[March, 1915] ... My lady told me everything be much better next winter. I going to have a nice warm room. This winter I had awfully cold room. I went to bed with my cloths. She didn’t give me no blankets, so I sleep in my clothes and I used to take hot iron with me to warm up the bed, so bad I have here. Friend, I got to go to school every Wednesday but next Wednesday I wouldn’t go, I go to the dance. I have white dress under the black skirt and long coat and she going to think that I go to school. I leave my skirt and my books in my friends house and I go to the dance, ha, ha, ha. Come with me ha, ha, I have there lots of nice young boys and the man who brings me the eggs and lots of other nice young man, so I going to have nice time. Dear, I went Sunday out and I went to the girl, her sister have a boarding house there where nice 3 young mans, and all ask me to go with them to the dance, so I going to have big fun. I be very glad if you can come with me, but don’t tell on me that I’m going to the dance. My lady she don’t know anything about it. She think I am innocent girl, No 1. I am, don’t you think friend? When I think I have three years, I start to cry, I don’t know what to do. But when I think of nice mens, I start to jump in the kitchen and singing. [Writes the song she sings.] Only if you see me you would burst from laughing.... I ask my garbage man if he can lend me money, he said he help me with much as he can....
So friend have a good time and maybe on Tuesday I be back to the institution. This year I get new trial, so don’t worry and don’t cry. You know we have one God and he see everything. He must punish Miss R. sometime. She is old enough but she couldn’t get married. Nobody wants her who is rich and poor man she don’t want.... I like to have the money by Tuesday. I should be sure that nothing is missing from her. So take care of yourself. I going to eat beans for supper, ha, ha, but I going to be all right. Now I be so bad that everyone is afraid of me. I don’t care if they put me in the disciplinary in the cellar—I going to have there friends—you know what kind—red ones, bed bugs, and roaches and mouses. Ha, ha, I’m going to have good time, I won’t cry. You friend, when you send the money don’t say nothing to your lady and send them so that my lady wouldn’t know nothing about it, my lady. I suppose Miss R. wrote that I receive dress from pawn shop. See, don’t tell on me—when I be in the institution. Tell that your J. that he put them [dress] there, that it shouldn’t get lost. Otherwise they would laugh at us that we did not have any money and we had to put our dress in pawn shop—that be a shame.
Miss R. wrote that they wouldn’t let me go to you—and if I ask again she would give me a good scolding, so write to the old fortune-teller. So good-bye friend, have a good time. Don’t forget to answer me right away. Don’t say to no one what happen—write right away. You know in the institution maybe they wouldn’t give me your letter. Good night and good-bye forever. I think if I come to the institution I take my life there.
[June, 1915. From Esther to parole officer, Miss R.]
... I am letting you know I am back in the same place—institution. I’m letting you know why and I wrote you letter about my head and I like to get rid of that. Doctor told me that he [saw] no other help, that I got to have an operate on my nose. If not then I get a inflamation thro my nose. So I wrote that to my friend, that one what we was together locked up, but I didn’t tell her that I got this sickness, but I wrote to her in English that I got disease, but I didn’t know that she gave the letter to her lady and they sent them to the institution. So they read that I getting disease that I stole $4 and one young man gave me $2, so they make me very dirty, but I’m not afraid of them—you know that, when they start with such a story, so I know that I’m in heaven. They only want have me back. I should stay here the three years, so they come and get me on Sunday, afternoon. So how I was, I went. They didn’t give me only chance to put on my dress, shoes and hat and put me in a auto and so that was we took the train to the institution and there they start to ask me questions, why they took me back and when I come down here. I got to let them examine myself and when she examine me, she said everything is all right. You know what a disease is—so explain to her about my head and my nose. So she said if girl say she have a disease, they take it that its girl bad from a man, but I didn’t know that a girl get sickness from a man. The lady doctor told me about how the girl get sick.... But where is the right? And on account of the $4, that this way: That girl is a Croation and I’m a Czech, and we used to write, and sometimes we didn’t understand the letters from each other. And so about the $2. Once in N. Y. I went down from car, I lost heel from shoe, I dropped the hand bag, and so real man come out and pick up my bag [and gave me $2.00].
[Letter to Superintendent of institution from parole officer; June 4, 1915, after Esther had been returned to the institution]:
... It is very difficult to tell from the letters [of Esther] whether or not she has actually broken her parole. The worst she has done, according to her own statement, is (1) to borrow $4 from employer’s purse to pay for a dress with fullest intention of returning it (and employer is sure she would have missed it had it not been returned); (2) opened a letter addressed to employer from writer; (3) went to picture shows sometimes when she was supposed to be in class; (4) flirted with men on train; (5) wrote T. T. whom she knew before coming to the Institution; (6) kissed the egg man; (7) probably had sexual relations with a man in Philadelphia for $2 (Esther denies this).
Her letters refer also to plans to go to a dance secretly and to go to New York secretly. There is nothing in the letters to indicate that she ever put her plan about coming to New York into effect. Esther denies emphatically that she has been to New York and her employer thinks it very unlikely that she could go without her knowledge. They show also she thought she was diseased and had been to a doctor about it before she came to the institution. She still worries about it whether or not there is any cause. (First blood test was S—— G——.)
Subject’s attitude expressed in these letters is far more serious to my mind than anything she has done, but it is a question whether it is anything for which she should be blamed or punished. She is unquestionably abnormally sensitive, suspicious and secretive and these traits have been unfortunately emphasized by her arrest and commitment here. She evidently suffers bitterly and constantly because she is on parole to the institution and that resentment poisons everything she does and thinks. She must have been under a frightful strain during these months while she was working with the lawyer to win her freedom, with the constant pressure he put on her for money and to come to New York to see him. Then too the conflict of what may be merely normal and natural sex interests and her fear of breaking her parole by expressing these in any way has probably been bad for her and has emphasized these sex interests. I think all of the references in the letters to “nice young mens” who smiled at her and tipped their hats to her on the train, to the nice young mens she sees at picture shows, to the men who invited her to a dance, may be explained as a boastful desire to appear bad and to be having attention and a good time, arising from a regretful realization of how much she is missing in these lines. Possibly she was just beginning to have a taste of “gay life” before she came to us and the institution may have done much to whet her curiosity. She seems to ridicule the idea of being considered “innocent and good”—“Sunday School girls”—and asks co-defendant to send her the picture of her (Esther’s) Bohemian sweetheart (she has always claimed to be engaged to a man now fighting in the Austrian army) so she can show her employer she has a sweetheart, “make her employer jealous” as she puts it.
Certainly if she had not been determined to keep her parole, with such a demand on her for money from the lawyer and such an interest in men, she would have solicited long before this. I think it is to her credit that she has worked so steadily and satisfactorily and has tried to keep, as she understood it, the letter at least of her parole.
I feel, however, that if the interest we have taken in her in giving her an early parole under such good conditions and her employer’s never failing efforts to understand and help her have not won her confidence, we can scarcely hope to break down her attitude of misunderstanding and suspicion of us, which breeds deceit in her so readily. After what has happened she will probably be more antagonistic than before; the strain on her of keeping parole might easily become too great at any time. It would seem to be a very great risk both for us and for Esther to have her out on parole again, particularly in another state.
I hope you will be able to make her see, even if you decide she has not actually broken her parole, that she has not even understood its spirit when she tried to buy her freedom through a lawyer and deceived us and her employers as to her real intentions.
I think much of subject’s suspiciousness and deceitfulness is racial and there is small chance of her adjusting to American customs. I remember that you considered deporting her in the first place and while I still think it would be very bad for subject to have the stigma of deportation added to that of arrest, I do feel that her own country is the best place for her and that she will be far more apt to live a straight, normal life there with the restraints of her family and their standards to help her than she will here. Do you think it may be possible to send her back on her own money when conditions of war permit?
From certain standpoints this girl seems to be almost ideal human material. The institution called her “intelligent, conscientious, and, far beyond our girls, sensitive to fine distinctions of right and wrong.” All her wishes are strong and social. She craves pleasure, association with “nice young mens”, dancing, pretty clothes, but is an industrious worker. Her letters to Lilian are overflowing with the desire for response—both to give it and to receive it. In a letter after her return to the institution, not printed here, she refers to the child of her former employer: “Oh, I was glad to hear about Max. How often I think about the times he used to pull my hair, and that was a great joke. Yes, I often think and talk about him. Give him my love and see if any of my flowers are up. If so, put one on him for me.” And she is always thinking of improving her position in the world. “We are,” she says, “going to look for some nice man, but something better, not only working men.” She is ashamed of her relation to the egg man, “because he is only egg man.” She does not want it known that she pawned a dress. In her reference to Austrian army officers and a sweetheart in Bohemia, she wishes to claim before her mistress that she has some social standing. During the whole of her parole she is working on the problem of her life. She is working alone, and she leaves no stone unturned. She is in a village, not allowed to visit New York. She plans her campaign for a new trial by letter, working through a stupid friend who unintentionally betrays her. Her lawyer is exploiting her, her doctor also; her Italian friend is not loyal, her uncle promises help but is poor. She even appeals to the garbage man. Like many who have sought to reconstruct a broken life, she plans to go west.
And she is very able. She has a mind adapted to the law, and she could write scenarios. Note how she plans in one letter to have something “up her sleeve” for the trial—to have her friend buy duplicates of the articles stolen on the anniversary of the theft, to change the date of the receipt from “1914” to “1915” on her employer’s typewriter, to put the receipt in the cuff of her wrap and leave it in the toilet room of the court to be found. This would be indeed a dramatic vindication. She is thoroughly cunning and she lies a great deal. But she is in a fight with organized society. She feels that there is a disproportion between her offense and her punishment, and that she is being wronged and defrauded of life. Cunning is one of the forms which intelligence takes in a fight. And in general people become cunning when they are oppressed or do not participate on an equal footing in their society. Esther is a Jew, and the “racial” cunning of the Jew has the same origin as the particular cunning in this case—exclusion from recognition and participation. Any successful scheme of education, reëducation or reformation must recognize the wishes expressed by Esther and will involve an active participation of the subject in the plan. Esther was not bad enough to be committed to the institution to which she was assigned, but once there we note her complete psychic isolation from the officials and from the family in which she was placed. She was directed toward no interesting and creative work, and was not included in any form of society in which she completely participated and in which she could have recognition and the gratification of the other wishes. And this is characteristic both of the penitentiary and of the older type of reformatory for adults and for children.
But some years ago the juvenile courts were established. It had become apparent that numbers of disorderly children, mainly from broken homes, were being brought into the criminal courts for escapades and sexual offenses, placed in jails with hardened criminals and thereby having the possibility of the formation of a normal scheme of life destroyed once and forever. Certain women were the first to protest and to act, and the result was the formation of a court for children which dispensed with lawyers and legal technicalities, and treated the child as far as possible as an unruly member of a family, not as a criminal. The first of these courts was established in Chicago, and in 1908 provision was made for the study of the child by endowing a psychological and medical clinic,—a practice which has been followed by other juvenile courts. During the past decade some of these courts have reached a high degree of elaboration and perfection. Their service has been very great in checking the beginnings of demoralization. The court is wiser than the parents of the children and incidentally does much to influence home life. These courts have also focused attention on the general questions and methods of reform and have begun to influence both penal institutions and general education. There are many successful formulations of influence developed by women of insight and personality connected with the juvenile courts in numerous localities. An important review of these conditions has recently been made by Miriam van Waters.[96] But perhaps the highest perfection of procedure has been reached in the juvenile court of Los Angeles where Dr. van Waters is herself the referee.
87. In the treatment of juvenile delinquency that comes before the court and involves change in status there should be an integration of the forces that seek to establish new social relationships.... Some mechanism of passing the threshold from ward of the state to the threshold of normal citizenship should be devised with sufficient strength to endure over the period of crisis.
An attempt to meet the problem of socialization has recently been begun in behalf of the juvenile court of Los Angeles County. For the girl whose normal relation to the family group has been severed by reason of the permanently broken home, parents dead, imprisoned, incurably ill, or defective and the like—a girl whose behavior-difficulties make it impossible for her to be absorbed in the neighborhood group—there is usually no provision but the reformatory institution. A place of adjustment, a link between the court, the detention home and the community is an important phase of diagnosis and treatment. El Retiro, a school for girls of Los Angeles County, is an experiment toward such solution.
The method of adjustment is as follows: Preliminary tests and examinations are made in the detention home and a more or less homogeneous group of girls in their teens are selected for El Retiro. An intensive program of work, study, play and expression has been provided. Student government, that is to say, student participation in the conduct of affairs of group life, not a formal organization based on the least satisfactory elements of our government, the municipality and the police court, but rather a flexible, club-like organization of team work and community responsibility is maintained. After another period of observation at El Retiro a conference is held concerning the girl. At this conference all available sources of information are brought together.
The referee of the court, the probation officer, physician, psychologist, superintendent of El Retiro, the principal of the El Retiro school, the recreation director (who later directs the program of the girl and directs the accomplishment of her project), and one of the girls chosen from the student-body to represent the student-body knowledge and opinion—all these persons with specialized information meet to form a many-angled diagnosis. Traits of personality and the reaction to group life are stressed especially. In this field of research no opinion is more competent than that of the girl who represents the student-body point of view—a mine of information hardly touched as yet by social research. The objective of the conference is the formation of a project or activity-goal for the new student, a task suited to her strength and personality and for which she will be responsible and receive the reward of recognition. On the completion of this project, usually from eight to ten months, the girl is ready to leave El Retiro; that is to say, she has succeeded in some phase of group life and important clues for the adjustment of her personality in the larger community outside have been formed.
Since these results have been attained largely as the result of social relationships formed within the group at El Retiro, and by the use of the project method and student government, the girl is likely to have developed both self-confidence and group loyalty. The next essential was to form some social relationship for the complete passage of the girl into the community.
A Girls’ Club was organized and a club house secured in the city for about eighteen girls and their field secretary. The girls pay their board and work in stores, industries, etc. The housework is done by one girl, who is paid by the others to act as home-maker. It is called the Los Angeles Business Girls’ Club and is sponsored by the Los Angeles Business Women’s Club not as a charity, but as an act of coöperation on the part of the business women with the younger and handicapped working girls of the city. Not all the residents are wards of the court, the chief requirement being that girls be under twenty-one years of age and receiving the minimum wage. The club serves as meeting place for organization of young people, business girls, college girls, etc. Thus any element of isolation, or unlikeness, is at an end for the girl who may be a ward of the court and she is brought into relationship with the normal forces of the community.
The following four cases, selected because they serve to illustrate the integrating processes at work in a socialized court procedure, may be presented.
Evelyn is one. She is an orphan of Canadian extraction. Placed by a children’s aid society in some six temporary homes, she readily drifted into delinquency. For two years for her it was a succession of institutions, tempered by probation, after she came under the court. Then El Retiro was established. Her health was so delicate that she was sent there for observation for anæmia. There her central ability was discovered—leadership, and her chief interest the design and manufacture of clothing. On graduation she became president of the alumnæ group of girls and went to live at the club house. She began earning $22.00 per week as designer and shortly plans to open a shop of her own. As president of the alumnæ organization she has succeeded in doing what no probation officer has done—the voluntary reporting of each girl’s change of work, address, and new friends. If they are out of work through indifference or indolence, her fluent scorn and her own stylish costume act on them as a spur. Her activity has two major outlets, leadership and craftsmanship.
Margaret is another: She was the oldest in a large family headed by a dissolute factory operative and a quarrelsome, complaining mother. Her home life was marked by coarseness and obscenity of language, and her personality by alternate melancholy and violence. At El Retiro it became apparently probable that her behavior was the reaction made by her organism in seeking that which it really craved most, peace and security. She became an El Retiro homemaker. A troublesome asthma yielded to treatment based on quiet and contentment. She is now an officer of the alumnæ club and she has returned to her own home, which has largely become rehabilitated through her efforts. The club life apparently affords her all she needs of contact with the outside world.
Geraldine is a girl of eighteen, wrecked on the moving picture industry. She was seduced by an under-director in attempting to sell a scenario, and was passed from hand to hand until her health broke. Her experiences were unbelievably tragic and unbelievably common. Her health, self-confidence, and charm were restored at El Retiro. She took to nursing but the key to her interest in everything was affection. A professional man understood her real and genuine capacity and married her. She is an exceptional wife and mother. She too is a club member, proud of her school and eager to assist.
Maggie was a rollicking, buxom girl of seventeen. Her parents were dead and her living relatives of doubtful reputation. Indeed all the female members of her family had “gone to the bad.” Maggie’s own escapades were many. At El Retiro she was rough, noisy, daring, fearless, impetuous, in short filled with the spirit of adventure. She did not graduate but was returned to the custody of the probation officer. While on probation she became pregnant. She refused to tell who was responsible but concocted a story of nameless attack. The court commented on her strength, her bravery, her resourcefulness, and gave her two weeks in which to find the man and bring him herself, unaided to court. Surprised but not daunted the girl succeeded. The man proved to be a soldier with a temperament much like her own; on careful examination, physical, mental, and social he was proved to be a fit husband and was permitted to marry Maggie. This social rehabilitation has restored her to club life, much to her delight. For several months she has been happy and successful.[97]
In the meantime another important step has been taken,—the attempt to forestall delinquency by working on the maladjusted, neurotic, predelinquent child, or to adjust the delinquent child without resort to the court and the consequent court record. In the larger cities departments of child study, children’s welfare committees, bureaus of children’s guidance, institutes for vocational guidance have been formed in the public schools or working in connection with the schools. In this work the object has been to work by cases, bringing the girl under the influence of the social worker, improving the home conditions and the attitudes of the parents, placing the girl in a better environment, moving her from one situation to another until one is found to which she responds, and developing in her some activity interests. The ideal is to coördinate the girl immediately with the large society in which she lives instead of building up a complete institutional community about her as in the case of El Retiro.
The possibilities of this type of approach to the problem are illustrated by the following cases reported by Doctor Jessie Taft of Philadelphia.
88. Ruth, fourteen, Irish, pink-cheeked and blue-eyed, in her first year of High School, the picture of attractive, innocent girlhood, had been taken to the house of detention for stealing a diamond pin and taking money from a teacher’s desk. When her denials were finally broken down by proof, she confessed to a long history of petty thieving, hitherto unpunished and for the most part undiscovered....
Ruth was an intensely egotistic person, desirous of social recognition, approval, personal success; but due to lack of training, unfavorable conditions and an impulsive, impatient make-up had never learned to work for her satisfactions or make her impression on society in constructive ways. She was quickly discouraged and resentful in the face of failure or hardship and at once turned to some pleasure experience as a compensation—something which could be obtained immediately and easily. She used boastful stories and even her own misdeeds to heighten the impression of her importance and superiority. This is a natural reaction in childhood, where immediate gratification is obtained through crying, tantrums, day dreams, purely subjective methods; but they are not appropriate to a developing organism and must be abandoned for an objective dealing with the facts of life. All of Ruth’s normal cravings had been thwarted by her environment. She had lost her love object in the death of her mother. Her family ideals had been shattered. Her father had been exposed as unfaithful to her mother, and a weakling in the battle between the stepmother and Ruth. He was a failure as a provider and did not pay his debts. Ruth was forced to live in a home situation which had for her none of the elements of a home, nothing to be proud of, no loving approval and overlooking of faults, no faith, no support and assurance of safety. She was forced not only to give up her love object but to see it supplanted by an enemy, who also usurped her place and influence with the father. Undoubtedly her sex ideals also met with shock. She became convinced that her father was interested in another woman before the death of the mother. Father and stepmother quarreled and made up—separated and came together repeatedly. She saw marriage as a series of endless petty conflicts. Both of them were churchgoers, given to religious interests. Ruth’s disillusionment with life was complete. There was nothing genuine, no real satisfaction. The father and mother who constitute the bridges over which the emotional life of the child may cross to a more and more social development had blocked normal growth and thrown the child back upon subjective or anti-social satisfactions. One of the defense reactions to such a thwarting of fundamental needs is that taken by Ruth—a cynical, suspicious, critical attitude toward everything and everybody. To want and never get satisfaction is too painful a state to keep up, so the individual criticizes every possible love object that he may make himself and others believe he wouldn’t have it if he could. The reason he has no love object is that none are worth having; thus he defends his inferiority. Also he undermines any criticism from others by showing up the inferiority of the source. He is protected by having already discredited the other person. Moreover, there is a sense of power and superiority in being able to criticize everything, so it offers a natural compensation for the inferiority from which the critical or cynical person suffers. Not having admirable loving parents one must remember is a source of tremendous inferiority. A child of eight has no intelligent weapons with which to combat a hostile family situation. It has no chance against the egoism of the adults around it. All it can do is to react blindly in ways that offer some temporary solace. Stealing from the stepmother is a way of satisfying the needs to fight with or injure or destroy the pain-giving stimulus. It gives the child a tremendous sense of power and victory. Here is something which he can do secretly and effectively. It really hurts the hateful object and it supplies pleasure-giving stimuli, such as candy, which are otherwise denied....
Ruth ... was so absorbed in the injuries done her by life that she thought of nothing but pleasure compensations. She would face nothing that demanded effort or any unpleasantness. She had a right to take things because life owed her reparation. She saw nothing in school or work, or the ordinary habits of daily hygiene but hardship to be avoided. She wanted nice clothes and felt she had a right to take them, but she saw no reason why she should take any care of them. If a garment was torn or dirty, get a new one. She thought she ought to be placed where there were servants so she would have no housework and no laundry to attend to. She had no loyalty to any one. She played one person against another and used everything to her own advantage as she saw it. As soon as an effort was made to give her insight she reacted to protect herself from the painful revelations by criticizing the worker and taking the attitude that there was a game going on between her and the worker in which each was trying to get ahead of the other. She could not believe in disinterested effort on her behalf.
Ruth was turned over to a child-placing agency with the foregoing interpretation of her behavior and suggestions for working on the problem, but with great doubt as to the outcome. She was to be given as much gratification of her pleasure wants as possible in order to reduce the struggle to satisfy them and leave some of her energy and interest free to be developed along other lines. She was to be placed with a really superior person whom she might finally come to respect as genuine and her best chance would be to find some one person, the worker or the foster mother, who had real faith in her possibilities.
The social worker who took her over was young and enthusiastic, undaunted by the impossible and full of faith in her own ability to get results. She transferred this faith to Ruth. She never wavered in her belief that Ruth could change her ways. She lived through stealing episodes, truancy periods, every kind of discouragement and finally found a home which did some of the things we had hoped for. Ruth’s first experience in this home was a summer trip and a glorious good time. When she came back there was little housework and a doctor’s important business to help with after school. There was social prestige in this home. The mother was a good disciplinarian and insisted on the formation of certain daily habits of living, but she took Ruth in as a member of the family and had, like the worker, supreme faith in her own ability to make Ruth go to school every day, study her lessons and keep going in the path of righteousness.
Ruth responded surprisingly and for six months all went well. Then she began to be unhappy and ask to be removed, saying that she would make removal necessary if something were not done. Finally she had her way. It seemed evident that this home, while successful in many ways, lacked the thoroughly admirable personality which we thought Ruth needed. The woman was hard, set and self-centered. Another home was found in which there proved to be serious marital conflicts in which Ruth was forced to be a party. Here the stealing broke out again. Then a high school teacher became interested in the girl and invited her to her summer home for vacation. This was the great turning point in Ruth’s life. Here her desires for social superiority and pleasure were satisfied, and she was surrounded by real people for whom she felt at last the whole-souled genuine devotion and admiration which was essential for her socialization.
From that moment there has been no trouble with Ruth. No more stealing, no more truancy, no shirking of lessons. She has gone to live with another teacher for whom she keeps house. Six months have passed and there has been no complaint. To complete this treatment and make it permanent, Ruth ought to be given insight into her own behavior and understand just what has happened to her. Then she would be armed against the accident of circumstance.[98]
89. ... Mary was an alert, boyish, attractive girl of eighteen ... at work in a department store after having reached first year in High School and reported to have been living with her weak, immoral mother, sharing the mother’s young paramour, a boy only a little older than herself....
The following case history was obtained: Because of the mother’s promiscuity, Mary’s paternity was uncertain. As a child in her mother’s home she had known only loose living, good-natured, easy-going neglect and poverty. Illegitimate births were common in the family. There seems to have been complete lack of ordinary sex morality and social standards. The family lived a roving, hand-to-mouth existence. When Mary was ten, the Court removed her and gave her to a child-placing agency. She was tried out unsuccessfully in several homes and finally made a good adjustment in a country home where she had excellent school opportunities, finishing grammar school at the head of her class. She entered High School with a continuing interest in school, accompanied by an increasing interest in boys. Her late hours, love for good times and her rebellion against restraint worried the foster parents so that they gave her up. She was accepted by a city institution where she was under strict supervision and was sent for the first time to a city school. She tried to enter the second year of High School with inadequate preparation, failing quite completely in every subject. Accident entered at this point in the shape of a new matron at the institution. The girls were trying her out and in her effort to control the situation she threatened to expel the next girl guilty of insubordination. Mary happened to be the victim. She was returned to the Court and discharged to a married and apparently respectable sister. The sister, unequal to disciplining Mary, allowed her to go to her mother, then living in a wretched little house in another town with a young man by whom she was pregnant. There was only one bedroom containing a bed and a cot. Mary shared the cot with the younger brother, a boy of fifteen. For about a year this situation continued. Mary broke away once only to return again. The mother finally went out to work with the new baby, leaving Mary to keep house for her brother and the man. Finally Mary came to the city a second time and got a job. She wandered from one position to another and came in contact with a social agency just as she was about to give up and go home again because she saw no work ahead and was unable to support herself on what she was earning.
The social worker took the matter up as a vocational guidance problem and ... with the psychologist worked out the following picture of Mary:
In earliest childhood she had known little or no restraint and had been familiar with the freest sex life and complete absence of ordinary social standards as regards sex. But there had been affection, easy-going, good-natured attitudes and a great deal of personal freedom. The loose living, the roving, unsettled existence had made it fairly easy for Mary to accept and adjust to varying conditions so that foster-home placement to her was not the agonizing experience that it is to some children. Moreover, she seems to have been from the first an objective, eager, alert, social youngster who most fortunately compensated for her family inferiorities by a complete going over into school life and active energetic expression in work and play....
The dismissal from her foster-home seems to have been caused by behavior which was natural enough on the part of a developing adolescent girl. She merely carried over too much of her superabundant energy into parties and good times with boys.... The dark side of her life here was her introduction to sex experience through the foster father. These experiences, shocking at first, were finally accepted as a matter of course and sank into the background of an existence in which objective interests—school, companions, good times, farm work, held first place. There seems never to have been any deep conflict nor any marked feeling of shame or inferiority. It was taken as part of the day’s work, something which went along with living in this foster-home which for the most part was desirable. She wanted to keep on with her school. She was afraid to tell the wife. She had none of the ordinary sex morality which most of us have absorbed from infancy on. The easiest way was to keep still and adjust. When Mary was asked how she felt about sex, she replied characteristically and cheerfully: “Well, the world is made that way, you just have to accept it. It isn’t any use to worry about it, you might as well take people as they are.”
Although these years in Mary’s life apparently left no scar, they did break down completely any sex inhibitions she might have had, aroused sex needs and accustomed her to the habit of sex expression. It meant that when she went to live with her mother, she experienced no particular shock and was illy prepared to offer resistance to the advances of her mother’s paramour who found her so much more attractive than her mother and with whom she was thoroughly infatuated....
The really critical experience was the transfer to the city institution and the city High School. In neither situation was she at home and for the first time in her life she experienced failure and disgrace in her studies. She now had a genuine inferiority, a discouragement which undoubtedly reacted on her behavior at home. She grew indifferent and reckless, would not respond to scolding or appeal. The objective work and play expressions, as well as the customary sex life, were cut off. There was nothing left but breaking rules to get a good time. Expulsion from the institution meant the final break with school and she thinks it was then that her ambition died. She had no technical training, she could get only underpaid, uninteresting jobs. Where was she to find an outlet for her young energy? The sister, less intelligent than Mary, had no influence and was only a source of irritation. Then in her restless seeking for something more satisfactory, she went to her mother who was living in another city. There she was disturbed chiefly by the mother’s jealousy and feeling she was doing her wrong; also the presence of the younger brother. Finally the glamour wore off and she began to see the man in his true character. He was lazy, unreliable, disloyal, weak. He had none of the straightforward, eager, active attitude which Mary had toward life. Gradually she turned against the kind of person he was and after many struggles, finally broke away.
It was at this point, when her courage was giving way once more, that she was found by the case worker.
It seemed to the psychological examiner that the problem here was not the so obviously indicated sex situation, but the blocking of Mary’s work and play interests and the complete quenching of her egoistic ambitions. The psychometric tests showed her to be well up to average in intelligence. She was as interested in taking the test as the examiner was in giving it. Her intellectual curiosity was a delight. In the course of the interview she brought out a slip of paper with two long words on it which she had been treasuring, waiting for an opportunity to look them up in a dictionary. She thought the examiner was a good substitute. Throughout she exhibited a frank, straightforward attitude, an honest, unsentimental facing of facts, a complete freedom from cynicism or critical reactions. She put no blame on other people, used no evasive mechanisms. She had a certain pride and independence. When consoling herself for her lack of good clothes she remarked: “My clothes aren’t much but no man is paying for them, and at least I have a contented mind.” There seemed to be every basis for a satisfactory adjustment to life if the environmental opportunities could be provided so that her work and social interests would have a chance to develop and help to organize a more socialized sex expression.
The social worker was reassured and determined by this analysis of the problem. Mary herself was allowed to go over every detail of the intelligence tests and was told that ability like hers had a right to a better training. She faced what lack of education would mean in underpaid, uninteresting work. Her faith in her own power and ability was restored and her ambition revived. Her former failure in High School was explained and she became convinced that it was not too late even now to achieve success in school work.
Meantime the case worker built up the social background, finally raised scholarship money and Mary went into the second year of the commercial course in a good High School.
There was never any attempt to deal with the sex side by repressive methods, never any interference with her social life, nor any form of restraint. When she wanted to go to visit her mother, the whole situation was talked out with her and she was given the worker’s attitude frankly and honestly but decision was left to her. She did not go. She has continued to associate with boys on an unusually free basis. She will go to see a boy friend at his home exactly as she would visit a girl. She could not be made to see why she should not accept a boy’s invitation to go to New York City for a sightseeing excursion. She was willing to stay home to please the worker but she was told she must decide on another basis. Only accident in the shape of the boy’s illness prevented the escapade. Everything she does is talked over with the worker with the utmost freedom. Her standards are changing rapidly with her developing tastes and interests. She has made good in her school work consistently. She has been rash and unconventional in the extreme but has never, apparently, overstepped the boundaries of morality on the sex side. For a year and a half she has made steady progress and there is no indication that she will ever again become a delinquent.[99]
The most disheartening condition which we have to face in connection with the delinquent child is the demoralized home. It appears in one study (document No. 58, p. 100) that nine tenths of the girls and three fourths of the boys who reach the juvenile court come from bad homes. Case No. 83 (p. 152) is an extended description of such a home and the following summary of some cases may be taken as representative.
90. A family of 13 children; father a drunkard who deserted them; mother scrubs and cleans; “a very poor, dirty, and crowded home.”
Family “very degraded”; father, a drunkard, criminally abused two little daughters (who later became delinquent wards of the court) and then deserted the family to avoid prosecution. Mother married again, but stepfather also drank and was so abusive that wife and children left him.
Father, a man of bad habits, deserted; mother drank; she said girl had inherited unfortunate tendencies from father.
A family of fourteen children, six of whom died; father was immoral and cruel to his wife, and very unkind to his children; he deserted, leaving family to charity; the girl left home because of ill treatment and became immoral.
Father, professional gambler, utterly irresponsible, deserted his family; one boy was always “wild” and one girl went to a house of prostitution.
Father and mother, both shiftless, begging people who will not work; father periodically deserts family, who were all in Home for the Friendless at one time and who are often destitute and a public charge. Father is now in old soldiers’ home and three of the children are in a soldiers’ orphans’ home.
A family of six children, one girl delinquent; home dirty and untidy with two beds in parlor; mother has a bad reputation, drinks habitually and always has the house full of men. Father deserted at one time, and family has been helped by a charitable society constantly for two years.
A family of seven children; father, an habitual drunkard, supposed to be a fruit peddler but really a common tramp; deserts periodically but always comes back; very brutal to wife and children when he is at home, and responsible for demoralization of two older girls; family a county charge and on records of three relief societies.
A very degraded home; father drunken and immoral, abused girl’s mother shamefully before her death; criminally abused girl when she was only seven and then abandoned her. Girl brought to court at the age of twelve on charge that she was “growing up in crime.”...
Lillie, a German girl, seven years of age, whose father, now dead, is said to have been as near a brute as a human being could be, whose mother is insane, and whose sister is abnormal, was brought in as incorrigible and immoral.
Vera, a seventeen-year-old girl, whose father’s address is unknown, and whose mother is insane, found employment as a barmaid in a concert hall, and afterwards became a prostitute.
Rosie, a sixteen-year-old Russian Jewess, whose mother is in the hospital for the insane, and whose father abandoned her, was brought into court on the charge of immorality.
Annie, a fifteen-year-old girl, whose father was frozen to death and whose mother is of unsound mind, has two brothers who are imbeciles. She is herself feebleminded, and has been the mother of three illegitimate children—probably the children of her imbecile brothers.[100]
The gradual realization of this condition through the experience of the juvenile courts and the schools and also the desire to avoid any court procedure in connection with a child whose morals are endangered has led many teachers and social workers to the view that the child should be taken in charge by society as soon as it shows any tendency to disorganization and that the school should have this function and should gradually displace or incorporate the juvenile court, or such functions of the juvenile court as remained would be transferred to the court of domestic relations. Eliot took this position as early as 1914,[101] and the conviction has been expressed frequently in various forms. The following is an extract from one of the most systematic proposals.
... Each city, probably each county would require an extension or reorganization of its personnel to include a department of adjustment to which teachers, policemen and others could refer all children who seemed to present problems of health, of mental development, of behavior or of social adjustment. For good work this would require the services of doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, field investigators, recreational specialists....
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....
The following case shows how, out of a bad family situation, real educational capital was made for a headstrong, irresponsible girl of fourteen who hated school and thought she wished to go to work to help her family. Knowing the reaction of the home situation on the girl’s school life, the visiting teacher worked out a special plan with the family agency to which she had referred the family. She advised that the money required for the family budget be paid in the form of a weekly scholarship to the girl. The conditions stipulated were that she attend school regularly and keep a budget. She was transferred to a special class and given a special course providing an unusual amount of household training—the one school subject which seemed to her to serve any useful purpose. The personal interest of the domestic science teacher was enlisted in the girl’s home situation, and she not only advised about the budget but encouraged the girl to make the most of her scanty home furnishings. A tutor was provided to help with the academic subjects. Through this weekly-payment plan the girl was made a partner in the family situation, and her sense of responsibility developed. Her budget book served as the most effective arithmetic text book she had ever used. Incidentally, she learned much about food values and purchasing.[103]
But while in the present condition of society there is no point at which the prevention of delinquency and the socialization of the family can be undertaken so successfully as in the school, the school itself has very grave defects of character, and the question of its adaptation to the welfare of the child involves at the same time the question of change and reform in the school itself. Many educators will agree that if we attempt to measure the influence of the school with reference to its efficiency as a factor in personality development we are confronted at once with the following conditions:
1. The average school, like the old community, works on the assumption of uniformity of personality and presents the same materials and plans in the same order to all. The assumption is that children react in the same way to the same influences regardless of their personal traits or their social past, and that it is therefore possible to provoke identical behavior by identical means. “Nature,” says Doctor Jennings, “has expended all her energy in making our little flock of children as diverse as she possibly can; in concealing within it unlimited possibilities which no one can define or predict. It sometimes seems as if we parents in our process of educating them were attempting to root out all of these diversities, to reduce our flock to a uniform mass.... The only way in which appreciable progress can be made in the attempt is by cutting off, stunting, preventing the development of the special and distinctive qualities of the individuals. Unfortunately this can be done to a certain extent, but only by a process which may be rightly compared with the taking of human life.”[104]
2. The creative or plan-forming interest of the child is an expression of the phase of new experience which is based on curiosity and appears very early in the child. The child expresses his energy and secures his recognition, favorable or unfavorable, mainly along this line. Response and security do not mean so much to him as yet. The fact that the school work is detached from activity and not related to the plan-forming and creative faculty explains its failure to interest the child. An investigator took five hundred children out of twenty factories in Chicago and asked them this question: “If your father had a good job and you did not have to work, which would you rather do, go to school or work in a factory?” Of the five hundred children, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, 412 said they would rather work in a factory.[105]
In 1920 the White-Williams counselors in the Junior Employment Service of the Board of Public Education interviewed 908 of the 10,674 children who came that year to the Board of Public Education for general working certificates. Forty-seven per cent of these did not want to go on with their school work. They gave as reasons: “I was ‘left down’”; “I didn’t like arithmetic”; “I was too tall for the other girls in the room”, etc. Many of these difficulties might have been adjusted if some one could have made plans with the children while they were still in school.[106]
3. There is therefore a question whether as a device for plan-forming by presenting the right material and definitions at the right moment, the school is not inferior to the world at large, at least when its influences are protracted. The school presents indispensable information, a technic for handling problems, such as reading, writing, and ciphering, and presents the solution of the innumerable problems which are already solved and which it is unnecessary to solve again. But the school works injuriously on personality development and creative tendencies. By presenting the whole body of cultural values in a planless way, planless so far as schemes of personal development are concerned, it tends to thwart and delay the expression of the plan-making tendency of children until physiological maturity approaches and the energetic, plan-forming, creative period is passed. The lives of creative men show that they began their work early and did it by hook or by crook sometimes by evading the schools, often by being the worst pupils. The chemist Ostwald in his interesting book “Grosse Männer” has pointed out that the precocity of such men as Leibnitz and Sir William Thomson would have done them no good if the schools had been “better” in their time.
In measuring the influence of the school we must recognize two types of success in the adaptation of the individual to life, the one based on his assertion and realization of wide and original claims, the other on contentment with limited claims. If he is contented with claims which are more limited than his powers justify, his adaptation is success through relative failure. To the degree that the school treats children as identical it produces a maximum number of relative failures. To some extent the genius is regarded as a prodigy because so much spontaneity is repressed by the school.
4. Clinicists and case workers who handle successfully difficult children taken from the schools report that the schools tend to accentuate rather than obviate the difficult features. Some of them feel that where unsocial and neurotic tendencies have begun to appear through bad family conditions the school is an additional influence for evil to be overcome.
The school reaches practically every child and does its part in deepening or lessening the neurotic tendencies. At present we are safe in assuming that for the most part it deepens these tendencies. It drives the neurotic child into truancy, vagrancy, anarchy, invalidism and every form of delinquency or hardens its emotional reactions into permanent moods, and it does all of this without in the least being aware of it....
If our public schools really educated, if they understood that education involves a training of the instinctive and emotional life as well as of the intellect, if they saw that they cannot even develop intellect as long as they ignore desire, we should have an agency for adjusting the neurotic girl and boy second only to the home in its power. There is proof for this statement. Enlightenment is coming into education in spots. There are visiting teachers who work on the problem children in a school and get wonderful results. There are experimental schools whose methods are based on an understanding of the new psychology as it applies to educational theory. These schools are able to deal with the able but neurotic child who cannot get along in the public school. Those of us who work with difficult children are defeated constantly, not so much by the impossibility of the cases, as by the impossibility of finding any public school that understands or has time to act on its understanding. I am constantly trying to straighten out the children the public school can’t handle. Our school is not primarily educational but is a place to observe and get acquainted with difficult, dependent, or destitute children whom the various children’s agencies of Philadelphia are trying to place satisfactorily in homes. They are children who do not get along anywhere. Nobody wants them because they are so hard to manage. The thing that constantly surprises us is how easy it is to manage their behavior. They are not set like adults and a little understanding, a little insight, and patience, a mere approach to real educational methods gives immediate results that are almost like magic.[107]
It is desirable that the school should eventually supersede the juvenile court and replace other welfare agencies concerned with the child, but in adapting itself to this task and to the task of general education it will be compelled to make provision for the development of the emotional and social life of the child as well as the informational, and in doing this it will inevitably approach the model of El Retiro as described by Doctor van Waters.