Читать книгу Woman's work in municipalities - Mary Ritter Beard - Страница 6

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The kindergarten idea appealed from the beginning to women and private experimentation along that line was one of their most successful endeavors. Boards of education have in instance after instance been persuaded to incorporate into the public school system the plan of kindergartens demonstrated to be practical and of social utility by women in their private capacities. Annie Laws, in the Kindergarten Review, states that she “can trace the social spirit of the kindergartner as an important factor in stimulating, and in some cases, even initiating, many of the social movements of today, among them playgrounds, social centers, vacation schools, public libraries, mothers’ clubs and school and home gardens.” The New York Kindergarten Association of today, like many others, is composed of men and women but largely supported by the latter, financially, as well as by active service.

Household Arts—cooking and sewing—were first made subjects of instruction in the public schools about 1876, in Massachusetts, through the work of Miss Emily Huntington.

From cooking and sewing have developed the whole domestic science education of today. Women have been supporters of this movement from the beginning and the Federation of Clubs early took an aggressive position in favor of such addition to the school curricula.

“What you would have appear in the life of the people, that you must put into the schools,” is the idea they had in mind. At first, in many cases, women furnished the equipment and paid for its operation until school boards municipalized this work.

Model housekeeping flats have been instituted by women in many cities to supplement the more limited school equipment. Sometimes, as in New York, the Board of Education itself helps to finance this practical educational work. Mabel Kittredge, who started the housekeeping centers in New York, thus explains their purpose: “It is agreed by all that our immigrants must have better homes. This has been the splendid passionate appeal of men and women for years, and fight after fight has been won at Albany: fights for open plumbing, running water in each apartment, decent sinks, more space; all these measures have been worked for and many adopted, but while we rejoice that the Italian and the Russian and the Pole are to realize better home equipment, we forget that these dazed people have no knowledge as to the way to use the improvements.”

The School of Domestic Arts and Sciences in Chicago was established and is managed by club women. In 1905 it had 1,100 students. A special effort is made to bring out labor-saving devices, the underlying idea being that the common-sense of the American homemaker will in time lift this work to a professional basis through scientific investigation and the contact of the theoretical worker and the practical housekeeper. Young women are trained in the care of children and extension work is done in homes of the people.

Women everywhere are largely instrumental in establishing courses and departments of domestic science in educational institutions, from vocational schools to the university. The Illinois legislature placed household economics in the five normal schools of the state while all the high schools of Ohio have it. Correspondence schools have also been developed.

A School of Mothercraft has been established in New York for exact and scientific knowledge about everything mothers need to know.

“Domestic Education,” too, is a new profession which has been developed by women to carry into the homes, for immediate use, that training which schools alone can give to the next generation.

Music, art, and dramatic taste as elements in school study and training, too, have been created and fostered by women, and each has an interesting history which lack of space forbids recounting here.

“A thorough textbook study of scientific temperance in public schools as a preventative against intemperance” was the aim of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as early as 1879. Forty-three states incorporated this instruction into the school system and twenty-four textbooks on the subject circulate. If the development of scientific knowledge and psychology leads to an appreciation of the inadequacy or failure of these textbooks and former methods of teaching temperance, the fact remains that temperance needs to be taught and improved textbooks and methods will doubtless appear soon.

Today when the major interest in school instruction centers about vocational training, it is interesting to go back over the history of manual training in the schools. “Manual training as a new feature of education was partly the result of an educational philosophy and partly a protest against mere bookishness. The first appearance of constructive work for clearly definite cultural purposes appears to have been in connection with the classes of the workingmen’s school founded in 1878 by the Ethical Culture Society of New York. In 1880, the St. Louis Manual Training School was founded in connection with the Washington University, and in 1882, Mrs. Quincy Shaw of Boston privately supported experimental classes in carpentry at the Dwight School. Two years later the city of Boston also experimented, but it was four years more before manual training was given a place in the curriculum. New York City began instruction in drawing, sewing, cooking and woodwork that same year.”

In Massachusetts, during this decade, eighteen women’s clubs took the promotion of vocational training for their special task and the Federations of Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut urged this upon their members. In some instances this conflict has to be renewed every year in order to maintain that which has been secured with so much labor and expense, owing to new and ignorant or penurious school boards. Sometimes impatient women have raised the money themselves. The Chicago Woman’s Club raised $40,000 for the Glenwood Industrial School for Boys.

Although the charge of lack of virility is so often brought against women school teachers, it is interesting to record that women have been among the pioneers in the advocacy of the introduction of physical training. About 1888, through the efforts of Mrs. Hemenway in Boston, who had experimented with physical training among teachers, the School Board arranged for her to try her system in the schools. Finding it a useful addition to the curriculum, physical training was definitely adopted the following year.

The Girls’ Branch of the Public Schools Athletic League in New York was formed by women to insure sufficient and wholesome recreation for school girls who need outlet for their energies quite as much as boys. While the coöperation of the Board of Education, the Park Department, the Bath Department and the Health Department has been obtained, far better provision is made for athletics for girls by reason of the activity of these women than would otherwise be secured. The closest coöperation exists between the Board of Education and the Girls’ Branch. The President of the Girls’ Branch is a member of the Board of Education, as are several of its Board of Directors, and the Executive Secretary (Elizabeth Burchenal) is Inspector of Athletics for the Board of Education.

The idea behind athletics for girls and boys is not solely the prevention of mischief and of worse things, important as that is. Those interested in physical training desire that “life shall be lived in its beauty, romance and splendor.” They thus approach the problem with positive ideals.

Women have not blindly said: “Physical training shall be an important element in instruction;” but they have stayed by the task of discovering what kind of physical training is best suited to young children and growing boys and girls and whether different training is necessary for the sexes or a mere question of individual capacity 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.