Why Community Matters: Connecting Education with Civic Life

3. Hull House

Chapter Three Hull House In these days of criticism of democracy as a political institution, Miss Addams has reminded us that democracy is not a form but a way of living together and working together. I doubt if any other one agency can be found which has touched so many people and brought to them a conception of the real meaning of the spirit of the common life. —John Dewey, 1930, on the fortieth anniversary of Hull House In this first case study, I examine the educational approach of Chicago’s original settlement house, Hull House, beginning with the ideas of its charismatic founder, Jane Addams. An examination of Hull House sets a solid foundation for why community matters, as it is perhaps the most extensive early attempt at comprehensive, relational, and public education that nurtures the ecology of civic learning. It is therefore essential to examine this case for lessons that may be illuminated for contemporary efforts to educate for democracy. In this pursuit, I have come to agree with historian Ellen Lagemann, who concludes that Addams “offers important grist for rethinking what education can and cannot do.”1 An Educator for Democracy Two years after Dewey’s “School as a Social Centre” speech, Jane Addams hinted at a more fundamental shift in educational practice than Dewey’s conception of schools as central to community life. Addams called for communities to be the center of education. Addams asked her readers to imagine what public schools would look like if they followed the educational practices of Hull House, the social settlement that Addams had formed with Ellen Gates Starr fifteen years before. “We could imagine 45 the business man teaching the immigrant his much needed English and arithmetic,” she wrote, “and receiving in return lessons in the handling of tools and materials so that they should assume in his mind a totally different significance from that [which] the factory gives them.” In the same place, Addams argued, one might see immigrant Italian women learning English in the kitchen while they teach their instructors “how to cook the delicious macaroni, such a different thing from the semi-elastic product which Americans honor with that name.”2 This was not a new concept for Addams. In fact, she had been articulating this conception of education and schooling since the founding of Hull House. This description, however, offers one of the earliest descriptions of “education in the community.” It is what Addams meant when she termed the social settlements movement a “protest against a restricted view of education.”3 Hull House’s approach, then, made the community, in the words of Jane Addams, “a center for social and educational activity.”4 She envisioned Hull House as a force for education that connected the many places where people learn in a neighborhood. “Its force was centrifugal,” writes Lawrence Cremin. “Instead of drawing educational functions into itself, it reached out into the community to help organize social relations in such a way that community itself would become educative.”5 In the process of reaching into the neighborhood, Addams became aware of the power of community learning. “Because Jane Addams remained aloof from most ‘professional’ thinking about education she understood that an infinite variety of experiences, associated with an infinite variety of institutions and sometimes not associated with any institution , can shape, expand, elaborate, refine, and otherwise change the ways in which people perceive themselves and their surroundings,” Ellen Lagemann observes. She continues that this nonprofessional approach enabled the settlement “to act in relation to those perceptions and . . . associate for purposes of thought and action with other people.”6 An approach that realized the value of nonprofessionals and the multitude of places that people learn also helped Addams recognize that the educative functions of Hull House could not be done in isolation; it required a whole community. Soon after founding Hull House, Addams realized that education was also inexplicably linked with civic life. Thus, Hull House increasingly tied its educational efforts with attempts to bring about political reform. During the Progressive Era, Jane Addams was an articulate voice on nearly every reform issue and her settlement house was a practical response to many of these issues.7 Hull House addressed political issues as varied as the corruption of elected politicians, child labor, labor orga46 Why Community Matters nizing, arts education, war and peace, treatment of new Americans, and the need for sanitary streets. In...