Why One Man Decided to Teach City Kids Latin

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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. I'll tell you, I did get in trouble one time.

Here you go. I was with a bunch of guys. This is my senior year of high school. And I hung out with these guys who are older than me and they went to Cheney University. Right. So I'm out there on a Sunday night with these guys at Cheney.

We're coming back on Route 3 Westchester Pike. And we stopped at a gas station and the guy who was driving wasn't even in his car. He starts taking oil from the gas station. OK, so I go in to pay for the gas and the guy says, I saw your friend stealing the oil.

He 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 Route 3 and Route 1, it seemed like every cop in Delaware County surrounded us. Now, these guys were all over 18. So they went to the adult place. I went to the juvenile sweat box, graffiti all over it, like Maddy from K&A was arrested for shoplifting here. Stuff like that.

Right. At about two thirty in the morning, my mother walks in. She's followed 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 69th Street. And I actually wanted the cops to let me stay in jail that night because I knew what I was going to get on the way home. And I know I got it about how it was embarrassing, how she hopes that it's not in the papers because the neighbors probably wouldn't speak to. I mean, it was it was she just she did the whole core dump of guilt on me. 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. 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. To keep everybody in mind, 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. And that was the one thing, you know, if you get arrested, they'll know that I work for the VA.

I believe that crap, too. Nobody knew that what a clerk from the VA looked on 27th and York was doing. I mean, how smart was that? That was her thing in driving me. She always made a point of pointing out who was doing well from the neighborhood in school.

Always a point of saying, 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.

And here's the deal. He got the Union League Good Citizenship Award. And man, you would have thought he got like the Congressional Medal of Honor or something. I don't think his parents made as big a deal of it as my mom. Oh, she every time he would walk by and she was talking to somebody, she called him over.

You know what he did? OK, so when I got the award and I took that home. She was speechless.

She was speechless. And I got it. I got to tell you, 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 that award so I could shut her up.

But the fact is that I saw the pride that she took in that and it did make me feel good. Obviously, she she valued education. This woman never lied. She never lied about anything.

If somebody called the house and you don't want to speak to him, she wouldn't say you weren't home. She would always, oh, no, you have to speak. I mean, she never lied about anything, but she lied for two of my three schools. My brother and my older 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 that was better resourced and got better results from the school.

So my mom used my grandmother's address, which honestly wasn't more than like 50 yards from my house. That's how tight this thing was. Now, I went to an elementary school that had an orchestra program. I played the string bass. OK, we had a full orchestra. I was in science fair.

We had the option of four foreign languages, French, Spanish, Latin, German. My friends weren't in that kind of stuff. They didn't have that at the other school with neighborhood public schools. People are assigned to that 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 obvious from the door. In 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 the talk about we did this so you can go to a better school. But I got the mom told a lie. I think I said that once.

I got pop for saying that. I went into education as kind of a time to kind of 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, this ad for a school for at risk kids in North Philadelphia. I thought I was probably an at risk kid at some point. So I show up at the school and it was horrible. 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 worst performing schools in Philadelphia. Now, this was like 1986. There was a craze going around with rap where you would do a beat box. You would make all kinds of noises. OK, kids would erupt into this stuff out of nowhere.

You'd be given a lesson. I said they start making all kinds of stupid noises. Crazy. 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 principal came to me a couple of days before school ended. He says, why 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 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 him reading Shakespeare. I had him reading all kinds of poets. I told him a little bit about 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. But I really got I got into the whole idea of teaching.

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. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibé sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price. Anibé has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud like frame duvet can go straight into your wash. Perfect for anyone with kids, pets or anyone who loves an easy to clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style. Whether you need a single chair, love seat or a luxuriously large sectional, Anibé has you covered. Visit washablesophas.com to upgrade your home. Sofa started just six hundred ninety nine dollars. And right now you can shop up to 60 percent off store wide with a 30 day money back guarantee. Shop now at washablesophas.com. Add a little to your life.

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Petivity, powered by Purina. And we continue with our American stories 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, Dave 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. And it would change his life.

Let's return to the story. A good student is a good citizen. A good citizen is somebody who follows the rules and tries to do things the right way. That starts in school. 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 didn'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 and all the 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 them, it would make them more dependent on the teachers and the school. We wanted to do an all boys school, an academic school, 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. They don't have to. 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. They come for a better education. The only people who are really against it were people who were tied to the school district, concerned about charter schools creating competition. And what happened was we applied for the school. You'd have 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 it was all male. So I asked, where was the complaint?

Because they really didn't have any. We had to get parents to protest. We had to get two legal opinions done, one by a woman at St. John's University.

And then we got one done by a local law firm because the school district said that the first legal opinion didn't count because she wasn't from Philadelphia. We did all that when they saw the politics were on our side. They gave in and that's how we got the 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 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 hand. 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 we had a pretty good reputation citywide. 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 good students with us. There were guys who were OK 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 is a Philadelphia school district employee today. He came to us. He had a disciplinary pack.

I'd say four inches thick, throwing cheers and cursing and fighting and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And when we saw that, I called his mother and I said, you know, this is going to be a serious school. He's got to do his work and he can't be disruptive because it's going to help.

It's not only going to hurt him, it's going to hurt other 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 his mom was struggling a little bit.

She had other kids and everything. So we got him uniforms. And then he came to the summer session that we had. 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 you get in trouble here. Now go back to class. And he turned around and he walked in the opposite direction of the class. What the hell's wrong with him? So I jumped right in front of him.

And this is a guy who had a four inch thick disciplinary record of throwing chairs and fighting and all that kind of stuff. So I wasn't quite sure what he was going to do. So 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. He turned around and went back to class.

Honest to God, I never had another problem out of him for four years. He graduated from our school. He went to Goucher. He graduated from Goucher 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 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 coed school because they were afraid they'd be wrong. And the girls would laugh at them. I mean, that's what you used to hear girls say 30, 40 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, come on.

The whole thing is turned upside down. 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 with a lot of public schools is that they have rules, but nobody has to follow them or everybody doesn't have to follow. When we had the school for the over-aged, under-credential kids, so the school district, because they assigned the kids to us, the school district insisted that we have a metal detector. So we got a metal detector. I've never had metal detectors at 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 detector. So we had a few pregnant girls. And the first thing they say is, I'm pregnant and I have to go through the metal detector.

And so we let them walk around. And then I started thinking, my wife had two kids. We went on planes when she was pregnant with each one of those kids and she always went through the metal detector.

Why is it that our girls can't get through? So I looked at the name on the metal detector. I called the company and asked them. And they said, of course, pregnant women can go through the metal detector. And they sent me the studies that showed it was OK. 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 going to have 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 detector. And the people from the school district asked me, how could I get the pregnant girls to go through a metal detector? And I said, it doesn't hurt them. 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 people who asked for religious exemptions for the metal detector.

Now, can you think of one religion that would be against metal detectors? That's the kind of nonsense that they live with. 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. 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. That starts in school. The story of boys Latin in West Philadelphia and the story of Dave Hardy here on Our American Stories. When you travel with Amex Platinum, the stops on your bucket list come with a room upgrade when available. Look at that view. And guaranteed 4 p.m. checkout at fine hotels and resorts properties booked through AmexTravel.com. So you have enough time to check out the pool and the spa and anything on the menu.

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Get all of the details at NFL dot com slash schedule release. This episode is brought to you by Purina. This is Samantha from Stuff Mom Never Told You. May is National Pet Month. It's time to reimagine how you care for the cat you love. Petivity is powered by Purina and developed by pet experts. Petivity's smart litter box monitor and app track your cat's weight and litter box behavior, alerting you to changes you may not notice on your own so you can act sooner if something is off. Shop the Petivity smart litter box monitor to try this game changing technology. Petivity. Powered by Purina.