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FIELD WORK OF THE MASSACHUSETTS COMMISSION FOR THE BLIND (1)

BY LUCY WRIGHT
Superintendent Registration and Information Department

IT is not easy to realize that there are among us, throughout the state, nearly 4,000 people without sight, or with very little sight. We who know personally full half the blind population of the state, if we could only wish one thing about them, would, I think, wish that you might know the blind of your own cities and towns, both on your own account for the inspiration you will find in the matchless courage of many of their lives, and on their account because you can help change the false notions and prejudices which are still such obstacles to their progress. We are eager that your state of mind shall not be the one we so often find outside workers for the blind and immediate friends, like that of the gentleman of whom Mr. Holmes told me yesterday (Mr. Holmes (2) is, as many of you know, the most active of blind men, and spends his time finding employment for other blind men), a gentleman who, with his wife, visited a school for the blind and showed no emotion or excitement until they happened upon the boys of the school making their preparations for dinner. He ran eagerly back for his wife. "Maria, Maria," he called, "come back! Come back and see these dear little blind boys washing their own hands!" Just so hard is it for as to imagine relying upon the convenient possessions of touch and of hearing and memory. And many of us are still surprised when a blind person, as the old colored woman said to Miss Garside, (3) "speaks up just as pert as anybody."

(3) One of the four blind home teachers employed by the state to instruct the blind in their homes.

I hope that we can show you that we cannot expect to provide for the blind as though they were a defective group to be sifted out of the population and isolated. (There is, to be sure, a defective group among the blind as among the seeing, but that is a problem in itself.) The problem of the blind is that of a handicapped group whose welfare is bound up with the life of the community. Work for the blind has been roughly divided into (1) care and education of the young blind, and (2) provision for the adult blind. Our particular problem, provision for the adult blind, may in turn be roughly divided into (a) efforts in industrial lines, particularly through shops, and (b) various efforts through what we may call "field work."

Field work is my particular province and the side of our work which most closely touches yours, but I cannot make its place in work for the blind quite clear without saying first a word in regard to this great general stirring that is taking place in work for the blind throughout the country. From all over the United States we hear news of it. In New York, Ohio, Illinois, Maine, and elsewhere, in one form or another, new movements are under way. Today Chicago and Milwaukee are in the midst of a most valuable experiment in education of blind children in the public schools; New York, through private philanthropy, among other things spends $5,000 this year in pursuing its efforts in the direction of prevention of blindness; only last week Ohio's new state commission was visiting ours; New Jersey is still investigating, and more is happening than I can give you a clew to in this brief paper. If you wish to follow the movement here and throughout the world, I refer you to the quarterly magazine, the Outlook for Blind, which will tell you that France has had its Valentin Hauy Association for many years, Germany has its Saxon system of "after-care," and England its substantial chain of workshops. We in the United States, who have had largely institutions for the young blind, and only a few hundred blind persons in the whole country employed in special workshops, are today at the beginning of a movement which will not rest until all preventable blindness has been prevented, until the competent blind have found a recognized place of usefulness in the community, and until the condition of the rest, the aged and otherwise handicapped, has been truly "ameliorated."

What does it mean? It means that the first seventy-five years of work for the blind in the United States have been devoted largely to the education of the young blind. Little by little we have waked up to the fact that the blind for life represent only a small part of the blind population. Home teaching and extension of library privileges have gradually developed for adults, and here and there industrial homes. With the continued extension of social and industrial movements, we have come a step further, and now ask ourselves, not only whether schools alone are adequate and workshops should be added, but whether we have yet found a system of providing for this handicapped class which takes sufficiently into account the economic and social conditions surrounding them. The new viewpoint is, to my mind, the change front the point of view of deeply rooted institutionalism, into which work for the blind fell after its first splendid impulse, to that of looking at work for the blind from the point of view of the blind man himself in his own community. The change that is going on as a result of the new point of view I like to call that of "socializing" work for the blind. Its characteristic method is field work, and it means reorganization and the development of a system in which school, shop, and community shall work together towards the common end of finding for the normal blind man, whether blind from infancy or later in life, a recognized place of usefulness in the world. It is not a change in aim, it is a change in method.