One of the principal social ideals resulting from the advent of democratic forms of government was the concept that made education the birthright of every child instead of maintaining it, in Toynbee's phrase, as "the monopoly of a privileged minority." However, it was not until the era of Jacksonian democracy that universal free education really took root in the United States. In earlier years, primary education had been supplied for the well-off by private academies, for the poor by church-supported and charity free schools and, in some parts of the country, particularly New England, by public schools supported through local property taxes.
The beginnings of American education for blind children also found their impetus in the Jacksonian surge toward freedom and equality. Within a single twelve-month span, 1832–33, schools were opened in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Founded and financed by philanthropists, they were thought of as charitable asylums rather than educational instruments, and their original names reflected this. What became the Perkins School for the Blind was incorporated as the New England Asylum for the Blind. The New York Institute for the Education of the Blind was the New-York Institution for the Blind. In Philadelphia the Overbrook School for the Blind was originally the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind.
By the Civil War, 18 additional residential schools had been opened for blind children. Unlike the first three, all but one of these (the exception was Maryland) were state-operated, not as schools but as charitable institutions under the supervision of the state's welfare authorities. Many began as multipurpose asylums for the care and education of "defective children"—the blind, the deaf and, in some instances, the feeble-minded.
Much of this growth of educational opportunity was attributable to the crusading zeal of a handful of men, among whom the most conspicuous was Samuel Gridley Howe, M.D. History has played a cruel trick on Howe. His was an extraordinary and varied career, yet his name is hardly recognized while his wife, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote new words to an old tune while accompanying her husband to a Civil War battleground, is known to every schoolchild who sings "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
In the special world of work for the blind, however, Howe was a man of legendary stature. He was born in Boston, November 10, 1801, graduated from Brown University, took up the study of medicine and had barely begun to practice when he enlisted in the Greek war of independence, a romantic struggle against tyranny begun in 1821. Howe, like others, was said to have been inspired by the example of the English poet Byron, who lost his life in the war to free Greece from the Ottoman Empire. It was said, too, that a disappointment in love acted as a further spur to Howe's hasty decision to set out for Greece in 1824. In any event he spent six years fighting and doctoring there, and an additional year traveling through other parts of Europe, before returning to Boston in 1831. Differing explanations were given for his return: that he contracted swamp fever in Greece and had to recover his health; that he came back to Boston to collect funds for the Greek cause. Both may have been true.
Whatever the reason, shortly after his return a chance encounter changed his plans and the future direction of his life. Two years earlier Dr. John D. Fisher had induced the Massachusetts legislature to incorporate "an institution for the blind of New England" in the form of a quasi-public school authorized to collect and expend funds under the direction of a board of trustees. Fisher and his fellow trustees had not yet found the right person to organize such a school when, as the story goes, they ran into Howe on Boylston Street and Fisher exclaimed, "Here is Howe—the very man we have been looking for all the time!"
Howe's daughter, Laura E. Richards, called the encounter on Boylston Street "a meeting of flint with steel." But the striking of a spark is not enough to ignite a flame unless it is applied to the right timber. Howe was that. As an earlier historian observed, "Howe was without a preliminary training for his task, yet he so combined poetic insight, the fiery zeal of the prophet, sound scholarship and business acumen, that any philanthropic enterprise was bound to prosper in his hands."
The enterprise that engaged Howe's interest that day did indeed prosper at his hands during a 44-year tenure, and so did many others. Although the school for the blind became his permanent base of operations, he also enlisted in many other social and political causes. He was active in the abolitionist movement, worked with Dorothea Dix in the crusade for humane treatment of the insane, founded and for 25 years directed the "school for idiots" that later became Massachusetts' Walter E. Fernald State School, helped Horace Mann in the campaign for universal free education, took an active role in establishing what became the Clarke School for the Deaf, served for a time as chairman of the Massachusetts State Board of Charities, spent one or more terms in the state legislature where he led a movement to reform prison conditions, and, during the Civil War, accepted an assignment to survey the sanitary conditions of the Massachusetts troops in the battlefields.
Despite this staggeringly wide range of interests, Howe was no dilettante, nor was he a mere figurehead. During Perkins' formative years he took an intimate interest in its daily operations, personally sought out and enrolled many of the early pupils, and, in the case of Laura Bridgman, devised what none before him had ever succeeded in achieving—a systematic method for communicating with a young girl who could neither see nor hear.
The idea that New England should have a school for blind children had come to John Fisher when, as a medical student in Paris, he visited the world's first such school, l'Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles. Then four decades old, it had been founded a few years before the French Revolution by Valentin Haüy, a young intellectual fired by the humanitarian philosophies of Rousseau and Voltaire and intrigued by the metaphysical speculations of such earlier encyclopedists as Diderot. In Haüy's case, philosophy and metaphysics were transmuted into activism by his horror over a scene he witnessed during St. Ovid's Fair in Paris one day in 1771, an incident that became as familiar a story in the annals of blindness as did Paul Revere's ride in the history of the American Revolution.
Seated on a high platform outside a cafe in what is now the Place Vendôme were a handful of blind men scraping away discordantly at an assortment of musical instruments. On their noses hung huge empty pasteboard spectacles; to emphasize their blindness, the inscribed sides of the candlelit music scores faced away from them. As though this were not ridicule enough, the men were costumed in grotesque robes and crowned with dunce caps adorned with asses' ears. An advertising poster caricatured the scene to attract customers to the Café des Aveugles (Café of the Blind).
As he gazed at this crude carnival and heard the jeers of the crowds, twenty-six-year-old Valentin Haüy was seized with "a profound sorrow" and "an exalted enthusiasm" to do away with such an "outrage to humanity." "I will substitute the truth for this mocking parody," he told himself. "I will make the blind to read! I will put in their hands volumes printed by themselves. They will trace the true characters and will read their own writing, and they shall be enabled to execute harmonious concerts."
It was a bold and generous resolve, but Haüy took more than a decade to put it into practice. What finally spurred him to action was a concert appearance in Paris by the blind Austrian pianist, Maria von Paradis, whose accomplishments had attracted royal patronage throughout Europe. Haüy went to see her after the concert; she explained how she had learned to read and write by means of pinpricked letters and told him of other blind people who had also improvised ways of educating themselves. Encouraged, Haüy sought out a promising seventeen-year-old, François Lesueur, whom he began to teach with the use of hand-carved wooden letters. The lad had been a street beggar; his motivation for the novel experiment was Haüy's promise to pay him a wage equal to the proceeds of his mendicancy.
It was François who made the accidental discovery that led to the creation of an actual school. Handling some papers on Haüy's desk, his fingers felt a protuberance on a sheet of paper: the imprint of a letter on the reverse side of a freshly printed funeral notice. François asked his teacher whether what he felt was the outline of the letter "o." It was indeed, and it came to Haüy in a flash that if the fingers of a blind boy could detect a single letter that had been faintly raised through accidental pressure, those same fingers could do wonders with print deliberately raised. Haüy tested this insight by embossing sheet after sheet in italic script. François could distinguish every letter. In six months, he could both read and write.
A demonstration before members of the Royal Academy of Sciences drew their endorsement and the subsequent permission of the government for Haüy to open a school. In 1784 this finally took shape: 14 blind boys and girls, wards of a philanthropic society, were brought together in a small dwelling where, with Haüy as headmaster and François as his assistant, they began their education.
The school underwent numerous vicissitudes during the stormy years of the Revolution and its aftermath, and so did Haüy, who fell into political disfavor under the changing regimes. His accomplishments with blind children were recognized, however, and although he was never permitted to resume leadership of the school he had founded, he was invited, toward the end of his life, to create schools in Germany and in Russia. The Paris school had become a solidly grounded institution (with Louis Braille as one of its students) by the time young Dr. Fisher of Boston visited it around 1825.
By then there were more than a dozen other schools for the blind in as many European countries, and one of the first things Samuel Gridley Howe did when he agreed to start a school in Boston was to go abroad to see what he could learn from them. He found "much to admire and to copy, but much also to avoid."
One of the European practices he criticized was the custom of displaying blind pupils in public exhibitions. But he soon learned that if he was to attract popular support for his budding institution and, more important, cultivate positive public attitudes toward blind persons and their potential for employment, he would have to do the same. For many years Howe's school was thrown open every weekend so visitors could marvel at blind children reading, writing, doing mathematical calculations, and playing musical instruments. To convince skeptics that these children really could not see, a green ribbon was bound over each child's eyes.
Presumably the children wore these blindfolds when Howe took them on tour, as he soon began to do. His school was only four years old and had but a handful of pupils when a letter from a physician in Ohio prompted him to take three of his most accomplished students to give a demonstration before that state's legislature. It proved so effective that Ohio became the first state to make public provision for the education of its blind children; under a legislative appropriation a school was opened in Columbus in 1837 with Perkins' first graduate, A. W. Penniman, in charge. Within the next few years, Howe and his students made similar appearances before the governing bodies of 17 states. They rarely failed in their purpose.
By this time his own school, which had begun with the two little Carter sisters Howe took into his family home in July 1832, had reached an enrollment of 65 pupils and had outgrown its first separate quarters, a mansion donated by the wealthy Boston merchant, Colonel Thomas H. Perkins. In 1839 a large hotel in South Boston was bought with funds derived from the sale of the Perkins property, and in gratitude for the Colonel's permission to make this sale, the trustees voted for the school to bear his name. Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind became the new name; in 1877 the word "school" replaced "asylum" and in 1955 the name was shortened to Perkins School for the Blind.
In the Ivy League of schools for the blind, Perkins assumed the status of Harvard in primacy of origin, prestige, and public recognition. So eminent was Boston as the nation's cultural center, so self-assured was Howe as pundit, social reformer, and political power, that the two other pioneer schools were overshadowed for decades.
The New York school actually began operations four months before Perkins, even though the latter's legal birth and appointment of a director occurred earlier. By sheer coincidence, Howe's counterpart in New York, Dr. John Dennison Russ, had also served in the Greek war of independence as almoner (chief relief administrator) and the two men were acquainted. But Russ arrived independently at his resolve to do something for the blind boys he saw in New York City almshouses. Like Howe, he found an organization already incorporated, but not yet in operation, that was eager to do something for blind children. He joined forces with them and in a rented room on Canal Street three boys taken from the almshouse began their lessons on March 15, 1832. Boston's Colonel Perkins also had a New York counterpart in James Boorman, a prosperous merchant who in 1837 gave the school his mansion and grounds in what was then still an outlying district of Manhattan.
There, however, the resemblance ended. Russ did not have Howe's flair for attracting attention and support, and New York had yet to overtake Boston as either a commercial capital or a population center. Not until after the Civil War, when Howe was nearing the end of his life, did the New York school come to challenge Perkins' supremacy.
A brilliant and dynamic new superintendent was the reason. William Bell Wait tackled Howe on the question of embossed type, and although the system he himself had invented, New York Point, ultimately gave way to braille, he succeeded in diminishing and finally ending the use of Howe's Boston Line Type. But it was not only through the "war of the dots" that Wait became a potent force in the education of blind children; he also assumed a dominant role in shaping the academic philosophy of all schools for the blind once the heads of these schools came together in the professional association they called the American Association of Instructors of the Blind.
The Philadelphia school was born under the auspices of the Society of Friends, whose members were the social and civic leaders of the City of Brotherly Love. A Quaker emissary named Joshua Francis Fisher (no relation, so far as can be told, to Boston's Dr. John Fisher) traveled to Europe in 1830 to study schools for the blind; his return to Philadelphia coincided with the arrival of a German educator, Julius Friedlander, who had been in contact with the schools for the blind in Germany, England, and France and had come to Philadelphia with the purpose of starting one. Friedlander brought with him letters of introduction to prominent Quakers, one of whom, Robert Vaux, took the lead in organizing the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind. Friedlander was appointed principal and began a class in March 1833; formal incorporation was approved the following January.
Credit for producing America's first embossed book, The Gospel of Mark, belongs to the Philadelphia school. Hand-embossed as a volunteer effort by a trustee, it used a tactile type that turned out to be illegible. Later, a variety of line type, different from Howe's Boston Line, was evolved at the school. Other achievements might have followed were it not for Friedlander's ill health, which caused his resignation a short time later. He died in 1838.
Although a subsequent head of the Philadelphia school, William Chapin, wielded considerable influence in the mid-nineteenth century, the school's major impact began in 1890, with the appointment of Edward E. Allen. What brought the youthful Allen into the national spotlight was not so much the educational theories he espoused as the changes he effected in the school's physical facilities. In 1899 he moved it out of a large congregate building in downtown Philadelphia to suburban Overbrook where, under his direction, a multimillion-dollar cottage school plant was constructed on spacious landscaped grounds. So dramatic was the change in atmosphere, so heightened was the morale of the school's students, and so impressive grew the placement record of its graduates that Allen, a former teacher at Perkins, was offered its directorship when Howe's successor died in 1906.
That successor had been Michael Anagnos, a Greek journalist Howe met when he once again took up the cause of Greek independence following the Cretan insurrection of 1866. As head of the Boston Greek Relief Committee, he went to Crete in 1867 to survey the islanders' needs. There he hired the thirty-year-old Anagnos as his "secretary for Cretan affairs" and brought him back to the United States. Within a short time the young Greek was helping the aging Howe with some of his many other interests; he also attracted the attention of Howe's eldest daughter, Julia, whom he married in 1871. By this time Howe was off on another political crusade, the nationalist revolution in Santo Domingo, and Anagnos took charge of the school in his father-in-law's frequent absences. He was the logical choice to head Perkins when Howe died in 1876.
Among the talents of Michael Anagnos was "a phenomenal gift of luring money out of benevolent citizens of Massachusetts," according to an account of the Perkins school written by one of its later directors, Gabriel Farrell. "So persuasive was he that proper Bostonians of his day would hardly dare face Saint Peter unless they had made provision for Perkins in their wills, a fact that greatly eased the financial problems of his successors." (It might be added that the tradition continued long after Anagnos' day; the 1972 annual report of the Perkins school showed assets of just under $45 million.)
Anagnos earned a place in history in three other respects. First, he founded the Kindergarten for Little Blind Children, the world's first school to begin the education of such children at age five when it was still customary to admit them at eight or nine. Originally established on separate premises in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, the kindergarten eventually became Perkins' "lower school"; it was brought together with the "upper school" soon after 1910, when Perkins moved out of Boston to a spacious Watertown estate where an improved cottage-style school was built under Allen.
Second, he founded the great library and museum of "blindiana" assembled at Perkins through the exchange program with the Blindeninstitut in Vienna. But what Anagnos was probably best known for was his catalytic role in the life of Helen Keller. It was he who recommended the just-graduated Anne Sullivan as Helen's tutor, who gave Anne access to Howe's copious notes on the methods used in instructing Laura Bridgman, and who encouraged and steadied the shaky young teacher as she struggled to make contact with the eager mind of a headstrong child. Anagnos later arranged for Helen and her teacher to spend three years in residence at Perkins, not as regular members of the school but as guests. They might have remained longer were it not for a misunderstanding over a newspaper article about Helen that led to a contretemps between the school's trustees and the hot-tempered Anne. She and thirteen-year-old Helen left in 1893; they never returned except as visitors on ceremonial occasions.
According to the version of this incident given by Anne to her biographer, Nella Braddy, Anagnos was not personally involved in the controversy; he was, in fact, abroad at the time. Helen Keller's version, as related in Midstream, is differently shaded and carries a tinge of angry pique against the man she says she had "loved like a father." Anagnos, she wrote, tried to keep her and her teacher at Perkins in an effort to "manage" them. When they left, he "bitterly resented what he was pleased to call Miss Sullivan's ingratitude and shut us out from his heart."
It is tempting to dwell on the colorful lives and careers of the pioneer educators of the blind, both American and foreign. Romance and drama are there in abundance. To cite a single example, the motivation that led Edward Rushton to found England's first school for the blind was at least as stirring as Valentin Haüy's. Born in Liverpool in 1756, Rushton went to sea at the age of eleven, serving as an apprentice on slave-traders. On one occasion, when his ship was wrecked, he swam toward the same floating cask as a slave he had befriended during the voyage. The cask could not sustain them both, and the slave sacrificed his own life by pushing the exhausted boy onto the float.
Rushton never forgot it; a few years later, when an epidemic of malignant ophthalmia broke out in the human cargo of another such ship, Rushton—aware that the captain was systematically throwing overboard those slaves who were blinded by the disease and thus worthless as commodities—went into the hold to help tend the afflicted. This impulse to repay his debt to the African who had saved his life cost him his own sight. He contracted the malignancy and was blind at the age of nineteen.
The details of Rushton's young manhood are obscure; somehow he gained an education, became a minor poet, editor, and bookseller, and founded a literary club which, at his urging, agreed to establish an institution that would "render the blind happy in themselves and useful to society." The Liverpool School for the Blind was opened in 1790 (some sources say 1791). Rushton's own life had a happy ending. After 33 years of blindness, an operation restored his sight. He lived another seven years before he died in 1814.
Unlike Haüy's establishment in Paris, the Liverpool school was not a residential institution. Its pupils boarded in the town and came for daily lessons, and one of its two small buildings was used as a workshop for blind adults. Educationally, it was not much, but it was a start, soon to be followed by larger and more conventionally organized schools in other parts of Britain. It also had the distinction of being the first school for the blind to be founded by a blind man.
Less melodramatic in origin, but of more enduring importance as an educational influence, was the school founded in Vienna in 1804 by Johann Wilhelm Klein. What later acquired the sonorous title of Imperial Royal Institute for the Education of the Blind began with a single blind lad, Jakob Braun, whom Klein took into his household and began to educate out of sheer affection. Klein was then a government official, a district supervisor of the poor; like Haüy, he effectively demonstrated his pupil's accomplishments before an official body, as a result of which he acquired additional pupils and began a school. Within a few years he succeeded in having it recognized and supported as a governmental institute.
Klein wrote extensively on his theories of education of blind children. Among the many ideas in which he was decades ahead of his time was his belief in the desirability of placing blind children in local schools alongside their sighted peers. The basic manual on education he wrote in 1819, the history of education of the blind he produced in 1837, the theories of teacher training and parent education he incorporated in subsequent books and monographs—these were so replete with forward-looking psychological and educational concepts that, according to Berthold Lowenfeld, who made a study of his life and work, Klein played "the most decisive role in the education of the blind among the German-speaking people of Europe."
Of all the foreign schools, the one which probably had the greatest impact on American methods was the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind, a British institution fashioned by an American expatriate who ultimately earned a knighthood at the hands of Edward VII. This was Francis J. Campbell: born in Tennessee in 1832, blinded by an acacia thorn before his sixth birthday, educated in the newly opened Tennessee State Institution for the Blind, teacher of music there while completing his own schooling at the University of Tennessee, then for 13 years a teacher of music at Perkins until, at the age of forty, he brought into being the unique "college" over which he was to preside for the next 50 years.
Campbell's overall influence on American services for blind people extended far beyond the realm of education; he founded a family dynasty whose activities were to impinge on virtually every phase of constructive progress in those services. Even had he been childless, however, Sir Francis would have made a unique contribution through his seminal role in shaping the thinking which a number of those who taught in his school brought back to the United States.
As had been the case with Samuel G. Howe, it was chance that brought Francis Campbell face to face with opportunity. An accomplished pianist, he had spent two years in Europe under the tutelage of noted masters and was on his way back to America when, on arrival in London, he met Thomas Rhodes Armitage, the blind physician who had just succeeded in federating Britain's scattered organizations for the blind in an overall body that ultimately became the Royal National Institute for the Blind. Armitage was impressed by Campbell's account of the many music students at Perkins he had turned into successful professionals. Could Campbell achieve similar results in England? The peppery Tennessean was sure of it, provided he were given a free hand. In 1872 a conservatory for blind children opened in the Upper Norwood district of London. Later it branched out to become a teacher training institute as well.
To get his academic program under way, Campbell applied to Howe for a loan of some of Perkins' teachers. Howe agreed to grant leaves of absence to several but was not sanguine over the school's prospects. He called it "an exotic" which would require "the most skillful care and attention, by persons of pure and high motives, to make it take firm root and attain large growth in its foreign soil."
No such doubts troubled Campbell, who had firm ideas about how to reach his objectives. His choice of the term "college" rather than "school" suggested the policy of selectivity he proposed to follow. Admission was on the basis of intellectual promise; retention in the student body hinged on merit. Education was by no means confined to the classroom but took place virtually around the clock. In the British prep school tradition, teachers roomed in the same buildings as their pupils, took meals with them and participated in their daily routine from wakeup to lights out. Over the years, 44 Americans were imported by Campbell to teach for longer or shorter periods. Asked during a hearing conducted by a royal commission in 1886 why he employed so many Americans, Campbell replied that English teachers
want far more waiting upon, and they will do far less than the American teachers. The American teacher never stops to think whether it is somebody else's business. … Supposing a boy comes in with dirty hands she is ready to go for soap and water and attend to him then and there. … Whereas if it was an English teacher I think she would be much more likely to ring for a servant. …
Campbell was a fervent believer in the value of physical exercise. He himself set the pace, leading the long hikes, the bicycle trips, the field games, the roller skating and swimming events for teachers and pupils alike. His wife and sons were also in the forefront of the fitness program. Campbell was proud of his own physical prowess; he regarded as one of the crowning achievements of his life his ascent of Mont Blanc when he was well into middle age.
Howe, too, believed in physical activity for blind youngsters, convinced that only through exercise could they overcome the natural fear of injury which locked so many blind people into sedentary existences. He resorted to stern methods to get his pupils out of doors; among the less salubrious memories of early Perkins graduates were the occasions when they were thrust into the frosty climate of the New England winter and the doors of the school locked against them until they had passed the requisite time in the fresh air. Anne Sullivan Macy told her biographer how the children "huddled against the wall, stamping their feet to keep warm."
Campbell regularly returned to Boston to recruit faculty, and it was on one such occasion that he met Edward Ellis Allen, who had graduated from Harvard College a year earlier and had begun the study of medicine. Allen came from a New England family of educators. His father operated a private academy where Edward's older brothers also taught. There were younger brothers as well, and at a point when the family fortunes were slim, there came the turn of one of these to go to college. Edward was asked to postpone completion of his medical studies and relieve the strain on the family budget by supporting himself for a time.
It was this factor, plus the intriguing prospect of living and working in England, that prompted him to apply for a teaching job at the Royal Normal College. He stayed at Upper Norwood three years—from 1885 to 1888—by which time he had decided against resuming his medical studies. His new resolve was not only to stay in teaching but to specialize in the education of the blind. As he neared the end of his sojourn, he received job offers from both the Philadelphia and the Boston schools; he chose the latter because it was closer to his family, and came to Perkins as head teacher of boys. Two years later, the tempting offer of a principalship brought him to Philadelphia. He was by then uniquely qualified.
His successor at Philadelphia, Olin H. Burritt, once pointed out that Allen was the only head of an American school for the blind in a position
to pass upon the merits of the four embossed types struggling for supremacy in the American schools for the blind—Boston line letter, New York point, American braille, English braille; for as a teacher in Dr. Campbell's school he had learned and used English braille; at Perkins he had used the Boston line letter and, finding New York point in use at the Philadelphia school, he learned this type and continued its use for two years. … He believed braille was superior to all other systems and American braille superior to English braille. … [To] Mr. Allen belongs the credit of holding the country for braille as against New York point.
In addition to his influence on the architecture and resulting life styles in schools for the blind, Allen pioneered in several other directions, among them public school classes for the partly sighted. Classes for "myopes" had begun in England in 1909. Allen, who was by then back at Perkins as its director, had a special class opened in Boston in 1913; he went so far as to use funds from the Perkins treasury to pay for needed supplies for the five students.
Allen attributed many of his accomplishments to what he had learned from Francis Campbell at the Royal Normal College. Of them all, it was Campbell's success with job placement that made the strongest impact on American educators of the blind. Few of them, however, could go to Campbellian lengths. Sir Francis, who started out each school day with a clarion exhortation to his pupils to "storm the castle, capture the fort and take them all prisoners!" used similarly buccaneering tactics to find jobs for his graduates, particularly those trained for musical careers. He kept personally in touch with major European and American musical organizations and hammered at them to secure orchestral posts and concert dates for his talented students. For one of the most gifted, the pianist Alfred Hollins, Campbell arranged concert appearances with the Berlin, London, and New York Philharmonics, the Boston Symphony, and other orchestras of equal renown. For these to engage a blind soloist had hitherto been "undreamt of," Hollins wrote many years later, and it happened only because of Campbell's "almost superhuman persistence."
America, too, had its pioneers in aggressive placement techniques, and one of them was Liborio Delfino, whose background could hardly have been more different from Campbell's. Delfino was a seventeen-year-old immigrant, newly arrived in the United States and working on a Philadelphia pick-and-shovel gang, when a quarry blast destroyed his eyesight and his right arm. Having spent an impoverished boyhood tending sheep and goats on a barren Italian mountainside, he had never learned to read or write. He knew only the most rudimentary English and was the sole member of his family to have come to America when the accident happened.
At Germantown Hospital, Delfino was befriended by an Italian-speaking visitor who persuaded him to enter Philadelphia's school for the blind. He had to begin in the primary grade with the school's smallest children, but he plugged away and reached graduation in 1900. A person of affectionate and cheerful disposition, and of great physical strength despite the loss of the arm, he won such popularity with both students and teachers that Edward Allen added him to the staff. Delfino did well at every assignment Allen gave him—teaching ungraded classes, making a survey of the school's graduates, inducing business and industrial firms to offer them jobs, persuading parents to enroll their blind children in the school. He soon became the school's official placement agent and manager of the salesroom which merchandised the products of its workshop and home workers. He remained a member of the staff until his death in 1937.
Many other men, both blind and sighted, earned a place in the pantheon of early educators. There was Joel W. Smith, who taught piano tuning at Perkins for 30 years under Anagnos and Allen. Blinded in early adulthood, Smith used his fine mechanical bent to devise many pieces of apparatus for use by the blind, including an early braillewriter constructed on the principle of the then newly invented typewriter. He was credited with introducing touch typing, a technique mastered by blind people long before sighted typists abandoned the original "hunt and peck" method. He devised the American braille code, which was taught at Perkins once Boston Line Letter was discarded, and which was subsequently adopted by a number of other schools for the blind. He was founder, editor and publisher of The Mentor, the first national print periodical dealing with work for the blind. Officially sponsored by the Perkins alumni association, this monthly was short-lived (from 1891 to 1894), but it set a pattern and cultivated an appetite later capitalized on by the Outlook.
There was Benjamin B. Huntoon, for nearly a half century superintendent of the Kentucky School for the Blind, founder and shaper of the affiliated American Printing House for the Blind, and prime mover in the early affairs of the AAIB. There was Frank H. Hall of the Illinois School, inventor of the first efficient braillewriter and braille stereotyper. There was Ambrose M. Shotwell, the bearded grandfatherly blind man who was both pacemaker and peacemaker in the establishment and development of AAWB. Shotwell was never a superintendent—he taught at the Arkansas school for a number of years and then was librarian at the Michigan school for several decades prior to his retirement in 1927—but the pressures exerted by him and other lower-level workers for the blind had much to do with changing the focus, and eventually the locus, of education for blind children.
There was also William Henry Churchman, blind from his seventeenth year, who in the pre-Civil War era launched three state schools—Tennessee, Indiana, and Wisconsin—as each one's first superintendent, and narrowly missed heading a fourth, the New York State School at Batavia. Churchman was generally credited with resuscitating the seemingly stillborn AAIB after an 18-year lapse; he served a term as president of the revived organization, 1876–78.
The early superintendents of schools for the blind were, for the most part, just what their titles implied. Educational policy was only one of their functions. Except for the few who headed philanthropically supported schools, the superintendents were public officials, in some cases political appointees, who were not only responsible for all aspects of institutional management but had to cultivate numerous legislative and bureaucratic relationships. Most of the tax-supported schools fell under a state board of charities; it would take many decades before one school after another succeeded in getting itself transferred to the jurisdiction of the state educational department.
Understandably, therefore, it was the privately endowed and financed schools—primarily Boston, Philadelphia, and New York—that took the initiative along purely educational lines. This they did for three days in August 1853, when the New-York Institution for the Blind hosted the meeting that laid the groundwork for what eventually became the American Association of Instructors of the Blind.
The 17 men present—14 superintendents and 3 teachers—found a lot to talk about even though their individual situations were so greatly dissimilar. The three pioneer schools had been in existence some twenty years; only two others (Ohio and Virginia) were backed by as much as a decade of experience; the remaining nine (Tennessee, Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Louisiana, Georgia, Iowa, and Maryland) had been founded less than ten years earlier, two of them (Iowa and Maryland) that very year.*
The substantive resolutions adopted at this first assembly reflected, as Francis M. Andrews and C. Warren Bledsoe noted in a historical chronicle of the AAIB,
perennial items of policy, practice and concern: 1. National responsibility for producing embossed books and federal funds to provide other educational resources. 2. Demonstration of the capacities of blind children by showing their performance to public officials. 3. The approval of a standard embossed type [Boston Line] but research for an improved system. 4. The necessity for a periodical concerned with blindness. 5. The approval of a standard system of musical notation. 6. Discipline of blind children as exacting as that applied with sighted children. 7. Responsibility for finding employment for graduates of schools. 8. The question of ideal architecture.
The convention's "immediate object," the proceedings noted, was "to make application to Congress for a donation for a permanent printing fund for the use of the blind" on the grounds that since Congress had
appropriated large portions of the public lands for general education, from the benefits of which the blind have been and necessarily are excluded, their claim for a portion of the proceeds of these lands to aid in their education is both just and reasonable.
This argument was to be presented to the next session of the federal legislature in the form of a "memorial." It is not clear whether such an approach was made, but if it was, it did not succeed any more than earlier approaches to Congress made by Howe. Another resolution was for a second convention to be called, presumably in the near future, but this did not happen either. It was not until 1871, when William Churchman circulated a questionnaire asking whether there was interest in holding another convention, that the moribund organization was brought back to life.
Howe had been elected president of the as-yet-unnamed 1853 body, and it was unquestionably he who kept the fragile organizational bud from blossoming. There could have been any number of reasons for his lack of action, one of which may well have been, as Andrews and Bledsoe suggested, unwillingness to share or dilute his status as the nation's undisputed authority on the subject of blindness. But, as they also pointed out, "time was running out for Howe" when, in 1871, he received the Churchman questionnaire.
It was not merely that he was seventy. His Boston Line Type was being steadily challenged, and dot codes were rapidly gaining new adherents, thanks in large part to the energetic efforts of that fast-rising star in the education of the blind, William Wait. Within his own domain at Perkins, Howe had had to cope with a palace revolution of sorts in which younger members of the faculty questioned existing educational methods. He himself was disappointed in the practical results achieved at his school; its graduates had failed, by and large, to gain the hoped-for acceptance in open employment, and the school had found it necessary to open a workshop for some and to create internal jobs for others. He had also been saddened that the families of many former students took little or no responsibility for their future welfare, which meant the school was expected to continue acting in a parental role.
In the marathon address he delivered as guest speaker at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the New York State Institution for the Blind at Batavia in 1866, Howe voiced these doubts publicly. He questioned whether the established schools for the blind were really fulfilling a useful function. Ruefully acknowledging his personal role in stimulating the growth of such schools—"I labored with more zeal than knowledge"—he went on to say:
I accept my full share of condemnation when I say that grave errors were incorporated into the very organic principles of our institutions for the blind, which make them already too much like asylums. … All great establishments in the nature of boarding schools, where the sexes must be separated; where there must be boarding in common, and sleeping in congregate dormitories; where there must be routine, and formality, and restraint, and repression of individuality; where the charms and refining influences of the true family relation cannot be had—all such institutions are unnatural, undesirable, and very liable to abuse. We should have as few of them as is possible, and those few should be kept as small as possible.
[Any] class of young persons marked by an infirmity like deafness or blindness … depend more than ordinary persons do for their happiness and for their support upon the ties of kindred, of friendship, and of neighborhood. … Beware how you needlessly sever any of those ties … lest you make a homeless man, a wanderer and a stranger. Especially beware how you cause him to neglect forming early relations of affection with those whose sympathy and friendship will be most important to him during life … and how you restrict him to such relations with persons subject to an infirmity like his own.
Undaunted by the fact that he was uttering these strictures at an occasion marking the construction of one of the very institutions whose practices he was deploring, Howe spelled out additional indictments. Schools for the blind, he said,
are generally wrong in receiving pupils too indiscriminately; being in most cases tempted to do so by the fact that they are paid according to the number they receive. They are wrong in receiving all pupils as boarders, when they should receive those only who cannot board at home, or in private families.
A better system, he declared, would be more selective. It would "reject everyone who can be taught in common schools," especially those who had some sight and could easily attend public day schools, "if special pains were taken with them, and special encouragement given … in the shape of books, slates, maps, etc."
Some of the other ideas Howe advanced were likewise well ahead of their time: Residential schools should act as screening and preparation centers, keeping some pupils a year or so for rudimentary instruction before sending them home to learn what they could in the common schools, where they would be aided by state-supplied books and apparatus and, if need be, a stipend for support. Which children, then, should receive their total education at a school for the blind? Only
the select pupils, say fifty in number, [who] should have every possible advantage and opportunity for improvement … the best masters, the best instruments. … They should be kept as long as may be necessary to qualify them to get their own living, as teachers of languages, as vocalists, as tuners of pianos, as organists, and the like.
In this last proposal lay the kernel of the idea that Francis Campbell, then a teacher at Perkins, was able to realize a few years later in England, but that Howe's own school, as a quasi-public body, could implement to only a limited extent. The state institutions were in even less of a position to exercise any real degree of selectivity. To keep a tax-supported school operating under capacity spelled political hot water for its superintendent.
Howe repeated some of these same reservations when he replied to the questionnaire he received from Churchman five years later. He saw no necessity to hold a convention, he wrote. "The great advantages which may flow from it, will be lessened by the fact, that it countenances the idea that there is greater difference between those who see, and those who do not see, than really exists."
The 1871 convention met without him, although Anagnos was present as "resident superintendent" of Perkins. This time the delegates made sure to adopt a constitution, give the organization a name and set a firm date for its next meeting a year later. Conventions thereafter were biennial. At the 1876 conclave, the plan for an appeal to Congress for support of books for blind students was revived and a committee appointed to see to it. Huntoon of Kentucky had already established a small printing house as an adjunct to his school; he chaired the committee, drafted a bill, persuaded his Congressman to sponsor it, and organized a campaign among the superintendents to rally their own representatives in the House and Senate in support. At the 1880 convention, he was able to announce that "An Act to Promote the Education of the Blind" had become law in March 1879 and the Printing House already had its first annual federal subsidy of $10,000 to provide schools for the blind with embossed textbooks. From this modest acorn grew the mighty forest which, in the 1972 fiscal year, commanded a federal appropriation of $1,590,000.
Despite Howe's warnings, residential schools continued to be built. By the turn of the century there were 37; another dozen were established during the next two decades. Of the 50 to 55† residential schools in existence in 1972, only one—a special school for multiply handicapped blind children—was less than a half century old.
The post–Civil War period was one of sporadic growth as the nation expanded westward. California opened its school for the blind in 1867. The Oregon school, which began in 1873, soon had to shut down and remained closed for four years due to lack of both pupils and funds. In 1891 it reported it had had an average of seven pupils in the eight years since reopening, but now had sixteen, "most of them children," and hoped to double that number soon. "The reluctance of parents to send their blind children to school, and their lack of appreciation of the privileges offered gratuitously by the State, are deplored," the school's superintendent complained; what Oregon needed was a law like the state of Washington's, making it mandatory that "all defective youth be placed in some school for special training."
The same point was made by the Institution for the Deaf and Blind of Colorado, one of the many dual schools existing at the time. There, as elsewhere, the deaf pupils greatly outnumbered the blind; the Colorado count in 1891 was 74 deaf and 34 blind pupils. New Mexico, then a territory, already had a school for the deaf "but the indifference of parents has retarded any active movement to provide advantages for blind children."
(Dual schools continue to exist; in 1972 there were ten, but although the physical facilities were shared and the administration was the same, faculties and classes were separate.)
The problem of compulsory education took a long time to solve. As late as 1930 there were still nine states which did not legally require parents of blind children to send them to school. As of 1972 this was no longer so; not only was school attendance compulsory for all children in all states, but local school authorities were mandated to provide educational facilities for all children.
All the schools established in the western states were tax-supported, but in the prosperous industrial areas of the East and the Middle West private philanthropy continued to play a significant role. Pittsburgh's Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children came into being in 1890 thanks to a wealthy spinster's $40,000 bequest, augmented by gifts from other prominent citizens in the thriving steel center. Mrs. Mary X. Schenley donated a five-acre tract of land "located in a desirable part of the city and … estimated to be worth upward of one hundred thousand dollars, " H. B. Jacobs, the new school's superintendent, reported early the next year. Another contributor was William Thaw, whose widow became a lifelong friend and benefactress of Helen Keller; she was the mother of Harry K. Thaw, the man who in 1906 was to kill his wife's lover, the architect Stanford White, in a still-remembered scandal of that era.
The Western Pennsylvania School "was opened without ceremony and now has 21 pupils," Jacobs reported in early 1891. Ceremony was apparently reserved for acceptance of the deed to Mrs. Schenley's land; at a gala reception the donor was presented with an engrossed resolution of thanks in the form of "an album bound in Turkish morocco, with a clasp of solid silver, richly chased, and upon the cover a plate of gold fittingly inscribed."
Large or small, publicly or privately financed, handsomely housed or installed in makeshift quarters, the residential schools had many problems in common. A hardy perennial was the question of segregation of the sexes. Separate housing of boys and girls was taken for granted, as it was in all boarding schools and institutions, but schools for the blind went to extraordinary lengths to discourage even the most casual boy-girl social relations. In some, a student found openly conversing with one of the opposite sex was subject to peremptory expulsion. Even in the classroom the sexes were kept apart. At Perkins, Michael Anagnos went so far as to open and close the boys' and girls' departments on different days to prevent the two sexes from becoming acquainted on the trains.
It was not merely a matter of Victorian morality; behind these extreme measures lay a very real fear of perpetuating hereditary blindness through intermarriage. Edward Allen had such strong convictions on the issue that in 1930 he drew up charts to show that there were "more than 120 ophthalmic anomalies exhibiting a definite hereditary transmission" and that, of the causes of blindness in the 300 members of the Perkins student body, 196 were "probably hereditary." Most educators of the blind shared Allen's viewpoint; many had sets of siblings enrolled in their schools and some with long tenure had seen the pattern of blindness repeated in successive generations of the same family.
Apart from eugenics, there were practical considerations. "A house should have windows on at least one side," was a popular maxim underscoring the thought that the marriage of two blind people carried with it a needlessly large number of obstacles. The dangers of intermarriage were repeatedly impressed upon the students, but neither stern warnings nor the penalties attached to violation of school rules were wholly effective.
Although still opposed in principle to intermarriage, educators in schools for the blind in the Seventies have accepted the realities of adolescence and afford their pupils ample opportunity for supervised social contact in and out of the classroom. They have also made sex education a part of the curriculum.
Segregation by race was long a feature of the residential schools in the southern states, but it was taken for granted until relatively recent times. Some of the state institutions maintained two separate schools under the same management. As of 1931 there were ten (two were still in existence in 1972); there were also five independently administered schools for Negro children. Some of the southern states were slow to make any provision whatever for blind black children; Mississippi's first class was not instituted until 1929, when a special department for the blind was organized in the Piney Woods School for the Colored.
As was generally the case with all types of segregated schools, the educational facilities offered Negro children who were blind were inferior. A 1939 Foundation survey revealed that some of the schools for blind black children had to make do with hand-me-downs from their sister schools for blind white children, not merely in the form of worn furniture, chipped crockery, and threadbare towels, but also in classroom materials such as braille books whose dots were so worn down as to be all but indistinguishable. Even more serious was the lack of professional training in the teachers. As will be seen, one of the Foundation's notable contributions dealt constructively with this situation.
Beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation and the subsequent passage of various federal anti-discrimination laws, racial integration—in a few instances of the token variety—came into existence in virtually all schools for the blind.
The most fundamental change affecting the education of blind children began quietly at the turn of the century when the fast-growing city of Chicago decided to establish a separate local school instead of sending its blind children to the state school in Jacksonville at the southern end of Illinois. Frank H. Hall, who was then superintendent of the state school, urged the Chicago Board of Education not to build a separate institution. Instead, he recommended providing special classrooms in existing school buildings, and having the children take part in as many regular classes as possible. Hall's views were supported by a blind Chicago lawyer, Edward J. Nolan, who argued so persuasively before the Chicago education authorities as to overcome their belief that blind and sighted children could not be schooled together. Nolan's was not an easy task; the education board had already bought a lot and hired an architect.
Chicago's first class for blind children in a regular public school was opened in September 1900. It was supervised by John B. Curtis, a blind teacher Hall released from his own faculty to carry out what was admittedly an experimental venture. By 1907 Curtis was able to report that Chicago had 24 blind pupils in grade school and 5 in high school, and that while "teaching blind children in the same public school with seeing children has its limitation and cannot be applied universally … its claims for favorable consideration are strong."
John Curtis, born in 1871, attended the Illinois school for the blind after he lost his sight at the age of ten. Having graduated from Chicago's Hyde Park High School and earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of Chicago, he knew from personal experience about gaining an education alongside sighted students. Robert Irwin, who first met Curtis in 1908, described him as "a gentle, retiring man who never received his due share of credit," and it was no doubt at Irwin's instigation that some of this overdue credit came to Curtis when he was given the Migel Medal in 1945, ten years after his retirement. The pioneer educator died in 1951.
It did not take long for the Chicago formula to be tried out elsewhere. Cincinnati started a day school class for blind children in 1905, Milwaukee in 1907, and two years later four other cities followed suit: Racine, Cleveland, Boston, and New York. All began on a cautiously small scale, feeling their way and uncertain about how best to shape their programs. The influence and prestige of the long-established residential schools remained strong, and the advocates of public school education were not unaware of the special advantages the residential schools offered. Irwin, who was appointed supervisor of the Cleveland day classes when they opened in 1909, told the AAIB a year later that he expected to send his pupils to the residential school when they were old enough to begin learning a trade. By that time, he said, a youth would have "passed the period when the influence of the home is most essential to his development." Moreover, it would be "a stimulus to more lasting effort for a sightless person, about to launch out for himself, to come into contact with others preparing to face life under similar conditions."
Irwin was also conscious of other key elements absent in the early public school classes. He set about filling these deficiencies by adding a half-day to the school week. The pupils reported on Saturday mornings for special instruction in music and crafts. Their teachers, too, took on extra duties; they led the children on weekend hikes and organized a summer camp program for them. They also made home visits. "Teachers have been expected to visit in the home of at least one pupil each week. This is as much as can reasonably be asked of them," Irwin reported in 1916. But, he concluded, this did not provide enough coverage, so he arranged for the Cleveland office of the State Commission for the Blind to add to its staff a visiting teacher whose job would be "to supervise the home training of the blind children attending the public school classes." This step was needed because the "most earnest and persistent efforts" of the school's teachers were often "neutralized by the ignorance or indifference of parents." A tactful visiting teacher would encourage parents to allow the child to practice at home the self-care and homemaking skills learned at school. The person appointed to the new post, incidentally, was Mary Blanchard, who later became Mrs. Irwin.
In New York City the public school classes were born in a battle royal over tactile type between a group of ardent braille advocates led by Winifred Holt, representing the newly organized Lighthouse, and an equally vigorous group of New York Point adherents led by William B. Wait. The type question may have been the ostensible issue, but it symbolized a far deeper conflict. Wait saw a threat to philanthropic support for his school in the establishment of public school classes on its own New York City territory. The impetuous Winifred saw a threat to the future of her fledgling Lighthouse if what she called "the old order for the blind" were permitted to prevail. As noted earlier, the braille forces won, with assists from, among others, Frank H. Hall and Helen Keller.
By 1910 there were, all told, just over 200 blind pupils in the public schools of various cities, while the population of the residential schools came to 4,600. That year the AAIB took its first serious notice of the day school movement. The heart of the issue was put very plainly at the convention in Little Rock by George F. Oliphant, head of the Georgia residential school:
It is no longer a question of whether the experiment of educating blind children in the public schools shall be made. It is already in progress. The only question for the institution to determine is our attitude toward the movement. Shall we help it, shall we fight it, or shall we sit still and see if it will run over us?
In the main, the school heads adopted the third alternative. A few more large cities initiated public school programs, but the movement soon reached a plateau. In 1949, nearly fifty years after Curtis' first experimental class in Chicago, the residential schools were still educating 90 percent of the nation's blind children.
Nine years later, that proportion had dropped to 60 percent and in some states, such as California, it was down to 25 percent. The cause of this sharp turnaround had little to do with instructional considerations; it stemmed from a wholly unexpected (and, for a dozen agonizing years, inexplicable) epidemic of infant blindness.
*It is puzzling that the official proceedings indicate that only two existing schools were unrepresented. The two missing schools are not identified but historical records show that four other schools were in existence as of 1853: Kentucky (founded 1842), North Carolina (1845), Mississippi (1848) and South Carolina (1849).
†Varying definitions of residential schools give rise to varying figures, but all counts put the number within this range.
