In the typical slum, Conant found, one-third of all children come from families in which there is neither father nor stepfather. Almost all their homes lack books and newspapers. Young girls say that their "biggest problem" is to get home without being molested by men. Teachers struggle "tenaciously and bravely" against the adversities of home and street, but bow before the realities. They assign no homework because it is an impossibility in filthy, noisy tenements. They teach no foreign languages in junior high school because half of their pupils hardly know English—they read at sixth-grade level or below. Their immediate task is to prod sleeping children who have been kept awake all night by battling parents. And they struggle steadily to keep their charges from quitting school, to keep them from joining the unemployed floaters on the street.
Within these limitations, slum teachers score remarkable successes. They do manage to bring some order to otherwise chaotic lives. Says Conant: "The outward manifestations of discipline, order and formal dress are found to a greater degree in the well-run slum schools of a city than in the wealthier sections of the same city." Yet in most big-city slums, more than half of the students drop out of school when they reach the legal age, usually 16. Two-thirds of the dropouts fail to find jobs; even among those who get high school diplomas, roughly half cannot get work. The massive idleness of slum-dwelling men aged 16 to 21 is the sharpest problem Conant found.
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