s, and the
statistics of the Board of Education show that the average age of the
pupils entering the lowest primary grade is six years and five months. The
whole number of different pupils taught in that year was 196,307.[11] The
Catholic schools, parochial and select, reported a total of 35,055; the
corporate schools (Children's Aid Society's, Orphan Asylums, American
Female Guardian Society's, etc.), 23,276; evening schools, 29,165;
Nautical School, 111; all other private schools (as estimated by
Superintendent of Schools Jasper), 15,000; total, 298,914; any possible
omissions in this list being more than made up for by the thousands over
fourteen who are included. So that by deducting the number of pupils from
the school population as given above, more than 50,000 children between
the ages of five and fourteen are shown to have received no schooling
whatever last year. As the public schools had seats for only 195,592,
while the registered attendance exceeded that number, it follows that
there was no room for the fifty thousand had they chosen to apply. In
fact, the year before, 3,783 children had been refused admission at the
opening of the schools after the summer vacation because there were no
seats for them. To be told in the same breath that there were more than
twenty thousand unoccupied seats in the schools at that time, is like
adding insult to injury. Though vacant and inviting pupils they were
worthless, for they were in the wrong schools. Where the crowding of the
growing population was greatest and the need of schooling for the
children most urgent, every seat was taken. Those who could not travel far
from home--the poor never can--in search of an education had to go
without.

The Department of Education employs twelve truant officers, who in 1891
"found and returned to school" 2,701 truants. There is a timid sort of
pretence that this was "enforcing the compulsory education law," though it
is coupled with the statement that at least eight more officers are needed
to do it properly, and that they should have power to seize the culprits
wherever found. Superintendent Jasper tells me that he thinks there are
only about 8,000 children in New York who do not go to school at all. But
the Department's own records furnish convincing proof that he is wrong,
and that the 50,000 estimate is right. That number is just about
one-seventh of the whole number of children between five and fourteen
years, as stated above.