As principal of the Grammar Schools of Mount Airy a few facts have come under my observation which pertain to the compulsory school law now being discussed in our town papers. One article offered criticisms because the smaller children attend school only a half day. That is true. It has been found that the children of the first and second grades do more and better work on a half day session and that a few hours of close application trains their plastic minds more rapidly than a whole day’s grind. So half day sessions for the primary grades have been universally adopted by all the best schools of the South. One article offered criticisms because the smaller children attend school only a half day. That is true. It has been found that the children of the first and second grades do more and better work on a half day session and that a few hours of close application trains their plastic minds more rapidly than a whole day’s grind. So half day sessions for the primary grades have been universally adopted by all the best schools of the South. In Mount Airy, due to the fact that it is a large manufacturing town, there is a large number of parents who, being raised in ignorance, cannot appreciate the value of an education, so naturally they are antagonistic to all efforts we put forth to place their children in school. We are full up to our Grammar schools, each teacher having more than double the number of pupils the State Board recommends, yet we are willing and glad to take those who should be in school. For it is far better that we should be overcrowded than to allow them to grow up in criminal ignorance, who when grown will in turn raise families that will oppose all the laws of society.
The question naturally arises why are these children not in school, and who is to blame for not having them put there? Some put the blame on the teachers, some think the county welfare officer is lax in his duty, while still others believe that the welfare officer and the teachers are working together to keep the children from school. Wonderful criticisms but where is the remedy? We have on file a list of all the children in Mount Airy who are within the compulsory school age, except maybe a few transients. We’ll be very glad to furnish this list to anyone who wishes to enforce the school law as we have not the time to serve in the dual capacity of teacher and law officer. It is also a very difficult matter to use the gentle art of persuasion upon those parents who willingly allow their children to be absent from school.
Is it possible that the town could be to blame for this condition? Mount Airy is a wealthy little town. The trade from a large territory pours into it. It has large manufacturing establishments and many stores. It has one of the largest quarries in the world and its fruit market ranks among the first in the state.
Much money pours into its coffers, yet it sends its children to schools where three occupy the same space one should occupy.
Hundreds of acres of flat land lie around Mount Airy, yet the small boys and girls who love so well to play have a side of a puny hill filled with rocks as their athletic emporium.
Mount Airy has resident buildings costing tens of thousands of dollars, yet the roof of the Rockford Street school building trembles over the heads of 600 children every time the wind blows.
A short distance from town is one of the largest quarries in the world, yet several hundred primary children go to school in a ramshackle wooden barn where in three of the rooms two inches of ice has been known to freeze over the floor where the water has run in.
At Rockford Street school we punish boys for using tobacco on the school grounds or on their way to and from school, yet I can cite you to dozens of cases where both father and mother use tobacco and give it to their children. Go into nearly any store in town and you will find all brands of smoking and chewing tobacco and snuff which the merchants sell to any boy or girl who is large enough to carry a nickel. In one room in the Rockford school 88 per cent of the boys habitually use or have used tobacco.
Go into any of the warehouses about 10 o’clock at night when all the tobacco wagons are in and look thirsty while you display a $10 bill and see the results. Not long ago one of my schoolboys came to school with a four-inch gash cut on his head. He had been hit with a bottle by some drunken bully who went not only unpunished but unsought.
Within 100 yards of Main street I know of a building where a certain clique of boys assemble nearly every night to gamble, tell dirty stories and later to prowl the streets and alleys. I have seen two with daggers and have taken a pistol form a third. Let to themselves within 10 years the majority will have attained the penitentiary or electric chair.
Go into the side streets, and that is where the majority of our children come from, and you will find mud axle deep, tin cans and all rubbish is pitched out the back door, waste water is dumped in the streets for germs to breed in, stables go for weeks uncleaned and are the breeding places for flies, and the odor of pigs, cows and boneyard mules pollute the air.
Rather than pass a curfew law to keep the children at home to study, they are allowed to roam the streets at night mingling with company from which they can learn but evil, which is the price of idleness. Dice, cards, tobacco and loafers are congenial company, and some parents seem to care very little where their wandering Willie’s are at night although some are surprisingly young.
From this kind of environment how can the children be expected to make good citizens? Oh that’s the school’s job! That’s right, it is the school’s job, but what about a little cooperation?
Our “Righteously Indignant Citizen” seems to think the teachers of Mount Airy are not earning their salary. Maybe not, but they are doing the amount of work that double the present number should be doing while some of the indignant tax payers howl at the amount of taxes they have to pay, not knowing that they get more value received from money spent on education than from any investment. Properly educate the coming generation and the poor houses, penitentiaries, and 90 per cent of the inmates of the asylums will not be. For education banishes squalid homes and filth and in their places spring up homes filled with happiness and cheer. Instead of dissipated manhood and womanhood there would be men and women each with trained minds and good physiques all standing equal in promulgating society and its laws.
Let us all get together and pull instead of trying to shift the responsibility.
From the editorial page of The Mount Airy News, Thursday, March 3, 1921
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