Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
“A thorough textbook study of scientific temperance in public schools as
a preventative against intemperance” was the aim of the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union as early as 1879. Forty-three states
incorporated this instruction into the school system and twenty-four
textbooks on the subject circulate. If the development of scientific
knowledge and psychology leads to an appreciation of the inadequacy or
failure of these textbooks and former methods of teaching temperance,
the fact remains that temperance needs to be taught and improved
textbooks and methods will doubtless appear soon.
Today when the major interest in school instruction centers about
vocational training, it is interesting to go back over the history of
manual training in the schools. “Manual training as a new feature of
education was partly the result of an educational philosophy and partly
a protest against mere bookishness. The first appearance of constructive
work for clearly definite cultural purposes appears to have been in
connection with the classes of the workingmen’s school founded in 1878
by the Ethical Culture Society of New York. In 1880, the St. Louis
Manual Training School was founded in connection with the Washington
University, and in 1882, Mrs. Quincy Shaw of Boston privately supported
experimental classes in carpentry at the Dwight School. Two years later
the city of Boston also experimented, but it was four years more before
manual training was given a place in the curriculum. New York City began
instruction in drawing, sewing, cooking and woodwork that same year.”
In Massachusetts, during this decade, eighteen women’s clubs took the
promotion of vocational training for their special task and the
Federations of Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut urged
this upon their members. In some instances this conflict has to be
renewed every year in order to maintain that which has been secured with
so much labor and expense, owing to new and ignorant or penurious school
boards. Sometimes impatient women have raised the money themselves. The
Chicago Woman’s Club raised $40,000 for the Glenwood Industrial School
for Boys.
Although the charge of lack of virility is so often brought against
women school teachers, it is interesting to record that women have been
among the pioneers in the advocacy of the introduction of physical
training. About 1888, through the efforts of Mrs. Hemenway in Boston,
who had experimented with physical training among teachers, the School
Board arranged for her to try her system in the schools. Finding it a
useful addition to the curriculum, physical training was definitely
adopted the following year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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