8—THE BULLETIN—Friday, April 13, 1973
RABBI JACOB J. HCCHT
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IT WAS SHOCKING news to hear that New York City intends to assign police to the public schools.
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It was even more shocking to learn that this is the only way, accod-ing to the school authorities, that discipline can be maintained, and students and teachers protected from violence from both inside and outside the schools.
At first glance, considering the horrendous problems the New York City public schools have been having, stationing police in the schools seems like a logical course. With violence breaking out in the classrooms, with dope being pushed in the rest rooms and cafeterias, with gang warfare erupting in the schoolyards, the situation has become intolerable.
Conditions have gone so far that teachers have been mugged by hoodlums who enter the schools from the streets, break into the classrooms, and with guns and knives - in full view of the terrified pupils - force teachers to hand over their pocketbooks and valuables.
So, when the school authorities in desperation, decided to station policemen in the classrooms, their decisions seemed like the most sensible thing to do.
Certainly, this approach has worked well in protecting riders of the subway during the late night and early hours.
A DECADE AGO, when crime in the streets was just becoming a national problem, the criminal element in New York found easy pickings in the subways. With their miles of pedestrian underground passageways, largely un-patrolled, the subways represented a fertile area in which hapless subway riders cpiild be attacked.
But the rounds of muggings and robberies produced an immediate reaction from the authorities. The mayor then, Robert F. Wagner, arranged a huge loan from the state which enabled the municipal government to hire city policemen on their time off to patrol the subways at night. The plan called for a patrolman to be assigned to every station and to every train from midnight to 6 a.m.
Such an arrangement has continued until the present day, and the result - from the very beginning - has been a drastic curtailment of subway crime. True, some still exists, but it is nothing of the magnitude of crime outside the subway.
So, with the success of this program to fall back upon, the school authorities with some logic decided to employ the same method on the school system. Put a policeman in every school, and several policemen in some schools, and violence - will disappear, their thinking went, leaving the teachers to concentrate on teaching, and students on learning.
However, what works for the subways doesn't work for the schools. The reason is this "logical 9pproach" completely ignores those who are the chief recipients of public-school education, i.e.. the students.
Many of these students, contrary   Pupil is to what we read, are serious. Teachers They come to school to learn. . . to learn a trade, to learn science, to learn the humanities, to lea.rn enough to attend college.
But whatever subject they are interested in, they cannot learn it when someone nearby is walking around with a gun. A policeman in the classroom does not make for a receptive atmosphere for learning.
Thus, the student is no better off than if hoodlums had entered the classroom.
THE CHIEF LESSON a student will learn when there are policemen in the schools is one that no one intended for him to learn. Namely, that authority is weak, and with so little control and power, that armed officers of the law have to be brought in to protect teachers and students and to keep the schools safe.
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So the lesson they will, learn is that force is the only way to contain violence.
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Only when we think of thousands of school children being indoctrinated into this attitude, do we realize what we are spawning, i.e. a generation of once-innocent youtii who will soon believe tiiat might makes right, that guns are the onlypower, that decency, truth, and morality are something to be pushed into the background (like their teachers were).
What a horrible lesson! a mockery of education!
What
side of a gun, be it a policeman's or gangsters?
Many Jews will ask: what does all this have to do with us?
They will point out that their children go to yeshivas and day schools where the atmosphere is entirely different. Of course they are right. No police are needed in Jewish parochial schools. The relationship between teacher and very clearly defined, are  there to teach; students to learn, ^.^hes must do what he is told and must not be disrespectful. There are no "and's, ifs, and but's." If a student goes too far out of line too often, he will no longer be allowed to attend.
ALTHOUGH THIS atmosphere sounds restrictive for learning, it is actually just the opposite. Students in yeshivas can maximize their learning. Also, as we know, far more is learned in yeshivas and day schools, than just subjects like the Torah, just subjects like arithmetic, history, and English. Far more is learned too than the Jewish subjects like the Torah, Talmud, Code of Jewish Law, Ehtics, etc.
However, what also comes throu£^ to the students - along with the book learning ai;;e ethical principles that will ^ide young Jewish boys and girls the rest of their lives. Students are hardly unfamiliar with these principles; they learn them first from the parents, and throughout their lives, they releam them ifrom their religious leaders. What the Yeshivas and day schools do is to reinforce these principles.
By the way the teachers teach and by the very atmosphere in which they teach, important principles are communicated, everything from the difference between .
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The United States is already .under attack for being too violent and bloodthirsty. Our allies condemn us for our senseless bombing of civilians. Our social critics warn of our attitudes that will lead to more crime and more disregard of ethical behavior. How can anything improve when we teach our children that the only way to be safe is to be on the
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In other words, students pick up more tiian the so-called book learning. They do this in every educational institution, but when tiiey are in a Jewish educational institution, they pick up the particular principles of Judaism which are unexcelled as far as high moral standards are concerned.
So, the question still remains: if our Jewish youth is being trained and educated along these lines, why should we be concerned as to what happens in the public schools to largely non-Jewish youth?
The answer is that these youth will be all around, in the neighborhoods, in the business world, and the Jewish youth as their fellow Americans will have to get along with them some way.
The proximity to and contact with these public-school graduates will tempt some Jewish youth to abandon the principles they were taught at home, in their parochial
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