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

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What are those kinds of business? To be able to pick the location of handsome new schools is worth a fortune to real estate interests; and that this is regularly done in New York is not my charge, but that of the comptroller of the city. To be able to determine the placing of contracts for school buildings and supplies is worth a fortune to any member of a political machine; and I talked with a former clerk of the school board, who told me he had seen so much graft that he had run away from the sight. I do not mean that this Tammany school board personally carries off the money, as it did in the days of Tweed; the method now is “honest graft”—that is, the placing of school contracts with companies in which your wife’s relatives and the members of your gang are interested. The amount to be expended in New York amounts to a hundred million dollars a year, and Tammany gets it all. At least four of the members of the board are “dummies,” having no function save to vote as the machine directs. All of them are Democrats, and the majority are Catholics; that is to say, the educating of a million American children is in the hands of people who teach that public education is a crime against God.