Schools: The Last Resort

No group of educators faces tougher problems than the neglected superintendents and teachers who fight to put the “reform” into what were once called reform schools, the “training” into what are now called boys training schools. Practical pessimists who yet remain stubbornly hopeful, they take youthful lawbreakers to whom school means only pain and failure—and in less than a year they are expected to replace the pain with pleasure, provide promise for the future.

That is expecting a lot—but the schools are making more progress than anyone has a right to hope for. For one thing, many of them do not look like jails any more. Often set in wooded hills, their small residential cottages spaced around a main administration and classroom building, they bear a surface resemblance to private prep schools. Many have open gates, unlocked doors, barless windows that lift easily.

No Threats. The approach to education is similarly less harsh. While classroom attendance is normally compulsory, teachers do not browbeat the boys into studying. “As soon as you crack down on them, they just freeze,” explains a teacher at the Illinois State Training School for Boys in St. Charles. The kids have to be stimulated to learn, rather than threatened. “Threats are useless,” contends Sam Jones, a teacher at the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys in Whittier, Calif. “These kids have been threatened by masters.”

Stimulation sometimes takes the form of outright bribery. At the National Training Institute near Washington, D.C., boys earn points as they progress in such basic subjects as reading and arithmetic. They can use their credits to buy free time in a lounge, play a pinball machine, purchase clothing, even to earn a private room. The system works: one group of boys advanced 2½ grades in three months. This bears out the contention of training school teachers that their kids are far from stupid, even though most have been kicked out of at least one school and are two or more grades behind their age level. They range normally in intelligence with other boys but lack motivation.

A model instructional program is that of the W. J. Maxey Boys Training School near Ann Arbor, Mich. In rustically modern buildings, 230 boys are housed in individual rooms, attend classes of no more than a dozen students, share 22 fully certified teachers. Most of the boys take a technical curriculum, including such subjects as typing, auto mechanics and metal work, plus English, science, math, art and social studies. One group of 24 boys is pursuing a normal college-preparatory course.

With a federal grant, the University of Michigan’s English Professor Daniel Fader has devised a special English course for Maxey boys. Arguing that “no hardbound text was ever thrust into a boy’s hip pocket,” he has thrown out such books, replaced them with paperbacks ranging from James Bond to Erich Fromm. When he first arrives at the school, each boy can select two from drugstore-type racks, keep them or exchange them with other boys —and no one tries to keep track of them. Fader also advises constant practice in writing. Boys are encouraged to keep a daily journal, which is never corrected for grammar or spelling, only checked to see if the boy is trying.

At New York’s Warwick Training School, the boys get better teaching than they are likely to have had in public schools. The accent is on remedial reading—almost half are functional illiterates—and there is one teacher for every ten slow readers. Grouped by ability, the boys never have to parade their ignorance before their peers —a humiliation that plagued them in home schools.

A Lark. Training-school officials have to tread a thin line between mak ing school a pleasant experience in rehabilitation and just a vacation from city life. Warwick Superintendent A. Alfred Cohen says that his school is “an abnormally good environment” for the boys, but if they stay too long they will not be able to adjust to conditions at home. California’s Nelles School al lows its boys to watch late-night movies on television, visit movie studios on field trips, attend monthly birthday parties. But some deliberately misbehave in order to stay longer and a few teachers think the place is too liberal. Declares one: “This is a lark for the boys —and we’re the pushovers. The chaos is unbelievable.”

Michigan Juvenile Court Judge James H. Lincoln rightfully points out that correctional institutions cannot really check juvenile delinquency, that they are, in fact, “last resorts and monuments to our failures.” Many schools are still no different from adult prisons; even the best face shortages of good teachers and modern equipment. What is worse, nearly 35% of juvenile delinquents return to training schools for later violations—not to mention the uncounted thousands who graduate to adult prisons. Nonetheless, reform-school teachers and superintendents take solace from the fact that they have unquestionably saved some boys from life behind bars. One Warwick graduate told Superintendent Cohen that he was going to go straight and land a job driving “the biggest damn truck in the world.” A few years later he drove a huge tractor-trailer right up to the Warwick gates. Another boy told Cohen: “Warwick gave me eyes. I ain’t stupid no more. I can read now.”