OCR Text |
Show tional field in Brooklyn, New York, where, until my recent retirement, for age, I have been a high school teacher of English for over thirty years. Nearly all of my pupils in this metropolis have been Hebrews from Eussia, Poland and other European nations, and a large precentage of them have been from homes where one or both parents were born on the other side of the Atlantic and often spoke no English. From 1912, through 1914, or for three years, I gathered statistics of the earnings of pupils in the school with which I was connected-one of the smaller high schools, with only three thousand to thirty-five hundred pupils-and found that, in summer vacation and after-school hours, the boys earned $64,136.16 and the girls earned $17,683.92 to help themselves while getting an education. Some of the tasks by which this sum of over $60,000 was earned by pupils between thirteen and eighteen years of age, in three years, were what many call "blind alley" jobs, such as working as errand boy, newsboy, route boy, barber, electrician, 12 |