Academic literature on the topic 'Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children'

ABSTRACT Elwyn is found outside Media, Pennsylvania, and houses extensive historical archives that include original source material from four separate organizations. These include Elwyn itself (historically, the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children), the Vineland Training School (historically, the New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble-Minded Children), Philadelphia Orphan Society, and Speaking for Ourselves. This article includes a brief description of each organization and then describes the museum and archival holdings in some detail.

ABSTRACT A train left Greenwood Station outside Philadelphia on April 20, 1897. It carried 153 people from the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children (now Elwyn) to the first government-operated facility for people with intellectual disabilities in Pennsylvania: the State Institution for Feeble-Minded of Western Pennsylvania at Polk (now Polk Training Center). Since 1852 Elwyn, a privately operated school, served as the only long-term out-of-home option in Pennsylvania designed specifically for people with intellectual disabilities. Over the ensuing decades, Polk became part of a statewide institutional system that during the 1960s housed over 13,000 people. Written amidst the context of these state institutions closing in recent years, this article details their beginnings and the lives of the 153 people on that train. Previously unexamined Elwyn and Polk archival material present these stories in the context of the emergent clinical, economic, moral, and political forces that promoted the institutional model.

This article examines late nineteenth-century preadmission records taken at the Pennsylvania Training School in order to better understand the biographical and medical characteristics of persons seeking admission to this prominent school for the “feeble-minded.” It draws on those records to then explore how guardians and the superintendent assessed the likelihood and nature of educational improvement. A pioneering institution for the education of people with intellectual disability, the Training School, generally known as “Elwyn,” kept extensive biographical and etiological records that contain a previously untapped wealth of data. These records offer valuable insight into parents’ understanding of their children's disability, their hopes for improvement, and opinions of what would constitute a successful, productive life. The authors use the records to develop a statistical profile of the characteristics of applicants that superintendent Dr. Martin Barr would deem most likely to improve from instruction, and a similar profile for those deemed incapable of improvement. We situate our analysis of the records within the Gilded Age context of anxieties surrounding the state of public education and worker productivity in an industrial economy. In the field of disability studies, the article adds to our understanding of how superintendents constructed and applied the “medical model” of disability and its tension with the lived social experience of disability.

Abstract Historians have described how powerful eugenic ideologies fueled the rapid expansion of custodial institutionalization of the so-called feebleminded in the early twentieth century. Using new sources from the recently opened archive of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children at Elwyn, this article argues that in practice, this transition to custodialism was difficult, uneven, and subject to constant compromise. Institutional residents and their families contested expert prognoses and disciplinary methods and maintained relationships across institutional boundaries. Their vernacular ideas about mental impairment, curability, and the purpose of institutional segregation produced a gap between eugenic discourse and institutional life. The challenges that residents and their families levied were neither absolute nor consistent: their force and success depended on their class status, community contexts, and most significantly, the perceived severity of a resident’s impairment. Residents with greater care needs were frequently relegated to the background, not only in psycho-medical professionals’ treatises and administration but in the expectations that families brought to bear on the institution. Decades before institutionalized people and their families formed political advocacy groups that struggled for deinstitutionalization and civil rights, they fought individual battles that pitted their intimate knowledge against expertise. Although their victories were small and statistically rare, they tested the bounds of psycho-medical authority and established the ideological and practical limits of eugenic mass institutionalization.