American Labor Education Service (ALES) interview of Eleanor Coit, Orlie Pell, and Jane Hilda Worthington Smith, undated
American Labor Education Service (ALES) interview of Eleanor Coit, Orlie Pell, and Jane Hilda Worthington Smith, undated, side 1
Transcript
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Interviewer 1Workers' education has seemed to go through a couple of stages in its
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Interviewer 1development. Uh,
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Interviewer 1the first phase that some people seem to notice is
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Interviewer 1a phase in the early twenties and early thirties in which the
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Interviewer 1character of the student body was not all trade unionists.
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Interviewer 1And the curriculum at that early point seemed to be a curriculum that was a
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Interviewer 1liberal arts curriculum based in the social sciences,
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Interviewer 1giving a broad offering of educational, uh,
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Interviewer 1opportunities to the students.
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Interviewer 1With the rise of the CIO and a, uh,
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Interviewer 1the period of the mid thirties to the late thirties.
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Interviewer 1The curriculum of workers' education seems to change to the need,
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Interviewer 1to meet the needs of the labor movement. Uh, the needs of being, uh,
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Interviewer 1providing shop steward training, providing, uh,
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Interviewer 1collective bargaining, uh, uh, procedures, et cetera.
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Interviewer 1The student body seems to change from a student body made up totally of trade
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Interviewer 1unionists. Uh, from your experience,
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Interviewer 1is that a correct statement or what, what in fact do you see that, uh,
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Interviewer 1moves along those lines? If anything?
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Eleanor CoitWell, Ms. Smith and Ms. Pell,
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Eleanor Coitand I have agreed I'll start and that gives them the hardest part of doing the
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Eleanor Coitnext part. Uh,
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Eleanor Coitcertainly workers' education has changed constantly over the
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Eleanor Coitwhole period of its life,
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Eleanor Coitand the curriculum is not a set curriculum.
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Eleanor CoitSome programs in workers' education would be one thing and
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Eleanor Coitother programs would be another thing in the early thirties. Um,
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Eleanor Coityou were speaking about a curriculum that centered on certain
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Eleanor Coithumanities, general thinking. Brookwood was in those days.
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Eleanor CoitAnd that wasn't what Brookwood concentrated on.
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Eleanor CoitAlthough what you have in mind is probably what some of the summer schools, uh,
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Eleanor Coithad in mind. Workers' education always changed, and continues to change,
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Eleanor Coitin terms of the needs of the Labor Movement, in terms of history,
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Eleanor Coitin terms of different groups,
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Eleanor Coitwith which you're dealing in different parts of the country.
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Eleanor CoitAnd you say that it eventually became bread and butter.
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Eleanor CoitALES never became bread and butter ever. It stayed in the social sciences,
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Eleanor Coitit worked on community problems, worked on international problems,
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Eleanor Coitworked on certainly specific trade union problems,
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Eleanor Coitbut the character and curriculum always adjusted
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Eleanor Coitto the needs and the interests of the students and the developments in the Labor
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Eleanor CoitMovement and the needs of the Labor Movement and to the historical scene.
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Eleanor CoitMs. Smith, please go on.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithWell, I should say that's a very good summary. Uh, I was thinking of say,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithyou take one worker's class, I'm speaking with the Bryn Mawr Summer School.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd those classes were very different, but in any of those classes,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithif you sat through even for a couple of hours,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithyou would find that the discussion was very closely related to what the
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithstudents were going to find and what they wanted to do when they went home in
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththeir own communities,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhether or not they were from YWs or settlements or from the unions.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithThey had in mind, something that they could take back to those other workers.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd I definitely remember a student who came into my office in the early days of
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththe Bryn Mawr School.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithShe was a garment worker from Baltimore--a laundry worker from Baltimore.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithShe said, you know,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI don't think I'm getting anything here that the laundry workers in my,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithin my community can use.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithShe said they will expect me to come back and put up the sun and fix the moon
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand arrange all the stars for them. She said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI don't think I'm getting anything that's going to help those laundry workers.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithSo we got her faculty together with her and we went over her,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithher course, her curriculum.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd we changed that her eight weeks in that school
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithfor something very specific that she could use with laundry workers in
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithBaltimore. Now this often came down to individual adjustments,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithbut you, you all know, I'm sure,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththat the instruction was not academic. It was,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithit was related to the people in the class. Uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand when you spoke of arts and humanities, including the social sciences,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththat rather threw me off the track,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithbecause I didn't think of those as arts and humanities or whatever they were
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithcalled. I thought of those as economics and English,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithelementary science, uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithall the things that were related to the situation of those
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithstudents in their own communities. And in general, they wanted,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththey wanted to understand something about, uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththeir employer's problems, their union problems, their communities,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand responsibilities in those communities, in general way,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithcitizenship. And I often thought of our curriculum as in those four categories:
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththe worker and the industry; the worker and his union, or her union;
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththe worker as related to government,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithlike the laws that affected that job;
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand the worker in the community in a general way, citizenship.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAll tied together with a great deal of English,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhich they all wanted a great deal of practice and public speaking and
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithmethods of publicity and visual education,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththings that they could use, which were basic. Now,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI don't know that that answers your question at all, but in general,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththere seems to be what I would regard as,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithas a method in workers' education, which still holds good.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd I might just add one,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithone comment that surprised me and gave me a [laughs] great deal to think about.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd this was in local 189, two or three years ago,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhere a group of university professors actually raised a question,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhich gave me a great feeling of shock.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithThey said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithshould controversial subjects be discussed in workers' classes? Well,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI thought we're back in the kindergarten stage,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththe early days of the Bryn Mawr School, where we actually had a long discussion,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithdid we dare use the term social action?
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithBecause those were dirty words at that time.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd here we've come around to it in a circle to where university professors
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithare questioning [laughs] whether or not controversial subjects should be brought
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithup. And I just thought, well, in about five minutes in a worker's class,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththey will find that they are in controversial subjects [laughter].
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Orlie PellAnd yet, uh, isn't it true, Jane, that the Labor Movement,
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Orlie Pellthe outside world did change, labor did become stronger in the thirties.
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Orlie PellAnd with that change in the world and in the strength of the Labor Movement,
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Orlie Pellthere had to be a difference in the emphasis in the curriculum.
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Orlie PellIt did deal more,
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Orlie Pelldidn't it with labor oriented subjects than it had in the early days when such a
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Orlie Pellsmall proportion of students were in unions or were active in unions?
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Eleanor CoitWell,
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Eleanor CoitI think it's important to recognize that almost any subject is labor oriented in
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Eleanor Coitone way or another. Uh,
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Eleanor Coitthe changing in program of the American Labor Education Service, uh,
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Eleanor Coitone of the most important things we worked on in the late fifties was
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Eleanor Coitlabor in the community, problems of labor in the community, older workers,
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Eleanor Coituh, all kinds of health problems that are labor oriented.
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Eleanor CoitAnd what you were working on always was, as Jane says,
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Eleanor Coitthe thing that confronted workers and that they had to do
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Eleanor Coitsomething about, and they were,
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Eleanor Coityou were hoping that workers' education would mean they would understand the
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Eleanor Coitworld they lived in better and understand how more effectively to meet the
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Eleanor Coitproblems that they had. Now,
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Eleanor Coitas far as whether people were more and more trade unionists in classes,
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Eleanor CoitI suppose they were because there were more and more trade unionists. But again,
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Eleanor Coitthe school's all different. You say Bryn Mawr started with half and half.
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Eleanor CoitBrookwood started with all trade unionists.
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Eleanor CoitAnd certainly the white collar school, which started in '33,
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Eleanor Coitstarted almost all unorganized because they weren't, uh,
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Eleanor Coitorganized. I remember Theresa Wilson who was teaching economics saying to me,
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Eleanor Coitdo you suppose we'll ever get to the Labor Movement?
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Eleanor CoitBecause there was so much in economic history that had to be understood to
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Eleanor Coitput it in its setting, uh, so that it would depend on the school,
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Eleanor Coitdepend on the need, and for instance,
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Eleanor Coitone of the last things the white collar school did was to have joint conferences
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Eleanor Coitwith social workers. Well, they happened to be organized social workers,
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Eleanor Coitbut they were concerned with problems that affected unorganized social workers,
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Eleanor Coitas well as social workers, so that the,
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Eleanor Coityou were trying to meet a situation. And, uh,
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Eleanor Coitwhat happened related to that situation and to that need.
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Interviewer 1Reading some of the things you've written, uh, about the,
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Interviewer 1uh, the affiliated schools,
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Interviewer 1I remember what came through to me very clearly about the spirit of those
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Interviewer 1schools was the desire to develop critical thinking among the students.
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Interviewer 1And of course, uh, you confronted the problem of controversial subjects by you,
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Interviewer 1uh, addressing it. But yet, uh,
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Interviewer 1well we find in labor education here that this is the bread and butter of our
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Interviewer 1classroom. Uh, nothing is alien to labor education,
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Interviewer 1no matter how controversial, and this is what makes up a basic, uh, uh,
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Interviewer 1part of it of.
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Interviewer 1I know that in the early years of our program,
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Interviewer 1and Dr. Levine has been doing some research recently into these early years here
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Interviewer 1at Rutgers, there were some problems with, for example, management, uh,
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Interviewer 1one company, uh, official, uh,
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Interviewer 1looking with a jaundice eye at the singing of solidarity forever at the
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Interviewer 1end of some of our, at the end of one of our programs.
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Interviewer 1And I know that in the Bryn Mawr experience,
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Interviewer 1you had some problems with the administration of the college, uh,
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Interviewer 1around the controversial,
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Interviewer 1extra curricular activities of the students.
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Interviewer 1And I was wondering if you would tell us a little bit about that period in 1935
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Interviewer 1when the school was in jeopardy,
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Interviewer 1the summer school was in jeopardy as a result of, uh,
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Interviewer 1some of this controversy.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithThe school was evicted by the college for two years. Well,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththis came about, we thought from a misunderstanding in the original,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithuh, agreement with the Trustees of Bryn Mawr College. And this is,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithyou probably all know, is the idea of president M. Carey Thomas.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithShe went to England in 1920,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand she found that in England every university had a worker's school.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithSo she came back with this rather startling idea of opening the buildings for
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwomen from the factories, uh, four and eight weeks course. Well,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithin 1935,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththere was a cannery strike nearby.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd we had had an agreement with the Trustees that while individuals could do
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithanything they please, take part in strikes, and we had some, some, uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithindustrial workers who came to Bryn Mawr, right from jail.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithThey'd been in jail for picketing.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithBut that we would not as a school take part in demonstrations,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwe would not carry banners. We would not March as a school. Well,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithin this cannery strike nearby, it was a few miles away, uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithtwo of the faculty,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithMildred Fairchild and Colston Warne went over just to see it.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithThey found that the conditions were very bad. Uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithapparently tear gas had been used. There were,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththere were women in the dormitories who were ill.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd they persuaded the, uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithemployer to call in a doctor and not to use this tear gas.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithUh, no one from the student body went near that strike,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithbut to our great surprise, we were in the headlines next day.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd one of the Trustees,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithone of our friends had misinterpreted this agreement,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand we were accused of having broken that agreement about strikes.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithWhereas it was not broken at all because
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithas a school we hadn't been near the strike.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithWe didn't even know there were demonstrations. Anyway,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwithout much discussion the college announced that we could not come back the
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithnext year.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd we decided we were going to carry on somewhere in some way.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithSo we,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwe borrowed the camp from the art workshop up in the
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithRamapo Mountains. And for two years,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwe conducted the summer school up there. And Mrs. Oti (?), Mrs., uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithBryn Mawr alumni who had been on the school staff was the director up there for
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithtwo years. And it was,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithit ran as a perfectly normal worker school. It wasn't as large,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithbut it went on. Then, by that time,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththe alumni all over the country,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththe Bryn Mawr alumni were very much enraged that this school had been put
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithout. Uh, they were supporting it.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithWe had 50 committees all through the country that were working for it.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithUh, the former students of course, were,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwere terribly upset that the school was not there on the Bryn Mawr campus the
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithnext year.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithSo the Trustees asked for a conference with us,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand I think I've never been at a funnier meeting. We set up a committee,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand we met with the committee of the Trustees.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd another accusation that they had against us, not only this strike thing,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithbut they also misinterpreted what had happened in the school when
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwe installed what they call the unit plan, which broke down the hundred,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smitha hundred students into units of 20,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smitheach with an English teacher and an economist,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand then cutting across on science and other things.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd it made it very much less confusing for the students to,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithto be in a unit where they, they were,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththey weren't so mixed up going from one, one place to another all the time.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithBut another accusation the college had against us at that time,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththat the original idea was a broad cultural program,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand here we'd become all economics, they said all economics.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithSo at that meeting that day, uh, they,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithone of the Trustees said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith"could we have a school here in art, literature,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand whatever, like humanities?" And we all said, "Oh yes,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwe can get such a school." And then they said, "Well,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithif we had such a school,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwouldn't they get a little interested in economics? If they came here?" I said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith"well not if you didn't, if you didn't teach it, I think." And they said, uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith"could, could we have a school like that?" I said, "yes,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithyou can probably find people interested in art, literature, and the humanities,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand you can have a school." And then they said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith"would I come back and direct it?" And I said, "no, thank you.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithBecause I would prefer to direct a worker school." And then the,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithall these nice, Quaker trustees, chorused, "well,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhat we want is a worker school." And our committee said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith"we want a real worker school." Our committee said "you had one and you put it
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithout." So they begged us to come back, on our own trips.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd we went back and had, I guess,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith12 more years on the Bryn Mawr campus after that,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithbefore we moved it to Hudson Shore.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI don't know if that answers your question.
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Interviewer 1It certainly does. [inaudible].
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Eleanor Coit... but perhaps that's not what the group is interested in.
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Interviewer 1Please do.
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Eleanor CoitWell, I just think that we're putting a great deal of attention, as we should,
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Eleanor Coiton certain pioneer efforts about workers'
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Eleanor Coiteducation,
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Eleanor Coitcertainly didn't consist only of the resident
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Eleanor Coitschools. There was a great deal, as you know, even in the early days,
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Eleanor Coitas you know, the Pennsylvania
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Eleanor CoitFederation of Labor had interesting classes. And as you know,
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Eleanor Coitthe Women's Trade Union League in Chicago was teaching,
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Eleanor Coitand there were many other needs that had to be met supplementing
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Eleanor Coitthese resident schools,
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Eleanor Coitwhich in mind were among the most important and the affiliated
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Eleanor Coitschools, um, about 1940,
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Eleanor CoitMs. Smith went to Washington--'34 didn't you, Ms. Smith?--
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith--'33--
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Eleanor Coit--Between 33 and 34. But you continued,
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Eleanor Coitas the director of the affiliated schools through '34, I think, before,
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Eleanor Coitthe latter part of part of it anyway.
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Eleanor Coit[crosstalk] And then the affiliated schools continued for another six or seven
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Eleanor Coityears, but partly through cooperating with the WPA program,
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Eleanor Coitwhich Ms. Smith ran. Our functions,
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Eleanor Coituh, became broader and broader and not a coordinating body as it had
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Eleanor Coitbeen originally for the summer schools.
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Eleanor CoitWe could still service the summer schools, but we serviced trade unions,
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Eleanor Coitwe serviced workers groups of all kinds,
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Eleanor Coitall types of unions, all types of, uh,
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Eleanor Coitthe parts of the country, all, um, approaches,
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Eleanor Coitall attitudes. And, uh, it was interesting,
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Eleanor Coitthe kinds of special interests, uh,
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Eleanor Coitthat had to been met that were not just bread and butter.
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Eleanor CoitThat's the point I want to point out, uh, for instance, the summer school,
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Eleanor Coitthe res--the ALES, which it became known as, did, um, uh,
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Eleanor Coitact as a center for many workers' education people to get together.
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Eleanor CoitBut that's not my, what I was talking about.
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Eleanor CoitWe began to work in the white collar field,
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Eleanor Coitwhich was a new field in which the trade unions were beginning to be interested.
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Eleanor CoitWe worked on the exchange of workers between this country and other countries.
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Eleanor CoitWe worked on the problems of intergroup relations and the contribution of all
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Eleanor Coitgroups, minority groups of all kinds,
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Eleanor Coitas well as others on the democratic approach.
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Eleanor CoitWe worked on farmer labor relations. We worked on international affairs.
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Eleanor CoitWe worked on labor in the community.
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Eleanor CoitThe trade union movement had moved into an area of much wider
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Eleanor Coitconcerns than only collective bargaining, as you know, they moved into a not,
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Eleanor Coituh, interest in the total community and their contribution to the community and
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Eleanor Coitinto understanding and taking part in world affairs.
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Eleanor CoitAnd I think it's awfully important to think of a curriculum as
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Eleanor Coitbeing based on all kinds of needs, uh, and not just on certain needs.
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Eleanor CoitWould that put it, Orlie, as you would put it?
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Orlie PellYes, I would think so.
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Eleanor CoitBut anyway, that seems to me important all the time, of course,
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Eleanor Coitthe affiliated schools, the Bryn Mawr Summer School,
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Eleanor Coitand the ALES worked on method, which was a very,
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Eleanor Coitvery important part of our work. And on materials for workers' classes,
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Eleanor Coituh, on training of teachers, as well as leadership training of trade unionists.
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Eleanor CoitBut I think if you're going to think in terms of workers' education,
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Eleanor Coityou have to think in very, very broad terms.
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Interviewer 1Uh, if I may, if I may,
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Interviewer 1I'd like to ask you about the methods that you use in conducting your classes
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Interviewer 1at Bryn Mawr. Um, I read, uh, that, uh,
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Interviewer 1you used psychological tests, uh, in which you hope to, uh,
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Interviewer 1determine, uh,
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Interviewer 1what the deficiencies or inadequacies of your students were at the time.
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Interviewer 1And you've mentioned in one of your books that their reading levels were
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Interviewer 1particularly low. But of more interest perhaps is,
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Interviewer 1is the fact that you used some very interesting teaching techniques. Um, uh,
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Interviewer 1you mentioned that, um, you use things like, uh,
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Interviewer 1techniques like role-playing, mock legislatures, things which have been,
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Interviewer 1techniques which have been popularized in the schools today. [inaudible].
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Eleanor CoitI'd like Orlie to follow it up though,
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Eleanor Coitbecause she was a teacher in the white collar school. And again,
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Eleanor Coityou use the same techniques, but with very different type of mind,
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Eleanor Coitwith a very different experience, with a very different attitude.
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Eleanor CoitYou always began where the group were. You began it, as Jane said,
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Eleanor Coitin terms of their interests. If you were teaching economics,
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Eleanor Coityou didn't do a long historical study first.
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Eleanor CoitYou began with the problem in their plans and they were probably acting it
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Eleanor Coitout. And there you call that role-playing, well,
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Eleanor Coitwe did it long before you called it role-playing because that's the way you got
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Eleanor Coitpeople thinking.
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Eleanor CoitBut your whole approach was to begin where they were and interpret
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Eleanor Coitthe world in which they lived. And it was--the psychological tests at Bryn Mawr,
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Eleanor CoitI think Jane ought to speak to rather than I because she was the one who
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Eleanor Coitconceived them. But it was very interesting. For instance,
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Eleanor Coitat the Wisconsin school, they found ways to divide up.
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Eleanor CoitI remember how I used to go to all the schools.
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Eleanor CoitI was the lucky one because I worked for the affiliated schools as educational
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Eleanor Coitdirector for three or four years. And I thought they divided them.
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Eleanor CoitThey were talking about their groups. They named them for the lakes.
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Eleanor Coit[laughter] I decided those were psychological terms,
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Eleanor Coitand I was--[laughter]--it was an
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Eleanor Coitawful joke when I [laughter] decided they divided them intelligently,
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Eleanor Coitbut their naming was just for the lakes.
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Eleanor CoitAnd I didn't have to be as bright as I thought
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Eleanor Coit[laughter]. But each school found a way, and they integrated, you see, the t
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Eleanor Coiteachers
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Eleanor Coitsat in each other's classes. I was thinking the other night about a class at
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Eleanor Coitthe Wisconsin school. I think it was being taught by Bill Haber, who was one of the economists. And they were just on the edge of their seats with
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Eleanor Coitt
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Eleanor Coithe discussion they were having in the area of economics, and they came to the end of the class and they said, "Oh, what will we do? We have to go to study English." And Mike Giles (?) who was an English teacher said, "Go right ahead. We'll do
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Eleanor Coitmine l
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Eleanor Coitater." Now you see you were working on the ability of the student to comprehend ideas and to make judgments intelligently and to understand, and you weren't in little pockets. Now, Orlie, why don't you illustrate it from the white collar school?
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Orlie PellWell, I'd be glad to. When you mentioned that the reading level of the people,
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Orlie Pellsome of the people at the Bryn Mawr School may have been low.
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Orlie PellThe exact opposite was true in the white collar school.
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Orlie PellThey were relatively well educated and what's more,
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Orlie Pellthey felt that they were educated. They'd been through school.
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Orlie PellAnd the problem with white collar workers was to get them to see that there was
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Orlie Pella lot more to education than just finishing high school and knowing that much
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Orlie Pellacademic material, and then no more.
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Orlie PellSo that you have to begin getting them thinking of themselves as living in a
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Orlie Pellworld that was more complex than they had thought.
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Orlie PellAnd to get them to think about that,
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Orlie Pellworry about things and to think about things, uh,
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Orlie Pellthat they had perhaps taken for granted, or hadn't worried about before.
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Orlie PellSo you began with educated people and got them interested in
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Orlie Pelltheir own economic problems, which some of them hadn't thought so much about.
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Orlie PellI remember Tom Tippett starting one of the classes--he was in econ--he was doing
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Orlie Pelleconomics at the white collar school. And he said, "look, if you're job,
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Orlie Pelleach of you now, if your job ended today,
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Orlie Pellhow long could you live on your financial resources?
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Orlie PellHow much do you have that you could live on?
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Orlie PellOr how many weeks or months or years could you live?" And, you know,
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Orlie Pellthat just brought them up. They hadn't thought of that. And some of them said,
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Orlie Pell"Well,
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Orlie PellI don't think I could live more than a couple of weeks." And some of them said,
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Orlie Pell"Well,
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Orlie PellI think I could for a couple of months." But they began to realize how awfully
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Orlie Pellclose they were to,
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Orlie Pellto economic disaster. And yet they thought of themselves in jobs,
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Orlie Pellwhite collar jobs that were secure and respectable and close to the boss.
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Orlie PellThey were sitting pretty,
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Orlie Pelland yet they were closer to the economic disaster than they thought.
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Orlie PellAnd he got them to think of that right away there. And then they began and said,
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Orlie Pell"well, what can we do about this? How can we work for more economic security?
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Orlie PellHow can we work to see that our jobs are not quite so much on the edge of
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Orlie Pelldisaster?" We also had a problem with them, I think,
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Orlie Pellthat many of them came.
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Orlie PellThat was the days of isms and our people were beginning to divide up.
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Orlie PellThere was capitalism, and there was communism,
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Orlie Pelland there was one thing or another, and you have to take sides,
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Orlie Pelland you have to be this and that.
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Orlie PellYou have to have an "ism." And they couldn't understand that
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Orlie Pellour approach was this democratic educational [inaudible] that you began and got
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Orlie Pellpeople thinking. You were not telling them what to think,
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Orlie Pellyou were trying to get them to think, and help them in how to think,
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Orlie Pellbut not what to think.
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Orlie PellAnd I had an awful argument with one girl who had an "ism" in her background,
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Orlie Pelland she couldn't believe that we were not there to put over some kind of
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Orlie Pellpropaganda,
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Orlie Pellthat we were really some kind of "ists" or some kind of "ism" we were trying to
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Orlie Pellget across.
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Orlie PellAnd I remember how pleased I was when at the end of the couple of weeks she came
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Orlie Pelland she said, "you know, I really believe you now.
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Orlie PellI think you were really interested in education and in helping us to think and
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Orlie Pellnot in getting an "ism" across." And that we really had convinced them by the
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Orlie Pellway we behaved, the way we acted,
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Orlie Pellthe way we worked the school that we were on the level,
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Orlie Pellthat we were on the up and up,
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Orlie Pelland that we were democratic in the real sense of trying to help them to develop
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Orlie Pelltheir thinking and not to accept this or that theory.
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Orlie PellSo there you had entirely different kinds of problems that white collar people
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Orlie Pellworked with.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAm I just say worried about these psychological tests?
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI think we had them partly at Bryn Mawr because we had a good psychologist on
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththe staff, Harriet Ahlers, who was interested in them,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand she set them up and conducted them in the first week of the
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithschool. Well,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththere was quite a good deal of unrest and protest among the students.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd I remember we tried to explain what they were and,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand they cooperated with it. They were worried about them.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithThey didn't know what was going on, what was happening,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhy they were being tested.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd I remember I tried to explain once by saying that they really were
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithexperimental, and we just wanted to understand if this was a good thing to use.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd I remember one student got up in the, in the school assembly and said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith"I wish to make a remark.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI am a student at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithand I am perfectly willing to be an experiment." And she sat down
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith[laughter]. And that sort of carried the day.
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Eleanor CoitAnd let me add a story. Jane always is the best one at stories. Uh,
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Eleanor Coitremember the man who said he would teach and said that he was running out of
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Eleanor Coiteconomics. [laughter] I thought that was your best one. [laughter] But, uh,
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Eleanor Coitone of the girls that came late to the summer school, uh,
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Eleanor Coithadn't taken the test. I don't know that I ever told you this or not. And she,
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Eleanor Coitum, I couldn't find her. She had to take this test,
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Eleanor Coitand she didn't think it was important. And she didn't know what it was about.
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Eleanor CoitAnd she said to me later, Eleanor,
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Eleanor Coitdo you remember what a fuss you made about that test? I was in the library,
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Eleanor Coitand I've always wanted to be in a library
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Eleanor Coit[laughter], and it didn't make any difference. She had come to learn.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAfter our training centers in the WPA,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhere we were trying to train these 2000 teachers in workers' education.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd after this training,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwe got a letter from this woman in Mississippi who just said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththis "I'm running out of economics,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithwhat shall I do next?" [laughter] [inaudible].
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Orlie PellGive me information about courses that are shot easy and cheap [laughter].
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Eleanor CoitAnd freely, I thought it was.
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Orlie PellWell, free. [cross-talk] Short, easy and free.
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Eleanor CoitYes. From all over the country, from teachers and workers,
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Eleanor Coitand how she understood each community well enough to answer them is,
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Eleanor Coitwas always a matter of great--I just thought you were remarkable,
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Eleanor Coitbecause she learned enough about the community and about the resources in the
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Eleanor Coitarea to really be helpful.
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Interviewer 1Would you please comment on the allowances that you made for the
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Interviewer 1foreign students that attended Bryn Mawr?
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Interviewer 1I recall a particular example in which you, uh,
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Interviewer 1decided to outline the map of the United States on the gym floor.
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Interviewer 1And you had students standing on certain parts,
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Interviewer 1certain parts of the gym floor, and they would, uh,
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Interviewer 1apparently they represented a certain part of the United States.
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Interviewer 1And in that way you taught, you were taught the, uh,
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Interviewer 1foreign students, the geography of the United States.
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Interviewer 1And I was wondering whether or not in doing so you had to resort to different
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Interviewer 1techniques that in trying to reach foreign students.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithIt was Amy Hughes that suggested in 1927 that we try to get some students from
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithother countries. She was going abroad that year.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithAnd she helped us organize committees in England and Sweden and
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithDenmark. And we had one in Germany for a while and then Belgium. But, uh,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththose students, um, they, they came over and the,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smiththose committees raised their travel. And we gave them scholarships.
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) SmithI remember something about that, that map of the United States,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithbut I also remember one of the foreign students who had come over in the
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smithearly days as an immigrant. And she looked at a map,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smitha map of the world and was very much puzzled. And she said,
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Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith"my God, did I come west when I came here--" (continues on side 2)
Transcript text
Interviewer (00:04):
Workers' education has seemed to go through a couple of stages in its development. Uh, the first phase that some people seem to notice is a phase in the early twenties and early thirties in which the character of the student body was not all trade unionists. And the curriculum at that early point seemed to be a curriculum that was a liberal arts curriculum based in the social sciences, giving a broad offering of educational, uh, opportunities to the students. With the rise of the CIO and a, uh, the period of the mid thirties to the late thirties. The curriculum of workers' education seems to change to the need, to meet the needs of the labor movement. Uh, the needs of being, uh, providing shop steward training, providing, uh, collective bargaining, uh, uh, procedures, et cetera. The student body seems to change from a student body made up totally of trade unionists. Uh, from your experience, is that a correct statement or what, what in fact do you see that, uh, moves along those lines? If anything?
Eleanor Coit (01:20):
Well, Ms. Smith and Ms. Pell, and I have agreed I'll start and that gives them the hardest part of doing the next part. Uh, certainly workers' education has changed constantly over the whole period of its life, and the curriculum is not a set curriculum. Some programs in workers' education would be one thing and other programs would be another thing in the early thirties. Um, you were speaking about a curriculum that centered on certain humanities, general thinking. Brookwood was in those days. And that wasn't what Brookwood concentrated on. Although what you have in mind is probably what some of the summer schools, uh, had in mind. Workers' education always changed, and continues to change, in terms of the needs of the Labor Movement, in terms of history, in terms of different groups, with which you're dealing in different parts of the country. And you say that it eventually became bread and butter. ALES never became bread and butter ever. It stayed in the social sciences, it worked on community problems, worked on international problems, worked on certainly specific trade union problems, but the character and curriculum always adjusted to the needs and the interests of the students and the developments in the Labor Movement and the needs of the Labor Movement and to the historical scene. Ms. Smith, please go on.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (02:49):
Well, I should say that's a very good summary. Uh, I was thinking of say, you take one worker's class, I'm speaking with the Bryn Mawr Summer School. And those classes were very different, but in any of those classes, if you sat through even for a couple of hours, you would find that the discussion was very closely related to what the students were going to find and what they wanted to do when they went home in their own communities, whether or not they were from YWs or settlements or from the unions. They had in mind, something that they could take back to those other workers. And I definitely remember a student who came into my office in the early days of the Bryn Mawr School. She was a garment worker from Baltimore--a laundry worker from Baltimore. She said, you know, I don't think I'm getting anything here that the laundry workers in my, in my community can use.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (03:43):
She said they will expect me to come back and put up the sun and fix the moon and arrange all the stars for them. She said, I don't think I'm getting anything that's going to help those laundry workers. So we got her faculty together with her and we went over her, her course, her curriculum. And we changed that her eight weeks in that school for something very specific that she could use with laundry workers in Baltimore. Now this often came down to individual adjustments, but you, you all know, I'm sure, that the instruction was not academic. It was, it was related to the people in the class. Uh, and when you spoke of arts and humanities, including the social sciences, that rather threw me off the track, because I didn't think of those as arts and humanities or whatever they were called. I thought of those as economics and English, elementary science, uh, all the things that were related to the situation of those students in their own communities.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (04:52):
And in general, they wanted, they wanted to understand something about, uh, their employer's problems, their union problems, their communities, and responsibilities in those communities, in general way, citizenship. And I often thought of our curriculum as in those four categories: the worker and the industry; the worker and his union, or her union; the worker as related to government, like the laws that affected that job; and the worker in the community in a general way, citizenship. All tied together with a great deal of English, which they all wanted a great deal of practice and public speaking and methods of publicity and visual education, things that they could use, which were basic. Now, I don't know that that answers your question at all, but in general, there seems to be what I would regard as, as a method in workers' education, which still holds good. And I might just add one, one comment that surprised me and gave me a [laughs] great deal to think about.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (06:02):
And this was in local 189, two or three years ago, where a group of university professors actually raised a question, which gave me a great feeling of shock. They said, should controversial subjects be discussed in workers' classes? Well, I thought we're back in the kindergarten stage, the early days of the Bryn Mawr School, where we actually had a long discussion, did we dare use the term social action? Because those were dirty words at that time. And here we've come around to it in a circle to where university professors are questioning [laughs] whether or not controversial subjects should be brought up. And I just thought, well, in about five minutes in a worker's class, they will find that they are in controversial subjects [laughter].
Orlie Pell (06:51):
And yet, uh, isn't it true, Jane, that the Labor Movement, the outside world did change, labor did become stronger in the thirties. And with that change in the world and in the strength of the Labor Movement, there had to be a difference in the emphasis in the curriculum. It did deal more, didn't it with labor oriented subjects than it had in the early days when such a small proportion of students were in unions or were active in unions?
Eleanor Coit (07:18):
Well, I think it's important to recognize that almost any subject is labor oriented in one way or another. Uh, the changing in program of the American Labor Education Service, uh, one of the most important things we worked on in the late fifties was labor in the community, problems of labor in the community, older workers, uh, all kinds of health problems that are labor oriented. And what you were working on always was, as Jane says, the thing that confronted workers and that they had to do something about, and they were, you were hoping that workers' education would mean they would understand the world they lived in better and understand how more effectively to meet the problems that they had. Now, as far as whether people were more and more trade unionists in classes, I suppose they were because there were more and more trade unionists. But again, the school's all different.
Eleanor Coit (08:14):
You say Bryn Mawr started with half and half. Brookwood started with all trade unionists. And certainly the white collar school, which started in '33, started almost all unorganized because they weren't, uh, organized. I remember Theresa Wilson who was teaching economics saying to me, do you suppose we'll ever get to the Labor Movement? Because there was so much in economic history that had to be understood to put it in its setting, uh, so that it would depend on the school, depend on the need, and for instance, one of the last things the white collar school did was to have joint conferences with social workers. Well, they happened to be organized social workers, but they were concerned
Eleanor Coit (08:56):
with problems that affected unorganized social workers, as well as social workers, so that the, you were trying to meet a situation. And, uh, what happened related to that situation and to that need.
Interviewer (09:16):
Reading some of the things you've written, uh, about the, uh, the affiliated schools, I remember what came through to me very clearly about the spirit of those schools was the desire to develop critical thinking among the students. And of course, uh, you confronted the problem of controversial subjects by you, uh, addressing it. But yet, uh, well we find in labor education here that this is the bread and butter of our classroom. Uh, nothing is alien to labor education, no matter how controversial, and this is what makes up a basic, uh, uh, part of it of. I know that in the early years of our program, and Dr. Levine has been doing some research recently into these early years here at Rutgers, there were some problems with, for example, management, uh, one company, uh, official, uh, looking with a jaundice eye at the singing of solidarity forever at the end of some of our, at the end of one of our programs. And I know that in the Bryn Mawr experience, you had some problems with the administration of the college, uh, around the controversial, extra curricular activities of the students. And I was wondering if you would tell us a little bit about that period in 1935 when the school was in jeopardy, the summer school was in jeopardy as a result of, uh, some of this controversy,
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (10:48):
The school was evicted by the college for two years. Well, this came about, we thought from a misunderstanding in the original, uh, agreement with the Trustees of Bryn Mawr College. And this is, you probably all know, is the idea of president M. Carey Thomas. She went to England in 1920, and she found that in England every university had a worker's school. So she came back with this rather startling idea of opening the buildings for women from the factories, uh, four and eight weeks course. Well, in 1935, there was a cannery strike nearby. And we had had an agreement with the Trustees that while individuals could do anything they please, take part in strikes, and we had some, some, uh, industrial workers who came to Bryn Mawr, right from jail. They'd been in jail for picketing. But that we would not as a school take part in demonstrations, we would not carry banners.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (11:46):
We would not March as a school. Well, in this cannery strike nearby, it was a few miles away, uh, two of the faculty, Mildred Fairchild and Colston Warne went over just to see it. They found that the conditions were very bad. Uh, apparently tear gas had been used. There were, there were women in the dormitories who were ill. And they persuaded the, uh, employer to call in a doctor and not to use this tear gas. Uh, no one from the student body went near that strike, but to our great surprise, we were in the headlines next day. And one of the Trustees, one of our friends had misinterpreted this agreement, and we were accused of having broken that agreement about strikes. Whereas it was not broken at all because as a school we hadn't been near the strike. We didn't even know there were demonstrations. Anyway, without much discussion the college announced that we could not come back the next year.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (12:55):
And we decided we were going to carry on somewhere in some way. So we, we borrowed the camp from the art workshop up in the Ramapo Mountains. And for two years, we conducted the summer school up there. And Mrs. Oti (?), Mrs., uh, Bryn Mawr alumni who had been on the school staff was the director up there for two years. And it was, it ran as a perfectly normal worker school. It wasn't as large, but it went on. Then, by that time, the alumni all over the country, the Bryn Mawr alumni were very much enraged that this school had been put out. Uh, they were supporting it. We had 50 committees all through the country that were working for it. Uh, the former students of course, were, were terribly upset that the school was not there on the Bryn Mawr campus the next year. So the Trustees asked for a conference with us, and I think I've never been at a funnier meeting.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (13:59):
We set up a committee, and we met with the committee of the Trustees. And another accusation that they had against us, not only this strike thing, but they also misinterpreted what had happened in the school when we installed what they call the unit plan, which broke down the hundred, a hundred students into units of 20, each with an English teacher and an economist, and then cutting across on science and other things. And it made it very much less confusing for the students to, to be in a unit where they, they were, they weren't so mixed up going from one, one place to another all the time. But another accusation the college had against us at that time, that the original idea was a broad cultural program, and here we'd become all economics, they said all economics. So at that meeting that day, uh, they, one of the Trustees said, "could we have a school here in art, literature, and whatever, like humanities?"
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (15:06):
And we all said, "Oh yes, we can get such a school." And then they said, "Well, if we had such a school, wouldn't they get a little interested in economics? If they came here?" I said, "well not if you didn't, if you didn't teach it, I think." And they said, uh, "could, could we have a school like that?" I said, "yes, you can probably find people interested in art, literature, and the humanities, and you can have a school." And then they said, "would I come back and direct it?" And I said, "no, thank you. Because I would prefer to direct a worker school." And then the, all these nice, Quaker trustees, chorused, "well, what we want is a worker school." And our committee said, "we want a real worker school." Our committee said "you had one and you put it out." So they begged us to come back, on our own trips. And we went back and had, I guess, 12 more years on the Bryn Mawr campus after that, before we moved it to Hudson Shore. I don't know if that answers your question.
Interviewer (16:25):
It certainly does. [inaudible]
Eleanor Coit (16:28):
... but perhaps that's not what the group is interested in.
Interviewer (16:30):
Please do.
Eleanor Coit (16:32):
Well, I just think that we're putting a great deal of attention, as we should, on certain pioneer efforts about workers' education, certainly didn't consist only of the resident schools. There was a great deal, as you know, even in the early days, as you know, the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor had interesting classes. And as you know, the Women's Trade Union League in Chicago was teaching, and there were many other needs that had to be met supplementing these resident schools, which in mind were among the most important and the affiliated schools, um, about 1940, Ms. Smith went to Washington--'34 didn't you, Ms. Smith?--
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (17:20):
--'33--
Eleanor Coit (17:21):
--between 33 and 34. But you continued, as the director of the affiliated schools through '34, I think, before, the latter part of part of it anyway.
Eleanor Coit (17:27):
[crosstalk] And then the affiliated schools continued for another six or seven years, but partly through cooperating with the WPA program, which Ms. Smith ran. Our functions, uh, became broader and broader and not a coordinating body as it had been originally for the summer schools. We could still service the summer schools, but we serviced trade unions, we serviced workers groups of all kinds, all types of unions, all types of, uh, the parts of the country, all, um, approaches, all attitudes. And, uh, it was interesting, the kinds of special interests, uh, that had to been met that were not just bread and butter. That's the point I want to point out, uh, for instance, the summer school, the res--the ALES, which it became known as, did, um, uh, act as a center for many workers' education people to get together. But that's not my, what I was talking about.
Eleanor Coit (18:29):
We began to work in the white collar field, which was a new field in which the trade unions were beginning to be interested. We worked on the exchange of workers between this country and other countries. We worked on the problems of intergroup relations and the contribution of all groups, minority groups of all kinds, as well as others on the democratic approach. We worked on farmer labor relations. We worked on international affairs. We worked on labor in the community. The trade union movement had moved into an area of much wider concerns than only collective bargaining, as you know, they moved into a not, uh, interest in the total community and their contribution to the community and into understanding and taking part in world affairs. And I think it's awfully important to think of a curriculum as being based on all kinds of needs, uh, and not just on certain needs. Would that put it, Orlie, as you would put it?
Orlie Pell (19:27):
Yes, I would think so.
Eleanor Coit (19:29):
But anyway, that seems to me important all the time, of course, the affiliated schools, the Bryn Mawr Summer School, and the ALES worked on method, which was a very, very important part of our work. And on materials for workers' classes, uh, on training of teachers, as well as leadership training of trade unionists. But I think if you're going to think in terms of workers' education, you have to think in very, very broad terms.
Interviewer (19:59):
Uh, if I may, if I may, I'd like to ask you about the methods that you use in conducting your classes at Bryn Mawr. Um, I read, uh, that, uh, you used psychological tests, uh, in which you hope to, uh, determine, uh, what the deficiencies or inadequacies of your students were at the time. And you've mentioned in one of your books that their reading levels were particularly low. But of more interest perhaps is, is the fact that you used some very interesting teaching techniques. Um, uh, you mentioned that, um, you use things like, uh, techniques like role-playing, mock legislatures, things which have been, techniques which have been popularized in the schools today. [inaudible]
Eleanor Coit (20:55):
I'd like Orlie to follow it up though, because she was a teacher in the white collar school. And again, you use the same techniques, but with very different type of mind, with a very different experience, with a very different attitude. You always began where the group were. You began it, as Jane said, in terms of their interests. If you were teaching economics, you didn't do a long historical study first. You began with the problem in their plans and they were probably acting it out. And there you call that role-playing, well, we did it long before you called it role-playing because that's the way you got people thinking. But your whole approach was to begin where they were and interpret the world in which they lived. And it was--the psychological tests at Bryn Mawr, I think Jane ought to speak to rather than I because she was the one who conceived them. But it was very interesting.
Eleanor Coit (21:46):
For instance, at the Wisconsin school, they found ways to divide up. I remember how I used to go to all the schools. I was the lucky one because I worked for the affiliated schools as educational director for three or four years. And I thought they divided them. They were talking about their groups. They named them for the lakes. [laughter] I decided those were psychological terms, and I was--[laughter]--it was an awful joke when I [laughter] decided they divided them intelligently, but their naming was just for the lakes. And I didn't have to be as bright as I thought [laughter]. But each school found a way, and they integrated, you see, the teachers sat in each other's classes. I was thinking the other night about a class at the Wisconsin school. I think it was being taught by Bill Haber, who was one of the economists. And they were just on the edge of their seats with the discussion they were having in the area of economics, and they came to the end of the class and they said, "Oh, what will we do? We have to go to study English." And Mike Giles (?) who was an English teacher said, "Go right ahead. We'll do mine later." Now you see you were working on the ability of the student to comprehend ideas and to make judgments intelligently and to understand, and you weren't in little pockets. Now, Orlie, why don't you illustrate it from the white collar school?
Orlie Pell (23:07):
Well, I'd be glad to. When you mentioned that the reading level of the people, some of the people at the Bryn Mawr School may have been low. The exact opposite was true in the white collar school. They were relatively well educated and what's more, they felt that they were educated. They'd been through school. And the problem with white collar workers was to get them to see that there was a lot more to education than just finishing high school and knowing that much academic material, and then no more. So that you have to begin getting them thinking of themselves as living in a world that was more complex than they had thought. And to get them to think about that, worry about things and to think about things, uh, that they had perhaps taken for granted, or hadn't worried about before. So you began with educated people and got them interested in their own economic problems, which some of them hadn't thought so much about.
Orlie Pell (23:55):
I remember Tom Tippett starting one of the classes--he was in econ--he was doing economics at the white collar school. And he said, "look, if you're job, each of you now, if your job ended today, how long could you live on your financial resources? How much do you have that you could live on? Or how many weeks or months or years could you live?" And, you know, that just brought them up. They hadn't thought of that. And some of them said, "Well, I don't think I could live more than a couple of weeks." And some of them said, "Well, I think I could for a couple of months." But they began to realize how awfully close they were to, to economic disaster. And yet they thought of themselves in jobs, white collar jobs that were secure and respectable and close to the boss. They were sitting pretty, and yet they were closer to the economic disaster than they thought.
Orlie Pell (24:40):
And he got them to think of that right away there. And then they began and said, "well, what can we do about this? How can we work for more economic security? How can we work to see that our jobs are not quite so much on the edge of disaster?" We also had a problem with them, I think, that many of them came. That was the days of isms and our people were beginning to divide up. There was capitalism, and there was communism, and there was one thing or another, and you have to take sides, and you have to be this and that. You have to have an "ism." And they couldn't understand that our approach was this democratic educational [inaudible] that you began and got people thinking. You were not telling them what to think, you were trying to get them to think, and help them in how to think, but not what to think.
Orlie Pell (25:25):
And I had an awful argument with one girl who had an "ism" in her background, and she couldn't believe that we were not there to put over some kind of propaganda, that we were really some kind of "ists" or some kind of "ism" we were trying to get across. And I remember how pleased I was when at the end of the couple of weeks she came and she said, "you know, I really believe you now. I think you were really interested in education and in helping us to think and not in getting an "ism" across." And that we really had convinced them by the way we behaved, the way we acted, the way we worked the school that we were on the level, that we were on the up and up, and that we were democratic in the real sense of trying to help them to develop their thinking and not to accept this or that theory. So there you had entirely different kinds of problems that white collar people worked with.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (26:15):
Am I just say worried about these psychological tests? I think we had them partly at Bryn Mawr because we had a good psychologist on the staff, Harriet Ahlers, who was interested in them, and she set them up and conducted them in the first week of the school. Well, there was quite a good deal of unrest and protest among the students. And I remember we tried to explain what they were and, and they cooperated with it. They were worried about
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (26:44):
them. They didn't know what was going on, what was happening, why they were being tested. And I remember I tried to explain once by saying that they really were experimental, and we just wanted to understand if this was a good thing to use. And I remember one student got up in the, in the school assembly and said, "I wish to make a remark. I am a student at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and I am perfectly willing to be an experiment." And she sat down [laughter]. And that sort of carried the day.
Eleanor Coit (27:14):
And let me add a story. Jane always is the best one at stories. Uh, remember the man who said he would teach and said that he was running out of economics. [laughter] I thought that was your best one. [laughter] But, uh, one of the girls that came late to the summer school, uh, hadn't taken the test. I don't know that I ever told you this or not. And she, um, I couldn't find her. She had to take this test, and she didn't think it was important. And she didn't know what it was about. And she said to me later, Eleanor, do you remember what a fuss you made about that test? I was in the library, and I've always wanted to be in a library [laughter], and it didn't make any difference. She had come to learn.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (27:58):
After our training centers in the WPA, where we were trying to train these 2000 teachers in workers' education. And after this training, we got a letter from this woman in Mississippi who just said, this "I'm running out of economics, what shall I do next?" [laughter] [inaudible]
Orlie Pell (28:24):
Give me information about courses that are shot easy and cheap [laughter].
Eleanor Coit (28:28):
And freely, I thought it was.
Orlie Pell (28:31):
Well, free. [cross-talk] Short, easy and free.
Eleanor Coit (28:35):
Yes. From all over the country, from teachers and workers, and how she understood each community well enough to answer them is, was always a matter of great--I just thought you were remarkable, because she learned enough about the community and about the resources in the area to really be helpful.
Interviewer (28:56):
Would you please comment on the allowances that you made for the foreign students that attended Bryn Mawr? I recall a particular example in which you, uh, decided to outline the map of the United States on the gym floor. And you had students standing on certain parts, certain parts of the gym floor, and they would, uh, apparently they represented a certain part of the United States. And in that way you taught, you were taught the, uh, foreign students, the geography of the United States. And I was wondering whether or not in doing so you had to resort to different techniques that in trying to reach foreign students.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (29:43):
It was Amy Hughes that suggested in 1927 that we try to get some students from other countries. She was going abroad that year. And she helped us organize committees in England and Sweden and Denmark. And we had one in Germany for a while and then Belgium. But, uh, those students, um, they, they came over and the, those committees raised their travel. And we gave them scholarships. I remember something about that, that map of the United States, but I also remember one of the foreign students who had come over in the early days as an immigrant. And she looked at a map, a map of the world and was very much puzzled. And she said, "my God, did I come west when I came here."
Workers' education has seemed to go through a couple of stages in its development. Uh, the first phase that some people seem to notice is a phase in the early twenties and early thirties in which the character of the student body was not all trade unionists. And the curriculum at that early point seemed to be a curriculum that was a liberal arts curriculum based in the social sciences, giving a broad offering of educational, uh, opportunities to the students. With the rise of the CIO and a, uh, the period of the mid thirties to the late thirties. The curriculum of workers' education seems to change to the need, to meet the needs of the labor movement. Uh, the needs of being, uh, providing shop steward training, providing, uh, collective bargaining, uh, uh, procedures, et cetera. The student body seems to change from a student body made up totally of trade unionists. Uh, from your experience, is that a correct statement or what, what in fact do you see that, uh, moves along those lines? If anything?
Eleanor Coit (01:20):
Well, Ms. Smith and Ms. Pell, and I have agreed I'll start and that gives them the hardest part of doing the next part. Uh, certainly workers' education has changed constantly over the whole period of its life, and the curriculum is not a set curriculum. Some programs in workers' education would be one thing and other programs would be another thing in the early thirties. Um, you were speaking about a curriculum that centered on certain humanities, general thinking. Brookwood was in those days. And that wasn't what Brookwood concentrated on. Although what you have in mind is probably what some of the summer schools, uh, had in mind. Workers' education always changed, and continues to change, in terms of the needs of the Labor Movement, in terms of history, in terms of different groups, with which you're dealing in different parts of the country. And you say that it eventually became bread and butter. ALES never became bread and butter ever. It stayed in the social sciences, it worked on community problems, worked on international problems, worked on certainly specific trade union problems, but the character and curriculum always adjusted to the needs and the interests of the students and the developments in the Labor Movement and the needs of the Labor Movement and to the historical scene. Ms. Smith, please go on.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (02:49):
Well, I should say that's a very good summary. Uh, I was thinking of say, you take one worker's class, I'm speaking with the Bryn Mawr Summer School. And those classes were very different, but in any of those classes, if you sat through even for a couple of hours, you would find that the discussion was very closely related to what the students were going to find and what they wanted to do when they went home in their own communities, whether or not they were from YWs or settlements or from the unions. They had in mind, something that they could take back to those other workers. And I definitely remember a student who came into my office in the early days of the Bryn Mawr School. She was a garment worker from Baltimore--a laundry worker from Baltimore. She said, you know, I don't think I'm getting anything here that the laundry workers in my, in my community can use.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (03:43):
She said they will expect me to come back and put up the sun and fix the moon and arrange all the stars for them. She said, I don't think I'm getting anything that's going to help those laundry workers. So we got her faculty together with her and we went over her, her course, her curriculum. And we changed that her eight weeks in that school for something very specific that she could use with laundry workers in Baltimore. Now this often came down to individual adjustments, but you, you all know, I'm sure, that the instruction was not academic. It was, it was related to the people in the class. Uh, and when you spoke of arts and humanities, including the social sciences, that rather threw me off the track, because I didn't think of those as arts and humanities or whatever they were called. I thought of those as economics and English, elementary science, uh, all the things that were related to the situation of those students in their own communities.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (04:52):
And in general, they wanted, they wanted to understand something about, uh, their employer's problems, their union problems, their communities, and responsibilities in those communities, in general way, citizenship. And I often thought of our curriculum as in those four categories: the worker and the industry; the worker and his union, or her union; the worker as related to government, like the laws that affected that job; and the worker in the community in a general way, citizenship. All tied together with a great deal of English, which they all wanted a great deal of practice and public speaking and methods of publicity and visual education, things that they could use, which were basic. Now, I don't know that that answers your question at all, but in general, there seems to be what I would regard as, as a method in workers' education, which still holds good. And I might just add one, one comment that surprised me and gave me a [laughs] great deal to think about.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (06:02):
And this was in local 189, two or three years ago, where a group of university professors actually raised a question, which gave me a great feeling of shock. They said, should controversial subjects be discussed in workers' classes? Well, I thought we're back in the kindergarten stage, the early days of the Bryn Mawr School, where we actually had a long discussion, did we dare use the term social action? Because those were dirty words at that time. And here we've come around to it in a circle to where university professors are questioning [laughs] whether or not controversial subjects should be brought up. And I just thought, well, in about five minutes in a worker's class, they will find that they are in controversial subjects [laughter].
Orlie Pell (06:51):
And yet, uh, isn't it true, Jane, that the Labor Movement, the outside world did change, labor did become stronger in the thirties. And with that change in the world and in the strength of the Labor Movement, there had to be a difference in the emphasis in the curriculum. It did deal more, didn't it with labor oriented subjects than it had in the early days when such a small proportion of students were in unions or were active in unions?
Eleanor Coit (07:18):
Well, I think it's important to recognize that almost any subject is labor oriented in one way or another. Uh, the changing in program of the American Labor Education Service, uh, one of the most important things we worked on in the late fifties was labor in the community, problems of labor in the community, older workers, uh, all kinds of health problems that are labor oriented. And what you were working on always was, as Jane says, the thing that confronted workers and that they had to do something about, and they were, you were hoping that workers' education would mean they would understand the world they lived in better and understand how more effectively to meet the problems that they had. Now, as far as whether people were more and more trade unionists in classes, I suppose they were because there were more and more trade unionists. But again, the school's all different.
Eleanor Coit (08:14):
You say Bryn Mawr started with half and half. Brookwood started with all trade unionists. And certainly the white collar school, which started in '33, started almost all unorganized because they weren't, uh, organized. I remember Theresa Wilson who was teaching economics saying to me, do you suppose we'll ever get to the Labor Movement? Because there was so much in economic history that had to be understood to put it in its setting, uh, so that it would depend on the school, depend on the need, and for instance, one of the last things the white collar school did was to have joint conferences with social workers. Well, they happened to be organized social workers, but they were concerned
Eleanor Coit (08:56):
with problems that affected unorganized social workers, as well as social workers, so that the, you were trying to meet a situation. And, uh, what happened related to that situation and to that need.
Interviewer (09:16):
Reading some of the things you've written, uh, about the, uh, the affiliated schools, I remember what came through to me very clearly about the spirit of those schools was the desire to develop critical thinking among the students. And of course, uh, you confronted the problem of controversial subjects by you, uh, addressing it. But yet, uh, well we find in labor education here that this is the bread and butter of our classroom. Uh, nothing is alien to labor education, no matter how controversial, and this is what makes up a basic, uh, uh, part of it of. I know that in the early years of our program, and Dr. Levine has been doing some research recently into these early years here at Rutgers, there were some problems with, for example, management, uh, one company, uh, official, uh, looking with a jaundice eye at the singing of solidarity forever at the end of some of our, at the end of one of our programs. And I know that in the Bryn Mawr experience, you had some problems with the administration of the college, uh, around the controversial, extra curricular activities of the students. And I was wondering if you would tell us a little bit about that period in 1935 when the school was in jeopardy, the summer school was in jeopardy as a result of, uh, some of this controversy,
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (10:48):
The school was evicted by the college for two years. Well, this came about, we thought from a misunderstanding in the original, uh, agreement with the Trustees of Bryn Mawr College. And this is, you probably all know, is the idea of president M. Carey Thomas. She went to England in 1920, and she found that in England every university had a worker's school. So she came back with this rather startling idea of opening the buildings for women from the factories, uh, four and eight weeks course. Well, in 1935, there was a cannery strike nearby. And we had had an agreement with the Trustees that while individuals could do anything they please, take part in strikes, and we had some, some, uh, industrial workers who came to Bryn Mawr, right from jail. They'd been in jail for picketing. But that we would not as a school take part in demonstrations, we would not carry banners.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (11:46):
We would not March as a school. Well, in this cannery strike nearby, it was a few miles away, uh, two of the faculty, Mildred Fairchild and Colston Warne went over just to see it. They found that the conditions were very bad. Uh, apparently tear gas had been used. There were, there were women in the dormitories who were ill. And they persuaded the, uh, employer to call in a doctor and not to use this tear gas. Uh, no one from the student body went near that strike, but to our great surprise, we were in the headlines next day. And one of the Trustees, one of our friends had misinterpreted this agreement, and we were accused of having broken that agreement about strikes. Whereas it was not broken at all because as a school we hadn't been near the strike. We didn't even know there were demonstrations. Anyway, without much discussion the college announced that we could not come back the next year.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (12:55):
And we decided we were going to carry on somewhere in some way. So we, we borrowed the camp from the art workshop up in the Ramapo Mountains. And for two years, we conducted the summer school up there. And Mrs. Oti (?), Mrs., uh, Bryn Mawr alumni who had been on the school staff was the director up there for two years. And it was, it ran as a perfectly normal worker school. It wasn't as large, but it went on. Then, by that time, the alumni all over the country, the Bryn Mawr alumni were very much enraged that this school had been put out. Uh, they were supporting it. We had 50 committees all through the country that were working for it. Uh, the former students of course, were, were terribly upset that the school was not there on the Bryn Mawr campus the next year. So the Trustees asked for a conference with us, and I think I've never been at a funnier meeting.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (13:59):
We set up a committee, and we met with the committee of the Trustees. And another accusation that they had against us, not only this strike thing, but they also misinterpreted what had happened in the school when we installed what they call the unit plan, which broke down the hundred, a hundred students into units of 20, each with an English teacher and an economist, and then cutting across on science and other things. And it made it very much less confusing for the students to, to be in a unit where they, they were, they weren't so mixed up going from one, one place to another all the time. But another accusation the college had against us at that time, that the original idea was a broad cultural program, and here we'd become all economics, they said all economics. So at that meeting that day, uh, they, one of the Trustees said, "could we have a school here in art, literature, and whatever, like humanities?"
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (15:06):
And we all said, "Oh yes, we can get such a school." And then they said, "Well, if we had such a school, wouldn't they get a little interested in economics? If they came here?" I said, "well not if you didn't, if you didn't teach it, I think." And they said, uh, "could, could we have a school like that?" I said, "yes, you can probably find people interested in art, literature, and the humanities, and you can have a school." And then they said, "would I come back and direct it?" And I said, "no, thank you. Because I would prefer to direct a worker school." And then the, all these nice, Quaker trustees, chorused, "well, what we want is a worker school." And our committee said, "we want a real worker school." Our committee said "you had one and you put it out." So they begged us to come back, on our own trips. And we went back and had, I guess, 12 more years on the Bryn Mawr campus after that, before we moved it to Hudson Shore. I don't know if that answers your question.
Interviewer (16:25):
It certainly does. [inaudible]
Eleanor Coit (16:28):
... but perhaps that's not what the group is interested in.
Interviewer (16:30):
Please do.
Eleanor Coit (16:32):
Well, I just think that we're putting a great deal of attention, as we should, on certain pioneer efforts about workers' education, certainly didn't consist only of the resident schools. There was a great deal, as you know, even in the early days, as you know, the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor had interesting classes. And as you know, the Women's Trade Union League in Chicago was teaching, and there were many other needs that had to be met supplementing these resident schools, which in mind were among the most important and the affiliated schools, um, about 1940, Ms. Smith went to Washington--'34 didn't you, Ms. Smith?--
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (17:20):
--'33--
Eleanor Coit (17:21):
--between 33 and 34. But you continued, as the director of the affiliated schools through '34, I think, before, the latter part of part of it anyway.
Eleanor Coit (17:27):
[crosstalk] And then the affiliated schools continued for another six or seven years, but partly through cooperating with the WPA program, which Ms. Smith ran. Our functions, uh, became broader and broader and not a coordinating body as it had been originally for the summer schools. We could still service the summer schools, but we serviced trade unions, we serviced workers groups of all kinds, all types of unions, all types of, uh, the parts of the country, all, um, approaches, all attitudes. And, uh, it was interesting, the kinds of special interests, uh, that had to been met that were not just bread and butter. That's the point I want to point out, uh, for instance, the summer school, the res--the ALES, which it became known as, did, um, uh, act as a center for many workers' education people to get together. But that's not my, what I was talking about.
Eleanor Coit (18:29):
We began to work in the white collar field, which was a new field in which the trade unions were beginning to be interested. We worked on the exchange of workers between this country and other countries. We worked on the problems of intergroup relations and the contribution of all groups, minority groups of all kinds, as well as others on the democratic approach. We worked on farmer labor relations. We worked on international affairs. We worked on labor in the community. The trade union movement had moved into an area of much wider concerns than only collective bargaining, as you know, they moved into a not, uh, interest in the total community and their contribution to the community and into understanding and taking part in world affairs. And I think it's awfully important to think of a curriculum as being based on all kinds of needs, uh, and not just on certain needs. Would that put it, Orlie, as you would put it?
Orlie Pell (19:27):
Yes, I would think so.
Eleanor Coit (19:29):
But anyway, that seems to me important all the time, of course, the affiliated schools, the Bryn Mawr Summer School, and the ALES worked on method, which was a very, very important part of our work. And on materials for workers' classes, uh, on training of teachers, as well as leadership training of trade unionists. But I think if you're going to think in terms of workers' education, you have to think in very, very broad terms.
Interviewer (19:59):
Uh, if I may, if I may, I'd like to ask you about the methods that you use in conducting your classes at Bryn Mawr. Um, I read, uh, that, uh, you used psychological tests, uh, in which you hope to, uh, determine, uh, what the deficiencies or inadequacies of your students were at the time. And you've mentioned in one of your books that their reading levels were particularly low. But of more interest perhaps is, is the fact that you used some very interesting teaching techniques. Um, uh, you mentioned that, um, you use things like, uh, techniques like role-playing, mock legislatures, things which have been, techniques which have been popularized in the schools today. [inaudible]
Eleanor Coit (20:55):
I'd like Orlie to follow it up though, because she was a teacher in the white collar school. And again, you use the same techniques, but with very different type of mind, with a very different experience, with a very different attitude. You always began where the group were. You began it, as Jane said, in terms of their interests. If you were teaching economics, you didn't do a long historical study first. You began with the problem in their plans and they were probably acting it out. And there you call that role-playing, well, we did it long before you called it role-playing because that's the way you got people thinking. But your whole approach was to begin where they were and interpret the world in which they lived. And it was--the psychological tests at Bryn Mawr, I think Jane ought to speak to rather than I because she was the one who conceived them. But it was very interesting.
Eleanor Coit (21:46):
For instance, at the Wisconsin school, they found ways to divide up. I remember how I used to go to all the schools. I was the lucky one because I worked for the affiliated schools as educational director for three or four years. And I thought they divided them. They were talking about their groups. They named them for the lakes. [laughter] I decided those were psychological terms, and I was--[laughter]--it was an awful joke when I [laughter] decided they divided them intelligently, but their naming was just for the lakes. And I didn't have to be as bright as I thought [laughter]. But each school found a way, and they integrated, you see, the teachers sat in each other's classes. I was thinking the other night about a class at the Wisconsin school. I think it was being taught by Bill Haber, who was one of the economists. And they were just on the edge of their seats with the discussion they were having in the area of economics, and they came to the end of the class and they said, "Oh, what will we do? We have to go to study English." And Mike Giles (?) who was an English teacher said, "Go right ahead. We'll do mine later." Now you see you were working on the ability of the student to comprehend ideas and to make judgments intelligently and to understand, and you weren't in little pockets. Now, Orlie, why don't you illustrate it from the white collar school?
Orlie Pell (23:07):
Well, I'd be glad to. When you mentioned that the reading level of the people, some of the people at the Bryn Mawr School may have been low. The exact opposite was true in the white collar school. They were relatively well educated and what's more, they felt that they were educated. They'd been through school. And the problem with white collar workers was to get them to see that there was a lot more to education than just finishing high school and knowing that much academic material, and then no more. So that you have to begin getting them thinking of themselves as living in a world that was more complex than they had thought. And to get them to think about that, worry about things and to think about things, uh, that they had perhaps taken for granted, or hadn't worried about before. So you began with educated people and got them interested in their own economic problems, which some of them hadn't thought so much about.
Orlie Pell (23:55):
I remember Tom Tippett starting one of the classes--he was in econ--he was doing economics at the white collar school. And he said, "look, if you're job, each of you now, if your job ended today, how long could you live on your financial resources? How much do you have that you could live on? Or how many weeks or months or years could you live?" And, you know, that just brought them up. They hadn't thought of that. And some of them said, "Well, I don't think I could live more than a couple of weeks." And some of them said, "Well, I think I could for a couple of months." But they began to realize how awfully close they were to, to economic disaster. And yet they thought of themselves in jobs, white collar jobs that were secure and respectable and close to the boss. They were sitting pretty, and yet they were closer to the economic disaster than they thought.
Orlie Pell (24:40):
And he got them to think of that right away there. And then they began and said, "well, what can we do about this? How can we work for more economic security? How can we work to see that our jobs are not quite so much on the edge of disaster?" We also had a problem with them, I think, that many of them came. That was the days of isms and our people were beginning to divide up. There was capitalism, and there was communism, and there was one thing or another, and you have to take sides, and you have to be this and that. You have to have an "ism." And they couldn't understand that our approach was this democratic educational [inaudible] that you began and got people thinking. You were not telling them what to think, you were trying to get them to think, and help them in how to think, but not what to think.
Orlie Pell (25:25):
And I had an awful argument with one girl who had an "ism" in her background, and she couldn't believe that we were not there to put over some kind of propaganda, that we were really some kind of "ists" or some kind of "ism" we were trying to get across. And I remember how pleased I was when at the end of the couple of weeks she came and she said, "you know, I really believe you now. I think you were really interested in education and in helping us to think and not in getting an "ism" across." And that we really had convinced them by the way we behaved, the way we acted, the way we worked the school that we were on the level, that we were on the up and up, and that we were democratic in the real sense of trying to help them to develop their thinking and not to accept this or that theory. So there you had entirely different kinds of problems that white collar people worked with.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (26:15):
Am I just say worried about these psychological tests? I think we had them partly at Bryn Mawr because we had a good psychologist on the staff, Harriet Ahlers, who was interested in them, and she set them up and conducted them in the first week of the school. Well, there was quite a good deal of unrest and protest among the students. And I remember we tried to explain what they were and, and they cooperated with it. They were worried about
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (26:44):
them. They didn't know what was going on, what was happening, why they were being tested. And I remember I tried to explain once by saying that they really were experimental, and we just wanted to understand if this was a good thing to use. And I remember one student got up in the, in the school assembly and said, "I wish to make a remark. I am a student at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and I am perfectly willing to be an experiment." And she sat down [laughter]. And that sort of carried the day.
Eleanor Coit (27:14):
And let me add a story. Jane always is the best one at stories. Uh, remember the man who said he would teach and said that he was running out of economics. [laughter] I thought that was your best one. [laughter] But, uh, one of the girls that came late to the summer school, uh, hadn't taken the test. I don't know that I ever told you this or not. And she, um, I couldn't find her. She had to take this test, and she didn't think it was important. And she didn't know what it was about. And she said to me later, Eleanor, do you remember what a fuss you made about that test? I was in the library, and I've always wanted to be in a library [laughter], and it didn't make any difference. She had come to learn.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (27:58):
After our training centers in the WPA, where we were trying to train these 2000 teachers in workers' education. And after this training, we got a letter from this woman in Mississippi who just said, this "I'm running out of economics, what shall I do next?" [laughter] [inaudible]
Orlie Pell (28:24):
Give me information about courses that are shot easy and cheap [laughter].
Eleanor Coit (28:28):
And freely, I thought it was.
Orlie Pell (28:31):
Well, free. [cross-talk] Short, easy and free.
Eleanor Coit (28:35):
Yes. From all over the country, from teachers and workers, and how she understood each community well enough to answer them is, was always a matter of great--I just thought you were remarkable, because she learned enough about the community and about the resources in the area to really be helpful.
Interviewer (28:56):
Would you please comment on the allowances that you made for the foreign students that attended Bryn Mawr? I recall a particular example in which you, uh, decided to outline the map of the United States on the gym floor. And you had students standing on certain parts, certain parts of the gym floor, and they would, uh, apparently they represented a certain part of the United States. And in that way you taught, you were taught the, uh, foreign students, the geography of the United States. And I was wondering whether or not in doing so you had to resort to different techniques that in trying to reach foreign students.
Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (29:43):
It was Amy Hughes that suggested in 1927 that we try to get some students from other countries. She was going abroad that year. And she helped us organize committees in England and Sweden and Denmark. And we had one in Germany for a while and then Belgium. But, uh, those students, um, they, they came over and the, those committees raised their travel. And we gave them scholarships. I remember something about that, that map of the United States, but I also remember one of the foreign students who had come over in the early days as an immigrant. And she looked at a map, a map of the world and was very much puzzled. And she said, "my God, did I come west when I came here."