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Jane Addams in the Classroom
By David Schaafsma UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09660-0
CHAPTER 1
In Good Company
Jane Addams's Democratic Experimentalism
TODD DESTIGTER
About two hours northwest of Chicago, ten miles south of the Wisconsin border, a sign beside a two-lane blacktop at the outskirts of an Illinois town, population 715, greets visitors with these words: "Cedarville, birthplace of Jane Addams, 1860–1935, Humanitarian, feminist, social worker, educator, author, publicist, founder of Hull-House pioneer settlement center, Chicago, 1889. President, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Nobel Peace Prize, 1931" Though the sign is a fitting tribute to Cedarville's most famous resident, it also serves as an abbreviated curriculum vitae attesting to Addams's broad repertoire of activities and her long list of associations as these grew over time and in often unexpected ways. In what follows, I'll explore some of the ways in which Addams's ever-expanding network of relationships led her to develop an evolving and complex conception of democracy that drew upon and contributed to the experimentalist impulses of American pragmatism. For contemporary teachers, to understand democracy as Addams did—as continually reconstructed on a shifting foundation of human interconnectedness and social conditions—represents what I think is a desirable alternative to much of the thinking in our current educational climate, in which democratic ideals like freedom, equality, and opportunity are too often defined according to the imperatives of individualism, the logic of the marketplace, and the certainty of standardized conceptions of knowledge.
More than Friends
Although Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House in the company of a few other settlement residents whose privileged backgrounds were similar to their own, over the course of her career Addams steadily expanded her professional interests and increased the number and types of people whom she recognized as essential to her work. This revision of what was initially a parochial project of benevolence occurred because Addams eventually figured out that the priorities and abilities of the people she hoped to serve were indispensable in defining the problems that her settlement work should address, in determining possible solutions to these problems, and in taking action to ameliorate them.
Addams learned of this need to join others in addressing a wide range of social issues early in her career as a settlement worker. As she reflects in Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910/1990), "One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited" (180). To explain how this inadequacy might be overcome, Addams introduces a conceit that recurs in many of her writings: namely, that of the "family" and the "social" claim. As Erin Vail explains later in this book, Addams (1902/2002b) describes the "family claim" as that which weighed upon young women of her time to direct their energies—indeed, to devote their lives—to the needs and interests of their households (36). However, while holding fast to the family claim in her relationships with her own relatives and several Hull-House residents, Addams understood that people could not address the family claim without also accepting the "wider inheritance" of responsibility and activism that she called the "social claim." In Addams's view, honoring the family claim depends upon heeding the social claim because one cannot address the specific needs of a family without also creating favorable conditions for doing so within the broader social environments in which families live and work. Drawing upon her experience as a settlement worker, Addams illustrates the inseparability of the family and social claims in her 1915 pamphlet, "Why Women Should Vote":
In a crowded city quarter, if the street is not cleaned up by the city authorities—no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed, a tenement house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield them.... In short, if a woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children, she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside of her immediate household. (qtd. in Elshtain 2002a, 166–67)
Addams's view of the reciprocity of the family and social claims was not limited, however, to issues related to women in domestic settings. Rather, the logic that led her to disregard false distinctions between the family and social claims prompted Addams to pursue a broad strategy of activism. To ensure that the citizens of her neighborhood had proper political representation, for instance, she and other Hull-House residents documented and crusaded against corruption in the Chicago city council. To promote the rights of workers afflicted by what she called "grief on the industrial side" (1899/2002, 63), she was instructed and persuaded by her friend Florence Kelley to become an advocate of organized labor. To alleviate the suffering of addicts, she lobbied to close liquor stores and opium houses. To provide guidance and opportunities to bored and wayward young people, she initiated the establishment of the nation's first juvenile justice system and helped create a network of recreational city parks. She ran for alderman, served on the Chicago School Board, became a prominent voice in national politics, and eventually led international efforts to promote justice and peace.
In this process of expanding the range and type of her own and her HullHouse colleagues' ambitions, however, Addams learned that she had to include in her efforts an ever-widening circle of people. Indeed, her upbringing in Cedarville, her studies at the nearby Rockford Female Seminary, and her "grand tour" of England and the Continent proved to be inadequate preparation for settlement work on the mean streets of Chicago. To do such work effectively—to operate at the intersection of the family and social claims—Addams grew to rely increasingly on the local knowledge and skills to be found in the Hull-House-area community rather than to try to fix it from the outside. As Addams put it a few years after the settlement opened, "The residents at Hull-House find in themselves a constantly increasing tendency to consult their neighbors on the advisability of each new undertaking" (1893/2002b, 41).
Addams's dependence on her neighbors did not end, however, once they had clarified for her what she ought to do. Rather, she looked to community members not only as sources of the Hull-House agenda but also as resources essential to pursuing it. Recounting the host of people involved in the day-today work of Hull-House, she writes, "We constantly rely more and more on neighborhood assistance" (1893/2002b, 41). Significantly, Addams makes a point of mentioning that this "neighborhood assistance" came not only from individuals but also from previously existing groups and institutions. In the context of describing the settlement's reliance on its community, Addams notes that on the wall next to the Hull-House telephone hung a list for easy reference that included the Cook County Hospital, the Visiting Nurses' Association, the Maxwell Street police station, the Chicago Health Department, and City Hall. Moreover, Addams writes that from the "very nature of our existence and purpose," she and her fellow settlement workers "have been on very good terms with" the Hebrew Relief and Aid Society, the Children's Aid, the Humane Society, and "the various church and national relief associations" (1893/2002b, 40). Far from being merely a gracious nod of appreciation, Addams's extended acknowledgment of the people and organizations who contributed to the settlement's activities underscores how crucial it was that Hull-House had adopted a culture of partnering with individuals and institutions in order to define and accomplish its goals.
By emphasizing the importance of such partnerships, Addams anticipated the work of contemporary sociologists who study the ways in which people attempt to join together to define and pursue what they perceive to be their common interests. Paul Lichterman (2005), for instance, has shown that civic groups are most successful in building "social capital"—social networks that empower civil society—when they develop what he calls "customs" of self-reflexivity and communication that encourage reflective talk about their aims and concrete relationships in the wider social world. Such customs, Lichterman contends, increase the likelihood that a group will be able to "spiral outward" and create "enduring, civic bridges across a variety of social differences" (15–17). In Lichterman's view, Addams's writings corroborate his findings in that her accounts of settlement life promote modes of communication and reflection that he found to be essential for civic life, and he cites Addams as among the best examples we have of someone who was able to create the kind of informed relationships necessary to address at once the family and social claims.
For teachers who aspire to have their work be consequential beyond the walls of their classrooms, Addams's conceptualization of the family and social claims provides useful insights regarding the proper nature and scope of education. Her description of the family claim, for instance, can enrich educators' understanding of how frequently and powerfully many students feel the pull of this claim as they work long hours to support themselves and their families, care for younger siblings or aging parents, and generally take on responsibilities that most people postpone until adulthood. Additionally, however, Addams's insights about the family claim can be useful to educators in a less literal sense. I'm referring to the likelihood that most readers of this book can recall times when the family claim has exerted itself within their classrooms. For insofar as teachers are able to cultivate strong personal bonds with and among their students, we might with some justification think of our students as family, and in so doing posit as our highest priority their individual and immediate well-being.
As we have seen, however, Addams's experience holds important lessons for teachers about how the family claim cannot be seriously attended to if we disassociate it from the social claim. Keeping such lessons in mind, we teachers might well emphasize the connections between school and society, broaden our forms of association, and expand our understandings of what our goals should be and how best to accomplish them. Addams herself encouraged this kind of conceptual connection between schooling and the "form" of her settlement work. Writing specifically of the need to revise education for women in the emerging industrial society of her day, Addams lamented that such training "has been singularly individualistic" and "has fostered ambitions almost exclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation" (1902/2002b, 42). What was needed, Addams argued, was education that would instead foster an "enlarged interest in life and the social movements around us" and thereby explicitly connect a student "with human interests outside of her family and her own immediate social circle." Such an education, Addams insists, is the best hope of cultivating in young people the knowledge, skills, and "motive power" to address both the family and social claims (1902/2002b, 43).
If what Addams is describing here sounds familiar, it is not only because her description of "individualistic" education directed toward "intellectual accumulation" goes a long way toward describing current school "reform" efforts but also because a long and distinguished line of educators has queued up behind her to make the same essential argument about what education should ideally do. John Dewey's claim that the purposes of education should "grow and take shape through the process of social intelligence" (1938/1963, 72); Paolo Freire's advocacy of education as "praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it" (1972/2002, 36); Henry A. Giroux's desire for a "critical pedagogy" that will "put equality, liberty, and human life at the center of notions of democracy and citizenship" (1988, 28); Maxine Greene's conception of education as a "dialectical" process characterized by "projects of action ... conducted by and for those willing to take responsibility for themselves and for each other" (1988, 22); bell hooks's struggle to "transgress" education "that merely strives to reinforce domination" (1994, 4); Marilyn Cochran-Smith's contention that "teacher education needs to be conceptualized as both a learning problem and a political problem aimed at social justice" (2004, 1–2)—all of these writers echo Addams's central point when she writes specifically about education: namely, that for schoolwork to be socially and politically relevant, educators must look for opportunities to follow the Hull-House example of venturing out into the world, bridging the gaps that separate us from sites where important work needs to be done, and establishing reciprocal relationships with people on whom we must rely if such work is to be productive.
Thus, as I believe Addams's example suggests, perhaps a beginning point for teachers rests in our committing to the necessity of conversation as we seek to broaden our understandings of our work. As Addams wrote in reference to her own learning process, such conversations will likely be "perplexing" and accompanied by "pangs and misgivings" (1899/2002, 75) in that they will have to include some fundamental questions that we might be reluctant to ask—questions like: Why, ultimately, do we want our students to be better readers and writers? To what extent do our literature and composition courses increase students' abilities to work with others in ways that are consequential beyond our classrooms? What's the sense in preparing student readers and writers to be "college- and career-ready" when college will leave them with decades of debt and most careers available these days don't come with a living wage or health care? What good does it do for young people to gain a critical awareness of various forms of injustice if they don't have the opportunity to do anything about it?
I raise these questions not to be dismissive of the work we teachers typically do, but to suggest that asking such questions opens the door to new possibilities regarding what our teaching might involve and what it might accomplish. Such possibilities will remain unimagined, however, unless we follow Addams in venturing beyond our familiar settings and circle of acquaintances to enrich our understandings of what we should do and why. As Addams learned, such ventures in no way guarantee success, and they are ambitious in that they acknowledge that our work must at times be more expansive and complicated than we initially assume it will be. Still, as Addams also came to know, when we do not reach far and outwardly enough, when we do not care deeply enough about the perspectives and priorities of others, the solutions we propose to a society's emerging dilemmas are too often simplistic and, ultimately, ineffective.
The overlapping, interactive, and mutually influential relationship between schools and society requires that we see schools not as hermetically sealed sites of decontextualized teaching and learning, but as operating dialectically with and within broader sociocultural circumstances. And if we continually strive to understand the specific ways in which our schoolwork might attend to both the family and social claims, we increase the likelihood that we will be able to shape—rather than merely to accept—these circumstances. As professionally isolating as teaching often is, and as difficult as it may seem to have a cumulative and lasting impact on the world outside of schools, this notion that teaching and learning is, at its best, a process of thinking and acting in the company of ever-more-inclusive groups of people is worthy of our efforts as educators.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jane Addams in the Classroom by David Schaafsma. Copyright © 2014 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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