efore it can get satisfactory
intellectual results. The school is the victim of an educational
system that was made to fit other conditions than those of the
present-day city; the whole system needs reconstructing, but the
management is conservative, ignorant, or parsimonious in many cases,
or too radical and given to fads and experiments. Yet, in spite of all
its faults and delinquencies, the public schools of the city are the
hope of the future.

The school is the melting-pot of the city's youth. It is the
training-school of municipal society. In the absence of family
training it provides the social education that is necessary to equip
the child for life. It accustoms him to an orderly group life and
establishes relations with others of similar age from other streets or
neighborhoods than those with which he is familiar. It teaches him how
intelligent public opinion is formed, and brings him within the circle
of larger interests than those with which he is naturally connected.
He learns how to accommodate himself to the group rather than to fight
or worm his way through for a desired end, as is the method of the
street. He learns good morals and good manners. He finds out that
there are better ways of expressing his ideas than in the slang of the
alley, and in time he gains an understanding of a social leadership
that depends on mental and moral superiority instead of physical
strength or agility. As he grows older he becomes acquainted with the
worth of established institutions, and his hand is no longer against
every man and every man's hand against him. He likes to share in the
social activities that occur as by-products of the school--the musical
and dramatic entertainments, the athletic contests, and the debating
and oratorical rivalries. By degrees he becomes aware that he is a
responsible member of society, that he is an individual unit in a
great aggregation of busy people doing the work of the world, and that
the school is given him to make it possible for him to play well his
part in the activities of the city and nation to which he belongs.

READING REFERENCES

VEILLER: _Housing Reform_, pages 3-46.

RIIS: _How the Other Half Lives._

CLOPPER: _Child Labor in the City Streets._

MARTIN: "Exhibit of Congestion," art. in _The Survey_,20: 27-39.

GOODYEAR: "Household Budgets of the Poor," art. in _Charities_,
16: 191-197.

"The Pittsburgh Survey," arts, in _The Survey_, vol. 21.