PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

By: Ms. Shirley C. VeniegasMAT-FILIPINO

JANE ADDAMS

Personal Biography

“On September 6, 1860 Laura Jane Addams was born to Sarah Weber Addams and John Addams, the same year in which Abraham Lincoln ran for president” (Bettis, 2006).

“ Jenny was born in Cedarville, Illinois“’Jenny’ as they called her as a baby was strongly influenced

by her father who lead a very active life. He was in the State Legislature for sixteen years and directed a bank as well as a railroad” (Bettis, 2006).

“Her mother Sarah Weber Addams was a strong woman and ‘stern disciplinarian’ of her eight children (Bettis, 2006).

Jane Addams grew very close to her father until he remarried Ana Halderman the former piano teacher.

Three of her siblings died in infancy, and another died at age 16, leaving only four by the time

Addams was age 8. Her mother, Sarah Addams ( Weber), died when Jane was two years old.

Jane attended college at Rockford College for women. “Suggesting that Jane succeeded in school is an understatement. Her accumulative GPA out of 10 was a 9.862; she was class president, head of the literary society, editor of the school magazine and valedictorian of her class. She received her bachelor's degree in 1910” (Bettis, 2006).

“Unexpectedly while on vacation with Jane, John Addams (her father) died of acute appendicitis. Without his strong personality, the Addams family seemed to fall apart.

After entering into medical school Jane felt as if things were not as she wanted. She could do the work but did not feel the passion as before. As a result, her family suggested she travel in Europe. Agreeing that this would be a good idea she did so with an old classmate Ellen Starr (1971)” (Bettis, 2006).

Addams was one of the most prominent

reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped turn America to issues of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively.

Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy. In 1889 she co-founded Hull House, and in 1920 she was a co-founder for the ACLU. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.

•Idealistic

•Optimistic

•Pragmatic

JANE ADDAMS

ADDAMS’ PHILOSOPHY WAS INFLUENCED BY THE

FOLLOWING PHILOSOPHERS & AUTHORS

Addams was well read and could claim numerous and varied

influences. However, she was no one's protégé. Addams picked

and chose intellectual resources that resonated with her notion of

sympathetic knowledge in the process of bringing about social

progress.

Thomas Carlyle’s (1795–1881)• He believed that the universe was ultimately good

and moral and led by a divine will that worked through society's heroes and leaders.

• To be moral is to be in right relation with God and others.

• A precursor to Addams’ notion of sympathetic knowledge can be found in Carlyle relational ethics.

• Carlyle’s social morality held a particular appeal to Addams.

John Raskin (1819-1900)• He theorized that art and culture reflected the

moral health of society.• Ruskin maintained a certain elitism in his view

that great people produced great art, he also saw such great cultural works as a manifestation of the well-being of society as a whole.

• Addams’ valorization of art and culture as exhibited in the appearance and activities of Hull House resonates with Ruskin’s aesthetics.

• “Social Life and art have always seemed to go best at Hull House” (STY 354). Addams viewed

art and cultural activities as reinforcing essential human bonds (DSE 29).

• For Addams, society grow and adapt to its conditions even in regard to moral philosophy.

• Tolstoy was another type of hero to Addams. Unlike Carlyle, Tolstoy did not valorize individuals standing out from the crowd as exemplary moral paragons who wield socially ordained positions of power. He valued solidarity with the common laborer.

• He is moral idealist.

Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910

• Addams saw the value of intelligent leadership of Tolstoy. • Addams’ own philosophy of civic activism

valued engagement through ongoing presence and listening.

CANON BARNETT• He is the inspiration of Addams on her writings. • “ THE FUNCTION OF THE SOCIAL SETTLEMENT”

Barnett’s philosophy played a prominent role. She agrees with him that settlements should not be missions because if they become too ideological, they will fail to be responsive to their neighbours (FSS 344-345). However, despite acknowledging that the term “settlement” was borrowed from London, she finds subtle differences between the philosophies of Toynbee Hall and Hull House:

• Addams is very sensitive about a sense of superiority in settlement work. She always eschewed the notion that she was a charitable “lady bountiful.” She wanted to learn about others so that she could develop the proper sympathies and strategies for assisting—sympathetic knowledge. For Addams, Hull House always combined epistemological concerns with moral ones.

• Addams work is usually associated with the work of John Dewey.

• This association is appropriate given their friendship and mutual interests; however her intellectual deference to Dewey is often overstated.JOHN DEWEY

(1859–1952)

• His work appealed to Addams because they shared many of the same commitments

including the value of a robust democracy as well as the importance of education that

engaged the student’s experience• Dewey became one of board members of Hull

House

• Dewey was the great intellectual—a thinker—and Addams was the activist—a doer. As

contemporaries, they represent classic archetypes of gender: the male as mind generating theory

and the woman as body experiencing and caring. However, there is much evidence that such a

characterization is inaccurate. .

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931)• who is considered the father of “symbolic

interactionism,” an approach to social inquiry that emphasizes how symbols create meaning in society. Mead’s work on development through play and education influenced Addams but, as with Dewey, the influence was mutual. Addams maintained a long-term close personal relationship with Mead and his wife, Helen Castle Mead.

• His works have been recognized as significant by sociologists but many philosophers have overlooked him.

William James (1842-1910) whose work she cites on many occasions. James was a pragmatist whose vision of urban improvement would have been shared by Addams. James and Addams both valued experience and among the “professional” pragmatists his style of writing is closest to Addams’ in terms of its readability and use of tangible examples.

"Addams’ philosophy combined feminist sensibilities with an unwavering commitment to social improvement through cooperative efforts. Although she sympathized with feminists, socialists, and pacifists, Addams refused to be labeled. This refusal was pragmatic rather than ideological.”

Contributions of Jane Addams

“In Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane describes her first experience in East London and the overwhelming poverty which was inflicted upon this city. This city seemed to make more of an impact on her than any other she had visited in Europe. She mentions the attraction she had to poverty-stricken cities. She seems to condemn herself for referring back to literature to explain the extreme poverty to which she had been exposed” (Bettis, 2006).

As a result of these experiences Jane opened the Hull house in Chicago.

• In 1889 Addams and her college friend and intimate partner Ellen Gates Starr co-founded Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois. The run-down mansion had been built by Charles Hull in 1856 and needed repairs and upgrading.

• Addams at first paid for all of the capital expenses (repairing the roof of the porch, repainting the rooms, buying furniture) and most of the operating costs. However gifts from individuals supported the House beginning in its first year and Addams was able to reduce the proportion of her contributions, although the annual budget grew rapidly.

• Hull-House was the first co-educational settlement.• A number of wealthy women became important long-

term donors to the House, including Helen Culver, who managed her first cousin Charles Hull's estate, and who eventually allowed the contributors to use the house rent-free. Other contributors were Louise DeKoven Bowen , Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, and others.

The Hull House was a center for research, empirical analysis, study, and debate, as well as a pragmatic center for living in and establishing good relations with the neighbourhood.

Residents of Hull-house conducted investigations on housing, midwifery, fatigue, tuberculosis, typhoid, garbage collection, cocaine, and truancy.

Its facilities included a night school for adults, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a

music school, a drama group and a theatre, apartments, a library, meeting rooms for discussion,

clubs, an employment bureau, and a lunchroom.

Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In addition to making available social services and cultural events for the largely immigrant population of the neighbourhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, Hull House became a 13-building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp (known as Bowen Country Club).

Hull House became America's best known settlement house. Addams used it to generate system-directed change, on the principle that to keep families safe, community and societal conditions had to be improved. The neighbourhood was controlled by local political bosses.

One aspect of the Hull house that was very important to Jane Addams was the Art Program. The art program at Hull house allowed Addams to challenge the system of industrialized education, which “fitted” the individual to a specific job or position. She wanted the house to provide a space, time and tools to encourage people to think independently. She saw art as the key to unlocking the diversity of the city through collective interaction, mutual self-discovery, recreation and the imagination. Art was integral to her vision of community, disrupting fixed ideas and stimulating the diversity and interaction on which a healthy society depends, based on a continual rewriting of cultural identities through variation and interculturalism.

“The Hull House charter read that it was ‘to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago’1995.

The organizations that she started tried to equalize the inequality between people and educate them on things they had in common as well as the qualities that made them unique; because she believed that the ‘things that make men like are finer and better than the things that keep them apart.’ This is most likely why she started the Hull House” (Bettis, 2006)

“Ignorance, disease, and crime were a result of economic desperation and not a result of some moral flaw in the character of the new immigrants…Access to opportunity was the

key to successful participation in a democratic, self-governing society.”

(Luft, n.d.)

“The ultimate aim of education is to modify the character and conduct of the individual, and to harmonize and adjust his activities.”(Addams)

CHILD CENTEREDPROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

Addams viewed lifelong education as a critical component of an engaged citizenry in a vibrant democracy. To that end, Hull-House sponsored a myriad of educational projects. Addams strived to improve childhood education by working for legislation to reduce child labour, she sponsored a kindergarten at Hull-House and worked with Dewey and education pioneer Ella Flagg Young on pedagogical techniques centered upon making education more relevant for students. Extant descriptions by visitors to Hull-house describe it as permeated by children furiously involved in a myriad of activities.

Addams goal was to teach adults not enrolled in formal academic institutions, because of their

poverty and/or lack of credentials.

Emphasis on childrenAddams at Hull House stressed the role of children in the Americanization process of new immigrants, and fostered the play movement and the research and service fields of leisure, youth, and human services. Addams argued in The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) that play and recreation programs are needed because cities are destroying the spirit of youth.

• Hull-House featured multiple programs in art and drama, kindergarten classes, boys' and girls' clubs, language classes, reading groups, college extension courses, along with public baths, a free-speech atmosphere, a gymnasium, a labor museum and playground.

• They were all designed to foster democratic cooperation and collective action and downplay individualism. She helped pass the first model tenement code and the first factory laws.

Addams wanted to give “children [the

very clear message] that poverty [did] not

translate to pity.”(Week 2: Poverty and Jane Addams, 1998)

ADDAMS infuses a high standard of social responsibility into this moral approach.

Addams advocates a duty of social awareness and engagement thus creating

the potential for care.

The development of Hull house was a cornerstone model of the power of community involvement, and

the impact it can have on education.

In the experimental mode they vaunted--in tune with the pragmatist ideas that Dewey and Addams liked to discuss--the residents fashioned programs and services in response to the needs that the neighbors voiced. They learned, more or less, to hold their middle-class certainties in check and, at least in theory, to follow the neighbors' lead. Immigrants loved societies, and there were clubs of many sorts: for sports, self-improvement, study, and ethnic unity.

They offered kindergarten and nursery care for children; a labor bureau to help people find jobs; theater groups and art groups and reading groups and English classes. Hull House gave space to anyone with a hankering to organize something: women, along with the bored teenagers, were particular beneficiaries, since immigrant culture typically stressed workingmen's fraternal societies that excluded women and the young. It provided services that could be had nowhere else, from public toilets to a Working People's Social Science Club that brought together adepts from various political tendencies and sects--anarchists, socialists, "pure and simple" unionists, Social Gospel Christians, and boosters of capitalism--to debate the issues of the day” (Stansell, 2006).

Classical Feminist Theory

The contributions of female thinkers to classical sociological theory have generally been overlooked throughout the years, even though they systematically developed understandings of society similar to those of their male counterparts. However, the theories of these female thinkers are distinctive because they incorporate the standpoint of gender, focus on the lives and work of women, critically engage the problem of social inequality, and offer solutions to ameliorate social problems. This chapter discusses the work of several women theorists, activists, and social reformers, and it presents the case for why it should be included in the canon of classical sociological theory.

1. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)-Martineau has come to be known as the "founding mother" of sociology for both her theoretical and empirical work. 2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)-believed that meaningful work is the essence of human self-realization.3. Jane Addams (1860-1935) and the Chicago Women's School-Addams and the other women of the Chicago School viewed sociological theory and research as a means to reform society, particularly in terms of ameliorating social problems that were intensified by immigration, urbanization, and industrialization. Addams' concept of the social ethic, individual action based on the welfare of the community, is characteristic of the work of all of these women.

THEORY OF DEMOCRACY• Addams maintained a robust definition of

democracy that moved far beyond understanding it merely as a political structure. For Addams, democracy represented both a mode of living and a social morality. She viewed democracy as an acknowledgement that the lives of citizens are bound up with one another and this relationship creates a duty to understand the struggles and circumstances of fellow citizens.

• Reciprocity of social relations is crucial for providing citizens with the empathetic foundation necessary to energize democracy.

• Social settlements were experiments in the kind of democracy that Addams endeavoured to promote: one of active social engagement. Addams’ definition of democracy becomes clearest in Democracy and Social Ethics where she makes two equivalencies clear. One, moral theory in the modern age must emphasize social ethics. Two, for Addams, democracy is social ethics.

Addams metaphorically described democracy as a dynamic organism that must grow with changing times in order to remain vital. She advocate “ Social Democracy”

Addams’ pragmatist philosophy integrated experience with theory in an ongoing and dynamic dance that makes it inappropriate to separate her theories from the social issues in which she engaged. This is part of the reason that Addams’ work appears alien to those steeped in the Western tradition of philosophy, which attempts to lay claim to universal truths. Addams makes use of what feminist philosophers have described as “standpoint epistemology,” acknowledging that her philosophy is derived from a particular social, political and historical position. Her theoretical work flowed from working out tangible social issues of her day, and yet many of her themes and conclusions remain relevant for the present.

METHODS OF TEACHING

Teaching in a settlement requires distinct methods, for it is true of people who have been allowed to remain undeveloped and whose facilities are inert and sterile, that they cannot take their learning heavily. It has to be diffused in a social atmosphere information must be held in solution, in a medium of fellowship and good will.

Jane Addams ElementarySchool

Jane Addams Middle School

Jane Addams

of

Hull House

and the

Women’s International League

of

Peace and Freedom

CRITIQUE

Although Jane Addams made great contributions to the field of sociology, she is rarely acknowledged.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

For applied sociologists such as Addams, indications of mutual influence must often besought in non-academic records. Original archival data containing correspondence, newspaper reports, and organizational records relevant to applied sociology can help to fill the gaps in our academic documentation. Such alternative resources are particularly vital in a situation like Addams' where her influence has been buried over the course of several decades.

Jane Addams was the greatest woman sociologist of her

times.

Reference:http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/addams6.htmhttp://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prihttp://infed.org/archieves/e-texts/addams18.htm

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