Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/674

 658 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

imply opportunity for learning how to become the best citizen these are finding better realization through the phase of school extension under consideration.

These, then, are among the less direct or immediate causes of the use of public-school property after regular school hours and during vacation months : the logic of a free public-school system, the industrial spirit and methods of the age, the ascendant philosophy of education, and the implications of democracy. Three more direct or immediate causes have united to bring about this same result. The first of these was the demand of two clasess of people for the privilege of free schools. The first class were the industrially less favored boys and girls who had been compelled to leave school for the shop, factory, or office. This ambitious army was reinforced by a large number of adult for- eigners seeking the opportunity to learn the English language and enough of the rudiments of an education to make them of higher economic efficiency.

Of the 10,000 people enrolled in twenty-two evening schools in Chicago (1903-4), about 70 per cent, were foreign-born or native-born of foreign parents. In seven schools alone there were enrolled 6,140 such foreigners, representing forty different nationalities. Mature men come night after night, crowd them- selves into small desks, and sit for an hour and a half, poring over simple English words and first-reader stories, in the cherished ambition to become able to read an American newspaper. Some have progressed far enough to read their trade papers, or to learn for themselves from the printed page something of the privileges of American citizenship, or the claims of labor. These ambitious foreigners, and the factory boys and girls, knocking at the closed doors of many school buildings, should find more doors opening to them.

A second immediate demand for the further use of the school- house arose from the side of need. To the children in the crowded parts of great cities, vacation does not mean grass and trees and hills and streams, open fields and summer sunshine; but long hours on hot, busy, bare streets or alleys lined with unsightly garbage cans, truancy from home, stolen rides, and stolen fruits: