Woman's work in municipalities. Mary Ritter Beard
fourteen years. Before this age the schools can do much to develop the incomplete individual and train him to a point of distinct usefulness in his later institutional life, or, if he must remain in the community, they will at least have endeavored to develop his latent possibilities of usefulness to their fullest extent.”
To promote needed legislation, a bill has been drafted along the lines of a memorandum prepared by the Advisory Council to the Department of Ungraded Classes. Such women as Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley are active on this Council. The bill calls for the appointment of a commission by the governor to study the entire subject of the education and care of mental defectives of all ages and conditions and recommend suitable and comprehensive legislation.
Within the Public Education Association of New York City there is a Committee on the Hygiene of School Children which engaged Elizabeth A. Irwin to make a study of the situation, as far as defectives are concerned, in the public schools and the schools subsidized by the city: the parochial schools, the Children’s Aid Society schools, and the schools managed by the American Female Guardian Society. In coöperation with a member of the Children’s Aid Society who came upon her committee, she made a careful study of the situation in schools of that type where hitherto classification had been neglected. The breadth of view of these women is demonstrated in a quotation from their report:
While the first step seems to be the mental classification and recognition of mental defect, the next step is not, in the opinion of the committee, to put these children out of school pending their possible commitment to an institution. If the schools are able, in time, to separate all these children into classes for proper instruction and so rid the normal children of this unnecessary burden, they will also be taking the first step toward demanding institutional care for those unfit to be at large in the community. For they will then be showing, as has never been done before, the numbers that exist and the definite limits of their educability. Surely such a demonstration as this will be a stronger argument for institutional care than either leaving them hidden away, as they now are, among their normal brothers and sisters, or plucking them from school and turning them into the street or back into tenement rooms. Once they are excluded, their parents, ashamed to have a child too stupid to go to school, often regard them as little outcasts, only fit, if indeed they are robust enough for that, to be the family drudge.
By means of Binet tests, home visiting for family study, charity and health records, etc., the investigation revealed enough feeble-mindedness to cause recommendations for a thoroughgoing medical and educational examination to be submitted to those in control of the schools of the Children’s Aid Society. This is of importance to the whole social fabric and its influence extends to all phases of public enlightenment for it must reveal certain causes of poverty or change sentimental ideas about the incapacity of the poor as well as lead to better guardianship of the unfit to prevent the perpetuation of the type. The work of Miss Irwin and her volunteer assistants, under the auspices of the committee on special children, was largely responsible for the reorganization of the department of ungraded classes in the school system last year, we are told in a report.
The report on the feeble-minded in New York generally was made for the Public Education Association by Dr. Anne Moore and published by the State Charities Aid Association’s Special Committee on Provision for the Feeble-Minded. This report includes a study of feeble-minded children in the public schools.
In several cities, women have been active in the study and solution of this problem. The Civic Club of Philadelphia started the first class for backward delinquent children. The city saw its value and incorporated the plan into its school system. Philadelphia now has seventy-five such classes.
Dr. C. Annette Buckel, of Oakland, California, was a director in the Mary R. Smith Trust for delinquent children from its beginning and took a personal interest in each little girl in the cottage homes. So keen was her concern for handicapped children that at her death she gave her home that the proceeds might help in promoting special training for them.
Knowing that venereal diseases are responsible for a certain amount of feeble-mindedness in children, women have backed the legislation in several states for health certificates for marriage, for one thing. The prohibition of the marriage of the unfit or feeble-minded adults is a measure in which they are also interested as well as in proposals and practices that deal with sterilization and compulsory commitment to institutions.
Colored children, although in general they are only slightly behind white children, are now beginning to receive some of that special attention which they so much need and deserve. In addition to the investigation of mentally defective children, a study is being made by Frances Blascoer of the living conditions of colored children in New York City whose school progress has been retarded.
Blind children in New York City receive education from their earliest years as a result of the agitation and legislative work carried on by Mrs. Cynthia Westover Alden of the International Sunshine Society and others. This last winter similar educational care of the blind children of the state was secured through the efforts of Mrs. Alden and the personal appeal to the legislators by a little blind girl, Rachel Askenas. Hitherto children under eight years of age had not been admitted to institutions for the blind. Now during those most receptive years they will get the necessary foundation for impressions which play so vital a part in the lives of normal children.
Special schools for foreigners have generally been started by women, we feel safe in claiming, after a review of all the evidence at hand. The Civic Club of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, composed of men and women, inaugurated the work among foreigners in Pittsburgh and Allegheny, but the women seem to have given most of the time necessary to make it a success.
Some months ago the judge of one of the courts in Savannah, Georgia, started the movement for free night schools for those who have to work by day. “Amid many discouragements, through months of wearying opposition, he would be inspired to renewed effort in behalf of an all-embracing education for the poor, by the knowledge of similar work done on a small scale by a few women in a rector’s study. And every now and then the helpful assurance would be given that the Woman’s Club was anxious for the success of the movement. He only learned of this because his wife was a member of the club.”[4] Night schools are regular municipal institutions in the larger cities.
Truant and parental schools are incorporated also into the programs of innumerable women’s clubs today and have been secured in some cities already by the pressure of these organizations. The truant school in New York is under a woman principal who is practically a juvenile court judge.
So many organizations claim credit for the first vacation school that we shall make no effort to locate it. We do know that the Social Science Club of Newton, Massachusetts, a woman’s club, has maintained a vacation school for seventeen years. In Chicago the Civic Federation opened one vacation school in 1896, the first in Chicago. The next was opened by the University Settlement. In 1898 the women’s clubs took up the work and opened five schools. By 1906 they had eight. Chicago now has a vacation school board with a club woman as president and another as secretary; other members consist of club women and men. From 1898–1906 club women contributed nearly $25,000 annually to these schools, yet “probably 15,000 children were turned away.” The Civic Club of Philadelphia organized the first vacation school in that city and Philadelphia now has many of them under public control.
Newark, New Jersey, was the first city to incorporate vacation schools into its educational system, but in 1909 over sixty cities had some sort of vacation work going on in their school buildings.
While women’s clubs have long been interested in the vacation school, most credit for it is due to the hundreds of women teachers who have given of their services to make it helpful to the child and to the community. These teachers have often, and nearly always in the beginning, given their services without compensation and where they have been paid a salary they have generally taught for less money than they would have received for regular winter classes.
With these summer school teachers, women librarians coöperate as do visiting nurses and other social workers. The children are taken by their teachers on municipal excursions, often too, to visit places of public interest and gain some idea of municipal enterprise and government.
All-year-round