Woman's work in municipalities. Mary Ritter Beard
and physique is involved.
One of the women who is giving close attention to this is Dr. Jessie Newkirk, member of the Board of Education of Kansas City, Kansas. Dr. Newkirk has been making an extensive educational survey of girls’ schools in the country, particularly to discover whether there are improved hygienic methods anywhere which have not been as yet used in Kansas City. In a newspaper interview she said: “I am able to say that I believe I found one practice a little better in the East than in the West. In our part of the country we have made the physical work of the girls too strenuous. If a girl is going to be an athlete, it is all right for her to take up athletics after she has finished her high school course, but it is a mistake to subject too rapidly growing girls to too rigid physical culture.”
From physical training in the schools to allied forms of hygiene has been an inevitable evolution. Thus we find women supporting and organizing the instruction in sex hygiene in the schools. Dr. Jessie Newkirk, whom we have just quoted, describes this type of instruction and the opposition that it still meets, as follows: “As for our teaching of sex hygiene, it is meeting considerable opposition. We have physicians who deliver a certain number of personal lectures, women physicians to the girls and men physicians to the boys. This we have been trying only for the last year. As we have three physicians on our board, you may imagine we are strongly in favor of it. The opposition of course comes from the parents. I am inclined to think this opposition springs from the objection to the name of ‘sex hygiene.’ If we were to put these lectures into the regular course in physiology, I do not believe the opposition would be anything like as strong. But the term that has been employed has been made fun of and anathematized. We are doing what we can in an educative way through our mothers’ clubs, so that most of the opposition now, I think, comes from the fathers who want to stand on ignorant ground, to keep their children innocent, whereas every thinking person must admit that it is better to be wise and pure than merely ignorant.”[2]
Many of the women still feel that, important as sex hygiene is, it must first be taught in normal schools or to adults and that the effort to introduce it into secondary schools is premature.
One who believes in a system of instruction in hygiene or physical training or what-not is naturally interested in its results when applied and therefore women have watched the effects of attempts at changed curricula on the children themselves. Both the teachers and the promoters of change have had a common interest in these results. It has not taken long to discover that children represent unequal foundations in their physical and mental make-ups for grasping instruction of any kind.
First there are the little crippled children for whom hard physical exercise is an impossibility and upon whose minds their physical condition has undoubted reactions. Crippled children seem first to have been given special educational opportunities in 1861 by the efforts of Dr. Knight and his daughter in their own home in New York City. Their home became a combination of school and hospital and furnished the stimulus for the Hospital-School for the Ruptured and Crippled in that city two years later. This was the first institution in America, it is claimed, to employ teachers of crippled children.
The next task, and women assumed that eagerly, was that of seeking out the little patients, and the Visiting Guild for Crippled Children of the Ethical Culture School was started in 1892 to insure continuance of instruction when the children were discharged from the hospital. Several societies developed then to care for crippled children, to feed them, supply them with orthopedic apparatus, and to carry them to and from schools. In 1906, “the Board of Education joined forces with two private guilds. The school equipment and teachers were supplied by the Board of Education; the building, transportation, nourishment and general physical care were looked after by the guilds. This attempt proved successful, and a further advance was made a year later, in 1907, when classes for crippled children were added to the regular public schools whenever rooms were available. At present there are twenty-three classes for crippled children in the public school system of the city of New York.” Provision was made for crippled children in the Chicago public schools in 1899, and in the schools of Philadelphia in 1903.
Blanche Van LeLuvan Browne, a crippled woman, told recently in the World’s Work how she began seven years ago with six dollars in her pocket and finally built up a hospital school for cripples in Detroit.
Mental defects were as apparent to teachers as physical defects and here and there sporadic attempts were made to classify and adapt instruction to individual needs. The rigidity of the school system, however, the large classes and need of economy led to no large effort on the part of school authorities to deal with mental defectives until some way was demonstrated to be practical.
Special Schools
In New York City mentally defective children were first given special attention in the public schools in 1900 when a class was formed in old Public School No. 1 under the Brooklyn Bridge, in charge of Elizabeth Farrell, who, backed by Josephine Shaw Lowell, had long and earnestly stressed the needs of these children and the way in which they held back their companions. So helpful did the work done by Miss Farrell prove to be that
At the present time there are 144 classes caring for about 2,300 children, with a constant increase in the number of applicants from the grades. …
In March, 1912, the State Charities Aid Association, through its special committee on provision for the feeble-minded, presented to the Committee on Elementary Schools of the Board of Education the following resolutions:
“Resolved, That the Board of Education shall be urged: (1) To classify mentally all children of school age under its supervision or brought to its attention by the Permanent Census Board or other agencies. (2) To determine as far as possible, by scientific methods, the degree of mental deficiency of those reported as sub-normal. (3) To keep full and accurate records of all sub-normal children, including school work, home conditions and heredity data. (4) To send to the proper state authorities the names of such children as are deemed to be custodial cases. …”
These resolutions were adopted by the Elementary Schools Committee and sent to the board of superintendents, that they might determine what force would be needed to carry them into effect. After the resolutions had passed through their hands and through the Committee on By-laws, the Board of Education was asked to ratify the following positions: Two assistant inspectors of ungraded classes; two physicians on full time and regularly assigned to the department of ungraded classes; two social workers or visiting teachers.
The Public Education Association took up the matter and obtained the coöperation of various organizations, among them the City Club, the Association of Neighborhood Workers, the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, the Women’s Municipal League, and the local school boards, in the effort to induce the Board of Education to take favorable action. …
After much discussion, ending in a hearing before the Committee on Elementary Schools attended by many physicians, most of whom were entirely in sympathy with the proposed increase in the department, the resolutions ratifying these positions, as well as additional clerical assistance, were passed in October, 1912. … [3]
This segregation of mental defectives in classes is continuing rapidly and a normal course for the teachers of ungraded classes is now being given in the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers.
Miss Farrell, who has been the inspiration of the effort that has been made in the city of New York to deal with defective children, continually contributes to the development of the movement in that direction as her own work among this type expands. The Public Education Association has also worked for greater attention to the problem on the part of the authorities. In one of its recent bulletins, the situation is thus presented:
“We have been told by doctors and psychologists, in terms that we cannot dispute, that actual feeble-mindedness is incurable, that feeble-mindedness is hereditary, and, therefore, that institutional care and constant supervision are the great safeguards against the rapid and appalling increase of feeble-mindedness. We must all agree that the end to work toward is permanent custodial care for all the feeble-minded