The Advance

SCHOOL IN A JAIL.

It is little one person can do to help the world if he dabbles in every reformatory scheme that comes his way. But if he begins by surveying the field, then selects his own particular work and sticks to it exclusively year after year, at the close of his labors here below he will see that he has done something for mankind. Seven years ago Miss Florence Hathorn began teaching a school in the boys' department of the Chicago common jail. She has stuck to it. The youths are of the average of fourteen, none of them over sixteen. They are confined in the county jail while awaiting trial and sentence for various misdemeanors. They remain there for periods ranging from a day to a year and a half. Thus the class changes from day to day. The teacher, of course, can give them no systematic scholastic training, as more fortunate children outside get. She does the best she can, mostly in the way of oral instruction. They will stand no maudlin sympathy or goody-good preaching. But if they understand that a teacher is genuinely their friend, as Miss Hathorn is, they give her their confidence, so far as such boys can give anybody confidence. They are the street boys who run wild. They exhibit mental peculiarities different from those of the child with a good home and regular training. They are deficient mentally in some ways, which their teacher attributes to years of smoking and insufficient nourishment. They seem incapable of sustained intellectual effort. They are, however, unusually quick in geography, just as a wild Bedouin might be. Rather oddly, too, they are quick in mental arithmetic. They know much more of criminal and civil law than the average boys of their age do, more than some respectable men learn in all their lives. The school is under the auspices of the Chicago Woman's Club. The ladies, so far as possible, follow up the youths after they are released. In a number of instances they have been able to permanently reclaim these wild boys.