line reports of those places, but what I have heard is truly Kafka-esque. (Although some tiny part of me was thinking at first “how bad can it be? at least you’d get a lot of reading done”… until they played the audio clip of the noise levels in there. Damn.)