428 APPLICABILITY OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 



scenes calculated to demoralize adults, and certain to leave their impress on the 

 susceptible minds of the young, quarreling, swearing, fighting, and in every way 

 emulating the immorality of those who bred them. There is scarcely a town in 

 England or Wales whose poorer streets from eight in the morning till ten at night 

 are not full of these harrowing and disgusting scenes, which thus continually show 

 us the real fountain head of our demoralized pauperism. In Switzerland nothing 

 of the kind is to be seen. The children are as regularly employed in school, as 

 their parents are in their daily occupations, and henceforward, instead of the 

 towns continuing to be, as they are in England, and as they had hitherto been in 

 Switzerland, the hot-beds and nurseries of irreligion, immorality, and sedition, they 

 will only afford still more favorable opportunities than the country, of advancing 

 the religious, moral,, and social interests of the children of the poor." 



In New England where the Free School system may be said to have 

 originated, it was found necessary, in the case of large cities, to adopt 

 what is named a " Truancy Act." This Act, which is in force, with 

 the happiest results in Boston, Providence and other cities, presents 

 the following features as described by Dr. Bishop who was lately 

 Superintendent of Schools in Boston. He says : 



" The territorial limits of the city are divided into three districts, and a 

 ' Truant Officer,' so called, is appointed for each district. He is required to 

 spend his whole time during school-hours in traversing streets, lanes, alleys 

 and other places, in search of absentees from school. These are of several different 

 classes. One class is composed of the children whose parents have recently moved 

 into the city, and who being more or less indifferent to the education of their 

 children, have neglected to find places for them at school. Whenever the truant 

 officer finds any of these children idle in the streets of his district, he makes such 

 inquiries of them as may be necessary to ascertain their condition. If he deems 

 it expedient he accompanies them to their places of residence, and by conversing 

 with their parents in kind and respectful terms, he generally succeeds in pursuad- 

 ing them to send their children to school, without any show of his authority, which 

 should always be kept out of sight until other means have failed, and then be exer- 

 cised as a last resort. 



Another class of absentees stay away from school for want of shoes, or such clotJiea 

 as will enable them to make a decent appearance among the pupils at school. By 

 patient efforts, on the part of the truant officer he can generally obtain from vari- 

 ous sources such new or second-hand articles of wearing apparel as will keep this 

 class of pupils respectably clad, and thus enable them to continue in school. 



A third class of absentees is composed of children whose parents are so unfortu- 

 nate, or idle, or vicious, as to require them to stay away from school for the pur- 

 pose of gathering fragments of fuel and food for the family at home. The officer 

 can do much in his district to diminish the number of this class of absentees, but in 

 cases of extreme poverty the absence can not be prevented, for necessity knows no 

 law. 



The fourth and last class embraces the idle and dissolute runaways from school, 



