Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
Riis and Rice, You should put there first names here
Urban Education at the Turn of the 20th Century
Lavinia Gadsden
Pratt Institute
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
Riis and Rice, Documenting Urban Education at the Turn of the 20th Century
Historical evidence can be diaries, letters, memoirs, artifacts and photographs. Often it is
difficult to have enough of these pieces of evidence to build a complete picture of what it was
like at a certain time in history. The work of Jacob Riis and Joseph Meyer Rice, a photographer
and an observer/writer, provide a good basis of understanding of urban education at the turn of
the 20th Century (citations). Educational historians have relied heavily on the work of each of
them to create an accurate study of that period. It is unlikely that we would have as complete an
understanding of the state of education in New York City at the turn of the century without the
work of both.
Reform of the educational system was a topic of much discussion during the late 19th
century and early 20th century. Riis and Rice were major contributors to the literature about
urban education during this period. Riis, a photojournalist and urban reformer, portrayed the
poor physical environment of New York City’s classrooms and the problems that children in the
slums faced in the classroom and the street (citation). Rice provided first hand observations of
urban educational systems, writing a book that included a chapter on New York City schools,
detailing what he saw in the classrooms (Rice, 1892). Their work has had long-lasting
significance on the historical study of education--this sentence belongs in another paragraph.
This paragraph describes their contributions at the time) Both of them focused on the conditions
within the classrooms and how these conditions were a disservice to the well-being of the
children attending school. Both of them had great insight into the issues that needed to be
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
addressed and put forth their ideas for improvement. Their work made it clear that the
challenges of improving urban education at the turn of the century were immense.
Jacob Riis, an immigrant from Denmark started out as a newspaper man. He eventually
became a photojournalist and published a book, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890 This book
included hundreds of black and white photographs, with accompanying text that exposed the
horrible living condition of the millions of immigrants living in the tenements of New York City.
These pictures told the story of the dark, airless, unheated, disease ridden “homes” and schools in
which many of New York City’s recent immigrants lived and learned. These images told the
story of the impact of immigration on New York City. It was estimated that 2.8 million
immigrants poured into the United States between the years 1890 and 1900 and predominantly
settled in the cities (Jacobs, 2010). Millions more were drawn to the cities from rural America in
search of industrial jobs. The lure of jobs for both immigrant and migrant populations was
powerful; the availability of jobs was scarce.
The adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” accurately described the impact that
Riis’ work had on bringing attention to the extremely unhealthy, crowded tenement living of
New York City, the meager wages and the “destruction of the integrity of the individual” (Button
& Provenzo, 1983, 197). Riis’ writings supplemented his powerful images and included reports
of numerous incidents of men and women killing themselves due to the utter misery and
hopelessness they felt.
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
Riis’ photographs provided visual documentation of the conditions within the schools as
well. Like the tenements, the schoolrooms were poorly lit, poorly heated, and overcrowded. The
photographs showed students squeezed into rows of desks or just benches that were bolted to the
floor. They showed students sitting in rows doing uniform tasks, facing a teacher at the head of
the class. Warren Button and Eugene Provenzo, historians of education quote Riis:
In New York we put boys in foul, dark classroom, where they have grown crooked for
want of a proper desk; we bid them play in gloomy caverns which the sun never enters,
forgetting that boys mush have a chance to play properly, or they will play hooky; we
turn them away by the thousands from even such delights as these and in the same breath
illogically threaten them with jail if they do not come. (Button & Provenzano, 1983,
p.198).
Riis was not an educator but his photos, books, and essays were influential as a means of
bringing attention to the physical environment of schools, as well as the slums. He lobbied for
programs that focused on the well being of the children who were growing up in these conditions
of squalor. One of the programs was a proposal for establishing small parks with playground
equipment for children. Another proposal was that the tenement buildings surrounding the
schools be demolished and that playgrounds be built in their place. Both of these proposals
were aimed at providing children relief from the darkness and disease that they lived in. He felt
that the existence of playgrounds, open air and space would encourage children to attend school.
Riis argued that (is this Riis’ quote or Buttona and Provenzano’s? If it is not Riis’ you sould
paraphrase the quote. If it is Riis’, see below for how to cite a quote in a secondary
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
source“Instead of being repelled, children would be attracted to a school that was identified with
a playground. Truancy would cease.” ( Riis (date) as cited in Button & Provenzo, 1983, 197).
Perhaps the most important result of the publication of his books was that Theodore
Roosevelt, the governor of New York read them. He is quoted as saying: “I have read your
book, and I have come to help” (Britannica, 1994-2009). Roosevelt came to New York –when?
and walked through the slums with Riis and saw first-hand the deplorable conditions of urban
life. This experience and the relationship that developed between them led to significant
legislation by when? Building codes which required the demolition of thousands of tenement
buildings became law. The living conditions of the urban poor improved, although compliance
was slow.
Riis’ legacy was the awareness that he brought to the conditions of the urban poor, and
his life-long fight to improve their physical environment and, in turn, their lives. Sol Cohen, an
education historian, argued in, Progressives and Urban Reform, that Riis was a “great
propagandist rather than an innovator.” However Riis states that this was his intention. In the
preface to Children of the Poor he states: “Other hands may carry forward (my) work. My aim
has been to gather the facts for them to build upon. I said it in “How the Other Half Lives” and
now, in sending this volume to the printer I can add nothing. The two books are one. Each
supplements the other” (Rice, 1893).
Joseph Mayer Rice, another urban reformer and muckraker who focused on the
conditions of schools during this time, complements and enriches Riis’ call for change by
offering a “scientific” study of urban schools (Rice, 1893). He wrote a comprehensive report
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
about the New York City’s schools, as well as other urban systems that provided insight into
how students were taught, the method of instruction. Again, the following phrase is extraneous
to your main argument. Right now you are providing the background for this argument. and by
implication provides historians insight into the pedagogy of the 1890s into the 20th Century.
Rice stated in the preface of his book that “the purpose of this work is to evaluate
schools, their methods of teaching, their standards and their administration for the benefit of the
child, not the benefit of the Boards of Education, Superintendents or teachers. Rice’s objective
was to” discover the causes of the marked variation in the general degree of excellence of the
schools of various localities….and eradicate the causes of their inferiority” (Rice, 1893).
Rice divided his book into chapters which document his findings from his visits to 36
urban school systems. He observed teachers and students in 1,200 classrooms, interviewed
teachers, principals, and superintendents and came away with one overriding theme: that
teachers were not doing an adequate job of educating the students in their classes. He believed
they were poorly trained and needed ongoing professional training. He stated that teachers were
the direct link to the students in their classrooms and thus were responsible for providing them an
excellent education. Rice details the rote learning that took place in the classrooms: the drills
and memorization of information. Students were learning facts and figures, often without
absorbing, synthesizing or even understanding what they were being taught. He believed that
teaching children to think for themselves and to arrive at their own conclusions was essential to
their development. He advocated a method of education that would “lead the child to observe, to
reason, and to acquire manual dexterity, as well as to memorize facts. In a word, to develop the
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
child naturally in all his facilities, intellectual, moral and physical” (Rice, 1893). This was the
core belief of the progressive movement in education – a new approach to education that
recognized that it was important to understand the psychological make-up of children and
incorporate this understanding into how and what children were taught.
On the contrary however, he summarized his observations of the teaching taking place in
the majority of classroom as follows: “teachers are accustomed to conduct sing-song recitations
in spelling and arithmetic, hear children recite lessons verbatim from a text-book [and] conduct
concert recitations in geography….One is liable to find in any city a teacher here and there who
follows such methods of instruction” (Rice, 1893).
Larry Cuban, an educational historian, reinforces Rice’s findings by looking at
photographs taken of classrooms during this era. He estimates that 90% of the photographs
“show rows of children with hands folded atop their desks staring into the camera” (Cuban,
1993). The method of instruction was that teachers stood in front of the class and provided
students with facts about math, geography, history and science. According to Cuban, students
memorized this information and were expected to repeat what they had learned verbatim. (this
would not show in the photograph—he must have supplemented his study with written text) The
proof that they had learned that information was demonstrated by their ability to do this (Cuban,
1993). Barbara Finkelstein another historian of education argues that “teachers assigned lessons,
asked questions and created standards of achievement designed to compel students to assimilate
knowledge and practice skills in a particular fashion. Instruction was delivered with dogmatic
determination” (Cuban, 1993).
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
This is where you begin to talk about Rice’s solutions to the problems he identified. You
probably need a transition here.
You need a topic sentence here. Rice wrote: “Of those teaching some are high school
graduates, others have simply attended a normal school, high school, or academy for one or more
terms, while a very large number of licenses to teach are granted to those whose education does
not extend beyond that received in grammar-school.”
He stated that “no teacher should be
“allowed, year after year, to instruct in this manner.” According to Rice, the antidote to teachers
who were poorly trained, poorly educated and unprepared for teaching is to provide them
professional development and ongoing teacher training (Rice, 1893).
Rice states unequivocally that the powerful political influence of school boards was the
most significant impediment to achieving excellence in the schools. The board members rarely
had experience as educators yet were responsible for the governance of the schools and the
education of tens of thousands of children in their district. They were responsible for appointing
the superintendent of each school district, and had the power of approval for all layers of
administration that governed the teachers; Superintendents, assistant puperintendents and
Principals. Rice found that few of these administrators had the educational background and
training, or understanding of the new movement in education. The result was a preponderance of
ineffective teachers (Citation).
Rice believed that the educational system could be improved if every member of the
board right down to the teachers was actively engaged in improving the teaching skills of those
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
who interacted daily with the children. He pointed to the superintendent as the pivotal point for a
culture of teaching excellence. The superintendent was to provide educational guidance to the
assistant superintendents, who in turn provided professional training to principals. Principals
were to be actively engaged in providing professional development to teachers. He insisted that
this training must be done on an ongoing basis. “While the teacher makes the school, the
superintendent in large part makes the teacher. And as the power to appoint both the
superintendent and teachers in the vast amount of instances lies in the hands of the board of
education, this body is ultimately the strongest factor in making or destroying the schools. With
this knowledge the remedies for school evils suggest themselves” (Rice, 1893).
Riis and Rice argued for improvements to New York’s education system. They visited
the schools and classrooms and had first-hand experience of what was taking place in the
classroom. Both came to the conclusion that the conditions were not conducive to providing
children with a good education. They wrote that their primary concern was the children who
were essentially trapped in a system that was desperately in need of significant change.
According to.. “The reforms that they called for were part of the experiments to change and
improve the physical conditions in the public schools as well as the methodologies of teaching”.
(Lewis, 2010).
The history of urban education at the turn of the 19th century is illuminated by the work
of Riis and Rice. The importance of their work as two parts of a whole is indisputable. Riis
wrote: “and now, in sending this volume to the printer I can add nothing. The two books are one.
Each supplements the other” (Riis, 1897). This is confusing. Riis is referring to his two books
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
( How the Other Half Lives and Children of the Poor—how does this speak to the
“complementary work of Riis and Rice? P This quote speaks to the complementary work of Riis
and Rice. It is only in viewing them together does one get the true sense of what it was like to be
a child in the public schools of NYC at the turn of the century.
You are almost done. Let me make one more suggestion for your argument. It is not
really stated at the beginning of the essay. You seem to have stated it in the last sentence in the
essay—that only by viewing them together does one get the true sense …..
You have an interesting argument here that appears to be quite original. I have not come
across any historical work that juxtaposes these two reformers in the way you have. Of course, I
have not looked at Cuban and Finkelstein’s work in a while—do either of them make a similar
argument. If not, you have something here that you should elaborate on in the beginning and
end of the essay. It seems Cuban uses photos to supplement his historical study but he does not
necessarily concentrate on Riis’ work the way you do. Here are some suggestions for how you
can strengthen your argument.
1. After you state in the first paragraph that without Riis’ and Rice’s work we would not have a
clear picture of what schools and living conditions were like in NYC – You should then insert
your argument-However, their work is generally interpreted in historical texts separately;
historians of education mostly analyze Rice’s work to understand the conditions of schooling and
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
urban and art historians mostly analyze Riis’ work for their accounts of living conditions, the use
of photojournalism and urban reform during this era (you can cite the texts we read). Yet, their
work seems to have been complementary even though there is little historical evidence to suggest
that their efforts to reform urban conditions coincided.
By comparing the intersections between
Riis and Rice’s work about children and their schooling conditions, this essay suggests that ……
Does this make sense? You have compared the two throughout the essay and now need to
answer the “so what” question. It seems that you might be saying that they both focused on
children……and therefore……
The essay is almost done. You just have a few small changes and the addition of a stronger
argument at the beginning and the end. Let me know if this makes sense to you.
Riis and Rice, Documenting Urban Education at the Turn of the 20th Century
References
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
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Cuban, Larry. (1993). How teachers taught, constancy and change in American classrooms
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Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. (1994 – 2009). Retrieved from
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Running head: RIIS AND RICE, URBAN EDUCATION
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