Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/671

 INCREASED USE OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PROPERTY

THOMAS JAMES RILEY, PH.D. Western State Normal School, Kalamazoo, Mich.

Like many of our educational ideas, the plan of using public- school buildings and grounds after regular school hours and dur- ing vacation months seems to have originated in New England. But it was soon put into operation in the Middle Atlantic states, and has reached its highest development and greatest differentia- tion in New York city. Such increased use of school property has taken the form of evening schools, free lectures, evening recreation centers, and playgrounds. The magnitude of this movement marks it as significant. During the school year of 1902-3, in the city of New York, there were registered in the evening and vacation schools almost one-fourth as many students as were registered in the day schools, and almost one-seventh as many teachers were employed; while an aggregate of two and one-half million people were reached by more than one thousand lecturers and instructors at the recreation centers, playgrounds, and lecture-halls. Chicago is far behind the first city of America in the absolute and relative extent of the increased use of public- school property ; but even there, as in all the other great cities of the country, this method of school extension has become very important.

So great a movement must have vital causes and the promise of good things. Its less direct causes are found in certain general tendencies. The experience of American communities has demonstrated that the education of the youth cannot be left entirely to the home; for there it is often neglected, sometimes degraded, and usually incomplete. This same experience has proved that education cannot be intrusted alone or freely to the church. Acting on an eminent interest in their future welfare, the American states provide a free public-school system with com- pulsory attendance, and exercise a regulative control over private

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