barrel and the hog were never part of the curriculum in any American
boy's school, I suppose; they seem too freakish to be credited to any
but the demoniac ingenuity of my home ogre. But they stood for a
comprehension of the office of school and teacher which was not patented
by any day or land. It is not so long since the notion yet prevailed
that the schools were principally to lock children up in for the
convenience of their parents, that we should have entirely forgotten it.
Only the other day a clergyman from up the state came into my office to
tell of a fine reform school they had in his town. They were very proud
of it.

"And how about the schools for the good boys in your town?" I asked,
when I had heard him out. "Are they anything to be proud of?"

He stared. He guessed they were all right, he said, after some
hesitation. But it was clear that he did not know.

[Illustration: The Old.]

[Illustration: The New.]

It is not necessary to go back forty years to find us in the metropolis
upon the clergyman's platform, if not upon Madame Bruin's. A dozen or
fifteen will do. They will bring us to the day when roof playgrounds
were contemptuously left out of the estimates for an East Side school,
as "frills" that had nothing to do with education; when the Board of
Health found but a single public school in more than sixscore that was
so ventilated as to keep the children from being poisoned by foul air;
when the authority of the Talmud had to be invoked by the Superintendent
of School Buildings to convince the president of the Board of Education,
who happened to be a Jew, that seventy-five or eighty pupils were far
too many for one classroom; when a man who had been dead a year was
appointed a school trustee of the Third Ward, under the mouldy old law
surviving from the day when New York was a big village, and filled the
office as well as if he had been alive, because there were no schools in
his ward--it was the wholesale grocery district; when manual training
and the kindergarten were yet the fads of yesterday, looked at askance;
when fifty thousand children roamed the streets for whom there was no
room in the schools, and the only defence of the School Commissioners
was that they "didn't know" there were so many; and when we mixed
truants and thieves in a jail with entire unconcern. Indeed, the jail
filled the title role in the educational cast of that day. Its inmates
were well lodged and cared for, while the