Encouraging people to help and better themselves?  Teaching them to fish instead of giving them fish to eat?  Ludicrous!  It must be communism!  Call out the FBI!  Call out the National Guard!  Summon up the ghost of Ronald Reagan!  Shake a leg!  There’s no time to lose!  The America we all know and love is in danger of collapse!  I knew a mere pittance about Jane Addams and Hull House before today.  My information, as well as my admiration, grew this morning.

 

Hull House

Many of you have mentioned this already, and few will take issue, but I can’t get over the fact that she put so much emphasis into art.  Art is a universal language, and using this as the bottom rung on the later, Jane Addams encouraged thousands to take their personal bull by the horns and wrestle it to the ground.  It may gore you and bruise you, but at Hull House you had a fighting chance.  She didn’t just complain about social ills.  She didn’t just volunteer to cope with the symptoms of poverty and immigration.  Jane Addams and her colleagues attempted to identify the causes and possible solutions to serious problems in the community.  Together with the thousands who came to Hull House, they shook up the expectations of what life in America should be for everyone.

The University of Illinois in Chicago has conceived a living history piece to the museum.  The “Re-thinking Soup” lunches, growing and canning its own vegetables, shaking off the chains that tie people to conglomerate grocery warehouses, has shown visitors how Addams and her contemporaries accomplished their goals at Hull House.  

The self-sufficiency continues with her refusal to take public funds.  Mark Sims always quotes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar- “He who eats my bread does my will.”  Jane Addams understood that by taking public money, she would be pressured to do whatever the government wanted her to do.  We observe this trait in teachers every day, afraid to step out of the box because of who signs their check.  We need more “stepping out of the box” in education.  You are the expert in that classroom.  Do what you believe to be the correct thing.  Shake up the establishment.

 

p.s.  The display and question about Jane Addams sexual orientation was inane.  It had absolutely no bearing on her importance in history.  Secondly, why would the museum be asking an under-informed public to decide the issue when the museum itself didn’t take a stand?

 

Post Meridiem

This afternoon, the rain put a damper on the Architecture Boat Trip.  Initially not overly inclement, a sudden decrease of comfort precipitated us moving downstairs.  Our guide provided a deluge of info on the buildings we were passing.  She would shower us with facts as we ferried up and down the river.  How good it was depended on weather you could see.