Schools have been for a long time the object of civic interest among women partly because of their intimate family relation through little children and partly because of the fact that women teachers formed an easy bond for coöperation. Today there exists an incredible number of organizations whose main purpose is coöperation with the schools in one way or another. A study of these organizations and their aims justifies the belief that many of the very best features of the present educational system owe their existence to private suggestion and assistance and experimentation.
Miss Elsa Denison in a book called “Helping School Children” has studied the range of private enterprise in education and throws an interesting light on the part played by women in that form of social service.
Settlements have demonstrated the need of: recreation; child welfare; instruction of mothers in the physical basis of well-being and morals; possible coöperation of home and school; and the need of industrial training. Miss Denison in the study to which we have referred, by means of the following table, illustrates the tendency toward the absorption of these settlement features by the school:
| SETTLEMENT | SCHOOL |
|---|---|
| Study Rooms | Study-recreation-rooms |
| Clubs | Clubs |
| Entertainments | Social Center Parties |
| Kindergartens | Public Kindergartens |
| Games | Public School Athletic League |
| Relief | School Association |
| Clinics | Inspection Medical Dental |
| Visiting Nurses | School |
| Music Gardens | Music Gardens |
| Playgrounds | Playgrounds |
| Home Visitors | Visiting Teachers and Truant Officers, Vocational and High Schools, Open-air Classes, Popular Lectures, Mothers’ Clubs, Libraries, Defective and Catch-up Classes. |
This indicates that the school has already in the most progressive cities become one huge settlement with a thoroughly democratic basis in place of a philanthropic foundation.
The public education associations in our leading cities are among the livest of civic organizations. In all these associations, women participate on equal terms with men, where they do not direct the aims and activities themselves. More than one such association, like that of Worcester, Massachusetts, owes its origin directly to the work and agitation of women.
The Public Education Association of the City of New York is an outgrowth of the Committee on Schools of the Council of Confederated Good Governments, a women’s civic organization. Women are very active on the committees of the Association and Mrs. Miriam Sutro Price is chairman of the Executive Committee. This organization has grown from a small committee of women interested in improving the public schools to an organization of over 850 capable members, men and women, under the direction of two trained educators, who supervise a regular staff of trained workers, besides experts employed from time to time and volunteer workers organized in standing committees. Its programs have included bills affecting the educational chapter of the city charter, compulsory education enforcement, truancy and child labor laws, permanent census laws, oversight of the school budget, and the initiation, extension or improvement of many new types of schools for special classes, and the extension of the use of library and school plants.
The Public Education Association of Worcester, Massachusetts, developed from the Committee on Public Schools of the Woman’s Club. Mrs. Eliza Draper Robinson was the energetic organizer of this influential association.
In Philadelphia we have a Public Education Association whose history, “since its organization, is the history of school progress in Philadelphia. To date, it has had a busy career of over thirty years, covering the conspicuously constructive period in the development of city school administration in all the United States and particularly in Philadelphia.”
Providence, Rhode Island, has, in its Public Education Association, Mrs. Carl Barus as secretary, and two of the five members of its executive committee are women: Dean Lida Shaw King and Mrs. Albert D. Mead. This association is striving to bring the educational system of Providence up to the standards set by the majority of other cities in the country. One of its most valuable publications is entitled “Should Providence Have a Small School Commission?” It represents a study of school administration in other cities corresponding reasonably in size with Providence.