April 29, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Latin is the dead language of the Romans—but to David P. Hardy, it was exactly what inner-city kids needed to thrive in school and become good citizens. Here's David with the story of how he founded Boys' Latin—and fell in love with being an educator in the worst neighborhood Philadelphia had to offer.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Can we continue with our American stories and one topic
we love on this show his education. We've done stories
with many important thinkers doctor Lowry Arne at Hillsdale College,
Arizona State University's Michael Crow to name a few. Today
we'll hear from a man who served on the front
lines of education reform in West Philadelphia, David P.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hardy.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
David is a distinguished Fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation and
the co founder and retired CEO of Boys Latin, an
all boys school in his home city that mandated that
city kids learn the dead language. Here's Dave with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
I'll tell you I did get in trouble one time.
Here you go.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I was with a bunch of guys and this is
my senior year high school, and I hung out with
these guys who are older than me and they went
to Cheney University.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
So I'm out there on a Sunday night with these
guys at Cheney. Were coming back on Route three Westchester Pike,
and we stopped at the gas station and the guy
who was driving wasn't even his car.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
He starts taking oil from the gas station. Okay, So
I go in.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
To pay for the gas and the guy says, I
saw your friend steal in the oil, You better tell
him to put it back, which I told him when
we got in the car, but he pulled off and
I kept telling him, look, let me out. I'd rather
walk home than get in trouble. But they wouldn't let
me out. At the corner of Root three and Root one,
(01:44):
it seemed like every cop in Delaware County surrounding us. Now,
these guys were all over eighteen, so they went to
the adult place. I went to the juvenile sweatbox. Graffiti
all over it like Maddie from K and A was
arrested for shoplifting here like that. Right at about two
thirty in the morning, my mother walks in. She's followed
(02:08):
by my sister, who thought it was pretty funny, and
my sister's boyfriend, who probably heard my mother complaining all
the way from North Billy to sixty ninth Street.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
And I actually wanted the cops to let me stay in.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Jail that night, because I knew what I was going
to get on the way home.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And I know I got it about how I was embarrassing.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
How she hopes that it's not in the papers because
the neighbors probably wouldn't speak to it. I mean, it
was it was she just she did the whole cor
dump of guilt on me.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But that's that's the kind of stuff you got from her.
She was a master of guilt. She knew how to
make you feel guilty.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
My mother worked for the federal government. She worked for
the Veterans Administration. I think she worked there for like
thirty five years. And one of the things that she
always talked about when I was young was things that
couldn't happen because she was a federal employee.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
To keep everybody in mind.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Like if I stood out on the corner and she
didn't like who I was standing out on the corner with,
she called me in the house.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
And that was the one thing. You know, if you
get arrested, don't know that I work for the VAA.
I believe that crap too.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Nobody knew that what a clerk from the VA looked
on twenty seventh in York was doing.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I mean, how smart was I. That was her thing
in driving me.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
She always made a point of pointing out who was
doing well from the neighborhood in school, always a point
of telling you know, this person got straight. My cousin
Bobby was a really good student. She would always talk
about him, guy across the street. Oh, man, she loved him.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
And here's the deal.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
He got the Union League, good Citizenship board, and man,
you would have thought he got like the Congressional Medal
of Honor or something. I don't think his parents made
this big a deal of it as my mom did.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
She every time he would walk by and she was
talking to somebody, she call him over.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
And you know what he did. Okay. So when I
got the award and I took that home, she was speechless.
She was speechless, and I gotta I gotta tell you.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
She took that thing. She put I got a frame
for it. She really valued that. And at first I
always said, I'm glad I got that award so I.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Could shut her up.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
But the fact is that I saw the pride that
she took in that, and it did.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Make me feel good. Obviously she valued education. This woman
never lied. She never lied about anything.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
If somebody called the house and you didn't want to
speak to him, she wouldn't say.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
You weren't home. She would always all, no, you have
to speak. I mean, she didn't lied about anything, but
she lied for two of my three schools.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
My brother and my oldest sister went to our neighborhood school,
and my mother did not like that school. She didn't
think they learned enough. She wasn't happy with the quality
of the education. She also knew people who lived one
block north of us who went to a different school
(05:30):
that was better resourced, and we got better.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Results from the school.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
So my mom used my godmother's address, which honestly wasn't
more than like fifty yards from my house. That's how
tight this thing was. Now, I went to an elementary
school that had an orchestra program.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
I played the string base. Okay, we had a full orchestra.
I was inside in spirit.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
We had the option of four foreign languages French, Spanish, Latin, German.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
My friends weren't in that kind of stuff. They didn't
have that at the other school.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
With neighborhood public schools, people are assigned at school and
they're going to get the same amount of money whether
you go there or not, whether your kids do their
homework or not, whether your kids learn or not, and
that is pretty.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Obvious from the door.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And my neighborhood school, all you could take was Spanish.
The problem was they didn't tell me that they were lying.
So every time they asked me my address at school,
I told them my address. They looked at me like
I was stupid, like I didn't know the address. So
then I had to get to talk about we did
(06:51):
this so you can go to a better school. But
I got the mom told a lie. I think I
said that one. I got popped that saying that I
went into education as kind of time to kind of
(07:13):
get back. I wanted to find some neighborhood school that
I could work at, maybe for three or four months
and help the kids out. And I'm sure they were
all there waiting for me to come in and be
the miracle of their life. And so I saw this
thing in the paper as ad for a school for
at risk kids in North Philadelphia. I thought I was
(07:36):
probably an at risk kid at some point.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
So I show up at the school and it was horrible.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
This neighborhood was declared by the Philadelphia Inquirers the worst
square mile in Pennsylvania the level of poverty, joblessness, rampant
drug sales on just about every corner. In fact, the
corner north of US there were twenty seven different drug
organizations selling on that corner, and the public schools mirrored
the neighborhood. So the public schools were some of the
(08:06):
worst performing schools in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Now, this was like nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
There was a craze going around with rap where you
would do a beat box, you would make all.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Kinds of noises.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Okay, kids would erupt into this stuff out of nowhere.
You'd be giving a lesson all of a sudden they
start making all.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Kinds of stupid noises. It's crazy.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
It was crazy, and the kids always thought everything was like,
really really funny. Anything that they didn't understand was really
really funny. I remember thinking, these kids are the strangest
kids I ever saw. My plan was as soon as
that year was over, I was getting out of there.
And I still don't understand what I did. But the
(08:50):
principal came to me a couple of days before school
ended and he says, well, are you going to come
back next year? And I said yes. I really don't
know why I did not like it. So when I
went back in September, I had the middle school kids, sixth, seventh,
and eighth graders. That's when I fell in love with
(09:10):
teaching because They were very impressionable. And I remember being
in middle school. I know how goofy middle school kids are,
so I gave him a lot of grace for that.
And I also got him to look at things and
try things that they ordinarily wouldn't have wanted to do.
I had them reading Shakespeare, I had him reading all
kinds of poets. I taught them a little bit about
(09:32):
the Anglo Saxon language. I took the course in Old
English when I was in college. That I could read
this stuff or I could write some of those different
letters that they had was always impressive.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But I really I got into the whole idea of teaching.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
When we come back more of the story of David P. Hardy,
an innovator, an educator, and lover of children. Here on
our American story, and we continue with our American stories
(10:11):
and with Dave Hardy's story when we last left off,
to give back to his community and help inner city
kids struggling with school, to volunteered to teach in one
of the worst schools in one of the worst neighborhoods
of Philadelphia. He didn't enjoy the experience and didn't want
to return, but something pushed him to do so anyway,
(10:32):
and it would change his life.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Let's return to the story. A good student is a
good citizen.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
A good citizen is somebody who follows the rules and
tries to do things the right way.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
That starts in school.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I was watching something on public television and somehow they
brought up Cotton Mather. I remember the name Cotton Mather
from history, but I really I couldn't quite remember why
he was so important. So I start reading about him,
and I saw that he went to Boston Latin, and
then I start reading about Boston Latin, then all the
(11:12):
people that came out of Boston Latin, and I thought
maybe by having something like that, where students had to
learn a language that was completely foreign to him, it
would make them more dependent on the teachers and the school.
We wanted to do an all boys school, an academic school,
(11:33):
because if you didn't have an academic focus and the
guys just came there expecting to do what they normally
did in high school in Philadelphia, that would be animal house.
People go to charter schools because they choose that school.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
They don't have to.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
You have to have something to make people want to
come and make them want to stay, and it's not
about gimmicks because people come for one reason.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
They come for a better education.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
The only people who were really against it were people
who were tied to the school district, concerned about charter
schools creating competition.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
And what happened was we applied for the school.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
You'd had to go before the school district board. But
about three weeks before we were supposed to go in
front of the school board, they had the Women's Law
Project come in and say that our school was constitutionally
illegal because.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
It was all male.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
So I asked where was the complaint because they really
didn't have any. We had to get parents to protests.
We had to get two legal opinions done, one by
a women at Saint John's University, and then we got
one done by our local law firm because the school
district said that the first legal opinion didn't count because
(12:59):
she wasn't from Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
We did all that.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
When they saw the politics were on our side, they
gave in and that's how we got to school. Anybody
who saw what was happening at Boys Latin had to
be impressed because you had guys in jackets and ties,
khaki pants put together. You saw these guys with book bags,
(13:25):
because I got to tell you, you can go by
a lot of high schools and see kids walking in
there without a book in their hands. Discipline was important,
attendance was important. These were all things that they weren't
able to do on a regular basis, particularly with young men.
When parents saw that we could do it, they went
out and talked about it, and it wasn't long before
(13:48):
we had a pretty good reputation city wide. What kind
of boys came to Boys Latin all types of boys.
There were guys who came there who were good students
at their old school and came right in and were.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Good students with us.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Guys who were okay students at their old school, but
in a different environment they shaped up and they became
good students. And then we had guys who in their
old school were hell raisers. My favorite one, he's a
Philadelphia School District employee.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Today. He came to us. He had a disciplinary pack
i'd say four inches.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Stick throwing cheers and cursing and fighting and doing all
kinds of crazy stings.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And when we saw that, I called his mother and
I said, you know.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
This is gonna be a serious school. He's got to
do his work and he can't be disrupted.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Because it's gonna help.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
It's not only going to hurt him, it's going to
hurt out the students. And she said, you know, he's
never really had a chance. I think what he needs
is a chance. And I said, well, that's one thing
we can give. It doesn't cost us anything. We'll give
him a chance. So I was able to get him
some uniforms because I knew that she was mine was
struggling a little because she had other kids and everything.
(14:59):
So we got him the forums and then he came
to the summer session that we have. I didn't hear
from him. I didn't know who he was really, But
then he got kicked out of class for something and
I said to him, you know you got to cut
that out, or are you get in trouble here? Now
go back to class. And he turned around and he
(15:21):
walked in the opposite direction of the class.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Hell's wrong with him? So I jumped right in front
of him.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Now, this is a guy who had a four inch
stick disciplinary record of throwing cheers and fighting and all
that kind of stuff, So I wasn't quite sure what
he was.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Going to do so.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I said to him, look, where are you going. He says,
I'm going home, and I said, you can't go home.
We don't quit here. Go back to class.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
He turned around and went back to class. Honest a guy.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
I never had another problem out of him for four years.
He graduated from our school. He went to Goucher, He
graduated from Oucher College, no easy college in four years,
and now he works for the school District of Philadelphia.
That's the kind of thing that happened at our school.
It was an environment for boys who understood, boys who
(16:15):
knew how to motivate boys. And you know a lot
of them said this. They said they didn't answer questions
when they went to a co ed school because they
were afraid they'd be wrong and the girls.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Would laugh at them.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
I mean, that's what you used to hear girls say
thirty forty years ago. I don't want to say anything
in front of the boys because they'll laugh at me
if I say, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Come on. The whole thing is turned upside down.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
And what happened in our school is because we had
a school where everybody was expected to do the same thing,
and we enforced it that way. That we got a
lot of cooperation because another thing wrong without the public
schools is that they have rules, but nobody has to
follow them, or everybody he doesn't have to follow. When
(17:02):
we had the school for the overaged under credential kids,
so the school district, because they assigned the kids to us,
the school district insisted that we have a metal detective.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
So we got a metal detective. So I never had metal.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Detectors as schools because I think that's a sign that
your school's in trouble anyway. But I wanted to enforce
that all students come through the metal detective. So we
had a few pregnant girls and the first thing they
say is I'm pregnant. I don't have to go through
the metal detector, and so we let him walk around.
And then I started thinking, my wife had two kids.
(17:37):
We went on planes when she was pregnant with each
one of those kids, and she always went through the
metal detector.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Why is it that our girls can't get through. So
I looked at the name on the metal detector.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
I called the company and asked them and they said,
of course, pregnant women can go through the metal detector,
and they stepped me to studies. This showed that was okay.
So then about three months later, we have a visit.
We have our official visit from the school district and
we had a fire drill scheduled for that day, and
the teacher said, let's not have it. We're gonna have
(18:11):
the people from the school. I said, no, let them
see our fire drill. So we had the fire drill,
we had people come back in and of course everybody
had to go back through the metal detective. And the
people from the school district asked me, how could I
get the pregnant girls to go through a metal detective
And I said, it.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Doesn't hurt them.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I showed them the study and everything, and the guy
from the school district told me that not only did
they have problems with pregnant girls, there were.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
People who asked for religious exemptions from the metal detective. Now,
can you.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Think of one religion that would be against metal detectors.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Hey, that's of nonsense that they lived with.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
So the fact that we could run an all boys'
school and they couldn't shouldn't be a surprise, because they
fall for every kind of problem. They give credence to
the most ridiculous problems. That's what made Boys Latin a
different school.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
And a special Thanks to Dave Hardy. I love what
he said at the beginning of that a good student
is a good citizen who tries to do the right
things in the right way, and that starts in school.
The story of Boys Latin in West Philadelphia and the
story of Dave Hardy here are now American stories.
Can we continue with our American stories and one topic
we love on this show his education. We've done stories
with many important thinkers doctor Lowry Arne at Hillsdale College,
Arizona State University's Michael Crow to name a few. Today
we'll hear from a man who served on the front
lines of education reform in West Philadelphia, David P.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Hardy.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
David is a distinguished Fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation and
the co founder and retired CEO of Boys Latin, an
all boys school in his home city that mandated that
city kids learn the dead language. Here's Dave with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
I'll tell you I did get in trouble one time.
Here you go.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I was with a bunch of guys and this is
my senior year high school, and I hung out with
these guys who are older than me and they went
to Cheney University.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Right.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
So I'm out there on a Sunday night with these
guys at Cheney. Were coming back on Route three Westchester Pike,
and we stopped at the gas station and the guy
who was driving wasn't even his car.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
He starts taking oil from the gas station. Okay, So
I go in.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
To pay for the gas and the guy says, I
saw your friend steal in the oil, You better tell
him to put it back, which I told him when
we got in the car, but he pulled off and
I kept telling him, look, let me out. I'd rather
walk home than get in trouble. But they wouldn't let
me out. At the corner of Root three and Root one,
(01:44):
it seemed like every cop in Delaware County surrounding us. Now,
these guys were all over eighteen, so they went to
the adult place. I went to the juvenile sweatbox. Graffiti
all over it like Maddie from K and A was
arrested for shoplifting here like that. Right at about two
thirty in the morning, my mother walks in. She's followed
(02:08):
by my sister, who thought it was pretty funny, and
my sister's boyfriend, who probably heard my mother complaining all
the way from North Billy to sixty ninth Street.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
And I actually wanted the cops to let me stay in.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Jail that night, because I knew what I was going
to get on the way home.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
And I know I got it about how I was embarrassing.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
How she hopes that it's not in the papers because
the neighbors probably wouldn't speak to it. I mean, it
was it was she just she did the whole cor
dump of guilt on me.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But that's that's the kind of stuff you got from her.
She was a master of guilt. She knew how to
make you feel guilty.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
My mother worked for the federal government. She worked for
the Veterans Administration. I think she worked there for like
thirty five years. And one of the things that she
always talked about when I was young was things that
couldn't happen because she was a federal employee.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
To keep everybody in mind.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Like if I stood out on the corner and she
didn't like who I was standing out on the corner with,
she called me in the house.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
And that was the one thing. You know, if you
get arrested, don't know that I work for the VAA.
I believe that crap too.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Nobody knew that what a clerk from the VA looked
on twenty seventh in York was doing.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I mean, how smart was I. That was her thing
in driving me.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
She always made a point of pointing out who was
doing well from the neighborhood in school, always a point
of telling you know, this person got straight. My cousin
Bobby was a really good student. She would always talk
about him, guy across the street. Oh, man, she loved him.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
And here's the deal.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
He got the Union League, good Citizenship board, and man,
you would have thought he got like the Congressional Medal
of Honor or something. I don't think his parents made
this big a deal of it as my mom did.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
She every time he would walk by and she was
talking to somebody, she call him over.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
And you know what he did. Okay. So when I
got the award and I took that home, she was speechless.
She was speechless, and I gotta I gotta tell you.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
She took that thing. She put I got a frame
for it. She really valued that. And at first I
always said, I'm glad I got that award so I.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Could shut her up.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
But the fact is that I saw the pride that
she took in that, and it did.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Make me feel good. Obviously she valued education. This woman
never lied. She never lied about anything.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
If somebody called the house and you didn't want to
speak to him, she wouldn't say.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
You weren't home. She would always all, no, you have
to speak. I mean, she didn't lied about anything, but
she lied for two of my three schools.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
My brother and my oldest sister went to our neighborhood school,
and my mother did not like that school. She didn't
think they learned enough. She wasn't happy with the quality
of the education. She also knew people who lived one
block north of us who went to a different school
(05:30):
that was better resourced, and we got better.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Results from the school.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
So my mom used my godmother's address, which honestly wasn't
more than like fifty yards from my house. That's how
tight this thing was. Now, I went to an elementary
school that had an orchestra program.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
I played the string base. Okay, we had a full orchestra.
I was inside in spirit.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
We had the option of four foreign languages French, Spanish, Latin, German.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
My friends weren't in that kind of stuff. They didn't
have that at the other school.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
With neighborhood public schools, people are assigned at school and
they're going to get the same amount of money whether
you go there or not, whether your kids do their
homework or not, whether your kids learn or not, and
that is pretty.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Obvious from the door.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And my neighborhood school, all you could take was Spanish.
The problem was they didn't tell me that they were lying.
So every time they asked me my address at school,
I told them my address. They looked at me like
I was stupid, like I didn't know the address. So
then I had to get to talk about we did
(06:51):
this so you can go to a better school. But
I got the mom told a lie. I think I
said that one. I got popped that saying that I
went into education as kind of time to kind of
(07:13):
get back. I wanted to find some neighborhood school that
I could work at, maybe for three or four months
and help the kids out. And I'm sure they were
all there waiting for me to come in and be
the miracle of their life. And so I saw this
thing in the paper as ad for a school for
at risk kids in North Philadelphia. I thought I was
(07:36):
probably an at risk kid at some point.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
So I show up at the school and it was horrible.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
This neighborhood was declared by the Philadelphia Inquirers the worst
square mile in Pennsylvania the level of poverty, joblessness, rampant
drug sales on just about every corner. In fact, the
corner north of US there were twenty seven different drug
organizations selling on that corner, and the public schools mirrored
the neighborhood. So the public schools were some of the
(08:06):
worst performing schools in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Now, this was like nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
There was a craze going around with rap where you
would do a beat box, you would make all.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Kinds of noises.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Okay, kids would erupt into this stuff out of nowhere.
You'd be giving a lesson all of a sudden they
start making all.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Kinds of stupid noises. It's crazy.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
It was crazy, and the kids always thought everything was like,
really really funny. Anything that they didn't understand was really
really funny. I remember thinking, these kids are the strangest
kids I ever saw. My plan was as soon as
that year was over, I was getting out of there.
And I still don't understand what I did. But the
(08:50):
principal came to me a couple of days before school
ended and he says, well, are you going to come
back next year? And I said yes. I really don't
know why I did not like it. So when I
went back in September, I had the middle school kids, sixth, seventh,
and eighth graders. That's when I fell in love with
(09:10):
teaching because They were very impressionable. And I remember being
in middle school. I know how goofy middle school kids are,
so I gave him a lot of grace for that.
And I also got him to look at things and
try things that they ordinarily wouldn't have wanted to do.
I had them reading Shakespeare, I had him reading all
kinds of poets. I taught them a little bit about
(09:32):
the Anglo Saxon language. I took the course in Old
English when I was in college. That I could read
this stuff or I could write some of those different
letters that they had was always impressive.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
But I really I got into the whole idea of teaching.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
When we come back more of the story of David P. Hardy,
an innovator, an educator, and lover of children. Here on
our American story, and we continue with our American stories
(10:11):
and with Dave Hardy's story when we last left off,
to give back to his community and help inner city
kids struggling with school, to volunteered to teach in one
of the worst schools in one of the worst neighborhoods
of Philadelphia. He didn't enjoy the experience and didn't want
to return, but something pushed him to do so anyway,
(10:32):
and it would change his life.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
Let's return to the story. A good student is a
good citizen.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
A good citizen is somebody who follows the rules and
tries to do things the right way.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
That starts in school.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
I was watching something on public television and somehow they
brought up Cotton Mather. I remember the name Cotton Mather
from history, but I really I couldn't quite remember why
he was so important. So I start reading about him,
and I saw that he went to Boston Latin, and
then I start reading about Boston Latin, then all the
(11:12):
people that came out of Boston Latin, and I thought
maybe by having something like that, where students had to
learn a language that was completely foreign to him, it
would make them more dependent on the teachers and the school.
We wanted to do an all boys school, an academic school,
(11:33):
because if you didn't have an academic focus and the
guys just came there expecting to do what they normally
did in high school in Philadelphia, that would be animal house.
People go to charter schools because they choose that school.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
They don't have to.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
You have to have something to make people want to
come and make them want to stay, and it's not
about gimmicks because people come for one reason.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
They come for a better education.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
The only people who were really against it were people
who were tied to the school district, concerned about charter
schools creating competition.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
And what happened was we applied for the school.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
You'd had to go before the school district board. But
about three weeks before we were supposed to go in
front of the school board, they had the Women's Law
Project come in and say that our school was constitutionally
illegal because.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
It was all male.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
So I asked where was the complaint because they really
didn't have any. We had to get parents to protests.
We had to get two legal opinions done, one by
a women at Saint John's University, and then we got
one done by our local law firm because the school
district said that the first legal opinion didn't count because
(12:59):
she wasn't from Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
We did all that.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
When they saw the politics were on our side, they
gave in and that's how we got to school. Anybody
who saw what was happening at Boys Latin had to
be impressed because you had guys in jackets and ties,
khaki pants put together. You saw these guys with book bags,
(13:25):
because I got to tell you, you can go by
a lot of high schools and see kids walking in
there without a book in their hands. Discipline was important,
attendance was important. These were all things that they weren't
able to do on a regular basis, particularly with young men.
When parents saw that we could do it, they went
out and talked about it, and it wasn't long before
(13:48):
we had a pretty good reputation city wide. What kind
of boys came to Boys Latin all types of boys.
There were guys who came there who were good students
at their old school and came right in and were.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Good students with us.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
Guys who were okay students at their old school, but
in a different environment they shaped up and they became
good students. And then we had guys who in their
old school were hell raisers. My favorite one, he's a
Philadelphia School District employee.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Today. He came to us. He had a disciplinary pack
i'd say four inches.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Stick throwing cheers and cursing and fighting and doing all
kinds of crazy stings.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
And when we saw that, I called his mother and
I said, you know.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
This is gonna be a serious school. He's got to
do his work and he can't be disrupted.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Because it's gonna help.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
It's not only going to hurt him, it's going to
hurt out the students. And she said, you know, he's
never really had a chance. I think what he needs
is a chance. And I said, well, that's one thing
we can give. It doesn't cost us anything. We'll give
him a chance. So I was able to get him
some uniforms because I knew that she was mine was
struggling a little because she had other kids and everything.
(14:59):
So we got him the forums and then he came
to the summer session that we have. I didn't hear
from him. I didn't know who he was really, But
then he got kicked out of class for something and
I said to him, you know you got to cut
that out, or are you get in trouble here? Now
go back to class. And he turned around and he
(15:21):
walked in the opposite direction of the class.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Hell's wrong with him? So I jumped right in front
of him.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Now, this is a guy who had a four inch
stick disciplinary record of throwing cheers and fighting and all
that kind of stuff, So I wasn't quite sure what
he was.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Going to do so.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I said to him, look, where are you going. He says,
I'm going home, and I said, you can't go home.
We don't quit here. Go back to class.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
He turned around and went back to class. Honest a guy.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
I never had another problem out of him for four years.
He graduated from our school. He went to Goucher, He
graduated from Oucher College, no easy college in four years,
and now he works for the school District of Philadelphia.
That's the kind of thing that happened at our school.
It was an environment for boys who understood, boys who
(16:15):
knew how to motivate boys. And you know a lot
of them said this. They said they didn't answer questions
when they went to a co ed school because they
were afraid they'd be wrong and the girls.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Would laugh at them.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
I mean, that's what you used to hear girls say
thirty forty years ago. I don't want to say anything
in front of the boys because they'll laugh at me
if I say, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Come on. The whole thing is turned upside down.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
And what happened in our school is because we had
a school where everybody was expected to do the same thing,
and we enforced it that way. That we got a
lot of cooperation because another thing wrong without the public
schools is that they have rules, but nobody has to
follow them, or everybody he doesn't have to follow. When
(17:02):
we had the school for the overaged under credential kids,
so the school district, because they assigned the kids to us,
the school district insisted that we have a metal detective.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
So we got a metal detective. So I never had metal.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Detectors as schools because I think that's a sign that
your school's in trouble anyway. But I wanted to enforce
that all students come through the metal detective. So we
had a few pregnant girls and the first thing they
say is I'm pregnant. I don't have to go through
the metal detector, and so we let him walk around.
And then I started thinking, my wife had two kids.
(17:37):
We went on planes when she was pregnant with each
one of those kids, and she always went through the
metal detector.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Why is it that our girls can't get through. So
I looked at the name on the metal detector.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
I called the company and asked them and they said,
of course, pregnant women can go through the metal detector,
and they stepped me to studies. This showed that was okay.
So then about three months later, we have a visit.
We have our official visit from the school district and
we had a fire drill scheduled for that day, and
the teacher said, let's not have it. We're gonna have
(18:11):
the people from the school. I said, no, let them
see our fire drill. So we had the fire drill,
we had people come back in and of course everybody
had to go back through the metal detective. And the
people from the school district asked me, how could I
get the pregnant girls to go through a metal detective
And I said, it.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Doesn't hurt them.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
I showed them the study and everything, and the guy
from the school district told me that not only did
they have problems with pregnant girls, there were.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
People who asked for religious exemptions from the metal detective. Now,
can you.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Think of one religion that would be against metal detectors.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Hey, that's of nonsense that they lived with.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
So the fact that we could run an all boys'
school and they couldn't shouldn't be a surprise, because they
fall for every kind of problem. They give credence to
the most ridiculous problems. That's what made Boys Latin a
different school.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
And a special Thanks to Dave Hardy. I love what
he said at the beginning of that a good student
is a good citizen who tries to do the right
things in the right way, and that starts in school.
The story of Boys Latin in West Philadelphia and the
story of Dave Hardy here are now American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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