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

149 страница из 161

Two school girls were found yesterday afternoon, clasped in each other’s arms, lying on the floor of a kitchen of an apartment in the tenement house at 75 Van Alst Avenue, Long Island City. The room was filled with gas and the discovery was made just in time to save them from death by asphyxiation. The girls were Dora Boylan, 15 years old, daughter of a widow who occupied the apartment, and who at the time was at work in a factory near by, and Agnes Dougherty, also 15, of 28 Hunterspoint Avenue, Long Island City. They had made up their minds to die rather than go to school.

ssss1

Let us take next the school system of Chicago. Here is a city of three million people, with representatives of most of the races and nations and tribes of the world; a great port, a great railroad center, a meat packing and manufacturing and banking center. The owners of these industries contribute the necessary cash, and finance alternately two rival political machines; candidates are chosen who are satisfactory to the “invisible government,” and with the help of four or five great capitalist newspapers the candidates are elected. The purpose for which they are elected is to protect Big Business while it plunders the city; incidentally, and on the side, the political officials plunder all they can.