p. 27 | Misery Loves Company by Editor

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 8, 1908

“Misery Loves Company”

By Editor

MANY of our teachers often have occasion to feel that they are of all teachers the most unfortunately situated so far as schoolroom conveniences are concerned. The following clipping, however, reveals the fact that we are not alone in our discomforts. This is the only reason we have for giving it an insertion in our columns. We have no sympathy whatever with such unfavorable, and, we believe we may truly say, unpardonable conditions. They are not right, and rarely ever are necessary. It is the duty of our school boards to provide hygienic conditions for our pupils. It is incumbent upon a people holding such good principles of health as do we, to give a demonstration of these principles in providing good-sized, well-lighted, properly ventilated rooms, equipped with seats, comfortably adapted to the size of the pupils, good blackboards, and to keep all buildings so clean and orderly that they are an ornament to our high profession of Christian education. However, if there is any crumb of comfort for our teachers afflicted with improper school-room conditions, here it is:—

“Public-school conditions in Philadelphia are in a bad way, according to the Public Ledger, which states that in one school, to which rich and poor alike send their children, the furnishings are so deficient that many children are obliged to sit on soap-boxes. This at what is declared to be one of ‘the city’s best-known and most-progressive grammar schools.’

“At present the school is crowded with more than five hundred pupils, of whom two thirds are in the grammar grades, and about two hundred fifty in the primary grades, under a corps of eighteen teachers, an average of fifty children to each instructor. Such is the congestion, that even in the higher grammar grades the bigger children sit two by two at single desks. Where the seats, through use and age, have altogether gone, soap-boxes, chairs, and other devices are resorted to. In one class-room with ostensibly thirty-nine desks there are fifty-two pupils. At nine desks there are no seats but soapboxes and chairs. The teachers’ desks are as dilapidated as the rest of the furniture. One teacher is without desk accommodations of any kind, and has to write at the window-sills or blackboard ledges.

“The Public Ledger describes the building itself, inside and outside, as follows: ‘Erected in 1879, the building, which contains eighteen class-rooms and is three stories high, is barely habitable. More than twenty years have elapsed probably since a brushful of paint was put on any of the class-room walls. Overhead the blackened plaster ceilings add to a general dinginess which only the hard work of the janitor and his assistants in the matter of daily cleaning of floors, desks, and walls, and the heart-breaking attempts of the teachers to brighten the rooms, rescue from absolute squalor. Unless the sun shines brightly, the gas has to be kept burning in the class-rooms so that the pupils may do their work. For lack of sash-cords, the window sashes are nailed up. Unpainted for so many years, the woodwork of the window frames is decayed, and through the interstices the snow during last week’s storm drifted in until the inside sills were covered. Splintered and broken floors, slate blackboards only kept from falling on the children by care in constantly driving additional nails to hold the decayed beadings from giving way, and broken desks and seats, which occasionally give way even under the moderate weight of children, are in keeping only with the general decay from top to bottom of the whole structure.’”