Hull House and Progressive Education

HULL HOUSE AND PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

The Settlement Movement

Originating in Victorian England, but spreading quickly to the United States, the settlement movement was a loose coalition of groups and individuals who sought to relieve the harsh conditions facing factory workers in the crowded English and American cities of the late nineteenth century. The first so-called settlement house opened in London in 1884, when social activist Edward Denison, clergyman Samuel A. Barrett, and historian Arnold Toynbee established a lodge, Toynbee Hall. Believing well-educated people should help close the gap between the society's rich and poor, Denison, Barrett, and Toynbee felt they could promote this purpose by living among poor people, most of whom were factory workers, and making the residence, or "settlement," a center of education. At Toynbee Hall the three men taught classes for the working people of London, hoping to give these people educational weapons to help them fight against their usually despicable living conditions. At the same time, the three men believed they could learn from their working-class students. After visiting Toynbee Hall in 1888, American Jane Addams decided to replicate the English program in Chicago, where her settlement, Hull House, became the third such settlement in the United States. By 1891, six such settlements existed across the country; by 1900 there were more than a hundred; and by 1910 more than four hundred settlement houses had opened.

AN IMMIGRANT DESCRIBES THE
AMERICANIZATION OF HIS NAME

T h e following extract from Leonard Covello's autobiography, The Heart is the Teacher, describes how the author's Italian family reacted to the Americanizing of his name by one of his teachers.

One day I came home from the Soup School with a report card for my father to sign.… With a weary expression my father glanced over the marks on the report card and was about to sign it However, he paused with the pen in his hand.

"What is this?" he said. "Leonard Covello! What happened to the i in Coviello?"

My mother paused in her mending. Vito and I just looked at each other.

"Well?" my father insisted.… "From Leonardo to Leonard I can follow," he said, "a perfectly natural process. In America anything can happen and does happen. But you don't change a family name. A name is a name. What happened to the i?"

"Mrs. Cutter took it out," I explained. "Every time she pronounced Coviello it came out Covello. So she took out the i. That way it's easier for everybody."

… My mother now suddenly entered the argument.… "You must explain this to your teacher," my mother insisted. "It was a mistake. She will know. She will not let it happen again. You will see."

"It was no mistake. On purpose. The i is out and Mrs. Cutter made it Covello. You just don't understand!"

'Will you stop saying that!" my mother insisted. "I don't understand. I don't understand. What is there to understand? Now that you have become Americanized you understand everything and I understand nothing."

Source:

Leonard Covello, with Guido D'Agostino, The Heart is the Teacher (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958).

Hull House

Owing largely to the administrative prowess and successful publicity efforts of the charismatic Jane Addams, Hull House became the best known of the settlement houses in the United States. Addams's Chicago house had two main purposes, the first of which was primarily educational. Hull House residents and volunteers provided numerous programs and services to help their immigrant neighbors; the earliest program offered, a kindergarten begun in 1889, typified the emphasis placed on providing educational opportunities for male and female immigrants of all ages. Other programs offered to adults and children included extension classes, lectures, picture exhibitions, a summer school, a laboratory school affiliated with the National College of Education, Sunday concerts, a nursery, a museum of labor that emphasized the ethnic traditions of immigrants' homelands, courses in cooking and housekeeping, and various men's and women's clubs. Eventually Hull House offered classes to teach recent immigrants how to speak, read, and write English; classes in citizenship also became popular. The second principal purpose of Hull House was that of promoting social justice. Settlement residents worked with their immigrant neighbors to seek solutions to the difficult social and economic problems the immigrants frequently faced in the large and growing city. Inspired by the energetic Addams, Hull House residents fought for and achieved many of their goals, which included parks and playgrounds for children, clean and well-lit streets, improved health care, and better working conditions.

Progressive Pedagogy

Basing the teaching and curriculum at Hull House on the ideas of the progressive educator and philosopher John Dewey, Jane Addams was proud that her settlement's educational program supported an unrestricted view of education. Self-expression among children was encouraged, and spirited attempts were made to connect youngsters' school and family lives. Hull House volunteers emphasized the arts in educational programs for all ages, and dancing classes, drama classes, and art and music lessons were a staple of Hull House activities. Addams believed, however, that "the educational efforts of a settlement should not be directed primarily to reproduce the college-type culture but to work out a method and an ideal adapted to adults who spend their time in industrial pursuits." Accordingly, for older students vocational education became a focus of the Hull House curriculum; but it was a vocational education that went beyond the conventional industrial training. Addams maintained that men and women entering the workforce should have an idea of the history and nature of modern, industrial society in urban America, because these workers needed a sense of context that would provide a fuller meaning to their lives. Additionally, Addams sought to furnish adults with meaningful discussions of contemporary issues. "A settlement soon discovers that simple people are interested in large and vital issues," she wrote. In her mind, simple people did not care to hear only about simple things; they wanted to hear of great things, simply told.

Publicizing Progressive Education

Working tirelessly to spread her ideas about education and reform, Jane Addams wrote or edited thirteen books and left in her collected papers more than one thousand articles, speeches, and addresses. Not all these writings concentrated on education, but many did, a fact that reflected Addams's enduring interest in the subject. Besides her work at Hull House, Addams also worked to reform American public schools, not only serving on an ad hoc citizens' school committee in Chicago, but, from 1905 to 1909, serving as an appointed member of the Chicago Board of Education. She also pushed hard for compulsory education laws and, as a member of the National Child Labor Committee, lobbied for laws to end child labor. In 1906 she helped found the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, which helped usher through Congress the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, supporting vocational education in the nation's high schools. And yet, despite Addams's passionate activism for reform of the formal and public education systems, she nevertheless believed that, ultimately, the nation's schools and universities played a limited role as agents of social change. It was the settlements, Addams believed, or similar institutions, that provided the driving force that most effectively connected education and social reform. Taken as a whole, the educational philosophy of Jane Addams exemplified the strand of progressivism that viewed education as an essential and powerful instrument for improving American society.

Sources:

Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, "Laura Jane Addams," in Women Educators in the United States, 1820-1993: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Maxine Schwartz Seller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994);

Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988);

Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).