The Problem of the City School

A SLOGAN of serfs in Middle Ages, we have been told, was the city air means freedom. To poor and oppressed in twentieth-century America, city offers similar attraction, but along with its opportunities and freedoms go its dangers and threats. The air itself carries a high concentration of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, hydrocarbons, and carcinogenic agents. America's great cities, pride of her civilization and incubators of her culture, have lured ambitious, intelligent, discontented, adventuresome, frustrated, and maladjusted off farms, out of mountains, and from across oceans. But cities have also presented newcomers with a particular set of problems. Even wonderful concepts of freedom and opportunity have been translated by lives of some urbanites into anonymity and, further, into anomie. Shortages of pure air and water combine with a plentiful supply of people and automobiles. High rates of crime, illness, poverty and suffering of all kinds seem abundant in cities, and while some of these rates are partially statistical illusion, there seems no escaping Robert Park's conclusion that, by one means or another, city magnifies crisis. The starting point for this exploration of problem school, then, is in problem city-and even healthiest institution would have problems by being located in city. A familiar example of this situation is found in area of race relations. Today, there is a high probability that city school will be a center of concern, social action, and perhaps even violence because of its role in race relations. While it is easy to agree that schools might do more to further healthy race relations in this country, it must also be recognized that much of what schools are now blamed for is actually acquired from socio-economic conditions outside school building: Economic in

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