February 14: Disability and science
Read:
Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman, ch. 6-9
Please answer one of the following questions:
1) How would you characterize Howe’s and Bridgman’s relationship? How would you describe the power dynamics? What does this suggest about institution life? Use evidence from ch. 6-9 in Freeberg to support your answer. [answer only if you did not write on this topic for Tuesday]
2) After reading the chapters on morality and religion, how do you feel about Howe’s personality and his overall experiment with Laura Bridgman? Use evidence from ch. 6-9 in Freeberg to support your answer.
3) Alternatively, you can summarize in several sentences (or possibly a short paragraph each) your “muddiest point(s)” in ch. 6-9 in Freeberg.
I would characterize Howe’s and Bridgman’s relationship at this point, like any typical loving father and daughter bonding. Howe demonstrates this by making sure Laura’s needs came before any other child at Perkins Institution. As Freeberg explains, “… Her character and her educational experience were much more complex and multidimensional than Howe ever admitted, and as a result his public reports on Laura offered only half-truths. He mentioned her victories but almost never her setbacks.” (Freeberg p.88) He, like any proud father, only shared those things that cast Laura in a favorable light out of his adoration for her.
The dynamics of their relationship is one of child trying to receive praise and acceptance of a parent. Laura was constantly making efforts to please Howe and sought to accomplish her lessons out of this desire. Freeberg writes “While Laura never had to fear the schoolmasters rod, she could be stricken by the possibility of falling out of Howe’s favor.” (Freeberg p.89) This demonstrates the power dynamics was one of submissiveness and an earnest desire to be pleasing to the dominant, yet caring, Howe. This would lead the reader to believe that in institution life the teachers role is one of authority and allows them to extend favor or discipline to the charges in their care. The students, while submissive often develop a dependence on their teachers and feels an innate desire to please.
Bridgman looks up to Howe as a father and wants his approval. She knows that he writes about her in his journal and she does not want him to disapprove of her. When she misbehaves she wants to know if she is still loved. She loves him like he is her father and he thinks of her like his adopted daughter. When she was doing well in school he would brag about how well she was doing. I can also see their relationship as a doctor and patient. He is testing his methods on her as if she was a patient. He also writes about her to the public so they can see how he is able to help someone who did not have much language.
To Howe, Bridgman was a scientific experiment. He had an agenda to prove and he thought Bridgman was his best opportunity to do so. The most prominent way he tried to push his agenda was through her religious education. He attempted to completely close off any conversations that were related to religious topics because he wanted her views to match his. And so when other people did bring up their religious views with her without his consent, “The unfettered, natural soul that he had dreamed of guiding to lofty heights of religious knowledge had been sidetracked into empty commonplaces of evangelical religion” (Freeberg, pg 162).
I do not like Howe. Yes, he did a lot of good things and his reforms were beneficial, however, he also became too caught up in his own agenda. His desire to prove his phrenological and anti-Calvinism views interfered with his humanitarian work. He was able to educate Bridgman in a positive way, but she was still an experiment to him.
In many ways, their relationship seems to be similar to that of a father and daughter but with some caveats. In particular, his insistence on controlling her access to knowledge as part of his experiment to discover innate knowledge and intuitive moral purity seems to reflect an imbalanced power structure both within his school at Perkins. Granted, any parent passes on their own views to their children whether intentionally or not and there is always a power imbalance between parent and child. Regardless, three important things make Howe and Bridgman’s divergent from the traditional parent-child dynamic. First and most obviously, they are not related. Second, Bridgman’s condition allowed for Howe to enjoy near complete control over her access to knowledge about religion, sexuality, and a variety of other topics he deemed to either be beyond her reckoning, or unsavory and possibly corrupting. This allowed him to exercise a great deal more power than he would otherwise have with most other subjects. Finally, while Howe does maintain a personal relationship with Bridgman, his attitudes and goals for her remained largely scientific. On the other hand, while Bridgman does show affection for the attentions of Mr. Howe, she does show efforts to resist the dominance exerted in the institution through her constant questions about taboo topics. Without broader evidence it would be near impossible to extrapolate these experiences at Perkins across institutions as whole, at least with any certainty. Particularly, Howe had wide-ranging goals for his school that challenged the orthodox interpretations of Christianity and epistemology which influenced the power dynamics at Perkins. Still, it can be generalized that a paternalistic (and maternalistic), if misguided, attitude prevailed in institutions such as these during the 19th century.
The relationship between Laura and Howe can best be characterized as complicated. While evidence in the book points towards Laura seeing Howe as a father figure, it appears that Howe saw Laura as an experiment. As Freeberg cites, “she had been awed by Howe’s presence, utterly dependent on his good will and instruction, and nurtured by his affection in a way that she had never fully known from her biological parents” (e-book Ch. 8). Upon the announcement of his engagement, she was very concerned about how it would affect their relationship.
He demonstrated control over Laura in several areas of her life. He restricted what her teachers communicated/taught to her, he reviewed journals of her progress often, attempted to keep the public from speaking with her about religion, was very specific in how she should be disciplined, and also kept her in his wing of the school. When her education wasn’t progressing how he imagined it should, he became very bitter. At the end of the book Freeberg expresses Howe’s feelings concerning Laura in the statement, “Howe had been inspired by a vision of who Laura could become, and now this ideal was contradicted by who she actually was” (e-book Ch. 9).
After reading the chapters on morality and religion, It becomes extremely difficult for me to respect Dr. Howe. It appears as though Dr. Howe’s extremely cruel use of social and physical isolation of Laura Bridgman to receive the required results for his experiment is no different from, and perhaps worse than, the physical rod he came to despise so thoroughly. Although Dr. Howe does not acknowledge the fact that the gender difference between himself and his patient are important enough to alter the experiment’s outcomes, I believe that subconsciously he was aware of the influence his “fatherly” requests and punishments had on Laura. I honestly believe that Dr. Howe may have begun this experiment with the best of intentions, however it seems as though he is continually losing sight of the girl he is attempting to help, and replacing it with personal financial and social gain.
In chapters 6-9 on morality and religion, it seemed to me that Dr. Howe became so personally involved with his fight against Calvinism and his own belief system that he forgot that Laura Bridgman was a person and not a thing to use to prove a point. In modern language, I would call him a “control freak.” He controlled every aspect of Laura Bridgman’s life in order to get the results he wanted. Throughout the chapters, evidence shows that Laura had many questions, fears, and needs with regard to religion that Dr. Howe often ignored. I don’t believe that he was dilberately cruel or harmful to Laura but that he was so self centered that he didn’t consider what was best for her.
In these chapters, Freeberg discusses Howe’s belief that corporal punishment “was not only ineffective but dangerously at odds with the ideals and practical needs of a democratic republic.” Howe believed in the importance of a moral education for children but differed from most of that time period in the way he believed it should be done. He believed that a teacher should “cultivate the goodness that is in a child by creating an atmosphere of kindness, firmness, and consistency.” Howe believed that his “scientifice experiment” with Laura Bridgman would prove his point. He rarely reported those times when Laura “swerved for a moment from right.” When Laura did misbehave, Dr. Howe withdrew affection and attention from her as a type of punishment. He believed “social affections to be the cornerstone of morality.” He didn’t, however, think about the confusion that Laura might have in times when he was unavailable. Because Laura was particularly reliant on others, this type of punishment made her extremely vulnerable. She would do anything to please and not dissapoint the doctor.
As a liberal Christian, Dr. Howe had very specific plans for Laura’s religious education. He planned to use Laura as a means of “enlightening others.” In chapter 7, it states “when he dedicated his life to the service of others and the steady improvement of the human condition; Howe believed that he was also committing himself to a lifelong battle against the orthodox.” As Laura began to be curious about the existance of God, Dr. Howe directed others to not answer any of her questions that might be theological in nature. He believed that the best training he could offer Laura was to help her understand effects and causes. Howe later made the decision and notified Laura’s parents that he wanted to take complete control of her religious education in order to protect her from chance encounters with religion and maintain the purity of the experiment. Again, this is Howe’s way of completely controlling Laura for his own purposes.
When Dr. Howe became interested and later married the distinguished Julia Ward, he began spending less and less time with Laura. He entrusted her care to her tutors while he spent a year in Europe on an extended honeymoon. Laura , of course was confused and upset by his absence. During this time, she continued to obsess about the mysteries of religion. Dr. Howe continued the practice of not answering her questions or letters. Freeberg states, “Laura’s fear of death may have been inspired by her more general feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability. As more and more powerful people began to question Howe’s position and motives, Howe had to admit that the results of the “experiment” were inconclusive. After Laura became an adult, Howe stated “my hopes of Laura have, in some respects been dissappointed but that is clearly because they were unreasonable.”
Laura Bridgman was an experiment to Dr. Howe. He might have cared for her but she was a means to be exploited to achieve a result. He was selfish, boastful, flawed, and brilliant.
I believe that at the beginning of his experiment Dr. Howe truly cared for Laura Bridgman. However, as the experiment progressed he becomes very disillusioned with the whole thing. According to Freberg, as Laura grew into her teens he began to see more faults within her. In addition, Howe might have had humanitarian reasons for conducting this experiment, however his efforts to control every aspect of her education negate these reasons. The fact that he was trying to shape her religious views, to match his own illustrates that he is selfish and manipulative man. To some extent I agree with Haley’s comment that Howe forgot that Laura Bridgman was a human being and not a tool to be used and then discarded. This is illustrated in the fact that he completely controls, and at one point even bans all discussion of religion with Laura. I believe that at this point Howe sees his great experiment as a failure. In one of his annual reports Howe writes “‘ my hopes of Laura have, in some respects been disappointed, but that is clearly because they were unreasonable”‘ (qtd in Freberg chapter 9)
I think that Howe was a scientist and often treated Laura as a subject to study. He did not seem to have emotional attachments to her but he was interested in her for scientific reasons. As for Laura she would have naturally gotten attached to Howe because she was a young child. He was the one that provided her the opportunity to be able to learn the things that she had desired to learn. I think that Laura was old enough to know that she was missing out on things that other children could do even before she went to Howe’s school. In the beginning of the book it showed us that Laura had a desire to be busy. Howe provided her with the things she desired and she would have wanted to stay with him. She also would have done what she could to make him happy. Howe was treating her like a subject for study and although that might have been morally wrong, Laura gained a lot from what he was doing. In addition, without Howe I think that Laura would not have been as happy as she was with who she had become. I think that with the progress that Howe made within the “experiment” he conducted there is nothing wrong with the way that Laura was treated by him.
I believe that Howe wasted much time and energy trying to control too much of his students lives like on page 129 were a 14 year old girl try’s to join the baptist church and Howe forbids her from become baptized and he also writes a letter to the girls parents. I believe that it is in instances like these that show that Howe was to consumed in pushing his own biases and beliefs on his student and even the world. Freeberg also points out that Howe only prints out the New Testament of the bible for the blind to read, and was very selective, so it would seem to me that Howe had a very iso-Jesus perspective on religion.
It seems that Howe while trying to psychologically shape Bridgeman’s behavior through social isolation, but was getting just as much of a negative response from Bridgeman as with physical punishment. I personally believe he should have went with a more positive style for shaping behavior by rewarding good behavior, Howe states that “the fear of punishment,” had proven insufficient (Pg. 113). However, this seemed to be what happened with Laura on account of the personal Journal entries with the female assistants from them punishing Bridgeman with social isolation.It seems that Howe while trying to psychologically shape Bridgeman’s behavior through social isolation, but was getting just as much of a negative response from Bridgeman as with physical punishment. I personally believe he should have went with a more positive style for shaping behavior by rewarding good behavior, Howe states that “the fear of punishment,” had proven insufficient (Pg. 113). However, this seemed to be what happened with Laura on account of the personal Journal entries with the female assistants from them punishing Bridgeman with social isolation.
Overall I am torn while he had great success with a large part of hist methods as well as teaching Bridgman very successfully, it is also unclear to what extent Howe went to, as well as how much he kept from the readers.
Reading from the chapters on morality and religion, it becomes even more obvious that Howe had an agenda in mind when he began his educational experiment with Laura Bridgman. As Howe firmly believed that the Calvinist point of view was wrong, and that a more liberal interpretation was needed, Bridgman became his way of having evidence to support this (p.127). Additionally, Howe was able to overlook some of Bridgman’s very obvious faults due to his distance from Bridgman and his role in her life. As Bridgman held him in such high esteem, and was not constantly spending time with him, the idea of disappointing “Dr.” was a greater threat than the idea of disappointing one of her companions (p. 121). This distance helped him be in a state of denial concerning his views of how to educate persons with disabilities and how moldable they were then if he had been more involved, perhaps.
Howe’s overall experiment, was, of course, in many ways one that supported his views, as well as his fame. Does this make the experiment a bad one? In this case, I would hesitate to say no, because, in very cliched terms, the ends justify the means, as Bridgman did benefit in many ways from Howe’s experiment that she would not have had in the future. While she was in many ways more of an experiment than a person to him, she was in a state of isolation from the world, and her terror of being cut off from the world shows how much that isolation had affected her (p. 118).
I am omitting the first response to the first part of the question about Howe’s relationship to Bridgman- responded on last Tuesday’s blog.
On power dynamics, I think Dr. Howe used his position to keep Laura safe from ‘harmful’ religious and child-upbringing theories that reigned his time. “Howe applied the rod at Perkins in rare cases, which particularly recalcitrant male students. But he believed that a democratic educator should always strive to replace corporal discipline with “moral discipline.” Rather than trying to break a child’s supposedly perverse will, the teacher ought to “cultivate the good that is in him” by creating an atmosphere of “kindness, firmness, and consistency.” In this reformed school environment, students would learn to obey voluntarily, not because they feared punishment but because their natural love for learning and admiration of the teacher’s moral example had been stimulated.” (Freeberg pg’111). The preceding words summarize the nature of Dr. Howe-he did not use his position or education achievements to intimidate his students or criticizers.
Howe approached religion with caution. He promoted religion in his student to some extent. He required his students to attend church service twice on Sundays (pg. 129). He let children for younger children go to churches approved by their parents. However he was cautious that some religious inclinations would lead to “mental and spiritual disaster.”(pg, 129).
1) How would you characterize Howe’s and Bridgman’s relationship? How would you describe the power dynamics? What does this suggest about institution life?
I would characterize Howe’s relationship with Bridgman’s as curious and somewhat loving. When I say curious it is because Howe was very curious about Laura and her disability from the start (even if his intentions were for fame and mostly scientific). Laura also became very curious of her teacher as well. Through time together, I do feel like Howe did grow to love Laura. He did want to teach her about other things in life such as religion,sex,and other topics that she might not have ever had the chance to be exposed to. The power dynamics between them was that Howe was the dominant one and Laura was very submissive,even though she did act out at times for his affection. Howe did favor Laura over other students,which suggest to me again that he did love her to some degree.
As far as how institution life was, I think that the students all wanted special attention in one way or another,especially in Laura’s case. As Freeberg states on p. 89 “While Laura never had to fear the schoolmasters rod, she could be stricken by the possibility of falling out of Howe’s favor.” The teachers at the institutes were not only mentors, but also disiplinaries. They had the role of parenting as well, where as the children may not have received elsewhere.
One of the “muddiest” aspects of the mid nineteenth century that I cant seem to understand is why everyone was soo set on the disabled being a sin sent from god. Everyone was “eager to tell her that she was born guilty of sin and deserving of death but that, by accepting Christs atoning sacrifice, she could enjoy gods forgiveness and win the salvation of her soul” (Freedman,120).Thks seems to be like it is today where if you sin you can ask good for forgiveness. Laura didn’t do anything wrong, though. It wasn’t her fault that she aquired these disabilities.
The most shocking about this subject was the fact that Howe didn’t believe in all this religious nonsince. He “believed her not to be sick so here. had no use for the orthodox cure” (Freedan, 120). With as much as Howe liked to be the center of attention, you would think he would grasp on to these religious teachings in order to get people to like him more. “Hundreds of Bostonians took an interest in the details of her religious life” too (Freedman, 120). Thus, you’d think they’d realize Howe was not following the common belief.
While Howe undoubtedly believed himself to be devoted to helping and teaching Laura, he seems to have used her as a pawn on various fronts of his larger personal agenda. Becoming her teacher, father figure, moral and religious instructor, Howe’s scientific study of Laura and the resulting data it produced were likely corrupted (consider the Observer Effect in physics). The young Laura Bridgman of Freebergs’s text seems like a puppet or doll of Howe’s, initially easily influenced and manipulated to his will. In all this, Howe’s great experiment, for better or worse, can be compared, rather than to a rat in a laboratory, to a child in every way under the direct control and influence of a domineering patriarch.
In my opinion I feel as if Howe viewed Laura as a special person under special circumstances and at other times he undoubtedly saw her as an experiment. Although their relationship was a real one, I feel as if Laura’s feelings for Howe are truly genuine while his feelings were based upon the different ways that he could mold Laura. There were examples throughout the 3 chapters where Howe would have a specific want for Laura and so he would find a way to manipulate either Laura, her teachers and or the situation entirely. In the idea of Laura learning to have a healthy conscience she is repeatedly conditioned to know the effects of her actions resulting that “bad is sad.” Then in his ideas of how she should learn religion and subjects involving death, he wants her to come to conclusions naturally but yet he guides her mind to subjects in his ideal time and pace. Their relationship was built on a powerful dynamic. He as her mentor needed results to progress and so he became somewhat manipulative and she was easily convinced with his guidance.
Because of how Howe treated Laura it was a bit puzzling to me that in some ways she looked up to him or see him as a father figure or a role model in her life. Their relationship to me was just odd and in its complexity very hard to understand. From my understanding after reading the book I believe that Howe saw Laura as a lab rat, an experiment, or something of low value that you use or treat like an animal or insect. He was very controlling and he had weird views on how she should live her life basically. Though it was an experiment and parts of his experiment were successful and in some ways it was beneficial I think that the way he treated Laura was terrible and should’ve done better.