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The Public Schools

About This Item

  • Title: The Public Schools
  • Date: 5 October 1858
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.01135
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 5 October 1858: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Kaylen Michaelis Samantha Gilmore Brandi Faulkner Stefan Schöberlein Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "The Public Schools." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 17 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.01135.xml (TEI)
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THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

It was reported in the New York papers, at the recent opening of the Public Schools of the city after the summer holidays, that there were ten thousand children turned away from the school doors, because there was not room for them. The loss to the children themselves, and to the community hereafter from the enforced ignorance of so many of its members, needs not to be expatiated upon. At the same time, it is well known to all who are conversant with school matters, that there would be ample room in the New York schools for these children, if the thousands of pupils who are obtaining education there under false pretences, were excluded.

In New York they have a Free Academy, into which the more promising scholars are admitted after passing the usual course in common schools. In this city, as in Jersey City and Hoboken, there is no such institution. Hence many parents residing in these cities are anxious to have their children educated in the New York schools instead of those of their own districts, so as to qualify them for subsequent admission into the Free Academy. Thousands of children are consequently sent from this city to New York schools, into which they procure admission by giving as their residence the house of some friend or relative residing in the district in which the school is located.

This practice could not exist without the connivance of the teachers of the New York schools, and these gentlemen have a direct interest in winking at it. It is a point of professional emulation among the New York Principals, to report a large number of pupils as qualified for the Free Academy; hence they are glad to get a pupil from Brooklyn, whose education has already been nearly finished in our schools. Thus the practice which we complain of not only tends to close the doors of the New York schools against thousands of children who ought to be admitted, but to lessen the number of scholars here, besides depriving our schools of the most promising pupils. We invoke the animadversion of the New York press on this practice. The evil is beyond our power to rectify, because it exists in New York, and nothing but its exposure by the papers of that city can remove it.

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