Municipal government -- United States; Peace; Political participation -- United States; Social justice; Working class -- United States
The schools for Reform are those which are inaugurating the most
advanced education in agriculture and manual arts. A bewildered foreign
parent comes from time to time to Hull-House, asking that his boy be
sent to a school to learn farming, basing his request upon the fact
that his neighbor’s boy has been sent to “a nice green, country-place.”
It is carefully explained that the neighbor’s boy was bad, and was
arrested and sent away because of his badness. After much conversation,
the disappointed parent sometimes understands, but he often goes away
shaking his head, and some such words as these issue: “I have been
in this country for five years, and have never gotten anything yet.”
At other times it is successfully explained to the man that the city
assumes that he is looking out for himself and taking care of his own
boy, but it ought to be possible to make him to see that if he feels
that his son needs the education of a farm school, that it lies with
him to agitate the subject and to vote for the man who will secure such
schools. He might well look amazed, were this advice tendered him, for
these questions have never been presented to him to vote upon. Because
he does not eagerly discuss the tariff or other remote subjects which
the political parties present to him from time to time we assume that
he is not to be trusted to vote on the education of his child, although
there is no doubt that the one thing his ancestors decided upon, from
the days of bows and arrows, was the sort of training each one should
give his son.
The fine education that is given to a juvenile offender may indicate
a certain compunction on the part of the State. Quite as men formerly
gloried in warfare and now apologize for it, as they formerly went
out to spoil their enemies and now go to civilize them, so civil
governments, while continuing to maintain prisons, have become more
or less ashamed of them, and are already experimenting in better
ways to elevate and reform criminals than by the way of violence and
imprisonment. We have already said in America that neither a gallows
nor an unmitigated prison shall ever exist for a child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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