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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 who have reached the age of 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 schools are projects now in the air which are a natural combination of regular and vacation schools.

School gardens, an important educational addition to school work, have been largely fostered by women. In Seattle the Women’s Congress has coöperated with the Seattle Garden Club in its program to include all the grammar schools of the city in the garden work; the ultimate hope is to persuade the city to take up this work in a systematic way. Harriet Livermore of Yonkers, New York, says of gardening: “It is a happy mingling of play and work, vacation and school, athletics and manual training, pleasure and business, beauty and utility, head and hand, freedom and responsibility; of corrective and preventive, constructive and creative influences, and all in the great school of out-of-doors. It is the corrective of the evils of the schoolroom. It is the preventive of the perils of misspent leisure. It is constructive of character building. It is creative of industrious, honest producers. In fact there is no child’s nature to which it does not in some way make a natural and powerful appeal.”

The Civic Club of Philadelphia seems to have started the first school garden. That city now has over eight large school gardens, nineteen for kindergarten scholars, and 5,000 separate gardens including window boxes, etc. The women of Kalamazoo and Dubuque and Newark are among the groups who inaugurated this work in their towns. The city took over the school garden in Newark after it had been organized and operated for a year by the women. Children’s school gardens in Cincinnati are the result of work started in 1908 by the civic department of the Woman’s Club. In three years’ time thirteen schools were promoting home gardens by distributing seeds among the school children and helping to get results, and there were eight school gardens. Two community gardens crown the educational efforts of the women of Cincinnati.

Mrs. Parsons is president of the International Children’s School Farm League and also director of the Children’s School Farms for the Department of Parks of New York City. The methods used by her in the work in the city parks are original with herself.