Theodore Roosevelt, the nation's 26th President, said that the progressive movement, writ large, was born of "a fierce discontent", among reformed minded middle class leaders of the late 19th century. One of those reformers was Jane Addams, an activist, social worker, and world renowned leader of the American Settlement House movement. Adams was arguably the most important humanitarian reformer of the first half of the 20th century. Her prescriptions and strategies for a just society had tremendous implications for the reform of urban public schools. Her education work was famously based at Hull House, the settlement house she and Ellen Gates Starr founded in 1889 in the 19th Ward on Chicago's West Side. >> The Chicago's settlement programs included college extension classes, clubs and literary offerings, ethnic festivals, art exhibits, recreational activities and neighborhood shower baths. A summer camp program for children, a cooperative boarding house for working women, a kindergarten and legal services. The women settlers of Hull House pioneered daycare and advocated for reforms that would be adopted by the urban schools of their generation. Playgrounds and recreational programs, vocational education, art, and music, shower baths and kindergartens. Other women's settlement leaders in East Coast and Midwest cities would pioneer or advocate visiting nurse programs and medical inspection in the schools, special education, vocational counseling, school lunches and school social centers. Often for different reasons, groups with competing social and political views, labor union leaders, socialists, business leaders, women's clubs, American Imperialists struck in formal accords to support such progressive reforms as vocational education and school lunches. >> More than other social settlements and reform agents, Jane Addams Hull House was a center for labor union activities, public forums, social science research, and advocacy for progressive social change. Hull House residents developed a hard-nosed political agenda. And an applied research process that included observing social conditions, compiling statistics, writing reports, memorably Hull House maps and papers published in 1895. And lobbying for such reforms as sweatshop legislation, child labor laws, enforced compulsory schooling, and juvenile courts. That the residents acted too frequently for, rather than with their neighbors, treating them as clients must be weighed against their dedication to an ideal of universal democratic participation. >> Addams and her colleagues provided a holistic institutional approach to the social problems of the American city. A strategy that combined amelioration, and reformed a social science, with education at its core. John Dewey, a frequent visitor to Hull house in the 1890s, and a close friend of Jane Addams understood that the Settlement was "primarily and in the broadest sense, an educational institution". Rethinking his own theory of school and society under Addams' influence, Dewey would propose a settlement idea as a strategy for advancing democracy through the public schools. We look more closely at Dewey's contributions in a later module. A second source of education reform in the larger progressive movement was the municipal reform movement, which introduced city managers and city planning to urban governance, built parks and playgrounds on the level ground of former tenement slums, charted public ownership of city transportation and utilities. And centralized the governance of urban school systems. In our next episode, we shift from progressivism writ large, to look at the structure of urban school governance, as it was reshaped by the progressive school reformers. Those individuals whom the historian David Hayek aptly names, administrative progressives. [MUSIC]
