It is not only the emigrant parent who profits by the work of the public
school. The American parent also finds himself, or generally herself,
brought into friendly contact with the foreign teachers and the foreign
friends of her children. The New York public school system culminates in
the Normal College, which trains women as teachers, and the College of
the City of New York, which offers courses to young men in the
profession of law, engineering, teaching, and, besides, a course in
business training. The commencement at these institutions brings
strangely contrasted parents together in a common interest and a common
pride. The students seem much like one another, but the parents are so
widely dissimilar as to make the similarity of their offspring an
amazing fact for contemplation. Mothers with shawls over their heads and
work-distorted hands sit beside mothers in Parisian costumes, and the
silk-clad woman is generally clever enough to appreciate and to admire
the spirit which strengthened her weary neighbor through all the years
of self-denial, labor, poverty and often hunger, which were necessary to
pay for the leisure and the education of son or daughter. The feeling of
inferiority, of uselessness, which this realization entails may
humiliate the idle woman but it is bound to do her good. It will
certainly deprive her conversation of sweeping criticisms on lives and
conditions unknown to her. It will also utterly do away with many of her
prejudices against the foreigner and it will make the "Let them eat
cake" attitude impossible.
And so the child, the parent, the teacher and the home-staying relative
are brought to feel their kinship with all the world through the agency
of the public school, but the teacher learns the lesson most fully, most
consciously. The value to the cause of peace and good-will in the
community of an army of thousands of educated men and women holding
views such as these cannot easily be over-estimated. The teachers, too,
are often aliens and nearly always of a race different from their
pupils, yet you will rarely meet a teacher who is not delighted with her
charges.
"Do come," they always say, "and see my little Italians, or Irish, or
German, or picaninnies; they are the sweetest little things," or, if
they be teachers of a higher grade, "They are the cleverest and the most
charming children." They are all clever in their different ways, and
they are all charming to those who know them, and the work of the public
school is to make this charm and cleverness appreciated, so that race
misunderstandings in the adult populations may grow fewer and fewer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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