By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
THEORY INTO PRACTICE
Elizabeth Farrell asserted that when “atypical children” were forced into the classroom, they often “played truant” because “there was nothing” that “attracted them in the school.” Lillian Wald agreed, declaring that children with special needs were often more interested in the “docks, the streets, the empty lots, even the ash cans and the garbage” than they were in “our elaborate school system.”
Farrell was convinced that these “atypical” children should be in school, and that school should be made a more welcoming place for them. But unlike many, she refused to believe that the learning and developmentally disabled should be warehoused into special classrooms where the teacher’s job was to act solely as a glorified babysitter. Like Wald, Farrell was motivated by “a deep-lying principle that every human being, even the least lovely, merits respectful consideration of his rights and his personality.” Wald and Farrell also shared the belief “that every individual should be developed to the highest level of which he was capable.”
One of the ways Farrell sought to make school more attractive to her students was by bringing the street into the classroom—in other words, by connecting her teaching methods to the way that children played. Instead of books, Farrell said, her students would have
‘tin cans; instead of spellers, they had picture puzzles to solve; instead of penmanship lessons, they had watercolor paints and brushes; instead of arithmetic and multiplication tables, they had wood and tools, and things with which to build and make.’
If children brought cherished items with them into the classroom, Farrell advised improvising and teaching with these objects. “‘From the marbles the child brings to school,’” she wrote, the teacher could
‘lead the child out to the making of marbles, to the making of toys to aid or complicate the game of marbles, to a study of soils, why marbles are made from this soil rather than that, other uses of clay—to thatched bird’s nests, to thatched houses for men in some countries, and it would be possible to lead from the marbles to the great pottery industries of the world.’”
Farrell honed these methods over the course of her career. After she had been teaching a few years, Lydia Chace, a special education advocate, observed Farrell with her students and described a typical class:
‘They always have some subject as a center; at present it is the farm. In woodwork, they are making a house and barn, fences, furniture, and flower-boxes. They are weaving the rugs for the floor, making a hammock, doing raffia work and basketry. They went to the country for the soil to plant their miniature fields, and sent to Washington for seeds. In painting, their subjects have been apple blossoms and violets with an illustrated trip to Bronx Park…..’
When the children were able, Farrell took these lessons a step further, incorporating more traditional education:
‘In arithmetic, the older boys measure in a concrete way, the rooms of the house and the fields. In their written work in English, they are having stories of farm life, and reports of personal observation; in reading, stories of dogs, horses, making hay, and so on; in spelling, words relating to manual occupations, e.g., “soil, leaves, barn.” In nature work, they are studying soils, the earthworm, buds and seeds….’
In addition to using the above techniques (called object-centered methodology, taught during her years as a student at Oswego Normal and Training School) Farrell insisted that a key ingredient of success was getting to know each student individually and discerning their specific gifts and interests. She called this practice “individualization.”* Her adherents came to believe that individualization was crucial to achieving positive results in the special education classroom.
Lillian Wald sought out a meeting with Elizabeth Farrell soon after Farrell started teaching in the Henry Street School (Public School #1). Once the two women met, Wald knew she had found someone whose vision mirrored her own. Even better, Wald became convinced that Farrell possessed a unique talent for implementing this vision. Wald would later declare that it was “a privilege to learn to know the noble enthusiasm of the young woman for those pupils who, to teachers, must always seem the least hopeful.”
After their meeting, Wald decided to do what she could to promote Farrell’s methods. Wald’s influence was growing, and she had already developed working relationships with some progressive members of the Board of Education. She now used these connections, inviting two members of the Board—Charles Burlingham, its president, and Felix Warburg, also a patron of the Henry Street Settlement—to a meeting with the teacher. The meeting took place at the Settlement House and there, in “that sympathetic environment,” Farrell “forgot her shyness and presented her idea with glowing vigor and enthusiasm.” Upon hearing the presentation, Burlingham and Warburg proclaimed Farrell to be among that rare species of “genius whose vision was essentially practical,” and decided to give her “freedom” and “encouragement” in developing her “project.”
At first, Farrell shied away from pushing for any district-wide funding or other expansion of her methods. She chose instead to “develop and monitor the success of one class based upon her curricular suppositions.” Using her own class as a pilot project, she “began to experiment” with its “structure and dynamics.” During this trial period, she sought advice and support from the highest levels—asking Superintendent William H. Maxwell for his input as well as relying upon the wisdom of Burlingham, Warburg, and her principal, William L. Ettinger.
Meanwhile Wald—by now increasingly interested in using pilot projects to spur widespread adoption of new methods—“made every effort to interest [other] members of the School Board and the public generally in … [the] class of children” that Farrell championed. In addition to her promotional work, Wald also gave Farrell concrete help with her classes and with the development of her ideas. The Settlement “provided equipment not yet on the School Board’s requisition list, obtained permission for her [Farrell] to attend children’s clinics, [and] secured [medical] treatment for the children….”
Furnishing lunch to her charges was part of Farrell’s plan, and Wald helped with that as well. “Friends” of the Settlement provided “pretty dishes and other necessary equipment,” including tables and paper napkins. The children brought their own bread and butter from home and “a penny for a glass of milk,” while the “older girls” in the school prepared the main dish as a part of their “cooking lessons.” It was the first time, to Wald’s knowledge, that a school lunch had been provided “in a city school room.”**
The depth of Wald’s personal involvement in this enterprise is illustrated by the stories she later told about students she encountered in this first class. Tony, “a Neapolitan,” had been sent out of his regular grade “because of emotional outbursts called ‘bad temper’” and because he had been deemed “an incorrigible truant.” Once Tony started attending Farrell’s class, he was found to have “defects of vision.” When this condition was diagnosed and treated, (perhaps using Wald’s medical contacts) “the outbursts became less frequent.” Farrell’s emphasis on “manual work” also revealed Tony’s “latent power of application.” As he succeeded, he became more willing to attend school. Wald followed Tony’s progress and years later proudly proclaimed that he grew up to become “a bricklayer” and “a member of the union in good standing.” Eventually he and his father were able to buy their own house in Brooklyn.
Katie was another student whom Wald followed. The girl had suffered from “spinal meningitis when she was very young.” The disease “left her with imperfect mental powers.” Although Katie never learned to read, under the tutelage of Farrell she “developed skill in clay-modeling,” in sewing and in embroidering. While she could not live independently as an adult, Katie could make her own clothes and help her mother around the house. On one occasion she made “warm undergarments” and sent them to the school at Christmastime to be distributed to needy children. Katie’s father later attributed his daughter’s cheerfulness and her abilities to the instruction she had received in the “ungraded class.” Without this instruction, he believed, she “‘would be in darkness.’”
Compulsory education laws meant that non-traditional students were entering public schools in large numbers for the first time. The school system had two choices—it could warehouse these children in massive day care settings, or it could adapt its methods of teaching to accommodate the learning styles and abilities of all children. Elizabeth Farrell, with the help of Lillian Wald, helped to ensure that the latter choice became the one chosen by the New York City schools.
*Farrell insisted that individualization was the key to teaching all students, not only the mentally disabled. She hoped that one day schools would be a place where “‘every teacher will know what the ability of the child is, and the child’s burden as it is represented by the course of study he undertakes. That burden,’” she said, should “‘be trimmed” to each child’s ability. “‘It will not be the same burden for every child,’” she cautioned, “‘but it will be a burden for every child commensurate with his ability to bear.’”
**Every day, one of the students in Farrell’s class was “permitted to invite an adult member of his family to the luncheon.” At least once, “an Italian mother was asked to prepare spaghetti for the children, ‘like the old country.’” Sometimes these efforts had unexpected consequences, as when well-meaning parents donated beer to the luncheon.
Bibliography
Chase, Lydia, “Public School Classes for Mentally Deficient Children,” by Lydia Gardiner Chace, Providence, RI, report compiled in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction at the Thirty-First Annual Session Held in the City of Portland, Maine, June 15-22, 1904, published online at Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Library, 2005, at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/n/ncosw/ACH8650.1904.001?view=toc
Current 3/14/17 (Chace’s report appears on pp. 390-401) See especially p. 399-400.
Hendrick, Irving G. and Donald L. MacMillan, “Selecting Children for Special Education in New York City: William Maxwell, Elizabeth Farrell, and the Development of Ungraded Classes, 1900-1920,” Journal of Special Education, v. 22, no. 4, Winter, 1989 [c2001], pp. 395-417. See especially p. 401-402.
Kode, Kimberly, Elizabeth Farrell and the History of Special Education, Arlington, VA: Council for Exceptional Children, 2002 (ERIC Document ED474364. See especially pp. 23-28 and 94-95.
Wald, Lillian D., The House on Henry Street, NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1915. See especially pp. 23-24, 117-120, and 120-121. Wald devotes a whole chapter to the origins and development of Special Education in New York’s public schools in “Chapter VI: The Handicapped Child.”
Wald, Lillian D., Windows on Henry Street, Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1934. See especially pp. 134-137.
Woods, Robert A. & Albert J. Kennedy, Handbook of Settlements (Russell Sage Foundation), NY: Charities Publication Committee, 1911. See especially pp. 205-209.
Woods, Robert A. and Albert J. Kennedy, The Settlement Horizon: A National Estimate, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1922. See especially p. 282.
Illustrations
Farrell, Elizabeth, Photo/Portrait, http://cecblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452098b69e20167666511de970b-pi Current 3/28/17
NYC DORIS, PS 1, Manhattan: exterior. Henry Street, Oliver Street, and Catherine Street, ca. 1900. Link to Illustration Current 3/28/17
Schoolboys in a toy-making class at P.S. 1, 1900. Courtesy of New York State Archives. https://nyhistorywalks.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/sbool-boys-p-s-1.jpg Current 3/
Schoolgirls in a nursing class at P.S. 1, 1900. Courtesy of New York State Archives. https://nyhistorywalks.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/school-girls-p-s-1.jpg Current 3/28/17
Old Normal School Building, created 31 Dec. 1892 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_43/May_1893/Oswego_Normal_School#/media/File:PSM_V43_D063_Old_normal_school_building.jpg Current 3/28/17
Riis, Shooting craps, playing in the street,1890 http://www.tenement.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/playing-in-the-street-4.22.14.jpg (Current 3/28/17)
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2017