Truancy and non-attendance in the Chicago schools : a study of the social aspects of the compulsory education and child labor legislation of Illinois / by Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge.

  • Abbott, Edith, 1876-1957.
Date:
[1917], ©1917
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Truancy and non-attendance in the Chicago schools : a study of the social aspects of the compulsory education and child labor legislation of Illinois / by Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    becoming delinquent. In the following year, 1883, the first compulsory education law of Illinois was passed. More than twenty-five years of agitation had been necessary to secure legislation providing for the support of the schools by taxation. In the quarter of a century that followed the passage of the free school law, the principle that the state might tax the property of its citizens to provide for the education of its children was embodied in the new constitution of Illinois and the legislature had taken another important step in advance by recognizing its right to make school attendance compulsory. But much remained to be done. It was left for the next quarter of a century to extend the provisions of the com- pulsory law and, by prohibiting child labor during the period of compulsory school attendance, to make possible its enforce- ment. ™“Very many of the other two-thirds are growing up not alone in ignorance but in vice, and from them will come the larger part of our criminals; for, though education and virtue do not always go together, the vicious are most commonly ignorant.” A report of the superintendent of the Pontiac Reformatory was quoted to show that out of 241 boys con- nected with the Reformatory in the two years preceding, 136 could not write, 120 knew nothing of arithmetic, 39 could not read, and 124 others could read only in the first or the second reader. The superintendent commented that “this shows a bad state of things, when we consider that the average age of the boys committed was fourteen years and six months”’ (Second Biennial Report of Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois (1882), P. 374).