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Field Work And Cooperation

Creator: Lucy Wright (author)
Date: July 1907
Publication: The Outlook for the Blind
Source: American Printing House for the Blind, Inc., M. C. Migel Library

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MISS LUCY WRIGHT
Superintendent Department of Registration and Information, Massachusetts Commission for the Blind

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Our papers and discussions as a whole, during the convention, seem to me to have pointed to two broad divisions of work for the blind: first, in the field of experiment, to find more and better special resources for the blind, that is, new occupations which may be followed without sight, a universal type, etc.; second, in the field of organization, to make better use of our present resources, and to lay a substantial foundation for future work. The first is a complex problem. The long neglect of the adult blind has resulted in an accumulation of difficulties, which will require a long period of hard and enthusiastic labor to remove; but the necessary experiments in new occupations will, I believe, be more effectively made if at the same time organization, the second division of work, is made of equal concern in any new movement for the blind. Field work and cooperation are, I believe, two of the biggest factors in solving this problem of organization. I shall, first of all, speak of field work as a means of finding out needs of the blind that could not be discovered, Or at least realized, in any other way; speak of one or two general needs suggested by field work in this state; and, finally, outline one way of helping to meet the needs of the blind in any state promptly, effectively, and economically.

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Here I wish to say that I think we are using field work in two senses, and that, for the guidance of states newly starting in this work, we ought to distinguish the two forms, either by different names or qualifying adjectives, according to the end they have in view -- for ends differ, as the Irishman in "The Seething Pot" admitted when confronted with two sets of statistics which didn't agree. "Them first statistics," said he, "was compiled for a different purpose." The foundation field work which confronts any state wishing to know the truth about the blind has as an end convincing the seeing persons of the state what they ought to do about the blind. As such, it should be done by seeing persons, and should completely cover a given area within a limited time, in order to present as a foundation for future work, an outline of the situation as a whole. Probably this ought to be called plain "census." I am glad to say that we are through with field work of this kind, and are busy about the kind of field work which needs to be continuous, and may best be done by both seeing and blind persons. It is this ideal kind of field work, not with information as an end, but in itself a means of helping the blind directly, of which Mr. Delfino is going to tell you the detail better than I could dream of doing. Home teaching is also a form of this kind of work.

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The thing that field work of either kind makes a living fact to any one engaged in it (I am sure Mr. Delfino and the home teachers will agree) is that the needs of the blind are extremely varied. During the last three years I have had an opportunity to visit a thousand or more homes in which there is a blind member of the family, and have had occasion to know about some hundreds more. It is perplexing even to try to think of the things they most need as a group. Here are three or four thousand blind persons scattered over this state, as they most be in every other, in hill towns miles from the railroad, in congested foreign quarters of our mill cities, in good homes and had homes, on avenues and in alleys -- young and old, blind from birth and blind after long lives of sighted usefulness. There are totally blind men who do not appear blind at all, and partially blind men who appear totally blind; children who are normal and children who are defective; courageous men, eager to do their part, men who will not ask for the help they need, and, now and then, we must confess, men who wish to be picked up and carried. There are homeless people and those who cannot leave their families; illiterate, unskilled persons who could only work in a special shop under supervision; skilled mechanics, and, here and there, highly trained men of literary ability and in command of modern languages. There are those who need everything -- relief, training, and work; those who need only the help of a guide, a market for goods, or, like one gentleman with defective sight who told me this week, "If you want to help me there are just three things I can think of you can do: viz., have the government make the figures on the new ten-dollar bills a larger size: require bells on rubber-tired vehicles; and require railway guides to speak up instead of shaking their heads at the blind." And he is right; those are real needs. It is such things as this that handicap hundreds of people with defective sight struggling to go on about their business without a straw of help from any one. Of all these three or four thousand blind a comparatively small group need any one thing. Obviously the largest single need is employment; but that, it should be said, of the most varied kinds and degrees of skill. A smaller group need schooling; some of them defective, some of them appearing so from lack of opportunity; some from good homes, many from kind homes but without a ghost of a chance for education and physical development. Others need the help of a blind babies' nursery, of home teaching, or a home for the aged. But many of the needs I have mentioned, and some I have yet to mention, could not, I wish to emphasize, be met by any one of our traditional institutions in itself. How are these needs to be continuously discovered and met?

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