The Unadjusted Girl, With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis

by William Isaac Thomas

The ideal would be to have the school act as a reserve parent, an unusually intelligent, responsible and resourceful parent, using whatever the community had to offer, making up whatever the community lacked....

All neglected, dependent and delinquent children, whether of school age or not, would fall within the province of [the department of adjustment]. For these children we would have the authority of the school extend from infancy to adult life.... We should [thus] get entirely away from the conception of penalizing children for their offenses and from the stigma of courts and reform schools.... We should establish our thinking firmly on an educational basis. The fatal gradation of reform school, work-house, county jail and state prison would be broken.... Wherever possible we would have dependent children sent to public schools. Homes for “friendless” or “destitute” children belong with scarlet letters, stocks and debtors’ prisons....

With the clearing away of old names and associations should come better opportunity to meet the needs of girls before they reach an advanced stage of incorrigibility.

[Arrangements should be made for] pooling the juvenile court’s probation officers, the truancy department’s numerous officers, the school nurses, the medical instructors, the special schools and reformatories, and all the rest of the specialists on the physical, mental and social troubles of school children into one department of adjustment.... Only the most determined blindness could prevent [the school board member] from seeing how the school truant officer and the probation officer overlap.... He could surely see the waste of having the schools, on the one hand, build up a staff of doctors and nurses and the juvenile court on the other trying to duplicate this machinery—both sets to serve the same group of children.[^[102]]

These writers argue also that the juvenile court does not afford so good an opportunity as the school for the study of the child and for record-making, that the stigma placed on the child by an appearance in court deprives him of the chance of future favorable recognition, that the court cannot prevent delinquency, that the child is frequently incorrigible before he reaches the court, that the courts have a very limited range as propaganda and general educational agencies, since they have no power over the child’s life before he comes actually before the bar of justice, that the power of the probation officer is relatively slight and casual, and that vocational placement should be connected with the school.

Further than this, the depraved family conditions which I have emphasized are due not only to bad economic conditions but to the failure of community influence. You may have very good family life with bad economic conditions but you cannot have good family life without community influence. I have shown in Chapter II how strong was the influence of the community on the family. It is not too much to say that the community made the family good. Human nature often appears at its worst in connection with pair marriages and small families. The records of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children are filled with sickening details of the brutality of parents. An organic connection with a larger community is necessary to the maintenance of moral standards and fine sentiments. If we look, therefore, as we are forced to look, for a social agency whose influence may penetrate the family we find it in the school. The school is not a natural organization like the family, but an artificial organization capable of rapid changes and adjustments. In this respect it has almost the freedom of a scientific laboratory. It receives all children early and keeps them a relatively long time. Its function is the setting and solving of problems and the communication of information. Its representatives are far superior to the average parent in intelligence and understanding. If we invented any device to replace social influence lacking at other points it would be the school. It is probable that the school could be a sort of community forming the background of the family and the child and could supply the elements lacking in the home, at least to the degree of preventing in a large measure delinquency and crime, if it exercised all the influence it could conceivably exercise, and that it could, more than any other agency, socialize the family. From this standpoint the appearance of the visiting teacher in the school has the greatest importance.

The first visiting teachers began work in the year 1906–1907 in New York, Boston and Hartford, Connecticut. In these cities, and later in other places, as has frequently happened in other educational experiments, the impulse came from outside the school system. Private organizations—in Boston, settlements and civic organizations; in New York, settlements and the Public Education Association; in Hartford, the director of the Psychological Laboratory—saw the need of providing a specially equipped worker to help the schools, and developed and privately maintained the work until the school board became convinced of its value and incorporated it as part of the school system. In other cities, like Rochester and Mt. Vernon, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio, the work was introduced directly by the board of education. At present in all but four cities the work is part of the city public school system. The movement has grown until at present the work has been extended to twenty-nine cities in fifteen states. In some of these “school visitor” or a similar term is used instead of visiting teacher....

“Through individuals to the group” is the approach of the visiting teacher, and as the result of her knowledge, derived from case work, new types of classes have been organized, school clubs, or other means to make the school fit the newly discovered need. Study rooms have been opened, school recreation centers organized; parents’ clubs, courses in domestic training, special trade courses, school lunches and other extensions have been started as a result of the visiting teacher’s view of the neighborhood. In this way her work becomes of value to the school as a whole. She acts as a scout bringing back a more definite knowledge of the lacks in the neighborhood, educational, social and moral, and of newer demands on the school that have arisen because of changing social and industrial conditions. This relation accords with the ideas of modern educators who believe that the connection between the school and the community life cannot be too closely integrated.

On the other hand, the visiting teacher’s acquaintance with the families and the neighborhood brings about social results. Through her work, various communities have been stimulated to provide scholarship funds, nurseries, community houses, homes for neglected children and other social activities. Hidden danger spots are not infrequently brought to her attention by parents who have not known what to do about the situation or have been afraid to report to the proper agency or official. In this way the work assumes an additional preventive aspect, and results in such improvements as better policing and lighting of parks, better provision for playgrounds, closing of improper movies, etc., checking of traffic in drugs to minors and the removal of similar insidious conditions.

The visiting teacher’s position as a member of the school staff makes for certain advantages. She gets in touch with cases at an earlier stage than would an outsider. Teachers and parents consult her about suspicious cases which they would not feel justified in referring to a social agency. As representative of the school, the visiting teacher is free from the suggestion of philanthropy, and of all visitors she has, perhaps, the most natural approach to the home, going as she does in the interests of the child. It is a very rare thing for a visiting teacher to experience an unpleasant reception. Further, she is in a position to follow the child in school from year to year. Where the home carries a serious handicap, she may anticipate the difficulties of the younger children, help them avoid the false starts made by the older brother or sister, and also assist the school to reinforce the children against the inroads of the family handicap....