SOCIALIZED EDUCATION
In a paper written years ago I deplored at some length the fact
that educational matters are more democratic in their political
than in their social aspect, and I quote the following extract
from it as throwing some light upon the earlier educational
undertakings at Hull-House:-
Teaching in a Settlement requires distinct methods, for it
is true of people who have been allowed to remain
undeveloped and whose facilities are inert and sterile,
that they cannot take their learning heavily. It has to be
diffused in a social atmosphere, information must be held
in solution, in a medium of fellowship and good will.
Intellectual life requires for its expansion and
manifestation the influences and assimilation of the
interests and affections of others. Mazzini, that
greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over the
condition of the South European peasantry, said:
"Education is not merely a necessity of true life by which
the individual renews his vital force in the vital force
of humanity; it is a Holy Communion with generations dead
and living, by which he fecundates all his faculties.
When he is withheld from this Communion for generations,
as the Italian peasant has been, we say, 'He is like a
beast of the field; he must be controlled by force.'" Even
to this it is sometimes added that it is absurd to educate
him, immoral to disturb his content. We stupidly use the
effect as an argument for a continuance of the cause. It
is needless to say that a Settlement is a protest against
a restricted view of education.
In line with this declaration, Hull-House in the very beginning
opened what we called College Extension Classes with a faculty
finally numbering thirty-five college men and women, many of whom
held their pupils for consecutive years. As these classes
antedated in Chicago the University Extension and Normal
Extension classes and supplied a demand for stimulating
instruction, the attendance strained to their utmost capacity the
spacious rooms in the old house. The relation of students and
faculty to each other and to the residents was that of guest and
hostess, and at the close of each term the residents gave a
reception to students and faculty which was one of the chief
social events of the season. Upon this comfortable social basis
some very good work was done.
In connection with these classes a Hull-House summer school was
instituted at Rockford College, which was most generously placed at
our disposal by the trustees. For ten years one hundred women
gathered there for six weeks, in addition there were always men on
the faculty, and a small group of young men among the students who
were lodged in the gymnasium building. The outdoor classes in bird
study and botany, the serious reading of literary masterpieces, the
boat excursions on the Rock River, the cooperative spirit of doing
the housework together, the satirical commencements in
parti-colored caps and gowns, lent themselves toward a reproduction
of the comradeship which college life fosters.
As each member of the faculty, as well as the students, paid
three dollars a week, and as we had little outlay beyond the
actual cost of food, we easily defrayed our expenses. The
undertaking was so simple and gratifying in results that it might
well be reproduced in many college buildings which are set in the
midst of beautiful surroundings, unused during the two months of
the year when hundreds of people, able to pay only a moderate
price for lodgings in the country, can find nothing comfortable
and no mental food more satisfying than piazza gossip.
Every Thursday evening during the first years, a public lecture
came to be an expected event in the neighborhood, and Hull-House
became one of the early University Extension centers, first in
connection with an independent society and later with the
University of Chicago. One of the Hull-House trustees was so
impressed with the value of this orderly and continuous
presentation of economic subjects that he endowed three courses
in a downtown center, in which the lectures were free to anyone
who chose to come. He was much pleased that these lectures were
largely attended by workingmen who ordinarily prefer that an
economic subject shall be presented by a partisan, and who are
supremely indifferent to examinations and credits. They also
dislike the balancing of pro and con which scholarly instruction
implies, and prefer to be "inebriated on raw truth" rather than
to sip a carefully prepared draught of knowledge.
Nevertheless Bowen Hall, which seats seven hundred and fifty
people, is often none too large to hold the audiences of men who
come to Hull-House every Sunday evening during the winter to attend
the illustrated lectures provided by the faculty of the University
of Chicago and others who kindly give their services. These courses
differ enormously in their popularity: one on European capitals and
their social significance was followed with the most vivid
attention and sense of participation indicated by groans and hisses
when the audience was reminded of an unforgettable feud between
Austria and her Slavic subjects, or when they wildly applauded a
Polish hero endeared through his tragic failure.
In spite of the success of these Sunday evening courses, it has
never been an easy undertaking to find acceptable lectures. A
course of lectures on astronomy illustrated by stereopticon slides
will attract a large audience the first week, who hope to hear of
the wonders of the heavens and the relation of our earth thereto,
but instead are treated to spectrum analyses of star dust, or the
latest theory concerning the milky way. The habit of research and
the desire to say the latest word upon any subject often overcomes
the sympathetic understanding of his audience which the lecturer
might otherwise develop, and he insensibly drops into the dull
terminology of the classroom. There are, of course, notable
exceptions; we had twelve gloriously popular talks on organic
evolution, but the lecturer was not yet a professor--merely a
university instructor--and his mind was still eager over the
marvel of it all. Fortunately there is an increasing number of
lecturers whose matter is so real, so definite, and so valuable,
that in an attempt to give it an exact equivalence in words, they
utilize the most direct forms of expression.
It sometimes seems as if the men of substantial scholarship were
content to leave to the charletan the teaching of those things
which deeply concern the welfare of mankind, and that the mass of
men get their intellectual food from the outcasts of scholarship,
who provide millions of books, pictures, and shows, not to
instruct and guide, but for the sake of their own financial
profit. A Settlement soon discovers that simple people are
interested in large and vital subjects, and the Hull-House
residents themselves at one time, with only partial success,
undertook to give a series of lectures on the history of the
world, beginning with the nebular hypothesis and reaching Chicago
itself in the twenty-fifth lecture! Absurd as the hasty review
appears, there is no doubt that the beginner in knowledge is
always eager for the general statement, as those wise old teachers
of the people well knew, when they put the history of creation on
the stage and the monks themselves became the actors. I recall
that in planning my first European journey I had soberly hoped in
two years to trace the entire pattern of human excellence as we
passed from one country to another, in the shrines popular
affection had consecrated to the saints, in the frequented statues
erected to heroes, and in the "worn blasonry of funeral
brasses"--an illustration that when we are young we all long for
those mountaintops upon which we may soberly stand and dream of
our own ephemeral and uncertain attempts at righteousness. I have
had many other illustrations of this; a statement was recently
made to me by a member of the Hull-House Boys' club, who had been
unjustly arrested as an accomplice to a young thief and held in
the police station for three days, that during his detention he
"had remembered the way Jean Valjean behaved when he was
everlastingly pursued by that policeman who was only trying to do
right"; "I kept seeing the pictures in that illustrated lecture
you gave about him, and I thought it would be queer if I couldn't
behave well for three days when he had kept it up for years."
The power of dramatic action may unfortunately be illustrated in
other ways. During the weeks when all the daily papers were full
of the details of a notorious murder trial in New York and all
the hideous events which preceded the crime, one evening I saw in
the street a knot of working girls leaning over a newspaper,
admiring the clothes, the beauty, and "sorrowful expression" of
the unhappy heroine. In the midst of the trial a woman whom I
had known for years came to talk to me about her daughter,
shamefacedly confessing that the girl was trying to dress and
look like the notorious girl in New York, and that she had even
said to her mother in a moment of defiance, "Some day I shall be
taken into court and then I shall dress just as Evelyn did and
face my accusers as she did in innocence and beauty."
If one makes calls on a Sunday afternoon in the homes of the
immigrant colonies near Hull-House, one finds the family absorbed
in the Sunday edition of a sensational daily newspaper, even
those who cannot read, quite easily following the comic
adventures portrayed in the colored pictures of the supplement or
tracing the clew of a murderer carefully depicted by a black line
drawn through a plan of the houses and streets.
Sometimes lessons in the great loyalties and group affections come
through life itself and yet in such a manner that one cannot but
deplore it. During the teamsters' strike in Chicago several years
ago when class bitterness rose to a dramatic climax, I remember
going to visit a neighborhood boy who had been severely injured
when he had taken the place of a union driver upon a coal wagon.
As I approached the house in which he lived, a large group of boys
and girls, some of them very little children, surrounded me to
convey the exciting information that "Jack T. was a 'scab'," and
that I couldn't go in there. I explained to the excited children
that his mother, who was a friend of mine, was in trouble, quite
irrespective of the way her boy had been hurt. The crowd around
me outside of the house of the "scab" constantly grew larger and
I, finally abandoning my attempt at explanation, walked in only to
have the mother say: "Please don't come here. You will only get
hurt, too." Of course I did not get hurt, but the episode left
upon my mind one of the most painful impressions I have ever
received in connection with the children of the neighborhood. In
addition to all else are the lessons of loyalty and comradeship to
come to them as the mere reversals of class antagonism? And yet
it was but a trifling incident out of the general spirit of
bitterness and strife which filled the city.
Therefore the residents of Hull-House place increasing emphasis
upon the great inspirations and solaces of literature and are
unwilling that it should ever languish as a subject for class
instruction or for reading parties. The Shakespeare club has
lived a continuous existence at Hull-House for sixteen years
during which time its members have heard the leading interpreters
of Shakespeare, both among scholars and players. I recall that
one of its earliest members said that her mind was peopled with
Shakespeare characters during her long hours of sewing in a shop,
that she couldn't remember what she thought about before she
joined the club, and concluded that she hadn't thought about
anything at all. To feed the mind of the worker, to lift it above
the monotony of his task, and to connect it with the larger world,
outside of his immediate surroundings, has always been the object
of art, perhaps never more nobly fulfilled than by the great
English bard. Miss Starr has held classes in Dante and Browning
for many years, and the great lines are conned with never failing
enthusiasm. I recall Miss Lathrop's Plato club and an audience
who listened to a series of lectures by Dr. John Dewey on "Social
Psychology" as geniune intellectual groups consisting largely of
people from the immediate neighborhood, who were willing to make
"that effort from which we all shrink, the effort of thought." But
while we prize these classes as we do the help we are able to give
to the exceptional young man or woman who reaches the college and
university and leaves the neighborhood of his childhood behind
him, the residents of Hull-House feel increasingly that the
educational efforts of a Settlement should not be directed
primarily to reproduce the college type of culture, but to work
out a method and an ideal adapted to the immediate situation.
They feel that they should promote a culture which will not set
its possessor aside in a class with others like himself, but which
will, on the contrary, connect him with all sorts of people by his
ability to understand them as well as by his power to supplement
their present surroundings with the historic background. Among
the hundreds of immigrants who have for years attended classes at
Hull-House designed primarily to teach the English language,
dozens of them have struggled to express in the newly acquired
tongue some of these hopes and longings which had so much to do
with their emigration.
A series of plays was thus written by a young Bohemian; essays by
a Russian youth, outpouring sorrows rivaling Werther himself and
yet containing the precious stuff of youth's perennial revolt
against accepted wrong; stories of Russian oppression and petty
injustices throughout which the desire for free America became a
crystallized hope; an attempt to portray the Jewish day of
Atonement, in such wise that even individualistic Americans may
catch a glimpse of that deeper national life which has survived
all transplanting and expresses itself in forms so ancient that
they appear grotesque to the ignorant spectator. I remember a
pathetic effort on the part of a young Russian Jewess to describe
the vivid inner life of an old Talmud scholar, probably her uncle
or father, as of one persistently occupied with the grave and
important things of the spirit, although when brought into sharp
contact with busy and overworked people, he inevitably appeared
self-absorbed and slothful. Certainly no one who had read her
paper could again see such an old man in his praying shawl bent
over his crabbed book, without a sense of understanding.
On the other hand, one of the most pitiful periods in the drama
of the much-praised young American who attempts to rise in life,
is the time when his educational requirements seem to have locked
him up and made him rigid. He fancies himself shut off from his
uneducated family and misunderstood by his friends. He is bowed
down by his mental accumulations and often gets no farther than
to carry them through life as a great burden, and not once does
he obtain a glimpse of the delights of knowledge.
The teacher in a Settlement is constantly put upon his mettle to
discover methods of instruction which shall make knowledge
quickly available to his pupils, and I should like here to pay my
tribute of admiration to the dean of our educational department,
Miss Landsberg, and to the many men and women who every winter
come regularly to Hull-House, putting untiring energy into the
endless task of teaching the newly arrived immigrant the first
use of a language of which he has such desperate need. Even a
meager knowledge of English may mean an opportunity to work in a
factory versus nonemployment, or it may mean a question of life
or death when a sharp command must be understood in order to
avoid the danger of a descending crane.
In response to a demand for an education which should be
immediately available, classes have been established and grown
apace in cooking, dressmaking, and millinery. A girl who attends
them will often say that she "expects to marry a workingman next
spring," and because she has worked in a factory so long she
knows "little about a house." Sometimes classes are composed of
young matrons of like factory experiences. I recall one of them
whose husband had become so desperate after two years of her
unskilled cooking that he had threatened to desert her and go
where he could get "decent food," as she confided to me in a
tearful interview, when she followed my advice to take the
Hull-House courses in cooking, and at the end of six months
reported a united and happy home.
Two distinct trends are found in response to these classes; the
first is for domestic training, and the other is for trade
teaching which shall enable the poor little milliner and
dressmaker apprentices to shorten the years of errand running
which is supposed to teach them their trade.
The beginning of trade instruction has been already evolved in
connection with the Hull-House Boys' club. The ample Boys' club
building presented to Hull-House three years ago by one of our
trustees has afforded well-equipped shops for work in wood, iron,
and brass; for smithing in copper and tin; for commercial
photography, for printing, for telegraphy, and electrical
construction. These shops have been filled with boys who are
eager for that which seems to give them a clew to the industrial
life all about them. These classes meet twice a week and are
taught by intelligent workingmen who apparently give the boys
what they want better than do the strictly professional teachers.
While these classes in no sense provide a trade training, they
often enable a boy to discover his aptitude and help him in the
selection of what he "wants to be" by reducing the trades to
embryonic forms. The factories are so complicated that the boy
brought in contact with them, unless he has some preliminary
preparation, is apt to become confused. In pedagogical terms, he
loses his "power of orderly reaction" and is often so discouraged
or so overstimulated in his very first years of factory life that
his future usefulness is seriously impaired.
One of Chicago's most significant experiments in the direction of
correlating the schools with actual industry was for several years
carried on in a public school building situated near Hull-House,
in which the bricklayers' apprentices were taught eight hours a
day in special classes during the non-bricklaying season. This
early public school venture anticipated the very successful
arrangement later carried on in Cincinnati, in Pittsburgh and in
Chicago itself, whereby a group of boys at work in a factory
alternate month by month with another group who are in school and
are thus intelligently conducted into the complicated processes of
modern industry. But for a certain type of boy who has been
demoralized by the constant change and excitement of street life,
even these apprenticeship classes are too strenuous, and he has to
be lured into the path of knowledge by all sorts of appeals.
It sometimes happens that boys are held in the Hull-House classes
for weeks by their desire for the excitement of placing burglar
alarms under the door mats. But to enable the possessor of even
a little knowledge to thus play with it, is to decoy his feet at
least through the first steps of the long, hard road of learning,
although even in this, the teacher must proceed warily. A
typical street boy who was utterly absorbed in a wood-carving
class, abruptly left never to return when he was told to use some
simple calculations in the laying out of the points. He
evidently scented the approach of his old enemy, arithmetic, and
fled the field. On the other hand, we have come across many
cases in which boys have vainly tried to secure such
opportunities for themselves. During the trial of a boy of ten
recently arrested for truancy, it developed that he had spent
many hours watching the electrical construction in a downtown
building, and many others in the public library "reading about
electricity." Another boy who was taken from school early, when
his father lost both of his legs in a factory accident, tried in
vain to find a place for himself "with machinery." He was
declared too small for any such position, and for four years
worked as an errand boy, during which time he steadily turned in
his unopened pay envelope for the use of the household. At the
end of the fourth year the boy disappeared, to the great distress
of his invalid father and his poor mother whose day washings
became the sole support of the family. He had beaten his way to
Kansas City, hoping "they wouldn't be so particular there about a
fellow's size." He came back at the end of six weeks because he
felt sorry for his mother who, aroused at last to a realization
of his unbending purpose, applied for help to the Juvenile
Protective Association. They found a position for the boy in a
machine shop and an opportunity for evening classes.
Out of the fifteen hundred members of the Hull-House Boy's club,
hundreds seem to respond only to the opportunities for
recreation, and many of the older ones apparently care only for
the bowling and the billiards. And yet tournaments and match
games under supervision and regulated hours are a great advance
over the sensual and exhausting pleasures to be found so easily
outside the club. These organized sports readily connect
themselves with the Hull-House gymnasium and with all those
enthusiasms which are so mysteriously aroused by athletics.
Our gymnasium has been filled with large and enthusiastic classes
for eighteen years in spite of the popularity of dancing and other
possible substitutes, while the Saturday evening athletic contests
have become a feature of the neighborhood. The Settlement strives
for that type of gymnastics which is at least partly a matter of
character, for that training which presupposes abstinence and the
curbing of impulse, as well as for those athletic contests in
which the mind of the contestant must be vigilant to keep the body
closely to the rules of the game. As one sees in rhythmic motion
the slim bodies of a class of lads, "that scrupulous and
uncontaminate purity of form which recommended itself even to the
Greeks as befitting messengers from the gods, if such messengers
should come," one offers up in awkward prosaic form the very
essence of that old prayer, "Grant them with feet so light to pass
through life." But while the glory stored up for Olympian winners
was at the most a handful of parsley, an ode, fame for family and
city, on the other hand, when the men and boys from the Hull-House
gymnasium bring back their cups and medals, one's mind is filled
with something like foreboding in the reflection that too much
success may lead the winners into the professionalism which is so
associated with betting and so close to pugilism. Candor,
however, compels me to state that a long acquaintance with the
acrobatic folk who have to do with the circus, a large number of
whom practice in our gymnasium every winter, has raised our
estimate of that profession.
Young people who work long hours at sedentary occupations,
factories and offices, need perhaps more than anything else the
freedom and ease to be acquired from a symmetrical muscular
development and are quick to respond to that fellowship which
athletics apparently affords more easily than anything else. The
Greek immigrants form large classes and are eager to reproduce
the remnants of old methods of wrestling, and other bits of
classic lore which they still possess, and when one of the Greeks
won a medal in a wrestling match which represented the
championship of the entire city, it was quite impossible that he
should present it to the Hull-House trophy chest without a
classic phrase which he recited most gravely and charmingly.
It was in connection with a large association of Greek lads that
Hull-House finally lifted its long restriction against military
drill. If athletic contests are the residuum of warfare first
waged against the conqueror without and then against the tyrants
within the State, the modern Greek youth is still in the first
stage so far as his inherited attitude against the Turk is
concerned. Each lad believes that at any moment he may be called
home to fight this long-time enemy of Greece. With such a
genuine motive at hand, it seemed mere affectation to deny the
use of our boys' club building and gymnasium for organized drill,
although happily it forms but a small part of the activities of
the Greek Educational Association.
Having thus confessed to military drill countenanced if not
encouraged at Hull-House, it is perhaps only fair to relate an
early experience of mine with the "Columbian Guards," and
organization of the World's Fair summer. Although the Hull-House
squad was organized as the others were with the motto of a clean
city, it was very anxious for military drill. This request not
only shocked my nonresistant principles, but seemed to afford an
opportunity to find a substitute for the military tactics which
were used in the boys' brigades everywhere, even in those
connected with churches. As the cleaning of the filthy streets
and alleys was the ostensible purpose of the Columbian guards, I
suggested to the boys that we work out a drill with sewer spades,
which with their long narrow blades and shortened handles were
not so unlike bayoneted guns in size, weight, and general
appearance, but that much of the usual military drill could be
readapted. While I myself was present at the gymnasium to
explain that it was nobler to drill in imitation of removing
disease-breeding filth than to drill in simulation of warfare;
while I distractedly readapted tales of chivalry to this modern
rescuing of the endangered and distressed, the new drill went
forward in some sort of fashion, but so surely as I withdrew, the
drillmaster would complain that our troops would first grow
self-conscious, then demoralized, and finally flatly refuse to go
on. Throughout the years since the failure of this Quixotic
experiment, I occasionally find one of these sewer spades in a
Hull-House storeroom, too truncated to be used for its original
purpose and too prosaic to serve the purpose for which it was
bought. I can only look at it in the forlorn hope that it may
foreshadow that piping time when the weapons of warfare shall be
turned into the implements of civic salvation.
Before closing this chapter on Socialized Education, it is only
fair to speak of the education accruing to the Hull-House
residents themselves during their years of living in what at least
purports to be a center for social and educational activity.
While a certain number of the residents are primarily interested
in charitable administration and the amelioration which can be
suggested only by those who know actual conditions, there are
other residents identified with the House from its earlier years
to whom the groups of immigrants make the historic appeal, and who
use, not only their linguistic ability, but all the resource they
can command of travel and reading to qualify themselves for
intelligent living in the immigrant quarter of the city. I
remember one resident lately returned from a visit in Sicily, who
was able to interpret to a bewildered judge the ancient privilege
of a jilted lover to scratch the cheek of his faithless sweetheart
with the edge of a coin. Although the custom in America had
degenerated into a knife slashing after the manner of foreign
customs here, and although the Sicilian deserved punishment, the
incident was yet lifted out of the slough of mere brutal assault,
and the interpretation won the gratitude of many Sicilians.
There is no doubt that residents in a Settlement too often move
toward their ends "with hurried and ignoble gait," putting forth
thorns in their eagerness to bear grapes. It is always easy for
those in pursuit of ends which they consider of overwhelming
importance to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit
and temper, to gradually develop a dark mistaken eagerness
alternating with fatigue, which supersedes "the great and
gracious ways" so much more congruous with worthy aims.
Partly because of this universal tendency, partly because a
Settlement shares the perplexities of its times and is never too
dogmatic concerning the final truth, the residents would be glad
to make the daily life at the Settlement "conform to every shape
and mode of excellence."
It may not be true
"That the good are always the merry
Save by an evil chance,"
but a Settlement would make clear that one need not be heartless
and flippant in order to be merry, nor solemn in order to be wise.
Therefore quite as Hull-House tries to redeem billiard tables from
the association of gambling, and dancing from the temptations of
the public dance halls, so it would associate with a life of
upright purpose those more engaging qualities which in the experience
of the neighborhood are too often connected with dubious aims.
Throughout the history of Hull-House many inquiries have been made
concerning the religion of the residents, and the reply that they
are as diversified in belief and in the ardor of the inner life as
any like number of people in a college or similar group, apparently
does not carry conviction. I recall that after a house for men
residents had been opened on Polk Street and the residential force
at Hull-House numbered twenty, we made an effort to come together
on Sunday evenings in a household service, hoping thus to express
our moral unity in spite of the fact that we represented many
creeds. But although all of us reverently knelt when the High
Church resident read the evening service and bowed our heads when
the evangelical resident led in prayer after his chapter, and
although we sat respectfully through the twilight when a resident
read her favorite passages from Plato and another from Abt Vogler,
we concluded at the end of the winter that this was not religious
fellowship and that we did not care for another reading club. So
it was reluctantly given up, and we found that it was quite as
necessary to come together on the basis of the deed and our common
aim inside the household as it was in the neighborhood itself. I
once had a conversation on the subject with the warden of Oxford
House, who kindly invited me to the evening service held for the
residents in a little chapel on the top floor of the Settlement.
All the residents were High Churchmen to whom the service was an
important and reverent part of the day. Upon my reply to a query
of the warden that the residents of Hull-House could not come
together for religious worship because there were among us Jews,
Roman Catholics, English Churchmen, Dissenters, and a few
agnostics, and that we had found unsatisfactory the diluted form of
worship which we could carry on together, he replied that it must
be most difficult to work with a group so diversified, for he
depended upon the evening service to clear away any difficulties
which the day had involved and to bring the residents to a
religious consciousness of their common aim. I replied that this
diversity of creed was part of the situation in American
Settlements, as it was our task to live in a neighborhood of many
nationalities and faiths, and that it might be possible that among
such diversified people it was better that the Settlement corps
should also represent varying religious beliefs.
A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that
they prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in," but
that it is no easy matter to find a world rational as to its
intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and practical aspects. Certainly
it is no easy matter if the place selected is of the very sort
where the four aspects are apparently furthest from perfection,
but an undertaking resembling this is what the Settlement
gradually becomes committed to, as its function is revealed
through the reaction on its consciousness of its own experiences.
Because of this fourfold undertaking, the Settlement has gathered
into residence people of widely diversified tastes and interests,
and in Hull-House, at least, the group has been surprisingly
permanent. The majority of the present corp of forty residents
support themselves by their business and professional occupations
in the city, giving only their leisure time to Settlement
undertakings. This in itself tends to continuity of residence
and has certain advantages. Among the present staff, of whom the
larger number have been in residence for more than twelve years,
there are the secretary of the City club, two practicing
physicians, several attorneys, newspapermen, businessmen,
teachers, scientists, artists, musicians, lecturers in the School
of Civics and Philanthropy, officers in The Juvenile Protective
Association and in The League for the Protection of Immigrants, a
visiting nurse, a sanitary inspector, and others.
We have also worked out during our years of residence a plan of
living which may be called cooperative, for the families and
individuals who rent the Hull-House apartments have the use of
the central kitchen and dining room so far as they care for them;
many of them work for hours every week in the studios and shops;
the theater and drawing-rooms are available for such social
organization as they care to form; the entire group of thirteen
buildings is heated and lighted from a central plant. During the
years, the common human experiences have gathered about the
House; funeral services have been held there, marriages and
christenings, and many memories hold us to each other as well as
to our neighbors. Each resident, of course, carefully defrays
his own expenses, and his relations to his fellow residents are
not unlike those of a college professor to his colleagues. The
depth and strength of his relation to the neighborhood must
depend very largely upon himself and upon the genuine friendships
he has been able to make. His relation to the city as a whole
comes largely through his identification with those groups who
are carrying forward the reforms which a Settlement neighborhood
so sadly needs and with which residence has made him familiar.
Life in the Settlement discovers above all what has been called
"the extraordinary pliability of human nature," and it seems
impossible to set any bounds to the moral capabilities which might
unfold under ideal civic and educational conditions. But in order
to obtain these conditions, the Settlement recognizes the need of
cooperation, both with the radical and the conservative, and from
the very nature of the case the Settlement cannot limit its
friends to any one political party or economic school.
The Settlement casts side none of those things which cultivated
men have come to consider reasonable and goodly, but it insists
that those belong as well to that great body of people who,
because of toilsome and underpaid labor, are unable to procure
them for themselves. Added to this is a profound conviction that
the common stock of intellectual enjoyment should not be
difficult of access because of the economic position of him who
would approach it, that those "best results of civilization" upon
which depend the finer and freer aspects of living must be
incorporated into our common life and have free mobility through
all elements of society if we would have our democracy endure.
The educational activities of a Settlement, as well its
philanthropic, civic, and social undertakings, are but differing
manifestations of the attempt to socialize democracy, as is the
very existence of the Settlement itself.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK
Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text
entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of
volunteer Samantha M. Constant.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]