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The Necessity Of Public Provision For The Employment Of The Blind
IntroductionSince the 1830s, state-funded schools had provided a largely free education to blind children. But as the twentieth century began, blind people and educators of the blind alike became aware that these schools were failing to prepare their graduates to be self-supporting. Many, if not most, blind graduates were unemployed or underemployed. Even more disturbing was the realization that there were no services at all for the majority of blind people. Indeed, most blind people lost their sight as adults and were, therefore, ineligible to attend state schools for the blind. These dual realizations led blind people and educators of the blind to debate the very structure and purpose of blind education. These debates, moreover, reflected the growing popularity of vocational (work-based) education at the turn of the twentieth century. | |||||||||||||
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| 1 | J. PERRINE HAMILTON (1) (1) Mr. Hamilton was unable to be present, but sent this paper which he read at the Thirty-fourth National Conference of Charities and Correction. | |
| 2 | THE opportunity of discussing the necessity of public provision for the employment of the blind before such an assembly as this is one for which I feel profoundly grateful. | |
| 3 | For years the juvenile blind in this country and Europe have had wonderful advantages for acquiring a literary and musical education placed at their disposal by the state. How inadequate such an education is to make blind people self-respecting, self-supporting citizens of the community is shown by a glance at general results attained. In Michigan, my home state, where conditions and opportunities for blind or sighted will average with other states of the Union, our school at Lansing has turned out about five hundred blind people during the past twenty-five years. Of this five hundred, less than five per cent have become self-supporting. A careful study of statistics would show as low a percentage elsewhere. Now consider the further fact that only about five per cent of the blind of this country attend the schools at all, and you will see that the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent every year in the education of the blind make only one-fourth of one per cent of them self-maintaining citizens. This is not a criticism of the schools, nor would I be understood as gauging the results of their work by the standard of dollars and cents alone. The point I wish to make is this: Schools for the literary and musical education of the young blind, which are about all we have had up to date, do a very small part of the work which should be done for our blind population. | |
| 4 | Educating blind children is easy and comparatively inexpensive; making blind adults wholly or partially self-supporting is hard -- only those who have tried it know how hard. | |
| 5 | Up to date, nearly all the millions spent in behalf of the blind have been expended along lines of the least resistance. Only three years ago, when I was entering this work, a superintendent of one of the largest and oldest and best schools for the blind in America said to me: "We take blind children in the kindergarten and lead them to the gates of Harvard College, and then we wash our hands of them. No one can do more for them; it is no use to try. You are wasting your time." One of the most pitiable things of which I ever knew was a graduate of that superintendent's school and of Harvard taking his place on the New York City pier to get his share of the city's alms doled out once a year to the blind. I have yet to be convinced that blind people educated for poorhouses are happier than those sent to them without college education; and the selfish egotism of literary and musical educators of the blind who discourage work along practical, industrial lines, because they are too lazy or too indifferent or too jealous to wish to see such work succeed, has done much to keep willing philanthropists from trying, and fair trials from being made. | |
| 6 | I shall not try in this discussion to make any sentimental appeal for the blind, but I do wish to get clearly before you a few facts and statements which carefully gathered statistics and painstaking experiments will prove and verify. In the United States there are between ninety and one hundred thousand blind people. Of these, fully ten per cent are capable of working and being taught. At present there is public provision for the training and employment of less than seven hundred of these nine or ten thousand capable blind citizens. The few experiments made up to the present time have proven beyond a doubt that these blind people can be made wholly or partially self-supporting if trained and employed at public cost. The per capita cost to the commonwealth for so training and employing all the blind capable of taking training and employment would be from a half cent to a cent and a half per annum. In Michigan it is costing one cent per year, and I believe we have passed the most expensive period of our history. | |
| 7 | What blindness means to an intelligent, capable man or woman is something which only the Lord and the devil and those who endure it know anything about; in their blackest nightmares those with sight cannot even faintly imagine it, and unemployed blindness is as much worse as despair is worse than hope. The world is so busy, and most blind people are so poor, that reading, entertainment, and amusement are out of reach. Employment, then, is the only solace and diversion left, and certainly this is as little as this unfortunate class has a right to ask and expect of a generous and enlightened public. Employed blind people may sometimes forget that they are blind; perhaps only for a few minutes, but these minutes to them are worth more than the happiest days, or months, or years you have ever known. | |
| 8 | At present we take good care of blind children and give most of them all the literary and musical education they need, and many of them more than they can possibly use; but if a man or woman loses sight after becoming eighteen or twenty years of age -- at this period when help is needed most, when blindness seems a thousand times more insurmountable than it does to children growing up accustomed to it -- in most parts of our country little or no provision is made to lend the helping hand so much required, or to furnish training or employment, the only things which can possibly bring any permanent solace or relief. | |
