As for a truant school, the lack of one was the worst outrage of
all, for it compelled the sending of boys, who had done no worse
harm than to play hooky on a sunny spring day, to a jail with iron
bars in the windows. For the boy who did this wicked thing--let me
be plain about it and say that if he had not; if he had patiently
preferred some of the schools I knew to a day of freedom out in
the sunshine, I should have thought him a miserable little lunkhead
quite beyond hope! As for those who locked him up, almost nothing
I can think of would be bad enough for them. The whole effort of
society should be, and is getting to be more and more, thank goodness
and common sense, to keep the boy out of jail. To run to it with
him the moment the sap begins to boil up in him and he does any
one of the thousand things we have all done or wanted to do if we
dared, why, it is sinful folly. I am not saying that there are not
boys who ought to be in jail, though to my mind it is the poorest
use you can put them to; but to put truants there, to learn all
the tricks the jail has to teach, with them in the frame of mind
in which it receives them,--for boys are not fools, whatever those
who are set over them may be, and they know when they are ill-used,--I
know of nothing so wickedly wasteful.
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