Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools онлайн

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“I do not know of a school system in the United States which is run for the benefit of the pupils; they are all run for the benefit of the gang”; thus District Superintendent Tildsley, debating with me before the Civic Club. Dr. Tildsley added that by “the gang” he meant the superintendents, the principals and the teachers. It was kind of him to add the teachers, but some of them in the audience did not appreciate his compliment. There is quite a group in the New York schools who are really concerned for the children, and feel no sense of solidarity with the bigoted autocracy which at present holds the power.

“It is the duty of a teacher who knows of anything wrong in the school system to complain to her superiors about it,” said the pious Dr. Tildsley; and there came a chorus from all over the room: “Yes, and lose her job!” Dr. Tildsley was pained by the suggestion that a teacher might encounter trouble as result of just complaints, made at the proper time and in the proper manner. As it happened, however, I had spent that morning in the home of Mr. James F. Berry, a teacher of mathematics at DeWitt Clinton High School, who had been for twenty-three years in the system, and took seriously the idea that a teacher has responsibility for teaching conditions. Mr. Berry made complaint against the grossest kind of evils in the school—cruelty to pupils, dishonesty, and acts of injustice by those in authority. As a result, his career in the system was one long misery. He was denied promotion to which he was justly entitled; and he put in my hands a little diary, in which he had kept the record of two decades of struggle for his rights. I glance through it and find entries such as this: