Education
In 1893, Abbott graduated from Brownell Hall, a girls' boarding school in Omaha. However, her family could not afford to send her to college, so she began teaching high school in Grand Island. She took correspondence courses and attended summer sessions until she earned a degree from the University of Nebraska in 1901. After two more years as a teacher, Abbott attended the University of Chicago and received a Ph.D. in economics in 1905.
In 1906, Abbott received a Carnegie Fellowship and continued her studies at University College London, and the London School of Economics. She learned from social reformers Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, who championed new approaches to dealing with poverty. The Webbs influenced the direction of Abbott's career. The Webbs were in favour of repealing the British "poor laws" that they viewed as demeaning to people in poverty, and they supported establishing programs to eliminate poverty. While studying in London, Abbott lived part of the time in a social reformers' settlement in a poverty-stricken area of the East End, where she gained experience in social work. The next year, Abbott returned to the United States and taught economics for a year at Wellesley College.
Read more about this topic: Edith Abbott
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)
“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
“Since [Rousseau’s] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)